From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

Rebekah is the deceased mother of Shadows Dance.

Rebekah's Story

Rebekah tensed in fear at the pounding knock at the door. The nightmare her life has become was leaving its mark on the petite blond woman with the violet eyes. Her quiet, dark haired toddler started to cry and her heard sank, she would have to open the door. She picked up Neviah and hugged her, trying to console her while the knock echoed again through the bare apartment.

“I’m coming.” She opened the door a crack and the bear like frame of the landlord peered in. She backed up a step, intimidated by the bulky man, harsh and huge. The visions had drawn her here, and she trusted them, but while had had none of the elegant, polished grace of her husband, his brutish strength spoke of the same lethality.

“Greg…”

“I think we should talk, miss.”

She cleared her throat and stepped back, letting him open the door into the apartment. He smiled at Neviah and reached to tickle the baby’s chin, and Rebekah turned away, placing herself between Neviah’s tear stained face and the man’s calloused hand. He sighed and shut the door behind himself.

“I’d never hurt the button, miss. Never would.”

Her silence was an accusation. He sighed again and his mouth drew into a tight, worried line. He pulled a chair from the small table and sat down, the rickety chair creaking dangerously under his weight.

“I got your credit check back. Rebekah Morgine doesn’t exist.”

“Its my maiden name.”

“No it isn’t.”

Uncomfortable silence fell and her light violet eyes burned into his, she was a hurt woman, but not beaten.

“I don’t care what you’ve done, miss, and a woman like you with a button here in the Row, its pretty obvious that you’re running from something you don’t want to find you. I’ll forgive the lying, but I can’t let you stay under my roof without knowin’ who you are, and who the button belongs to.”

She hugged the girl roughly to her chest, her tears starting over again, “She’s mine! She’s my daughter.”

He considered her carefully. “I don’t know that she is or she isn’t, but I see how you care for her and that means whatever you brung her from is worse for her than here. So its gotta be pretty bad. From the looks of your clothes, you gave up quite a bit to get her here, and I don’t know that you woulda done it without her. So from where I sit, she’s your daughter, regardless of blood. But I need to know.”

She bounced the baby gently while she thought about his words.

“I gotta know what is under my roof. Or you’ll have to find another one. And you and I both know that there’s not many that will take you in as you are, no money, no background, no questions. Not without wanting something you may not want to give, or something from the button there. It’s a bad world, miss. I want to help you, but I can’t unless I know how bad it is.”

“You won’t believe me.”

“You don’t know until you try.”

Her smile was bitter, “I’ll make some tea.” She sat Neviah in her high chair and walked the few steps to the kitchen. In later years, these small, connected rooms would become full of life, a warm, bright haven from the desolate streets of King’s Row. Now they held little furniture and less care. She boiled water on the stove, taking comfort in the movement, and served tea in two mismatched mugs while Greg made faces at the baby. The child’s trills of laughter calmed her more and she rolled the high chair to a place between them while they each cradled their cups.

“She has her father’s nose.”

“Your eyes, though.”

She smiled at an untold joke, “Yes, that she does.” The eyes in question lifted to meet his and again he felt the odd intensity and strength of spirit usually associated with greatness, not battered wives in hiding. He sipped his tea and let her talk.

“I’m Martina d’Alveirs, and that is my maiden name. He named her Leila. She’s Neviah now. I don’t know where to start, really. It gets pretty wild.”

“I won’t doubt you if you don’t lie to me.”

She cleared her throat and began to share her story.

My family is an old line of …well… we’ve been called oracles, prophets, witches, the current term is precognitives, I always liked “seers”. We can see things, the truth, the future, not always, but its controllable, for the most part. I was brought up in the tradition of my family, where the future was known, but not necessarily set, and lying was never productive. Its not as bad as it sounds, the old ways are pretty flexible, they use the tools and customs of the time. The fundamentals stay the same, the surface changes. Even so, I rebelled, went to college and became a modern woman, majored in Education, joined a sorority, all the usual stuff. I met a man, he was obviously military, even then, but elegant and charismatic, and I was young and trusting. A Marine officer, very dashing, older than me. That I was considering someone of that description scandalized my family back at the commune, and he was determined to take me away from all of that insanity.

I never told him about the Sight. I didn’t talk about it at college, I had stopped using it, stopped praying to the old gods, or any at all. I didn’t want to be seen as different, as a freak, and more importantly, we all knew that there were those who would want to use our Sight for their plans. Leaders have always wanted to control the future, and if they think they have that option by controlling one who Sees it… well, the d’Alviers line never liked being controlled. So I let myself get further and further away from my heritage, from my birthright. He thought it was just a hippie hideaway, all organic and kumbiya and free love. I stopped going home, I stopped writing.

I stopped getting letters from my sisters. Finally I got a letter from a lawyer. The commune had …ended. Mass suicide. He said that my family had finally gone Moony and thanked his God that I was safe. With him. I was devastated. You have to understand, my whole family was there, sisters, aunts, cousins… suddenly I was alone in the world.

I was so blind. So blind to everything. He was my sun, moon and stars. All the light in my world centered on him and his voice. We got married. He told me he had joined a special force from the Marines, a secret military branch called the Council, it was the Cold War, everything was secrets upon secrets. We lived well, far better than we had on his Marine paycheck, and I didn’t have to work. I made us a little home and tried to ignore my nightmares.

They never found all the bodies, you see, at the commune. They assumed that more had left, or some had escaped, or been killed and hidden before the mass death ritual. They were wrong, and I ignored my dreams for far too long. Some were killed, yes, men mostly, and the women who stayed to fight. Most of the ones they wanted tried to run, most of my line, the Seers. They tried to run and go into hiding, but they failed. And I saw their fight and their failure night after night and ignored it.

I saw when he started locking up his keys so I couldn’t take the car without him. I saw how angry he got whenever I tried to have friends outside of the house. I saw it all, every little step along the way to where we ended up, and I ignored them all. I clung to how happy he was with me, when I would make just the right thing for dinner, or know just what to wear, or how to rub his neck after a bad day. His job was hard and stressful, long hours, all the excuses women have ever used.

I clung to how he changed when I became pregnant. He shone like the sun again. He took time off of work to take me to every doctor’s appointment, he found me special vitamins, we took long walks in the evenings, he learned Lamaze, he would hold headphones to my belly so the baby could hear music and classic literature. Everything a doting husband should do, he did, and more. I was worried that he wanted a son and would be disappointed when we learned it was a girl, but he wept with joy. He looked to me with tears in his eyes and said we would name her Leila, and I couldn’t deny him, even though in my dreams she was Neviah.

I got sick. Very sick. It was a rough pregnancy. And he moved us to the base on Striga so the Council doctors could take care of me. I know it sounds crazy, but it felt like a military hospital run by a special government provision. I know now what it was in truth, oh what I know now…

I had Leila and recovered in our quarters on the base. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but he had several promotions by then and was mentored by the highest of the high and our apartment had a private garden and three bathrooms. He was a devoted father, paying attention to her every movement and noise, reading and worrying over child development literature and tracking her head turns and eye focusing on a chart. He played with her every night, and would get up in the middle of the night to check on her, check that she was breathing. He wanted to feed her, to bathe her, to hold her, to talk to her, every moment he could. She had more toys at six months old than the entire commune at home.

When I started to get better I decided to take on my own housekeeping again, I was never one to sit around and laze while maids and cooks and nannies took over my place in my home. The housekeeper had been given strict instructions to stay out of his den, so naturally it was a terrible mess. His secretary took care of his desk at his office, and he was a naturally neat person in most areas, but his den… I started there. I thought it would be a surprise for him, to come home to something clean and neat, organized just the way he would want it, if he had the time.

I found a folder on a project called Sybil. I wish I hadn’t, but I guess Seers don’t get to choose what they see, especially when they have forsaken their gods. It described the life’s work of a very determined man. It was as much journal as it was report. Touching the pages I Saw the true story behind the dry words. As a Boy Scout he had gotten lost in the woods and been found by a small woman with violet eyes, who was carrying food and water and greeted him by name. They talked while he ate and she led him back to the path that would get him home. When they parted, they clasped hands, and she saw his future, not just her own, and what she saw terrified her. She asked her gods what she had done by saving this monster, that his life would be the undoing of all she loved. She was much more powerful than I.

He tried to ask her what she meant, and she told him that she should have left him in the woods and she ran from him. He tried to follow her and failed, but he did make it back to his civilization, and for years all that remained of that was a woman in his dreams. I don’t know what happened to turn him from that, or if he always wanted to know, but he joined the Marines and found the tail end of Vietnam. That much I know is true. I also know that he was part of the Council before we were married. Before we even met.

He joined the Council on the basis of his research into people who could see the future, a family line of precognitives living in a compound in the wilderness. They gave him a budget and told him to find out everything he could. This was the Sybil project.

The Sybil file had photographs of my home, photographs of me leaving it. It had comments on various possible test subjects and the difficulty of claiming them. There were biographies of most of the women in my family that I grew up with, and a family tree with many of our ancestors. I still don’t know how an outsider found out that much about my line. It catalogued most of my female ancestors for as long as the family had been in the United States – hundreds of years. It had a collection of testimonies of people we had touched. The conclusion of the first phase of the project summarized that the precognitives of the d’Alviers line were all female and marked by violet eyes, pointing to an elusive, recessive mutation in a certain chromosome. Furthermore, it proposed that the project be extended to create rather than enlist a d’Alviers precog for the use of the Council, noting our independent nature and distrust of authority.

Phase two was proposed by and given to the control of one of the youngest generals ever to be promoted in the Council. He dressed up as a much lower rank Marine and went courting the likeliest d’Alviers carrier that he could identify. His project reports noted the progress of our relationship, and he finally recommended that the d’Alviers compound be secured, with inhabitants not useful to the Sybil project left for the authorities to find, and any surviving d’Alviers precogs be taken into custody for further examination and experimentation. He needed me to be isolated from my previous support network to become wholly dependant on him, and thus, controllable.

He had reports on them all. How he tested them, frightened them, tortured them and killed them, one by one. Girls barely budded to grandmothers, frail and wrinkled. From women who could barely tell you the sun would rise tomorrow to the one who saw his evil before he found it in his own heart. He took away their names and gave them numbers and ratings and graves. All while coming home to me every night and holding me while I cried in the dark.

They learned how to gauge our strengths, our weaknesses, our Sight. They learned that I was far from powerful, far from skilled, and that power and skill varied from woman to woman like most twists of Fate.

Phase two ended when he dragged the life from the last of his prisoners, and I was officially the only living d’Alviers Seer in North America. Sybil stalled then, while he considered his options. Years of trying to create an embryo with the right gene structure to see the future had failed him, even while his living subjects lost their will to fight and succumbed to the darkness. The cells would refuse to multiply, the creatures would fail to thrive, a couple of efforts got to the second trimester of development, horribly twisted things, but living enough to convince his higher ups to continue to fund his horribly twisted projects.

Phase three was funded when I became pregnant – giving him his option. No wonder I became the center of his universe then, the eyes of all the Council were on him, on me. Where all his scientists had failed before, with me he could succeed. The only question left in his reports was whether, if I were to have a girl, I should survive the experience, or if the girl would be more apt to help her Papa if Mother was removed from the picture.

I suppose the only reason why I survived was that he felt some odd affection for me. He reported it as a failsafe, two psychics under their control was better than one, just in case the baby was a failure. The doctors he was taking me to were working on Sybil, my drugs were designed to create the best environment for developing the recessive mutation. They also caused my illness. So much effort, so much death and disregard for all that makes life holy, and it was all focused on my little girl.

I read them all, every progress report in the file, every biography, every phase report. And then I put them all back, just where I had found them and arranged myself on the sofa. I didn’t have to try to look pale and shaken for when he came home, my entire life had turned to ashes. I could barely stand to watch him touch her, she adored him, but how he looked at her… it was all calculated, like training an animal. Which is what he was doing. I could see it, as sure as Sight, she would grow up with the best Daddy in the whole wide world, and when Mommy died, she would turn to him. He would be heartbroken, and wish that he could have prevented it, and ask her to try to See. He wanted a pet Seer, and he was well on his way to getting one.

I was stupid to think we could just leave. I tried. I packed a bag for us and tried to walk out of the quarters the next day while he was at work. The guards were polite, but informed me that under no circumstances was the baby allowed to leave without approval from the general. They took the bag away from me and walked me back to our quarters. He didn’t say a word about it until Leila was packed off to bed. He called me into our bedroom like a child being kept after school. He didn’t believe me when I said we just wanted to go to a park on the mainland. He had gotten a full report of what he called “the incident”. We had our first fight that night. We had disagreements before, arguments, spats like most couples. But I had never truly stood against him on anything.

I lost my temper and asked him about Sybil. He changed then… I think that was one of the few times I saw him as he really was. He picked up his gun then, he was so quiet, so mechanical. I told him that he would never get what he wanted from her, she needed to be trained and he had killed all the others who could train her. That was the first time he hit me.

At least we were honest then. I hated him openly, and he made no fuss about keeping us prisoner. I could be with my daughter during the day, he took her away every evening. Some nights he would come to me, to talk, to taunt me I suppose, to relieve his stress. I had no family, no connections to speak of, he was brutally honest that no one was looking for me, and that the only people who cared where I was didn’t care what happened to me. I think, by the end of it, he was trying to get me pregnant again.

I prayed to my gods for forgiveness, for what I had brought upon their people. I begged them for the strength to save my daughter. I began to get visions again, true Seeing, not just dreams. Powerfully precise, detailed to a depth I had never experienced – as I said, I am not the strength of my line. But I saw a way, a day, a plan, where a woman and her child could get out of the base and to someplace safe for them.

The details don’t matter, and I’ve told you more than is safe for you to know, but this building was the end of my vision. My gods led me to you, and I have to trust in them.

Her tea had long gone cold, and his mug was empty on the table, the little girl had fallen asleep with all the depth of innocence.

“That’s quite the tale, miss.”

“Yes I know.” Silence filled the room.

“I’ve got some friends, we can get your names to stand up a bit more. But we’ll be careful, I can’t imagine that he’s not looking for you.”

She gasped with disbelief, “We can stay?”

“My late Molly Jean would have my hide if I put you two back out on the street. I am not a young man, Miss Rebekah, and I plan to spend eternity with my Molly. We’ll get you squared away. You got a job yet?”

“Um… no. I don’t. I just got this far…”

“You can clean the building here for your rent, if you want. Food for you and the littl’un if you care to do some housekeeping around my place, cooking, mending, and the like. When you feel up to it, or get tired of putting up with me, we’ll find you something better. I have friends who will take my word over a background check on a government database any day, and know better than to try to take advantage of a woman who don’t need the trouble.”

“Greg…”

“You’re welcome.”

“Don’t tell her, okay? She doesn’t need all this.”

“Miss, I’m not always the sharpest tool in the shed, but I know better than to get between a lion and her cubs.”