by Tosca Lee
Slowly, she comes into focus. The side of my face is already beginning to swell, and the outside of my eye with it.
“I brought you what you wanted,” I say.
“A chart with a few names? That is what Nikola wanted. I have given him something better in exchange for the honor of meeting you.”
“And what is that?”
“A limited truce.”
“He didn’t bring me here. I did.”
“Yes. You are a woman who brokers her own fate. I’ve heard about such a woman before. You are so like her.”
“Everybody’s heard about my mother.”
“I mean Bathory herself.”
She leans a hip against the altar, gestures in the direction of court. “Every woman out there is her, in some way or another. Some genius. Some beautiful. Some sensual. Some brash. Each of you endowed with one sin for which she was punished, like the shattered shards of a single stone.”
“Her sin was that she wouldn’t be bullied,” I say, working my jaw and thinking I might not vomit after all.
“She was impolitic at the least, a traitor at worst. And she was crushed by the same power with which she abused others. Her sins were plenty. But I haven’t come to debate with you. Several years ago, Nikola recovered some pages of your mother’s.”
“This is news to me.”
“I believe you have several more pages as of today. More accurate ones. Or the real ones. It’s very possible Nikola’s were planted to mislead, as we have not been able to make sense of them. But more likely they only made sense to her because of how her mind worked. Her Progeny mind . . . so like yours. She was rumored to be very close to finding something before she died. I would like you to find it.”
“Yes. The map. I just gave you half of it!”
“I believe there is something more.”
“The diary.”
“Yes. I believe she encoded its whereabouts in her notes and that only you will be able to make sense of them.”
“The diary’s a myth! The so-called diary is the map you just burned a part of!”
“Myths have their foundation in truth.”
I give a short, incredulous laugh. “You want me to find King Arthur’s sword while I’m at it? The Holy Grail?”
“I don’t care what you find, as long as you deliver me that.”
“I can’t do it,” I blurt.
“And yet you will,” she says. “Or Luka will die.”
“You don’t understand. Even if it’s real, the notes don’t make any sense!” I say, scrambling for purchase, my mind already rushing ahead—to China, Madagascar, anyplace on this planet we can run, fly, or swim, as we should have done a week ago. All of us.
“Look,” I say. “Nikola is Utod. He actually knew her. He took her life. Let him earn his truce with you. Send him on your quest. I’ll give up the notes . . . in exchange for Luka.”
She lowers her head, and for a moment I think she might actually be considering it. But then I see that she has pulled something from within her robes. A phone. Without a word, she places a call.
“Put him on, please,” she says.
The screen blooms to pixelated life. She turns it toward me as the camera pans to a bloodied Luka bound to a chair.
39
* * *
It happens in car accidents. Everything slows, seconds like delayed heartbeats. The closest object in hyperfocus . . . everything else fallen away.
Except this is no accident that can be averted with lightning-quick reflexes. My attention snaps to the gun in her other hand, but I have no control over what happens on the other end of the screen.
“Luka, please say hello,” she says.
Luka doesn’t move. For a horrible moment, I actually think he’s dead.
She lifts the gun and points it at me.
My own face stares back from the tiny screen in the corner.
Luka’s head lolls with painful effort. His face is purple, hair matted to a bloody crust on the side of his skull.
“Audra, get out of there.” His voice is a rasp. He squints through eyes swollen nearly shut, but then lifts his head a little more. “What have they done to you? What have you done to her?” he shouts, bucking against his restraints, and this time he’s rewarded with a sickening punch.
I scream and scream, and can’t stop. He’s trying to say something, but I can’t even hear him.
The screen clicks off.
At some point two of the robed men have entered the room and restrained me. I lunge for the phone, the gun, the Historian herself, my arms twisting in their sockets.
“I can’t do it!” I scream, over and over. But what I am really shouting is Luka’s name, my fear, my guilt. This is my fault. He will die, and it is all my fault.
“You have five days,” the Historian says, before they drag me out.
40
* * *
They do not take me out the way I came in but through the court itself. A strobe-lit nightmare pounding through my skull.
But all I can think is: If Luka dies, it’ll be because of me. If that happens, I don’t want to remember. I can’t remember and live with it. I’d rather die.
At some point the throbbing ebbs from my ears, if not my head. I see them, belatedly, like an image delayed in long-distance transmission from my eyes to my brain. The masks turned in my direction, mouths agape at my uncovered face—or in recognition, or both. Is this what Nikola wanted? His court in uproar over Amerie’s daughter returned from the dead? My resurrected self appearing to the frenetic masses? If only they knew I was being escorted out by two hunters—that the Historian herself is within their sanctuary.
He accused me of leaving the court shattered in my wake once before.
I could show him shattered.
But I won’t live to take revenge on Nikola. Because, like Luka, I am as good as dead.
We emerge from the underground labyrinth via the stairs of a darkened building and exit through a utility door. The night air assails me, and I begin to shudder between the hands holding me by my upper arms. But not from the chill.
One of them throws his cloak around my shoulders. I find this gesture of kindness ridiculous. Laughable. I shrug the cloak to the ground.
Somewhere across the river Claudia is freaking out; it must be well past midnight. I wonder if she’ll ever be able to forgive me for leaving her a second time without a word. I don’t dare contact her and don’t know how to say good-bye.
As we descend a narrow walk on the edge of Castle Hill, I lift my head. From here I can see across the dark Danube deep into the Pest side of the city. It would be beautiful if the waters weren’t ominous, if the city weren’t filled with ghosts.
A car pulls up, and one of the men with me opens the door. For a minute I harbor the wild hope that Luka will be there, waiting in the backseat. But of course, the seat is empty.
I slide in, mute, not bothering to shut the door, so that one of the men has to do it before he slides in front. The second man waits as though to be certain I won’t try to bolt. But I have no more fight left in me. He turns back as the car pulls away. The man in front is still wearing his mask. I must be coming unhinged because I find it slightly hysterical that a hunter is wearing a mask in front of me.
“These are the papers,” the driver says and hands me an envelope. I stare at it uncomprehendingly, and then recall I’m supposed to be on some fool’s errand to find the diary.
I take it finally, if only to bide my time until I can ensure they’ll never be able to harvest my memory. I will not share with them a single moment that passed between Luka and me. How to find Claudia, Piotrek, Jester. The precious few words my mother left me.
I take it, too, because the writing inside is hers. And then—perhaps for that same reason—I open it.
The pages are similar to the others, sentences running up some of the sides, curving along the corners where she ran out of room. Some of the information is familiar, though the dates are incongr
uous.
The Historian was right: This set is a ruse.
“Where do you want to go?”
I want to go to Luka. Barring that, to the Danube, with its icy waters.
“Csepel Island,” I say, throat raw. Do I imagine it, or does the man in the passenger seat tilt his head, slightly? Perhaps he knows it’s an unlikely place to hide a diary or the lifework of a woman who knew her time was short.
Or perhaps, in a sense of ironic congruity, he recognizes it as the location where my mother’s body was found, floating in the water.
The car winds south toward the river. Somewhere near the inner city, before we have even crossed the bridge, the hunter in the passenger seat points toward a road and murmurs. The driver responds in Hungarian, irritated, but then pulls off onto a side road toward a park. Because of course I won’t be allowed to die without some kind of abuse or molestation first. I steel myself for the fight to escape, to reach the river with my dignity, at least, intact.
The minute the passenger removes his mask, I know that possibility is gone.
I recognize that profile from nightmares. And now that I’m looking at him, the shape of that ear.
Rolan.
Before I can grab the door handle, he lunges across the front seat for the driver. Bashes his head against the window with a sickening crack. The car careens toward a grassy lawn and crashes up a curb, the driver’s head bouncing against the steering wheel. I shove myself across the seat as Rolan grapples for control of the car. The instant it slows I heave the door open, pitch onto the lawn so hard it knocks the breath from my lungs. The ground tilts. I crawl to my hands and knees, fight to stagger to my feet.
“Audra!” He grabs me by the shoulders. I twist away like a wild animal, claw at his face.
“I’m trying to help you!” he shouts, shaking me.
“Killer!” I spit. “You killed Ivan!” A hysterical sound rises within me, and my feet come up off the ground, kicking at nothing.
“I did not kill Ivan.” He shakes me again, drags me back several feet until I notice the form of the driver sprawled on the ground. His face is covered in blood. So much blood—so much like Luka’s. Like Nino’s. I have seen too much blood, too many killed for one lifetime, let alone the space of these short days.
“Get in the car!” he says, but I’m struggling to break free—until his next words stop me cold.
“If you want to save Luka, get in the car now.”
* * *
It’s like the tendrils of a nightmare that will never end. Death at every signpost, blood on the pavement. Rolan at the wheel.
“I saw you on television. You were there. You killed Ivan!” I am beyond composure, if not logic. The curse, perhaps, of my Progeny brain.
“I was on the ferry when his hunter killed him. I didn’t get to him in time. I tried to revive him,” he says tightly.
“To take his memory!”
“If I killed him, would I have been anywhere near the body by the time the police arrived? Think, Audra!”
I squeeze shut my eyes, press my palms tight against them. It makes the swelling on my face hurt even more. I welcome the pain. It gives me focus.
The car on the television screen, abandoned on the ferry. The body still in it. The police. Rolan’s face in the pixels. The voice on the phone.
Hallo, Audra.
But it wasn’t Rolan’s.
“Someone answered his phone after he was dead.”
“It was gone by the time I found him or I would’ve used it to reach you.” He’s speeding down the freeway, south, for lack of any other direction.
“You came to kill me in Maine,” I say.
“I did not come to kill you. I came to protect you. They were suspicious after your death—had already tracked Luka to Maine, pegged him as a traitor. They were coming for him and would have found you. I volunteered to take him out, but I came to the States for you.”
“You let me believe he was trying to kill me!”
“I had to get you away from him. To remember who you are. It was the only way to keep you alive.”
His hint that my adopted parents were in danger. His willingness to return me to the Center and retrieve my records. To kill Luka.
And now I have effectively killed him myself.
Everything I have done. The details of a life, obliterated. All for a single month of peace. In the end, all for nothing. I have saved no one.
“Why are you doing this?” I say wearily. “I know what you are! And there are no such things as Watchers.”
“Not by that name, no. But we have watched for centuries. Sympathetic to the Progeny plight. Without the resources to take down the Scions of the Dispossessed—until now.”
I shake my head. “Sympathetic to the plight . . .”
“We were monks, Audra.”
I give a harsh, abbreviated laugh. “I’ve heard that one before.”
He’s silent.
“I just saw you kill a man!”
But now I remember Rolan murmuring while I was still in hysterics over the sight of the body. I had thought it Croatian, Hungarian.
No. It was Latin.
“It has taken generations for us to make our way into the ranks of the Scions,” he says quietly. “To mingle bloodlines with families ancient enough for us to become the thing we have hated. I called us ‘Watchers’ more aptly than you know. We saw our course as a necessary evil, and broke from the order that we loved with the knowledge that this day would come. The Progeny will not survive another generation. Not just because of the Scions. Nikola’s gifts are gone, but he is still ambitious. He’ll deliver his own before giving up power. Few Progeny who live long enough ever reconcile losing their gifts. They’d rather be hunted than be common.”
My head is spinning.
“If you’ve been planning this for centuries, why didn’t Ivan know about you?”
“And risk exposure with a single harvested memory? We’ve been, by design, as unknown to your world as you are to the common one around you. Renounced as heretics by the sect we served, cut off even from them for the things we meant—and had—to do. But we never forgot who we were. And we waited, in anticipation of a day like this. It’s time for the Scions—and princes like Nikola—to be held accountable.”
“And you and your ‘Watcher’ friends are going to do that.”
“No. You are.”
This time my laugh is genuine.
“Except that you’re failing to realize one thing: unless you and your brotherhood of evil monks knows where the diary is—do you, by the way?”
“No.”
“Then I’ve got nothing. Even if I managed to somehow find and deliver it, you and I both know the Historian would never let Luka or me live. And that’s assuming the diary even exists.”
“I believe it does, that it is the key to ending this, and that you have more to bargain with than you know.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“You aren’t just Progeny, Audra. You’re a direct descendant of Anastasia.”
“Her first daughter? The illegitimate one?”
“Yes.”
“I thought they all died out.”
“Not all of them.”
I think back to the conversation with Jester. Nikola’s census. And then I know: Nikola isn’t trying to chart the Historian’s so-called death map. He’s trying to locate more descendants like me.
The children of Elizabeth’s illegitimate daughter are more powerful than those of her legitimate son.
My ability to sense Ivan and Nikola. To persuade an airport, to project suggestion ahead of me on the run . . .
“Your brain is brilliant. Your gifts are stronger. They fade later in life. Or at least . . . that’s the theory.”
“No one’s lived long enough for you to know,” I say dully.
“Your line has been hiding for centuries. That it survived at all is testament to its power, Audra. There was a massacre two hundred years ago, when the genealo
gy the brothers kept was stolen. That wasn’t the work of Scions. Anastasia’s line has been hunted by a faction of princes for generations in an effort to keep you out of the Scions’ hands.”
“You’re saying it was an inside job. That the Progeny are killing their own.”
“Is that really so surprising, given what you know?”
“Then why did Nikola bring me to the Historian—why, when he killed my mother?”
“I don’t think he killed your mother.”
“You think she killed herself rather than be used as a pawn by either of them.”
“I’m speculating, but I don’t think he did. I do know this: You’re a great prize to the Scions. Do you know what they could do with someone like you?”
“Then why not just take me? Why send me after this thing?”
“Because whatever it is, it’s even more valuable or threatening than you are.”
I close my eyes. But every time I do, I can’t stop seeing Luka beaten nearly to death. Can’t stop thinking of Nino, who didn’t survive. I would gladly trade the gifts and power Nikola seems to crave so much for a common life without them, surrounded by the people I love. Given the choice now, I wouldn’t take a single step further.
But I am not surrounded by those I love. And I have been unable so far to protect them.
My mother failed in this regard, too.
Something nags at the back of my mind. The incongruences in her notes. If her mind was like mine, she would never have needed to write notes at all. Or having done so, could have destroyed and retained the information.
Unless they were meant as a message to someone who could make sense of them, who thought like she did.
Someone like me.
“Is there any possibility they’ll let Luka live?”
“I suppose that depends,” Rolan says quietly.
“On what?”
“On you.”
41
* * *
If I never see this stretch of highway to Bratislava again it will be too soon.
Claudia is in hysterics at the thought of me with a hunter. It’s 2:00 A.M., and I’ve asked her to dispose of the envelope I left with her somewhere safe, if such a place exists. Or to burn it if it doesn’t. Pain twists in my chest at the thought of losing those few precious remnants of my mother. Of Luka.
