Chapter Forty-Six
Out at the clearing by the river, Allhan stood with his back to the crime scene and stared across at his sister’s safe house.
She wasn’t moving around where he could see, but there were open drapes in several rooms and the elegant spaces seemed orderly and undisturbed.
So clearly, nothing violent had happened.
Then again, how hard was it to kidnap someone who couldn’t fight back?
The lesser wasn’t going to do that, though. Not yet.
Its need for the information was so great that the undead gave Allhan the only leverage he had in the situation: If Carmen was harmed, Allhan was going to kill himself and then the fucker got nothing.
Apparently, his resolve was so clear on that potential outcome the slayer believed him.
Then again, the truth was what it was.
The final part of his plan was the most dangerous, of course, and he ran through it once again: He was going to take a USB drive with the address to the Brotherhood’s housing development to a location south of Caldwell.
Then he was going to position himself on Carmen’s property and keep the slayer on the phone.
The file would be encrypted, of course, and only he was going to know how to to open it.
Allhan would get Carmen out of that house, explain to her the truth, and then turn over the last of the bank accounts to her.
She would proceed to the safety location Allhan had set up down south, and he would finally call Vishous and ’fess up.
After which he’d verify the funds were in the account and tell the lesser how to get into the file on that USB drive.
And then he would pray the Brotherhood followed their own rules.
At least the emergency protocols for the Wheel were well-practiced by everybody: The doggen staff would come underground, and everybody would proceed out of the tunnel system. Then the Brotherhood would wait for the lessers to attack—in the aboveground houses.
And they would win because there was no better defensive systems than the ones set up by Vishous. No better fighters than the Brothers and their allies.
The slayers would be picked off like cans on a fucking fence.
Meanwhile, Allhan would up and disappear, and figure out some kind of an existence somewhere.
Assuming they didn’t somehow find him and kill him.
Hacking was one of his best skills, and even with the proliferation of AI, there were plenty of jobs in computing he could get.
And certainly creating an identity was easy, and navigating human services was the work of a moment. He would… survive.
Without Denne.
Without Vishous and Jane.
He’d be undead in his own way.
All things considered, it seemed fitting that he’d be trading places with the very enemy he’d been engaging with, him becoming a soulless vessel wandering around, serving the master of a past he was not going to be able to forget in favor of a bleak, infinite future.
Again, assuming he wasn’t hunted and taken out.
As he thought about it all, grief and sorrow bubbled in the back of his mind, his subconscious a stew of regrets and unhappiness.
Desperation really was its own special kind of narcissism, and even though he knew that in the selfish things he had done and was prepared to do, he was creating deadly havoc, but what other choice did he have?
Turning around, he looked at where he had first seen Denne. The yellow tape was still up, but the fragile yellow circle was broken, its tail ends waving lazily in the cold wind like they were trying to capture the attention of the disinterested trees.
It was more than a little fucked up to think with a romantic purple haze about a dead guy on the ground.
And that didn’t last as he remembered other bodies he had stood over.
As he scrubbed his face, he felt like he had aged a hundred and fifty years since his transition—and he hadn’t had the bloom of youth to lose anyway. He’d never had that.
At least Carmen would be okay.
Assuming the law of chaos didn’t come by and stomp on all his carefully stood-up dominoes.
Allhan took one last look at his sister, waiting until she walked past one of the windows before he brought up that burner and sent a text:
If anything happens to her, you get nothing.
The response came almost immediately, and it was just a picture of the river, taken from what had to be the back of his sister’s house.
The image was facing him, as if to taunt that the lesser knew where he was standing, right in this very moment.
A growl percolated out of his snarling mouth, rage curling in his body and inflating him from the inside out in the most vicious of ways.
He wanted to kill that motherfucker, and for once, he knew where the bastard was: Except for on that first night, their contact had only ever been by phone.
And now he wasn’t a scrawny pretrans anymore.
All he had to do was dematerialize across the river.
Maybe it was time to change the plan.
And leave the Brothers and all the people he cared about out of this bullshit nightmare his father had created for everybody.
Maybe he just needed to handle this by himself.
Face to face.
In the chart room off the celestry, Denne stared at the laptop screen.
She was no expert at reading the stars, but she knew enough to recognize the big markers.
In this respect, it was like picking out familiar trees in a landscape you’d lost track of.
Once you found them, your orientation swung into place, and you were all oh-right-here-I-am.
Yet even as she studied the cosmos as it had appeared at the moment of Allhan’s birth, she knew this was stupid. Why the hell she wanted to know more about a male she was never going to see again… what a waste of time.
The pathetic answer to that rhetorical was that viewing his chart was the only way to connect to him now, the methadone to her madness as she couldn’t have the real thing.
And she was no doubt going to memorize every single twinkler on this layout, until she could see them on the backs of her eyelids.
Measuring the arrangement of stars and galaxies and planets and moons, and mentally laying a grid over them, she tried to see his life in the positions of all the most important quadrants: Love.
Family. Young. Spirituality. Purpose. Bloodline.
There were so many others, but the big six, as she liked to call them, were what she knew best.
And of them, she focused on… love.
There was one star. One single star.
An abiding love that lasted his whole life, that defined it, and marked it so completely, that no other existed for him.
Her eyes swam with tears. She’d only ever seen it before in one other chart. Her own. And she’d assumed it justified the mating with t’On.
Now she knew the truth.
She would love Al for her entire lonely life of duty as well.
Denne had to look away from the screen. And as soon as she did, she started properly crying. That star was her. It was the only explanation: Somehow, he was going to be faithful to her memory for all of his nights, however many they were. As if they had been long-mated and she’d died.
Unless he didn’t live very long?
With dread, she looked into the other quadrants, but it was like she was reading gibberish. Her mind was jammed with fear and sadness, and no doubt the way her eyes were tripping around the constellations wasn’t helping.
Still, she stayed curled around the screen as if it were a hearth giving her warmth.
It was hard to say when things formed a pattern, and at first, she fought the conclusion that was manifesting. And then she rubbed her eyes and leaned in even closer. As if that was going to change anything?
Except no. There was an arrangement of stars that she had seen just the night before, in her own chart. In the family quadrant, where her parents had been in danger unless she mated t’On. And also in the quadrant associated with the s’Hisbe itself.
Death.
His sister? Oh, fuck. His sister was going to die.
Unless… maybe she was reading it wrong?
Twisting around, she glanced at her slot. Then got up and went over to it. The wax seal had no seams she could ease off, so she ended up breaking the thing. It was her own damn chart, anyway.
Back at the desk, she moved the laptop over and unrolled the parchment from her transition’s reading on top of the glass viewing pane.
There were two parts to every astrological chart, the arrangement of the stars and then the grid.
Where the grid was placed on the night sky was determined by your birth date and time, and what its precise position revealed was supposed to represent the person’s destiny.
The role of the Tretary, apart from doing nightly maps for consultation, was to read and interpret the intersections between the grid and the cosmos and record what was shown.
Pinpointing the grids on her own chart, she then triangulated what was on the parchment with what showed on the laptop screen.
In the family section, her chart had two death marks that were shadowed, indicating what would happen if she did not take the throne: Her parents died because of something she did.
Allhan’s was not shaded.
It had to be his sister, and she felt a rush of sympathy for him. Something he was going to do would cause her death, and what a curse to bear. And given how haunted he was as he stared across the river at that glass house, it was like he knew what was coming.
To have the blood of a family member on your hands… she couldn’t imagine bearing that guilt.
Which was why she was mating a male she didn’t love.
Maybe there was still a way she could help Al? Even with every-thing she was going through herself?
Was the answer in the stars, she wondered.
Opening another tab on the laptop, she entered her own birthday and instantly the screen populated with her grid system and star arrangement.
A couple of clicks on the mouse pad and she added a grid to Al’s and then merged the two charts, everything swinging around to overlay, her in yellow, Al in red.
Her eyes bounced around again, looking for a place to land.
Of course she went to love first, and though their other grid parts were in different places, boxing different stars, both of their heart sections settled over that single northern star.
And framing the upper corners were two shooting stars on a path to intersect right across that glowing pinpoint of light.
A chill went through her.
9:19 on a winter’s night. The pair of them in that clearing. Every-thing changing in her life at that moment.
Wait a minute.
What if the prophecy was about her meeting Allhan. And he was her destiny.
What if the sacred intersection in the heavens had been about them?
Except of course, because fate was a fucking asshole, it didn’t mean they ended up together. Nah, they just got to be miserable for the rest of their lives, missing the true love they should have had, could have had, if the rest of the world didn’t exist.
Not how things worked, though.
She had to wipe her eyes again. And as her heart ached so badly it was like she’d been kicked in the chest, she dropped her hands and stared at the screen.
There were so many similarities, she realized, grids lining up, stars intersecting.
It was as if their destinies were, and always had been, inextricably entwined.
t’On had interpreted things in another way, though.
“Oh, who the fuck knows…”
Later, she would think about the moment that came next, dissecting it over and over again to isolate the instant that awareness came to her. There was no way of tracking that, however, because it was a gradual thing, like a camera pulling out details as its lens was focused.
Her eyes drifted over to the family grid on her chart.
She sucked in a gasp.
There were two stars in the death orientation, yes. Except here, they were shining brightly, no shadow that had been interpreted and drawn there identifying a future that could be prevented.
That couldn’t be right.
Frowning, she pulled her parchment back over. God, she wished she’d paid better attention to the homework her tutor had assigned instead of sneaking out to swim in those frickin’ ponds.
She’d thought those astrological lessons had been trigonometry she’d never use. Instead, they were paramount knowledge she desperately needed right now.
Doing what she could to track the differences between what the laptop was showing and what was on the chart that had been drawn, an alarm started going off in her head
Unless she was totally wrong… the constellation arrangement on the screen was a warning to her.
But not for what she’d been told to do.
On the laptop, it appeared as if, were she to continue on her course and mate t’On, that both her parents died and the s’Hisbe was destroyed.
Denne’s eyes went back and forth between the parchment and the screen so many times she got dizzy. Or maybe that was from the conclusion that was propagating in her mind. She just wished she was more confident in her ability to read the grids and stars so she could be more sure.
But it certainly looked like the physical copy of her chart had been doctored: What was shadowed on the parchment was the actual outcome.
And there was only one explanation that made any sense.
t’On had fabricated the whole thing.
Her heart started pounding. She had to go to her parents right now—
“What are you doing?” her mother’s Tretary demanded from the doorway.