by Jenna Black
“Really?” I asked over the intercom. “You’re going to start testing me when Anderson’s been gone all of half an hour?”
“Nope, no testing,” he promised. “I come bearing gifts.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I mean it. It won’t take long, and it’ll be more than worth your while.”
Be wary of Olympians bearing gifts, I told myself, but I had to admit I was curious. He sounded sincere, although tone of voice doesn’t necessarily carry that well over an intercom. Still, it wouldn’t bode well for our new policy of peaceful coexistence if I told him to shove it.
I buzzed him in and hoped he wouldn’t make me regret it.
I brought him up to Anderson’s study. No, my study now, though I supposed it would take a while for me to start thinking of it that way. I felt like a little kid playing dress-up when I helped myself to Anderson’s chair. I hoped the awkwardness and unfamiliarity didn’t show on my face.
“So . . . what was it you were saying about bearing gifts?” I inquired. He wasn’t carrying any packages, which I took to mean that the word gifts had been metaphorical.
He surprised me by pulling an envelope from the inner pocket of his sport coat. He looked at it with strange intensity and didn’t immediately hand it over. Something about his demeanor caused my pulse to kick up.
Cyrus looked away from the envelope and met my eyes. “I know you’re aware of my father’s policy toward Descendants.”
“You mean the one where you search out Descendants and their families and slaughter them all—except for the children you feel are young enough to be brainwashed into drinking the Olympian Kool-Aid?”
“That was my father’s doing,” Cyrus reminded me, “and I put an end to it the moment I took charge.”
“You put an end to killing the children,” I corrected, knowing it was true, but wondering just what constituted a child in the current Olympian view.
“I did that first,” Cyrus agreed. “But I decided to put a stop to the practice altogether. Most of the Descendants we hunted were no threat to us, and killing them so they couldn’t kill us first was a precaution that bordered on paranoia. But never mind that for now. My point is that my father’s policy was to eliminate any and all adult Descendants he could locate and all but the youngest Descendant children.”
My pulse went from slightly elevated to racing in no time flat. “So what’s your point?”
“Even without a descendant of Artemis on our payroll, we were damn good at finding Descendants and eliminating them. But as good as we were, sometimes our quarry got away.”
“As evidenced by your father giving me a list of names and trying to strong-arm me into finding them.” My heart was pounding hard enough that I could practically hear its drumbeat, and my voice came out tight and breathless.
“Exactly.” Cyrus cleared his throat. “One of the ones who got away was a descendant of Artemis.”
I squeezed the arms of my chair.
“She eluded us and went on the run with her young daughter and infant son.” He put the envelope on the desk and pushed it toward me. “She must be a remarkably resourceful and clever woman. We never did find her. Or her children.”
My eyes blurred with tears as I stared at the envelope before me. My mother had abandoned me in a church far from where I grew up when I was only four years old. I hadn’t known my own last name, and I was so far from home that no one could possibly recognize me, so the authorities had never been able to determine who my mother was or where I had come from.
All my life I’d hated her for that abandonment, for the repeated childhood traumas I endured as I was passed from foster home to foster home, becoming more of a problem child each time. I’d been on my way to becoming a juvenile delinquent at best, a career criminal at worst, when the Glasses found me, took me in, and tamed me. But all the years of kindness and love since then hadn’t even begun to erase the bitterness and hurt that resided deep within me.
Until I had become Liberi, I hadn’t once considered the possibility that my mother had abandoned me for any reason other than that she didn’t want me. It was a terrible and painful conviction to grow up with, but it seemed the obvious conclusion from the facts I had available.
Once I’d learned about Konstantin and his purges of Descendant families, I entertained occasional fantasies that my mother had left me in that church to escape the Olympians’ clutches, but I had never really believed it. Back when she’d been speaking to me, Steph kept badgering me to use my newfound powers to find my birth mother, and I had repeatedly rejected the idea. I was terrified I’d find her and discover that my initial assumption was right, that she hadn’t wanted me and that noble sacrifice had had nothing to do with it. Bad enough to think that was what happened. I couldn’t bear to know it.
“What’s in the envelope?” I asked with a hoarse croak.
“It’s your family tree. What we know of it, anyway. It’s also got your mother’s name and her last known address.”
In other words, everything a person with my abilities would need in order to locate both my birth mother and my little brother.
With shaking hands, I picked up the envelope. Cyrus hadn’t bothered to seal it, which was probably a good thing or I might have torn it apart trying to get it open. Neither my body nor my brain was working at full capacity at the moment. I had to scrub at my eyes before they could focus enough to read.
There was indeed an intricate family tree drawn out, but I had little interest in anything but its very last branch. I saw my name and my brother’s—William—at the very bottom and traced up one generation to find the name Jessica.
My mother.
I noted there was a question mark where my father’s name should have been. I had no memory of him, so whoever he was, my mother had clearly split with him—if they had ever truly been together in the first place.
My mother had had two sisters and a brother, all younger and childless. And all of whom had apparently died in the same year. The year my mother had abandoned me.
“Oh, my God. The Olympians killed my aunts and uncle,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Cyrus whispered back. “I’m very sorry. I had nothing to do with it, but I know I am complicit anyway.”
Another shock—I traced the tree up a little farther and found my mother’s surname: Mallory. I recognized the name Jessica Mallory, and it wasn’t because I finally remembered it from my childhood.
Jessica Mallory. That name and William’s had been two of the names on the list of Descendants that Konstantin had given me to hunt down for him. My mother, and my little brother, Billy. If I had given in to Konstantin’s demands, he would have killed them both. And oh, how he would have reveled in the cruelty of what he’d had me do.
“My father and all his followers are dead now,” Cyrus said. “If you want to find your mother and your brother, you don’t have to worry that they’ll come to harm.”
He pushed his chair back, but I didn’t have the strength or will to do the same. I was shaking, my thoughts whizzing around in my head like a fly trapped in a jar.
“I’m going to assume you need a little time to yourself,” Cyrus said. “I know I would in your position. I’ll see myself out.” And because this was Cyrus and he couldn’t resist being a smartass: “Don’t worry about the silver and china. I have plenty of my own.”
If I were being my normal, ornery self, that quip would have made it necessary for me to personally escort him to the door, but this time I wasn’t up to it, and I just let him go.
My hands still shaking, I put down the family tree and smoothed it against the desk with both hands.
Should I look for my family?
So far, I hadn’t exactly been superconfident of my abilities, but I knew deep down that I could do it. And Lord, how I wanted to. I imagined a tearful reunion full of hugs and laughter. As hard as it had been for me to grow up without my mother, how much worse must it have been for her? By abandoning me—and, I presum
ed, Billy as well—she had made sure that even if the Olympians caught her, they would never be able to find her children. What a heartbreaking—and courageous—decision that must have been.
Just thinking about it made me start weeping in earnest. All these years, she’d had no way of knowing what happened to us, whether we found good homes, whether we were loved, whether we were happy. She deserved to know that all the pain she’d been through had been worth it, that we had survived and flourished—assuming my brother had done as well as I, but at least he’d been a baby when she’d left him. It was much easier to find a good home for a baby boy than for a four-year-old girl who was just old enough to know what she’d lost.
And yet . . .
Cyrus had told me the Olympians would not seek out and murder Descendants anymore, and I believed he’d been sincere. But just because he said it was safe didn’t mean it was the truth. He’d made some drastic changes to the makeup of the Olympians when he’d killed off his father’s cronies, but I was sure there were still plenty of bad apples left in his orchard. And his command of his Olympians wasn’t as absolute as his father’s had been or he’d never have had so many deserters. It would kill me if by finding my mother and my brother, I ended up leading the Olympians straight to their doorsteps. For all I knew, my mother had more children now, who were every bit as vulnerable as Billy and I had been. Hell, Billy would be a little young for it still, but it wasn’t impossible that he had children of his own.
I felt like I would be playing Russian roulette with the lives of my family if I went looking for them as I so desperately wanted to.
I took a deep, shuddering breath and wiped away my tears. It had been more than twenty years since I’d been left in that church. Just because I now had the ability to find her didn’t mean I had to make a decision about it today.
I slid the family tree back into its envelope and tucked it deep into the desk drawer. I had plenty of time to think about it before I acted. And maybe, over time, I’d get a better feeling for how much change the Olympians were capable of. Maybe Cyrus would surprise me and have no trouble maintaining control. And maybe he would continue getting rid of the bad seeds, replacing them with those who at least knew what a moral compass was, even if the ones they possessed were rusty and disused.
I had a whole life ahead of me, and it was destined to be a long one. Maybe it would never be safe to search for my biological family. If that was the case, then I’d learn to live with it. But for the first time ever, I was filled with a genuine sense of optimism. And I had a support system, people who would be there to help me figure out what I really wanted to do.
With that in mind, I decided installing myself in my new office could wait. What I needed now was to pour my heart out to someone who would understand exactly what I was going through. Lucky for me, I had someone who fit that bill perfectly, waiting patiently for me to be done fussing so that we could christen my new bedroom.
There would never be a better time than now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenna Black graduated from Duke University with a degree in physical anthropology and French. Once upon a time, she dreamed she would be the next Jane Goodall, camping in the bush making fascinating discoveries about primate behavior. Then, during her senior year at Duke, she did some actual research in the field, and her fascinating discovery was this: primates spend most of their time doing such exciting things as sleeping and eating.
Concluding that this discovery was her life’s work in the field of primatology, she then moved on to such varied pastimes as grooming dogs and writing technical documentation. She is now a full-time writer of fantasy, romance, and young adult fiction.
To keep up to date with the latest book news, follow her on Twitter (@JennaBlack) or Facebook (Facebook.com/JennaBlackAuthor), or sign up for a periodic newsletter—with news and release announcements and members-only contests—on her website at www.JennaBlack.com.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jenna-Black
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Enter the dark and seductive world of
JENNA BLACK
THE DESCENDANT SERIES
Dark Descendant
Deadly Descendant
Pros and Cons (e-novella)
Rogue Descendant
Divine Descendant
THE MORGAN KINGSLEY SERIES
The Devil Inside
The Devil You Know
The Devil’s Due
Speak of the Devil
The Devil’s Playground
GUARDIANS OF THE NIGHT SERIES
Watchers in the Night
Secrets in the Shadows
Shadows on the Soul
Hungers of the Heart
THE FAERIEWALKER SERIES
Glimmerglass
Shadowspell
Sirensong
THE REPLICA SERIES
Replica
Resistance
Revolution
THE NIGHTSTRUCK SERIES
Nightstruck
We hope you enjoyed reading this Pocket Star Books eBook.
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Pocket Star Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Jenna Black
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Pocket Star Books ebook edition May 2016
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Cover design by James Perales
Cover photos: Female assassin © James Carol/Getty Images; city at night © Frontpage/Shutterstock
ISBN 978-1-4767-0009-0
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
About the Author
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