by A. L. Tyler
But Mrs. Ralston was giving her a confused look. She didn’t know yet; Howard had probably made a judgment call with the doctor to wait until Griffin was stronger. There was too much risk of a power struggle if Griffin wasn’t looking healthy and up to the challenge at the time of his appointment as the head of the single most powerful Silenti house in the world.
“Yes, I’d like to talk to Howard.”
Mrs. Ralston nodded uncertainly, looking at Lena like she thought she was suffering from exhaustion, and left. Lena sank back onto the floor and leaned against her nightstand. Just moments later, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in!” She called.
Howard opened the door and stuck his head in. “Lena?”
When he saw her on the floor, he came in, shut the door behind him, and made his way to where Lena was sitting. He sat down on the edge of the bed for a moment, and then slid off onto the floor to sit next to his niece. He waited several minutes for her to start talking, but she never did.
“So…” He started. Lena cringed, she wasn’t okay, and she wasn’t going to be okay any time soon. She didn’t want to have to discuss it anymore. But what Howard asked surprised her. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
Lena looked over at him. His face was relieved, but still sad. His question hadn’t been sarcastic or self-serving; he was asking out of genuine concern and curiosity. And when it came down to it, she hadn’t. The mission hadn’t made her life any easier; she wasn’t any more trusted by her fellow Council members. She wasn’t happier, or freer, or any closer to having the life that she wanted.
“No.” She said quietly.
Howard paused. “What did you find?”
Lena thought. The only thing she had really found that she could tell Howard was that Pyrallis Daray had murdered Ben Collins; everything else was gone and away. She had found out that Warren Astley had been a close friend of her father, and that he had a daughter, living at Waldgrave, that he had never met but still cared for dearly. Somehow, she would clear his name of the crimes he had been convicted for, but she didn’t see how she could do it; telling Astley’s story meant revealing the conspiracy to kill her brother and father, plunging the Daray and Corbett households, what little was left of them, into investigation. She still wasn’t sure if she was going to tell them about Pyrallis Daray and how he’d had the portal all along—or at least until someone else had taken it from him; the panic that would surely ensue would put a halo of suspicion on the fact that Lena still didn’t know where it was. With Griffin slowly grappling his way back into the world of the living, and Lena not quite sure if she was there herself, there was no way they would be able to defend themselves against the litany of questions, accusations, and restrictions they were about to be slapped with.
She looked back at Howard; he looked so sad, and yet so happy that she was back. He had lived at Waldgrave on and off his whole life, watching his father take care of the Darays and all their problems; a fate he was ultimately determined to repeat. How was she supposed to tell him that Pyrallis Daray, the man he and his father had dedicated their lives to protecting from the paranoia, sometimes justified, of every other Silenti in the community, had killed his father? And now the murderer was dead. He had gotten away with it. He had lived with Howard all those years, after killing Thomas, Aaron, Ben, and probably Ben’s wife as well—he had killed everyone but Lena and Howard. And then he had lived with them; he had eaten meals with them, gone shopping with them, slept under the same roof, and not once—once—had he ever expressed any shred of guilt or regret. He was truly an evil man.
Looking at Howard, and his sad eyes, Lena knew that she couldn’t let the legacy live on. It was time for Pyrallis to die and be forgotten; he wasn’t going to hurt her family any more. “It was a burglar, Howard. Someone broke into his room that night and shot him in his sleep. And…” She paused, not sure if she was really ready to do what she was doing, but if she didn’t, there would always be questions. Pyrallis had died and taken the portal with him. He died with his secrets and deceptions, knowing that Lena never intended to put another Daray on the planet. “And, then I saw that it wasn’t the portal. The guy, he walked over to it and he used some kind of chisel thing to pry it open…I think it was part of a lock-picking kit. He got really rough with it, but it finally opened, and it was filled with junk, Howard. Just junk. I think it was bonded shut by the coral that grew all over it in the water.”
She looked hesitantly back over at Howard, who was looking off into a corner of the room. He nodded slightly. “It wasn’t about all this at all…” He smiled sadly. “He would have liked that. He was a fan of irony.”
They sat there together for a while afterwards before Howard finally got to his feet. He held out his hand to her. “Come down to lunch with me?”
Lena took his hand. She sat down at the table with him, but didn’t eat. After lunch was over, she excused herself to go up and see Griffin. The present Council Representatives objected to this, but Lena informed them that unless they were willing to physically stop her, there wasn’t much they could do about it. She just wanted to see how he was doing, as he was the only reason she had survived the trip to Ecuador and back. He was alone in his room this time, and wide awake. Doctor Evans had removed the breathing tube that had previously been shoved down his throat, and the cat was stretched out next to his side. He was even angled to be sitting up a little.
When he saw Lena, he was confused; then, his face fell. His voice was hoarse. “It wasn’t a dream, then…”
Lena came in and sat down on the side of his bed. “No, it wasn’t. I’m so sorry, Griffin.”
Griffin nodded slightly and looked down at the oversized cat at his side. Did you get to talk to him first, about—
“Before I tell you that, there’s something else that I need to tell you. Um, I never told you what I saw, back in that room. If anyone asks, you don’t know. You don’t know what happened to Ben Collins, or the portal, and you just made a stupid call trying to bring me back here because you weren’t sleeping and you lost a lot of blood from that bullet wound. The first bullet wound.” Lena closed her eyes and crinkled her brow. “And about that. I can’t tell you how completely grateful I am—“
You should be. But did you get to talk to him about it before he… expired?
Lena glanced back at him. He was still staring at the cat. “Um, well…yes. Yes, we talked about it. He wouldn’t tell me, I think because he’d rather take it with him than give it to the New Faith.”
Griffin closed his eyes. At first she thought he was angry, but then he reached out and grabbed her hand. And then he was just quiet; neither of them had anything to say. He didn’t bother to ask about Rollin; Lena wondered if he blamed himself for her capture. Doctor Evans eventually came in to check on Griffin, and she went back downstairs.
She found the necessary Council Representatives and asked them to the library, where she gave a detailed account of how the object they had fought so desperately to track down had never been the portal to begin with, how she had not recognized Ben’s killer, and how she suspected him to be nothing more than a common human criminal.
At this point, Master Barton stopped her. “You don’t believe it was the portal?”
Lena leveled her gaze on him. “I know it wasn’t the portal. It was Silenti, and very old, which may account for my mother being the only one able to read the markings, but it wasn’t the portal. It was just a box filled with clay pots, books, and sea water. I’m afraid it was never the portal to begin with.”
He stared at her for what felt like an eternity. “Then…all of this time, all of the fighting—“
“Was for nothing. Yes.” Lena looked down at her hands. “It’s just as legendary as always. No one alive has seen it, and from my understanding, no one has since the early twentieth century. It’s long gone.”
A silence came over the room as everyone exchanged significant looks.
And then they reached t
he part that began with her in a car trunk and ended with the lacerations on her palms. She stuttered the whole way through, and couldn’t maintain eye contact. She felt her body involuntarily tensing up.
“I…I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m quite ready to be doing this.”
The man writing the transcript closed his notebook and looked at her over his glasses. “We could take a break, if…”
“No.” Lena said firmly. She started again, and this time made it all the way through. She asked why they hadn’t come to get her when they found out that Rollin and his gang were squatting at the motel; Howard explained that even though human-borns were transparent, it didn’t make them any less dangerous. Rollin had guns, soldiers, and was sitting in a precariously public area. She asked why he hadn’t guarded her better, and Master Perry offered the explanation that human-borns were too empathetic; stationing anyone too close to an intended victim for too long ran the risk that the guard would take pity on the plight of the captured. Rollin was brilliant and cruel, but it wasn’t the nature of human-borns to torture or threaten; they were too inept as Silenti to shut out the emotions of others, and they felt the terror and pain as clearly as the sufferer.
When she was done, Lena went back to her room and called Hesper. The conversation wasn’t long, and it wasn’t the same. Greg was doing much better; Lena wasn’t sure when she would be able to see her friend again, but promised she would as soon as the Council permitted. She hung up not feeling much better than she had before; her life was about to get difficult. The Council was fickle, and she hadn’t delivered on her promise with the portal. With Daray dead, there was no promise that anyone would actually follow Griffin in his stead; and Lena had only begun dealing with her demons surrounding her grandfather.
Two weeks later, Griffin said he was feeling well enough to be up and around; the attending Council members stayed on pending the resolution of the situation with Rollin and his group of rogue human-borns. Everyone started wearing holstered guns around the house. The day that Lena had walked downstairs for breakfast and found a half dozen automatic handguns removed from belts and laid on the table, she had raised an eyebrow at Howard.
“Okay…” She said, causing several older men to look up at her curiously. “Seriously?”
Howard waved her off. The guns have always been here. People usually don’t carry them around like this, that’s all. The human-borns have been moving around the area, and no one wants to get caught unprepared.
“This is a good idea?” Lena took a seat next to her uncle. “With the arguments we typically have around her?”
Howard shrugged. The human-borns will have guns, Lena. As we previously discussed, they need to maintain some distance from their victims, and guns are both ranged and quick. We have to stay prepared.
Since many of the Representatives believed that the portal was long lost, they had been more lenient toward the restrictions laid down for Lena. She had enjoyed going where she wanted to in the house, spending much more time with Griffin as he finished getting Daray’s affairs in order, and sorting through the numerous volumes of personal papers he had stashed in the multiple libraries and offices around Waldgrave. Despite their best efforts, they couldn’t find any of his personal diaries; Griffin knew he had kept them, and was hopeful that they might contain the last known whereabouts of the portal.
“You’re sure, Griffin? Absolutely sure?” Lena placed another foot-thick stack of papers into a box, and looked over at Griffin, who was resting in a chair with his arm propped up.
He sighed; in a frustrated tone, for perhaps the tenth time, he reasserted exactly how sure he was. “He would have been incensed at losing it, Lena! There’s no way he didn’t record it somewhere. He recorded everything. He even recorded things like…like exactly how many books were lost in the fire, your exact age at the time you came to live here, every conversation he had with you. He would have written this down somewhere, because this portal was his life. This was his legacy, and he charged me with finishing it, and we’re going to find it.”
The search went on for several more days before they had run out of papers to sort through. No personal diaries. No clues as to where to look. Griffin had made her search Daray’s bedroom when he was too tired to do it, and though she was thoroughly uncomfortable being in that room again, she made sure to do a thorough search. Finally, the day came when they sat in Daray’s office together, and Lena had to explain that she really was ready to let go, even though Griffin wasn’t.
“It’s here, Lena. We can’t stop looking.”
“He obviously didn’t want us to know. We’re never going to find it! He lived his whole life in lies and keeping secrets, and he did it very well. I’m starting to wonder if he didn’t destroy the diaries before he died, because he knew I would find out what he did.” Lena said glumly.
Griffin brought a hand to his mouth and leaned back in his chair. It just wasn’t possible; the portal had been every waking moment of Pyrallis Daray’s life. He was obsessed with its safety and the fulfillment of the prophecy surrounding it—he wouldn’t have let it slip away. He would have left a clue, some way for Griffin to complete his life’s work. Lena’s eyes wandered around the office, Griffin watched as she looked from bookcase to bookcase, and then finally settled her gaze onto giant cat’s skeleton in the corner.
“What is that thing, anyways?” She asked.
Griffin looked over at it. “It’s a portal cat. Like him.” He nodded toward the cat that was exploring an empty box in the corner. “Of course, they need hundreds of years to get that big. In all of the old texts, they're hailed as guardians of the Silenti, and especially the Darays. It always upset him that the purebred cats had nearly died out.”
Lena frowned. “How would you ever get a skeleton that big into this room? Even if you took it apart, some of it is still too big to get through the door.”
Griffin stared at it for a long moment. “Maybe they built the room around it. He did custom design the new Waldgrave after the other one burned down, remember.”
Lena got up and wandered over to the skeleton; something didn’t feel right about it. That skeleton had never sat right with her; she walked around it, exploring it fully for the first time. Griffin watched as she circled it several times, wedging her way between the narrow space between the base and the wall, and then reached out to touch it. He opened his mouth to protest; Daray had never liked her touching the artifacts. But then a strange thing happened—as she placed her hand on the hip of the large skeleton, she pushed. And the whole skeleton, and the base that it was mounted on, moved.
It was only a few inches, but it was astounding. Griffin rose from his chair as Lena reached out and pushed the skeleton again, harder, and it swung away from the wall as if on a hinge. When Griffin had joined her at her side, they looked down on the most unexpected thing—stairs. A spiral staircase that went straight down.
Slowly they descended down several flights to a place that was dark and crowded with bookshelves and boxes. It was a veritable labyrinth. Lena searched the wall next to her, and then her hand caught on a switch. The lights went on. They were in a room with no windows, that smelled heavily of charring and smoke, and judging from the amount of stairs they had just descended, it was a basement. The foundations of the first house on the Waldgrave property. She looked over at Griffin.
He was smirking. “I told you so.”
He pushed past her and walked over to a bookcase. He pulled out a volume, opened it, and quickly became absorbed in his reading. Lena wandered past him and to the left, running her hand over the hundreds of books that Daray had secreted away so that the Council would never know he had them. There were all manner of relics and collections of broken pots and weavings, clothing, bones, musical instruments, eating sets, hunting tools, jewelry, children’s toys, and everything else imaginable. Ben had probably contributed a great deal to this collection.
Despite the decrepit appearance everything had, Lena could not help bu
t remark that everything looked so clean. There was no dust—not anywhere. Even across the loads and loads of boxes and books, nothing had accumulated any dust. Daray had been keeping it all up nicely; almost obsessively.
Then she came to an opening in the maze, and there was a kind of shrine that he had put together. In the middle of the stone floor, there was a single marble headstone. It was written in Latito, but what with all the lessons Daray had forced on her, she understood it perfectly.
Here Lies
Edward Daray
Beloved Father
And His Wife
Melinda Daray, nee Baker
Lena could only stare at the names. Those were her great-grandparents; they had died in the fire. He had buried them in the foundations of the house; her shock was compounded when she finally tore her eyes away and looked beyond the headstone to see a line of urns stacked neatly on a shelf. She walked to them; many of the names she did not recognize. But there was one that she did, written in gilt letters on a sapphire blue urn and placed off to one side atop a squat bookcase of several apparently random volumes.
Avalon Daray
Lena grabbed the bookcase to steady herself. Then her eyes fell on the books below her mother’s urn. The one in the top right hand corner was written by L.C.—Lenore Cassius. She pulled it out and realized that the book had been one of those damaged in the fire; the lower right hand corner was burned away.
The corner diary, as Ben had said, by Lenore Cassius.
She opened it, and saw what she had only ever seen before in Lenore’s diaries—sketches. Except that someone, a childish hand, had gone through and traced over all of the pictures in a sloppy scribble. Lena turned the pages, and there it was again; Ava must have thought it was a game. From the way her overwritten artwork had been burned away with the rest of the book, she would have been very young indeed, maybe just three or four, when she had gotten into it. Master Daray would have been furious; the thought made Lena smile.
