naomi_jay | Anti-Nano Excerpts (Reply)

It's our first excerpt-posting! And Cthulhu expects great things from you:

I'll go first, since I'm ... here. I'm currently meeting my 1k a day target for Night and Chaos:

19574 / 30000
(65.25%)

And here's an excerpt to prove it!

Determined not to be ignored, I followed Dad down the beach towards the lighthouse. I struggled to keep up, my bare feet sinking into the sand, but it didn’t seem he was trying that hard to get away from me, and soon we were side-by-side. ‘It’s my business,’ I told him. ‘I’m not going anywhere, so you may as well just tell me everything. And if you don’t, Van will.’ Probably an empty threat, since Van hadn’t been much more forthcoming himself, but my past with Van was as close to a trump card as I had.
‘Van wants you out of it,’ Dad snapped. ‘He’s still trying to protect you, damned if I know why after how you treated him.’
That stung. ‘Van’s a big boy, Dad. I’m pretty sure he can fight his own battles.’
‘Regardless,’ he said, ‘there are excellent reasons for you not to be involved. Excellent reasons why you should just go home and forget all these ever happened.’
‘Would you care to share those reasons? They might strengthen your case.’
I could almost hear the cogs turning in his head. ‘Has your mother ever tried to contact you since you left?’ he asked after a short pause.
I laughed, more out of surprise than humour. ‘What do you think? Honestly?’ If my relationship with Fraser was fractured, my relationship with Selene was shattered. She’d been an inconstant presence throughout my childhood, around for a week or so at a time, then gone for months at a stretch. She’d paid me about as much attention as you would a stranger’s child; maybe I’d get the occasional forced smile or frosty conversation, but that was about it. For a long time I thought Dad’s lack of interest in me was because I reminded him of Selene, and her lack of interest in us both.
Dad nodded, stern expression relaxing. ‘Good. That’s good.’
‘Why would she?’ I asked. If I pestered him enough, eventually he’d crack and tell me what was happening just to shut me up. It worked when I was fourteen, anyway.
He stopped walking, pulled at his lower lip. ‘A couple of years ago Selene took off. Not one of her usual jaunts – she was gone for almost a year. When she came back she was ... different.’ He trailed off now, his frown returning.
I’d have thought “different” would be an improvement, but far be it from me to try and fathom the depths of Fraser and Selene’s relationship, such as it was. ‘Different how?’ I asked when his silence went on a little too long. ‘Better? Worse?’
‘Different,’ he said again. ‘Focused. Intense. She’d been in India, researching, she said.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I should have known then something was wrong – Selene was never any more interested in APTT than you were. But she said she’d been researching. Exploring different, safer ways of transferring devas into humans. You remember how unpredictable the process could be.’

I nodded. I was one of Dad’s big success stories – not only had the transfer of the night deva to me worked first time, it had held, the deva forming a symbiotic relationship with me. A lot of times the transfer either didn’t work – some incompatibility between the deva’s nature and the host’s, Jeb had speculated – or didn’t last. The host’s body might reject the deva, or their mind might break under the strain of sharing it with an alien creature.

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