Chapter 48 #2
Her sweat-coated brows meet in bewildered confusion, but she must understand on some level that if I’m the one who showed up to save her, and I’m wielding weapons like Lara Croft, maybe I’ve got a point.
She sniffles, lip wobbling, but I can see snippets of all my lies over the years starting to make some kind of sense in her mind as she ties my wrists together.
“Stay put until I come back for you,” I tell her. “Unless you get the chance to run. If you do, take it.”
Horror slices in Penny’s eyes. She places her gag in my mouth with a wince and a nod. The door begins to slide up. Penny shoves the hood over my head, and I hear her throw herself behind the boxes as I instructed.
Two pairs of footsteps stop right before me. Since I don’t hear the sound of claws in flesh, I take it they haven’t noticed that Penny and I have swapped. Triumph sings in my veins.
“Come on, blondie,” says one Brood.
“Mmph!” I shout into my gag. I kick my legs and bang my back against the metal of the container until a blow lands across my cheek that sends my eyes pulsing in their sockets. I move my jaw in circles to make sure it’s not broken. Nose might be, but I can’t tell.
“Mortals are so whiny,” the other grunts.
I’m hoisted up by my arms and dragged outside as the door is slammed shut behind us.
The icy air whips at my tied hands and the thin fabric of my tank when my coat flies open.
Against every instinct in my body, I don’t break free.
I can’t risk escaping before I can go back and save Penny.
And, shocker: I don’t love my odds against two members of the Brood.
So I allow myself to be carried somewhere marginally warmer—definitely inside—where I can no longer hear the push and pull of the sea.
When I’m forced to my knees and the hood is ripped off, I blink until I understand I’m in an empty warehouse. Wide, scuffed floor. High ceilings over a space that once stored yachts and shipping machinery, now long since abandoned. Wide glass windows that look out onto the angry, oil-slicked ocean.
The two men behind me are clearly run-of-the-mill Brood demons. Their brands give them away, and their clear skin, nice teeth, and various muscles tell me they’re taking enough souls to live long and well.
“That’s not the mortal,” the demon at my side balks.
To my right stands Dean Driscoll, a patch slapped over his right eye. I narrow my gaze at him with enough vitriol to peel the skin from his bones.
“No, it’s not.” His expression is one of grim delight. His voice echoes off the cavernous walls. “It’s David Cadell’s little girl. The aeon we’d been looking for, under my nose the whole damn time.”
And there it is. The reason my dad changed his name, kept me from Harker, and was on the run from Edgar.
Not just because he discovered Edgar was turned, but for the same reason he always warned me against sharing that I was an aeon with anyone.
Sure, the Elders would come after us to end our bloodline, but his own turned friend had been hunting for aeons too.
He didn’t want either of us to be an ingredient in the High Thane’s syrabraxa.
I try to respond, but the gag is still lodged in my mouth. Where is Reid? A vision of his perfect jaw mangled into an unrecognizable shape sends panic into my veins.
He’s fine. He has to be.
“You look just like him,” Edgar muses.
I thrash and spit until the gag flies from my mouth. “Don’t you dare speak about him. You betrayed him.”
Driscoll only glowers at me. “All that bravado and you’re still just a little girl who thinks her daddy could do no wrong.
You didn’t know the David I knew. We fought all the same battles.
Bested all the same beasts, and I never felt like he looked at me with the respect I deserved.
Because he was a hunter. And I wasn’t. Can you imagine my shock when he told me what he was?
A dirty, bloodthirsty aeon. And still, he had all the glory. ”
“So you joined the Brood because you were jealous of one person?” He’s out of his fucking mind.
But Driscoll’s grin is grim and satisfied. “I joined the Brood because they accepted me. Saw my value, even though I wasn’t a demon. The High Thane offered me a place at the table that even the Elders never could.”
That’s wrong, I want to say. The demons are the ones who marginalize beings for what they are. Not the Elders. Not my dad.
“And in turn,” Driscoll continues, “I gave him the name of the last remaining aeon bloodline and the chance to make the syrabraxa he’s always wanted.”
My father knew he was being hunted. Maybe for years.
And all in pursuit of his aeon blood, so he could be used for some spell.
It’s not like he could have even gone to the Citadel—he would have had to reveal Driscoll’s motive for hunting him, and the Elders would have killed him for what he was instead. Probably me too…
So he changed his name and erased me from their records. All to keep me safe. To keep the Brood from using me to make their syrabraxa, as they’d hoped to use him. He threw himself to his own death to avoid letting them complete their insidious spell with his blood.
But the records—
Driscoll knew my father’s real identity. And those records said he had two daughters.
And I managed to end up here, in his clutches. Bound and gagged like a lobster for dinner. But I wasn’t the first. “Kitty and Lyra. Your own students. You tried to use their blood for your spell, and it didn’t work.”
Driscoll’s one remaining eye is cold. Remorseless.
It wasn’t just that they seemed like aeons.
It’s even more obvious to me now: They also looked like they could be my father’s daughter.
Pitch-black hair. Light eyes. Pale skin.
We could have been sisters, the three of us.
The Brood was trying to find a viable aeon for the spell.
Their only lead for the last decade…They were trying to find me.
Kitty and Lyra died in my place. The shame and sorrow are enough to drown me. “They were innocent.”
“You’re right. They weren’t you,” Driscoll says as if I should carry the burden of their lost lives.
“How did you put together that I was the one you wanted?” I bite out.
It’s the last piece of the story I don’t have.
Try as I might to rack my brain, I don’t know how he could have figured out I was David’s daughter.
And from there, my entire life in Astera—my family, my home, Penny.
He didn’t know it when I was in his cabin, or he would have captured me then.
At that point he only knew I was a nuisance, looking into his plans.
He set me on a path to the White Stag, hoping it would end in my death and stop me poking around.
But he didn’t know I was the aeon he sought until today when he kidnapped Penny as leverage. What changed?
I don’t allow myself to doubt Sophia, Elliot, or Peter. None of them would have told a soul. I know it in my bones. But nobody outside of those three knows what I am.
Driscoll ignores the question. He nods to the demons, who shove the gag back into my mouth.
Then he pulls out his phone to make a call.
“She’s here.” Silence as someone asks something on the other line.
“We didn’t have to ransom the mortal. She made it to us on her own somehow.
” More silence. “Does it matter? You can tell your father you did it. You found her. Now we can begin.”
Begin. To take my blood. To brew his spell. Place it in a human vessel…
My restraints are still loose enough for me to break free, but the demons at my sides have me in an iron grip.
I don’t allow myself to look around. I can’t give any indication I’m not alone.
If nobody knows Reid’s here, he must have succeeded in killing all the Broods outside…
But then where is he? I’m running out of—
Licks of ice ripple across the warehouse floor, and frost prickles my eyelashes.
I convulse against the unwelcome chill as a darker, more harrowing sensation than I’ve felt before undulates beneath my skin.
It thrums with the need to kill. I can only watch as icicles form on the vents and pipes above us.
On the fingers of the demons who hold me down.
Footsteps sound behind me. Two sets. Driscoll looks up with a grim nod and walks to greet them.
“Well done.” I can’t see him, but I know that distorted voice from the Windsor. They’re behind me, and though I thrash, the demons hold me still. But even behind the reverberating noise, there’s something smooth to his voice.
Smooth and…familiar.
In the dirt-flecked glass of the windows before me, I can just make out the reflection of a man in a long dark cloak placing a hand on the shoulder of a demon with dark hair. That hand—claws of withered gray, wrinkled slightly with age, but sturdy, strong, and tipped in shining silver.
“See to it that she is viable,” the High Thane says. “I won’t be brought back here again. No mistakes this time.”
“Yes, Father,” another voice says. But I already figured out this dark-haired demon is the High Thane’s son. That’s the kind of chastising you only get from a fed-up, disappointed parent. Takes one to know one.
And then the High Thane retreats, his icy chill leaving with him, and his son and Driscoll stalk back toward me. I strain to get a better look at the High Thane before he leaves the warehouse, but I can’t see much in the glassy reflection except his dark hood and his venomous snake eyes.
When the two of them draw near, so does the sound of enamel tapping. My breaths come nearly as fast as my heartbeat.
Strolling into my vision is a demon who looks like the lead in a Grease revival musical.
Slicked-back hair, thunderbird jaw, leather jacket.
He’s got a mean glint in his eyes, and I’d bet all of Stan Pine’s money that he tortured his childhood puppy and plucked the wings off flies.
He taps his light gray claws together like it’s a nervous tic.
The clacking sound reverberates through the warehouse.
“Aeon,” says the Brood demon heir, eyes lit with warped glee. “Finally.”