Moon Pirate (Priscilla Clarke: Book 1) Read online

  Feeling suddenly ashamed at her actions, Priscilla glanced down at the spider. As it scurried away, she could have sworn she saw tiny blue beads where the spider’s eyes should have been. Her thoughts immediately shifted to the children that she had seen in her dream the night before--to her sister, Belinda. A shiver ran up her spine, goosebumps covering her limbs. Hoping that Demetria would not notice, she quickly and vigorously rubbed at the skin on her arms until the goosebumps disappeared.

  Unfortunately, Demetria had noticed. “So,” she said. “Now you see? You are learning very quickly,” she noted, adding, “much more quickly than I would have expected.”

  “Are we going to look at the book now?” Priscilla asked, hoping that she had not just proved herself unworthy and reset the clock back to her theoretical probation.

  “Go right ahead,” Demetria responded, handing her the gritty book. Priscilla began to flip through the pages, glancing over them in disbelief at what they contained.

  “They’re empty,” she said, astonished. “Why are they empty? I thought I was going to learn something.” Silent tears of frustration began to well up within the unseen soul of Priscilla’s eyes. She began to suspect that this was all a game.

  Demetria laughed. “Well, of course the book is empty!” she exclaimed. “Did you really think that I was ever going to let you look at classified information after working for me only two days?” she asked scoffing again. “The spider was the lesson for today.”

  “The spider?” Priscilla asked, somewhat amused, but much more frightened than the former. “How on earth did you know that I was going to try to step on it?” she questioned rather curiously.

  Demetria’s chuckle returned. “I will always know what you are going to do in advance,” she said. “How else do you think I would have known to hire you--or any of the other things that I seem to know about me without you ever telling me?”

  “I--well, I didn’t really think of that.” Priscilla just stood there for a moment, wondering why Demetria did not respond.

  “Why are you still here, child?” she asked, using her familiar over-motherly tone, which Priscilla still found a little bit disquieting since she did not really know Demetria very well.

  “Isn’t there something else to do today?” she questioned, though, if it was to be anything like the day before, she already had a pretty good idea of what the answer would be.

  “You can go home now,” Demetria replied, confirming Priscilla’s prior assumption.

  “Okay, then.” She walked out the front door, trudging over to her car. Once inside the vehicle, Priscilla drove slowly, having a more responsible approach towards driving since her near-accident earlier that morning.

  About half-way on her trip home, she stopped at an old-fashioned diner with classic 1950s metal exterior. Priscilla went inside, hoping to wait out the rest of her shift so her parents would not ask questions that could lead to her giving up any of what Demetria had shown her. A friendly-looking waitress with red hair and sparkling green eyes approached her, dressed completely in vintage-style restaurant garb.

  “May I take your order?” the girl questioned cheerfully.

  “Sure,” Priscilla responded, probably sounding a bit disgruntled.

  “What would you like?” asked the waitress, her voice faltering ever so slightly but enough that Priscilla briefly wondered if her rudeness had offended the girl.

  “Just a big piece of old-fashioned apple pie and a strawberry milkshake,” she said, involuntarily sounding a bit fresh again.

  The waitress laughed. “We don’t sell that here anymore,” she replied. “Haven’t since my grandmother’s time,” she added. “But we do have doughnuts and diet smoothies.”

  “That’s fine,” I guess. There I am being rude again, she thought.

  “Are you fine?” the waitress inquired, surprising her just a bit. How could she tell that she wasn’t? Would her parents be able to when she got home? Priscilla hesitated, postponing her eventual answer.

  “No.”

  “I could tell,” she said. “I have a daughter at home. She’s a lot younger than you though, obviously,” the girl said, looking at her sideways. She must have picked up on the fact that Priscilla was worried she’d been rude. Good, Priscilla thought. She doesn’t mind. I didn’t hurt her feelings. “After all,” the young woman said, “I am only twenty-eight.”

  “You’re still ten years older than me,” Priscilla said, testing to see if the waitress was still cool with her surly attitude. Her voice cracked at the end of her sentence, just after the words “ten years” passed from the boundaries of her lips. She was yet again reminded of Belinda and all of the things that Demetria would soon teach her. Your mission, she had said.

  “You’re eighteen?” she asked. “You have a job? We’re hiring here…”

  “Yeah, I have a job at a--library,” she replied, trying her very best not to hesitate when she spoke. She had to be careful with that. Then, trying to change the subject, she added, “So, anyway, you never told me how old your daughter was.” Part of Priscilla’s curiosity surely stemmed from the recent revival of her Belinda-centered thinking. Deep down, she was wondering if the girl’s daughter was someone that she could get to know and be like a sister with if she never found Belinda as Demetria had promised.

  “My daughter?” she questioned, looking a bit puzzled. Her brow furrowed, making the previously invisible wrinkles on her face much more prominent. “She’s eight years old; in the third grade starting this fall.”

  There’s the ten years thing again, Priscilla thought. She’s ten years younger than me. Then, in a startled realization, Priscilla became aware that the waitress’ daughter was the same age that Belinda had been on the night of her disappearance. “Do you have a picture of her?” she asked the girl, hoping it wasn’t a total line crosser. She desperately needed to see one.

  “Sure,” said Rory, which, by the tag on the front of her apron, Priscilla now noted, was her name. Well, her first name, anyway. She reached into a pocket on the left side of her short uniform skirt, pulling out a vivid color photo of her little girl. She then handed it to Priscilla.

  Looking at the photo up close, she was startled, but not surprised. The child in the photo was much like she and her sister. Black hair. Blue eyes. White skin. Angelic-looking. Priscilla handed the photo back to Rory. She tried to keep calm and smile as she did so, saying, “She’s adorable. Reminds me of my sister.” Of course, it hurt just a little even to say that.

  “Actually,” Rory began, “she looks a lot more like you than me.”

  “Is she your, uh, biological kid?” If Priscilla had not offended Rory before, she suspected that she might have at that point.

  “Yup, she sure is!” Rory exclaimed, and, to Priscilla’s relief, she didn’t sound insulted in the least. “People ask me that all the time, with my red hair and all. I tell ‘em ‘Yes! And her father was a Colombian immigrant.’”

  “Wow.” That was all that she could manage to say. She stuffed the last bite of her doughnut into her mouth and sucked down the milky ice-water that was left of her smoothie. “I guess I’ll be going home now,” she said, fibbing, “I have to be on time for a college entrance exam later this afternoon.”

  “Oh, okay,” Rory answered as she picked up Priscilla’s plate and glass off the table, turning and retreating behind the front counter, into the kitchen where Priscilla could hear her drop the dishes into the sink with a mixture of care and carelessness.

  Just before walking away, Priscilla asked Rory, “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  “Abby,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” Priscilla lied. Pushing even further past personal boundaries, she proceeded to question, “What’s her birthday?” Quickly realizing that she had gone way, way too far, she abruptly added, “If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”

  It was extremely clear that Rory felt a bit uncomfortable with Priscilla’s questions; maybe even a
little beyond that; perhaps totally weirded-out. But, she responded anyway.

  “September twenty-first,” she said.

  Priscilla’s heart felt as though it had stopped for a second. September twenty-first was her birthday. It was Belinda’s birthday. Was Abby next?

  Trying not to seem even more freaked-out than what Rory was, which, in all due fact, was exactly how she felt, Priscilla grabbed the soft yellow shoulder-purse that she carried with her everywhere and had almost forgotten on the barstool-like chair. Before Rory had any chance of noticing her very noticeable fear, she ran out of the diner and out to her car.

  Once she had arrived home, Priscilla Clarke knew that she was dead set on what she needed to do next. As she walked through the front door, her mother, who stood by the telephone, chatting away to an insurance agency, did not address her, but, rather, seemed to take into account that her daughter had presumably spent a longer and much more productive day at work than she had during her previous attempt. She seemed to be satisfied enough with that not to push any farther into questioning Priscilla about what she had actually accomplished.

  Priscilla charged into her bedroom and walked over to her simple oak computer desk, her summer shoes thumping reverently on the hard ground. She roughly and somewhat carelessly grabbed her thin silver laptop from the desk and sat down on her bed. She looked out the window at the budding stars for the first time in ten years before opening the lid of her computer.

  Once the thing had turned on, which didn’t take very long at all considering the ample supply of Random Access Memory on her machine, Priscilla double-clicked the round, colorful icon for her web browser and waited about half a second for the search engine on her homepage to fire up and load. She wrestled with the unruly touchpad until her cursor finally rested over the search bar, then she clicked, typing in “Massachusetts birth records.”

  Priscilla had to scroll through a few pages of search engine results that would most likely lead to crooked malware distributors or identity thieves, before finding a reputable link that got the green check mark of approval from her built-in antivirus software. She loaded up the page and then did a reverse lookup on children born on September twenty-first over the course of the last thirty years, just to be sure.

  When the data finally ran through, thousands of names popped up. Her own and her sister’s were there near the top of the list, with the rest of the C’s. After some brief hesitation, she did a key command search for Tommy Hertz. A listing for his birth certificate came up, but, when she clicked on it, it was password protected.

  I didn’t want to have to do this, Priscilla thought. She pulled up her password-cracking program that she had built a few months earlier to get at the instant messages of her friend’s ex to see if he was cheating. The program ran through dozens of possible combinations before stopping when it hit the combo “password1.” Seriously, she thought. Okay.

  The birth certificate was up on her computer screen. Her eyes ran through until she reached the birthdate. September twenty-first. Then, she noticed something else. Tommy Hertz had a twin brother named Dylan who, unlike Tommy, had never been reported missing. Priscilla gasped, her eyes gaping wide open. She quickly closed the file and then did an advanced search for children named Abby with a mother named Rory. Only one came up; Abby Addison, the daughter of Rory Addison and Juan Sanchez. Well, I guess Rory tells the truth.

  Just as Priscilla was about to click the x-button in the corner of the screen, she noticed that there was another file in that folder. She opened it and could not believe what she saw. There was another child listed on the same birthday for Rory and Juan; a girl named Lindsey. Priscilla scrolled down the page. Across the bottom was a huge red word printed in all capitals: DECEASED. Priscilla almost cried. Not knowing if she could take what she might find, she did another search for Lindsey’s death records. To her surprise, there wasn’t one.

  Apparently, a missing child report had been filed two years earlier for her, but the police stopped searching and presumed her dead after finding an unknown child’s body that had been hit by a car nearby. But, what if it wasn’t her, Priscilla thought. What if she’s with Belinda and Tommy? What if Demetria is right? What if I can find them?

  Before powering her laptop down, Priscilla had one search left to do. She ran a check for all missing child reports in the country of Caucasian children with blue eyes and black hair. When the page finally loaded, it brought back seven hundred and seventy-three results. This time, Priscilla did cry. Then, all of a sudden, her computer system had a glitch. Head-shots of all the children began popping up onto the screen. They were definitely the children that she had seen in her dream. The only difference was that, in her dream, there had been many more. She scaled back the search range to the beginning of the public records.

  Her face fell. There had been thousands and thousands more, beginning in 1856. Exactly seven hundred and seventy-seven were taken the same way, mysteriously in the night, per ten years. The time frames and the numbers per week, month, and single year, were completely unpredictable as far as Priscilla could tell. The current year was 2013. That meant that there were three years left in this cycle. Four more children, and eight more sets of twins.

  I have to tell Demetria, she thought. Well, tomorrow, that is. Having lost her appetite, Priscilla went to bed without her dinner, but it would be a long time before she would be able to sleep easy once again.

  Chapter Four: Back From a Dream

  That night, Priscilla Clarke did not have any dreams. However, she had just as difficult of a night as she would on an eve amidst the worst nightmare imaginable. For the majority of the time, as the bright green numbers on her digital alarm clock slowly, yet surely, increased, she tossed and turned recklessly. Her bed covers once again twisted beneath her over-heated self, tangling with her body until they ended up falling to the floor with the various clothes and footwear that she so often tossed messily around without a care.

  From within her blackened, disturbed slumber, Priscilla could hear the goings on around the seemingly sleepless house. Her mind filled with strange images and strings of nonsense words; so much that her head began to throb. She saw Belinda again; her face, her eyes, her sadness, but it was not a dream, for she was surely not sleeping.

  Thankfully, the morning woke her at eight, and she would presumably be on time for work the first time that week. As usual, she showered, dressed, ate, and left for Hear the Word as soon as she could, although she was still somewhat dispassionate to the strangeness of the place. Gladly, she did not face any accidents on the way there.

  Once her car was parked in front of the eerie bookstore, Priscilla charged forth into it with a different kind of determination than what she used to have. The door slammed behind her and she walked straight up to Demetria’s old desk.

  “I didn’t sleep well last night,” she said, sure that the woman already knew.

  “Ah, child,” she began, “I figured as much with those bags under your eyes and your clothes in complete disarray.” Demetria looked pensive.

  “You mean your psychic powers didn’t alert you to it before I came?” Priscilla inquired sarcastically, rolling her eyes just slightly.

  “Well, that too, I suppose,” Demetria said, adding, “And, I see you are in the process of acquiring a fine sense of humor, am I right?”

  “Not in the slightest. Besides, there’s nothing humorous about what I saw on some state records on my computer last night.”

  “The photos and records of the other lost children?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Priscilla replied, startled. “How did you know?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “I guess not.”

  Demetria walked out from behind her desk, dressed in a drab grey dress with brown sandals like the ones male biblical figures often wore in famous paintings. Her hair was tied back in its usual tight bun, the silver color shining out from beneath a thick layer of hairpins that varied in their hue.

 
“We need to talk,” she said. “And not just the way that we have been.”

  “Go on,” Priscilla responded submissively.

  “You see, there are a special kind of people out there that few people know about. They are called the Moon Pirates.”

  “Aren’t Moon Pirates people who steal?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “But these Moon Pirates are so much more than that.”

  “Why?”

  “Moon Pirates are people who have the power to retrieve things from within other realms; from within their own dreams. They are made like the moon despite their origins: black hair like the night sky, blue eyes like dust, skin as white as a glowing star. They are always born in sets of twins. One of the twins, the second to be born, is taken in the night, from within their own dreams, so that they may go to the world of dreams and use their special connection with their twin for the power of good.”

  “How do they do that?” Priscilla asked Demetria.

  “You see, the twin that stays on Earth is the one who has the power to retrieve anything they want or need from within a dream. However, they cannot do that without their twin; their other half, being a part of the other realm in order to permanently tie them to the endless night sky of possibilities.”

  “That doesn’t tell me what I want to know,” Priscilla said. “How do I get Belinda back?”

  “Priscilla, child,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “You will only get your sister back if you can complete the mission that will be revealed to you on the anniversary of her disappearance. Among all of the Earth twins, you have been chosen for this duty. When your sister returns with you, so will all other Moon Pirates whose siblings are still alive.”