Chapter 14 #9
He let the illusion fade, and for a moment he looked almost vulnerable.
Michael was still rubbing his temples from their little exercise when Lucy grinned across the table.
“Right,” she said. “My turn.”
He leaned back, laughing. “You won’t get it that fast, so don’t worry if you...” Before he could finish, the air shimmered around her. In the space of a heartbeat, Lucy was gone, replaced by him.
Not a weak copy either. She’d matched his height, his clothes, his exact crooked grin, even the faint scar by his eyebrow. Her voice came out perfect too.
“don’t worry if you what?” she said, finishing his sentence in his voice.
Michael jumped up so fast the chair screeched backward. “What the fuck, how! I can’t do that!”
Lucy-as-Michael mimicked him perfectly, flailing her hands. “What the fuck how! I can’t do that!” “Stop it!” he barked.
“No, you stop it!” she shot back, matching his tone and expression.
The shouting drew quick footsteps in the corridor. Barnaby opened the door; he blinked at the two identical Michaels standing in front of him.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Lucy, which one are you?”
Both stayed silent.
Then one of them pointed dramatically at the other. “He’s Lucy!”
The other Michael gasped and slapped his hands to his mouth. “You lying cow bag!”
Lucy broke first, bursting into laughter so hard she doubled over. “Cow bag?” she managed between giggles. “What’s a cow bag?”
Michael looked offended. “My British friend said it means you’re rude or unpleasant!”
Barnaby raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have any British friends, genius. You’re Lucy.”
Before he could blink, Lucy changed again, this time into Barnaby. Exact clothes, hair, everything.
“Good thing you’re smart, little bro,” she said in Barnaby’s voice, smirking. “I wonder if I get your brain too.”
Barnaby crossed his arms. “I doubt it. That’s… impressive. I mean, wow, look at me. I'm gorgeous, I even have some muscles too now. Just wow””
Michael stared between them, still half in shock. “Why can you do that?” he asked. “I’ve never been able to change clothes, or… all of it. I must steal clothes to pull off a look.”
Lucy shimmered back into herself, still grinning. “No idea. I just tried.”
Barnaby’s eyes flicked to her. “It’s probably because you’re full Nephilim, and royalty on top of that. You’ve got more range than he does.”
The grin faded slightly from Michael’s face. He sank into the nearest chair, his voice quiet. “So, it’s true then. What Mandy and Mary said. You really are the daughter of the royal family.”
Lucy nodded once. “I am.”
Michael’s jaw tightened. “Right.” He stood abruptly, muttered something under his breath, and walked toward the gardens; shoulders tense.
Lucy watched him go, the humour draining from the room. “He seems… conflicted,” she said softly.
Barnaby sighed. “Yeah. He does. Let’s hope he opens up before things get worse. Otherwise, we’re flying blind with him.”
Lucy nodded, still staring out the window after Michael. “Then we’d better keep our eyes open.”
Chapter 13
As Michael left the room, his control slipped, and the truth he was avoiding pressed forward. His memories came flooding back.
The day the sky went dark, the air itself seemed to scream.
Flames rose where houses had been only moments before, walls collapsing into rivers of ash. The snow fell thick and slow, each flake turning red as it touched the ground.
Michael ran until his legs gave out, tripping over bodies he knew by name. He tried to call out to them, but his voice came out as a rasp that no one could hear over the roar of fire and the sharp crack of gunfire somewhere beyond the fields.
He watched his friends fall one after another, their small bodies jerking and twisting before going still.
His father’s screams tore through the chaos it and then he was silenced.
His mother reached for him. He still remembered the look in her eyes, they were wild, terrified and pleading. And then she fell too.
When the noise finally began to fade, the world felt hollow. They were lying only a few feet away from him, side by side. His mothers hand still stretched toward him, frozen in that final attempt to reach her son.
The wind carried the smell of burnt cloth and blood, heavy enough to choke him. The snow that had once been white now lay dark and wet, thick with red that gleamed like glass in the firelight.
Michael sank to his knees beside them. His hands were shaking so hard that when he pressed them to the ground, he left prints that filled instantly with blood.
He didn’t notice the cold anymore. He didn’t even feel his own wounds—the long cut across his forehead that dripped into his eyes, the sting of smoke in his lungs.
All he felt was the hollow weight of the silence that followed.
He sat there for what felt like hours, the last child left in a world that had torn itself apart.
When footsteps finally approached, he didn’t look up right away. He thought it might be his father coming back, or maybe the end itself come to finish what it had started. But it was a stranger, a man in a spotless coat, boots sinking into the red snow.
The man crouched beside him and spoke softly, like this was nothing unusual. “Found one.”
A hand settled on his shoulder. It was warm.
Michael didn’t move. He just kept staring at the field where his family lay. The snow fell thicker, the world growing quieter, until the man’s shadow was the only thing left beside him.
And then he was lifted from the ground, carried away from the only home he had ever known, leaving behind a land that bled in silence.
He was eight when they found him. The people who destroyed his life, called themselves The Lucent. Their uniforms were clean and very white. They promised warmth, food, and safety.
They also promised he would never be alone again.
He believed them.
That same day, they captured Gloriana. She’d tried to fight, but they dragged her one way and carried him another. Two halves of a story cut apart.
They treated them very differently. Gloriana was defiant, she shouted, she resisted, she terrified them.
They locked her in the underground facility, under constant observation.
When she wouldn’t cooperate, they increased the pain until she stopped moving altogether.
Finally, she put herself into what they called a “self-sustaining coma.” She left her body behind to live in the astral field, where they couldn’t reach her.
Michael’s fate was quieter.
They placed him with a group of researchers who believed in conditioning rather than torture. The man who supervised him Doctor Shaw, smiled too much. He gave Michael new clothes, warm meals, and soft words that always came with a lesson attached.
“You’re special, Michael,” Shaw would say. “But what you are was made wrong. If you help us fix it, we can fix you too.”
For a long time, Michael didn’t understand what that meant. He only knew that when he refused to help, Shaw’s voice turned sharp and the room grew cold. When he obeyed, Shaw smiled again and called him son.
By fourteen, Michael could mimic a dozen faces perfectly. By sixteen, he could mimic at heartbeat. The scientists called him “useful.” They told him the others, which were his kind, were monsters. That his purpose was to find them and help the Lucent make the world safe again.
At first, he didn’t believe them. He remembered his mother's laughter and the promises she once made. But years of repetition, lectures, conditioning, isolation had turned the memories thin and brittle. He learned to nod when they said evil, to repeat the phrases that made them proud.
By the time he was twenty, he could look anyone in the eye and tell them he was human.
And most of the time, he almost believed it.
Then, a few weeks ago, something inside him cracked.
He’d been sleeping in his quarters when a pulse ran through his chest, a shimmer of energy, old and familiar. It was the same feeling he’d known as a child when Gloriana reached for him in dreams. A connection. A call.
It broke everything the Lucent had built in him.
Voices overlapped in his mind: find them, destroy them. And in the same breath protect them, remember who you are.
He woke shaking.
For days, he hid the tremor in his hands and told himself it was nothing.
But the call kept growing stronger until he knew what it meant: someone like him was close.
Several, maybe. That same night, they told him they may have a lead as there was a breach at a facility, and it was coincidently in the same direction he was being pulled in.
By the time he reached the forest and saw the manor through the trees, his thoughts were split clean down the middle. Part of him, the loyal part, repeated the Lucent’s orders: gain intelligence, identify targets, report back.
The other part whispered that these people were the ones he’d been waiting for.
Meeting Lucy destroyed what was left of his certainty.
The way she looked at him, without disgust, without pity, was disarming.
It wasn’t kindness he understood; it was too genuine.
And when Lucy connected with him, that spark of shared energy ripped through every layer of conditioning he had.
Memories he thought erased came flooding back: Gloriana’s voice, the sound of rain the night they were taken, the promise that one day they would be free.
But the Lucent’s programming didn’t vanish. It sat in the back of his skull, steady and cold, reminding him what he was supposed to do.
Gain intel. Report. Deliver results.
He’d tried to resist it, but the compulsion was carved too deep.
Now, standing at the manor’s edge beside Damian, Michael tried to keep his hands from shaking.
They were laying the perimeter explosives, the final layer of defence. Damian moved ahead, checking each placement while Michael followed, marking coordinates on a small pad.