Something in his tone sparked within me. My eyes snapped to his face. It wasn’t a Knowing—only a guess. “Your parents were Guardians?” I asked. “That’s how they died?”
Leon’s gaze was steady on mine, his voice calm. “That was different. Not something you need to worry about.”
He didn’t speak of his parents often. He’d told me, once, that he didn’t really think of them; he’d been barely two years old when they died, and his memories were few. But now, for the first time since we’d met, I got a sense from him: a vague almost-Knowing— a flash, and then gone. An image of a small boy, waiting with huge hopeful eyes. An echo of laughter, abruptly ceasing. And then a tall man bending down, reaching for his hand.
“What happened to them?”
He frowned, and I thought for a moment he wouldn’t answer. Something else he didn’t want to tell me. Then his eyes flicked away and he said, “We call it a Harrowing.”
Harrowing. A charged word, like Kin. But different. It didn’t make me think of home, or safety, or spaces of rest. It was bitter, filled with anguish and anger.
“A war,” I said.
His voice was soft. “Your mother ended it.”
I didn’t speak. I waited, taking deep, steadying breaths. A bird trilled somewhere above us, long and mournful. The air here was cool, clean. Beneath the scent of pine and water, I caught the hint of sweetness, calm and soothing. But it didn’t soothe me.
A Harrowing, I thought. Leon’s parents had died because of it. My mother had fought a war before I was born.
And somehow he thought this would comfort me. I almost laughed again. “All of this was supposed to make me feel better?”
I gazed across the darkness at him. In the slice of moonlight, his blue eyes were black, his dark hair tipped with stars.
His hand grazed my arm, then fell to his side. “Audrey—”
“I’m not okay,” I said. “You can’t—you can’t just bring me out here and give me a talk and act all nice and expect me to be okay.”
“Of course you’re not. I’ve lived with this knowledge a long time, and I’m not okay with it. You don’t need to be. But you do need to keep going.”
He looked so stern and serious that, this time, I did laugh. “No offense, Leon, but you suck at this.”
His smile returned—a crooked, apologetic sort of smile that warmed his entire face and made me smile back. “Come on, then,” he said, jerking one of his shoulders toward his motorcycle. “We’re going home?”
“Not yet,” Leon said as I climbed up behind him on the bike. “This was only step one. There’s someone you need to meet.”
***
Once again, Leon didn’t tell me where we were headed. Our route skirted Minneapolis and brought us into St. Paul, past the lights and looming buildings of downtown, past lakes and drowsy neighborhoods. Leon parked at the end of a long driveway. I slid down, pulling off my helmet, and attempted to tame my tousled hair. The neighborhood was quiet. The soft yellow glow of streetlamps did little to brighten our surroundings, instead tossing stark shadows up and down the sidewalks. I looked forward, down the length of the drive. An iron gate barred the way. Beyond, I could see the tall, sprawling shape of a house.
My home was large, but this building was massive. It was dark and sharply angled, like something out of a horror film. I half expected lightning to shoot out of the sky around it, or to hear ominous background music cue up behind me.
“They’re not going to let us in there,” I said. Whoever owned this house, it seemed unlikely they would open their gates for a skinny college student and a girl in cow-print pajamas.
Unconcerned, Leon put a hand on my shoulder, dragging me to him. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “Just . . . try not to be a smartass.” Then he pulled us through the air, into nothing.
I blinked. One moment we were outside, the driveway beneath us, the wind in my hair, and the next we stood in a well-lit room with floral wallpaper. Leon had teleported me before, but it wasn’t easy to grow accustomed to. Disoriented and off balance, I clutched at him.
“A little warning would’ve been nice,” I complained. “I really hate it when you—”
I broke off. We weren’t alone in the room.
“Well, Mr. Farkas. You do like to make an entrance.”
The woman who stood before me was tall and thin, dressed in a tidy peach-colored business suit. She was older, in her late sixties maybe, though she hadn’t quite gone to gray. Her long hair had a dark luster to it, thick and curling, and her eyes were a color somewhere between brown and gold. A string of pearls circled her neck. She smiled tightly as she watched us.
“This is the girl? You may leave her here.”
Before I could protest, Leon gave a short nod and vanished.
I looked down at my ratty old coat and faded pajamas, feeling out of place next to this elegant woman, in this clean room furnished with chairs of dark wood and antique tables. I didn’t recognize the paintings on the walls, but I assumed they were expensive.
The woman continued to watch me. I clasped my hands and stood straight.
She cleared her throat. “Your mother lied about your age. Ryan was right. I should have made an effort to meet you sooner.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I blurted out, “Who are you?”
A faint smile crossed her face. “I’m Esther St. Croix, leader of the Kin. And I’m your grandmother.”
Esther. Like my first name. I was too bewildered to think clearly. Gram’s face flashed before me: the wrinkles that mapped her face, the broad smile she always wore, sunlight upon her as she bent in the garden. “My grandmother is dead,” I answered.
“Angela Whitticomb is dead. I am your father’s mother. Have a seat.”
I did as she instructed, mostly because I felt awkward standing. I moved to the closest chair and sank into it, watching Esther St. Croix with narrowed eyes. She took the seat across from me, folding her hands in her lap.
My mother had never told me much about my father. He’d left, and she didn’t want to talk about him. When I first began asking questions, Gram had been the one to answer. Don’t go to your mother, she’d said. Come to me, I will tell you what I can. Eventually, I’d stopped asking. I didn’t know that I ever wanted to meet the man who had injured my mother so deeply that she still felt the wound.
I had never thought to ask about his family.
“Your mother never told you about me, I see,” Esther said, still watching me with those strange eyes. “We have that in common. Lucy always did want to have things her own way.”
I kept my silence.
“Your mother tells me you’re afraid.”
“I think I have a right to be,” I said.
She dismissed this with a shrug. “So you met a demon. It happens.”
My mind still withdrew from the word. I closed my eyes. “Things like that—they’re not supposed to exist. They’re just stories.”
“Like Morning Star is a story, a myth some reporter thought up. And the Kin too, no doubt?”
“I don’t even know what this Kin is.”
“I see. You thought you were special. You thought you had these abilities, these gifts, and no one else did.”
I didn’t answer. She was too close to the truth. Peripherally, I’d known there were other Guardians, but I had never met them. Until this week, I’d thought of them in simple, comic book terms. My mother was a superhero, and Leon was her sidekick.
“Well, you are special,” Esther continued. “You’re Kin. But you’re not the only one.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said helplessly.
“Another issue I’ll be taking up with your mother,” Esther said. “Let’s do a reading, shall we?”
Without waiting for my response, she stood and moved across the room, pulling one of the tables toward us. She set it between our chairs, then opened a drawer and withdrew a deck of cards.
Nav cards.
I
looked up, startled.
Esther’s lips curved in a smile. “You have Angela’s deck, I think, but there are others. Here. I’ll deal.”
I watched her shuffle, her long fingers moving deftly. I didn’t speak. I tried to focus. I was able to get a sense of Esther easily: an image of long halls, of curtains fluttering, the smell of cotton. I saw her as a younger woman, bending to lift a child into her arms. I saw her grim and stern, speaking to a young man whose face was turned away. She had called herself a leader, and I believed her.
She placed the first card on the table.
Card seventeen. The Archer.
“I don’t do readings often, but this is me,” she said, and placed it in the center. “This, I presume, is you.”
And sure enough, there was card fifty. Inverted Crescent
She placed the next two. The Child. The Untilled Earth.
“Your mother thought to protect you,” Esther said. “She didn’t want you to grow up Kin.”
I caught an image of my mother, fleeting and distant. She was young, her belly round, swelling against her hands.
Esther paused then, looking up at me, her fingers idling upon the cards. “Before we go any further, I want to be certain you understand something. What I am about to tell you is to be kept within the Kin. It’s not to be repeated. Not to your classmates, not to your boyfriend.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Very good. You’ll want to date other Kin. There are several eligible boys your age.”
“Uh, thanks, but I’ll pass on the whole arranged-marriage thing.” Esther favored me with a peevish frown. Belatedly, I remembered Leon telling me not to be a smartass. “Sorry,” I said.
Turning her eyes heavenward, she muttered something beneath her breath. Then she returned her attention to me. “Let’s continue.”
She dealt three more cards. The Garden. The Desert. The Triple Knot.
“This is the Kin,” Esther said. “This is what you need to know. Are you ready? I’m going to tell you.”
13
When I was little, there was one story Gram loved to tell more than all others: the story of the Old Race.
In the beginning, she said, before the time of words and wheels and flint to make fire, there was the Old Race. They didn’t live on earth as humans did, but inhabited the Beneath. They lived in the space between sun and shadow, the space between seconds and breaths, between thought and voice. They began with time and remembered the first burst of light in the vast swell of darkness. They were powerful, indestructible, without love or malice.
When humans first appeared on earth, the Old Race took no notice. But as humanity evolved, the Old Race became fascinated with them: their ingenuity, the way they experienced the world around them, the way they lived and died. And suddenly, the Old Race was not content. They no longer wanted to live in seconds and spaces. They wanted the physical world as well.
So the Old Race crossed over. They built bridges into our world, paths made of light and energy, of spiderweb and sinew, of sound and silence. They left the emptiness behind and came to live among humans, letting their powers sleep.
I imagined great beings with wings, moving down from the heavens with a warm golden glow. “Like angels?” I asked, curled up beside Gram on the porch swing.
“Not at all,” she answered. “They became human, just like you and me.”
But, she told me, not all of the Old Race crossed over.
Some stayed. Some were left behind in the void. The paths closed, and those on the other side learned, without knowing hope or love, what it was to grieve.
And to hate.
“The Old Race had taken the light with them, you see,” she explained. “The very last pinprick of light. And the world they left behind grew very dark, indeed.”
“What happened to the ones left behind?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Gram said. “Nothing happened to them. It’s just a story, sweeting.”
It was the same story Esther told, but she told it differently. The Old Race crossed over, she said—and became the Kin.
“We have been here since time before memory,” Esther said, watching me as she spoke. She leaned forward, her hands lingering over the Nav cards. “Though there are few of us now. We are secret, hidden across the world. We live where the Astral Circles lend their light.”
Histories woven into fairy tale, I thought. My skin prickled; I’d heard all this before. But those had been stories, nothing more. I shifted in my seat, swallowing. “You expect me to believe I’m some kind of—mythical being?”
Esther’s gaze narrowed. “I don’t expect you to believe anything. Either you’ll understand who you are, or you won’t. Belief has nothing to do with it.” She turned another card. Sign of Brothers. “We are human, but we’re something more as well. I said you were special, didn’t I? There is power that lives in our blood, the mark of our ancestry. Energy. The ability to do things most humans cannot.”
Like teleport, I supposed. Or pull the door off a car. Or—
“Knowing,” I said, sliding a hand forward to touch the Nav cards.
“A valuable gift, though gifts vary. Different bloodlines trend toward different abilities. Seeing. Healing. Fighting. We use them in service to others. The Kin live to protect,” Esther said. “It is our duty and our burden.”
“Guardians.”
“Yes,” she said. “All Guardians are Kin, though not all Kin are Guardians.”
I pictured my mother disappearing into the dusk, her hair pulled back, her face shadowed. I knew the way she moved, agile and deliberate. I saw the dark circles beneath her eyes, the way she occasionally fell silent and stared into the distance. A duty and a burden.
I’d always been proud of her, of her secret: my mother, Morning Star; the living, breathing myth; the superhero; the savior. But that pride had been mixed with a certain jealousy. Not just of her strength, but of her courage, her will, her very identity. When teachers asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them a doctor or a lawyer or maybe the president. I never told them the truth: I wanted to be a Guardian, like my mother.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
Now I knew just what it was she was guarding us against.
“Tell me . . .” I swallowed, clenching my hands into fists. I lifted my gaze to Esther. “I want to know about demons.”
In the yellow light, her strange eyes glittered. “They have no true name. They are known by many names. Demons. The Unseen. Here, we call them Harrowers.”
Harrowers. Harrowing.
Mom might not like the word demon, but this one felt worse. “What are they?”
Esther’s hands stilled. She’d flipped the final card over. The Beast. “They were a part of us, once.”
“The Kin?”
“The Old Race. Or so the story goes,” she said, giving me a delicate shrug. “So much is myth now, but I’ll tell you what I know of it. Our ancestors were a dying people. They saw humanity as their salvation. That is why they crossed over. And the Harrowers—they are those who remained behind. Over time, their realm deteriorated. The Harrowers became corrupted, twisted until there was nothing left of them but their hate. Now most tread the emptiness Beneath, tortured by endless envy and rage. Some are able to breach the barriers, inhabit our world, but they cannot truly escape. The Beneath lives in them, calls to them. And so they are never content, never at ease. There is no joy within them, no peace. They abhor the light, and roam in darkness. They cannot feel as we do—but they hunger to.”
I gazed at her, almost believing, not wanting to believe.
Seeing my hesitation, she shrugged again. “You have doubts? Perhaps some of it is only myth. Yet we are connected to them, and they are driven by their hatred for us. I’m certain you felt it.” She leaned forward, peering intently at me. “You met one, after all.”
“But what I saw—” I shook my head. “I didn’t see it. I sensed it, I think. But it felt . . . almost human.”
> A slow nod this time. “Yes, it would have. They have abilities, just as we do. When they are not Beneath, they take both human shape and name. You sensed its true form, what it is when it doesn’t wear our skin.”
I’d had only flashes, nothing concrete. I was suddenly very glad I hadn’t seen it. “Just when I thought this couldn’t get any more disturbing.” I leaned back, drawing my knees up against me. “What do they want?”
Her gaze didn’t waver. “Death. Pain. Power. The more vicious ones hunt humans for sport, but we are their true targets. They revile the Kin, and yearn to be what we are. They want us.”
“So, what, they just go around luring girls into alleys and slicing their ankles?”
“Ah, you mean, what did the one who attacked you want? There is something particular it craves. They’re searching for something, you see. And they’re bleeding Kin children to find it.”
“Bleeding,” I repeated. Pain slashing through me. Red in the street. I hugged my knees tighter.
“There is power in our blood,” she continued. “And ankles are easy. They’re two of the five sacred spots. They bleed, but not enough to kill. Not immediately. First the Harrowers test you, test your blood. They cannot risk destroying the very thing they seek.”
I took a shaky breath. “What is it they seek?”
Our eyes met across the table. Esther reached forward and placed one cool, wrinkled hand against my cheek.
“A Remnant,” she murmured. She sat back, folding her hands in her lap. “Something left behind in our bloodline. A piece of the past, best forgotten.”
Before I could ask what she meant, the door was thrown open, and a whirlwind of black hair rushed in.
I recognized the girl immediately. I’d last seen her in the Drought and Deluge, her eyes pinned to Gideon, her dark blue dress catching the light. Now she wore checkered boxer shorts and a faded T-shirt. There was facial cream on her forehead, but she looked just as gorgeous as she had in the glow of the dance floor. Looking from her to Esther, I could see the family resemblance. Though the girl’s skin was darker, both she and Esther were tall and slender, both had long black hair that tumbled wildly down their backs. The shape of their eyes was similar, and the curve of their jaws.
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