Prior Claim (Sanctum #1)

Episode 1

Sevastyan

The air was cold. The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures museum stood in a stone building at the end of the main quad.

Salt, keeping the cement path from becoming a lane of ice, ground under Sevastyan’s boots.

Almost no one was walking about. They wouldn’t be, not mid-morning on the second of January.

Classes for the University of Chicago were not in session, and the professors, staff, and students who could be were hidden inside, away from the storm.

All the fewer to see him pass or remember his face.

He reached the doors of the Institute as they were unlocked, the sign in the front door just changed over to “Open”.

The sleepy attendant waved him inside, and Sevastyan followed him up the short, enclosed stairway to the second set of front doors.

Like many places in Chicago, the double entrance space was necessary for keeping the indoors warm during the winter.

Sevastyan pulled off his coat and the attendant pointed him across the foyer to a small side room with space to hang outer garments built into the back wall.

He left his large outer layer but kept the thick beanie covering his hair, taking time to brush the snow off it while standing on the gray mats.

The attendant yawned several times and blinked at him as he returned to the main space. “Donation only.” He waved to a box in front of the desk and a bit to the right. There was a QR code on the front for those who didn’t want to deposit cash through the slot in the top.

“Thanks,” Sevastyan said. He shoved cash into the box.

The first hall was accessed through a pair of heavy double doors. Wood and metal framed heavy glass that revealed what was coming. He pushed through, bypassing the rows of artifacts laid out in clear cases on either side. It was the massive figure at the end on which he was fixed.

The end of the hall was open space. From three sides, heavy stone reliefs looked down from above, figures half freed from slabs of stone the size of city walls.

The greatest stared down the hall, facing any who entered—a perfect Assyrian lamassu.

A massively winged divine protector. The body was that of a bull and the head of an ancient Mesopotamian king, his beard coiled in rows on his bare breast. Armor wrapped his shoulders and the massive tail of lion arched out behind.

Every line of the face was defined and his headdress rose up to the ceiling.

Attending the lamassu on the left were war horses and armed men, and to the right, princes and their retinue.

Sevastyan stared up at the lamassu’s implacable face.

For all that Sevastyan was above average height and at the peak of physical fitness, the abs and arms on the figure eclipsed him completely.

They were on the level of divinity, above what man had to offer, for all that man had chiseled them into being.

Was it art? Yes. And yet art had not been the aim. Figures such as these had stared down upon travelers as they entered the realm of kings, hewn to invoke power, to quell thoughts of rebellion, and to ignite fear in the heart of an embryonic challenger. A divine protector.

Sevastyan swallowed, keeping his back to the entrance. This was a risk. It was all a risk. But now that he was here—waiting—the danger was not what clawed at his throat and turned his skin slick with sweat.

He wouldn’t turn to watch.

He would wait.

It was up to the one he was waiting for whether this winged creature would be the last vision of his life. Lamassu were meant to be protective figures, but not even these ancient spirits would protect him now.

“Meet me at the gates of Assyria.”

Sevastyan’s breath stilled. The voice had not changed. The tone, if anything, had matured, but it was still the same timbre that had brought him to his knees more than ten years before.

He rotated slowly, hands laced together behind his back. “You came.”

“You called.”

Ellisandre had barely changed. The two of them stared at each other.

He’d stalked them for years now, finding glimpses of them in the background of the tabloid and news coverage of Ellisandre’s employer.

Ellisandre’s clothes were what he had come to expect: androgynous to the extreme, leaning towards avant-garde.

Today they wore a brown suit with shoulder pads and oversized pants beneath a flat, maroon, wide-brimmed hat made of suede.

Their jacket was buttoned in the center and a silk scarf of muted red, blue, and pink was tied around their throat.

Their makeup was flawless, highlighting strong cheekbones and piercing gray eyes.

Russet lips muted a mouth that should have looked too wide on such an angular face, but instead offset a sharp jaw and carved, alabaster neck.

The rest of their form was lost beneath the bulk of the suit.

Even their hands were gloved in leather the color of their lips.

The speech he’d planned to make flew out of his thoughts. Instead, he looked into those gray eyes and said, “You let me think a terrible thing.”

“I did.”

No denial. How like Ellisandre. Blunt and obvious. Absolutely opaque. The opposite of Rei. Sevastyan looked away.

Ellisandre moved to stand beside him, not shoulder to shoulder but close, so that they were absorbing the ancient guardian of the Assyrian gate as he had. Sevastyan turned back to stare at the stones with them.

“It is good you called,” Ellisandre said.

“Now or then?”

“Yes.”

Ellisandre

Ten Years Ago

The phone pressed against her collarbone shook with an incoming call.

There was no one left alive. The long-abandoned and recently embattled stone farmhouse and barns were silent, the yard littered with cars and motorbikes.

Bodies lay between them. Bodies clogged the kitchen door.

Bodies draped across the fence. She flipped the phone open, not speaking.

The person on the other end spoke. “Tell me you’re alive.”

Sevastyan. Bal. It was all Bal in Sevastyan’s voice right then. Mixed with bits of Vast. Her beautiful, tangled boy. Man. A man who was sometimes still a boy.

Weren’t they all children beneath?

She had to answer. Her eyes passed over the broken bodies.

The broken walls. The grass swaying in the wind.

The bright blue sky. “This isn’t living.

” She’d done her task too well. This was the body of the criminal underworld fighting for its life, red blood cells spattered on the landscape, programmed for self-sacrifice.

She was the virus taking them out. But what did that make Europe, no. . . the world . . Was that the body?

Her metaphor was falling apart.

Sevastyan’s breath came tight and sharp through the phone. “They’re going to flatten the place. They’ve lost too many trying to take you. Get out.”

Her beautiful, loving boy, always risking more than he should. “Tell me they don’t know you called me.”

“They don’t even know we’ve met.”

Ellisandre stood and staggered out past the bodies. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” This would be over soon. But first, there was something she needed to do. “Bal.”

“Yes?”

“Remember what I told you in Berlin. No one has permission to kill you. No one but me.”

“I remember.”

“So if I’m dead, you’re not allowed to die.” Ellisandre laughed. It was simple. They might keep him from her, but as long as he followed that one rule, as long as her will was iron above him, he would survive.

There was a roar of a plane in the distance.

She narrowed her eyes, tracking its progress over the forest at the end of the pasture.

“It’s good you called.” The broken bulletproof vest on her chest was restricting her breathing.

She rubbed at her sternum with the heel of her palm. “I’m glad you’re not here.”

He was doing that thing where he tried to not cry and utterly failed. If she could see him, his eyes would be red and his pale visage flushed. “I wish I was.”

“You have something to live for, Vast. Prior claim, remember?”

“And you have me. I thought you had me.”

“They have you, for now. I’m not letting them have me too.”

“What will you do? Why didn’t you call Europol? It didn’t have to be this way.”

Ellisandre laughed again. Sevastyan wasn’t standing at a point on the road of life from which he could see what had her by the throat.

There was no part of him that could. She had to do this.

She’d cut the heart out of more than one of the beasts.

She’d played the game on their own territory, on their terms, and done better.

Judge. Jury. Executioner. This was the price.

She was beyond the bounds of the law. It hadn’t started there, but it had gone there.

No regrets, only grief. It didn’t look like she could live with what she’d done, but she could die with it, at peace.

Blood pooled in her mouth. She choked, coughing and bending, staining the ground vermillion with tendrils of her life. “I’m going to die, Bal.”

“I called so you wouldn’t.”

Tears ran in tracks down Ellisandre’s cheeks. “Find me on the other side. Whether or not you survive. Any part of you. Find me. When the claims are gone. When I’m your only prior.”

Coughs racked her battered ribs once again.

“Elli.” Her name came out of his throat like he was the one about to perish. Perhaps that was the truth, the greatest truth. Perhaps you died with the ones you loved, time after time.

She smiled through the tears pouring down her cheeks.

This was their funeral, then. No music. No bells.

No mourners. Only the two of them together, grieving each other, grieving themselves.

A love story that had existed in secret, strangled for air.

“Myths are meant to be rewritten. Goodbye, beloved.”

The plane was almost there. It was time. The phone fell from her fingers.

Sevastyan

Present