BROKEN BLADE

by J. C. Daniels

  “The very same. I don’t know if there is any truth to it. If there is, it makes a poetic sort of sense. She created races that would disseminate Adam’s descendants...taking her vengeance, angry still, after all these years.” She paused, shrugging. “The truths I know are the truths as they were passed down through my line. Vampires and weres were the world’s first monsters…and the ones who survive the change are predominantly male…and here we are, both of our races...created from man, and our races are predominantly female. Created and bred to drive those monsters to extinction.”

  “And exactly how are we to do that?” Unable to sit there drinking tea, I stood up and started to pace. Pulling a blade from my vest, I made it dance in the air over my hand as I waited for her answer.

  It turned to a blur of silver and black as she watched me.

  “Kit...you are a very talented killer,” Es said, her voice dispassionate. “You do not even enjoy doing it. You kill only when you have no choice or when you believe the person truly needs to die. But no matter what anybody thinks, you are a talented killer. You know your targets and you take them out with a minimal amount of fuss and despite the fact that you often hunt prey much stronger than you, you manage to remain alive.”

  Catching my knife out of the air, I tapped the flat of the blade against my palm. She knew so much about me, so much about how my kills affected me. I think she knew more about my race than I did. Which wasn’t surprising.

  I run my tongue across my teeth and moved forward, choosing the words with care. “Hypothetically speaking, if I were to kill, I’d think it would be wisest to do it with a minimum amount of fuss. And ideally, it would be best to go with a decent gameplan, so I can stay alive. Because being dead would probably suck.”

  She smiled. “I’m pleased to know you think so. I’ve worried about that.”

  I flushed and looked away. Actually, it was a surprise to realize I even thought being dead would suck. Most mornings, it was a struggle just to think about getting up. Why wouldn’t dead be better?

  “Kit...if you ever need to talk, I’m here.”

  “I’ve heard that line. A lot.” As shame and misery twisted me into knots, I tuned away. “Talking solves nothing. It undoes nothing. I still have the memories and I still carry the marks of what happened. There is no point is talking about it.”

  “Do you think you’re the only one who has survived such horror, Kit?”

  “No.” I closed my eyes. “But I don’t want to hear what helped somebody else heal, and I don’t want to share what he did to me. He made me into a thing, Es. Just a thing. I don’t want to share that and relive it. I want to remake myself. That’s all I want. Now can we get back to Pandora?”

  There was a heavy, uncomfortable silence, something I wasn’t used to with her. But then Es averted her gaze and the strange, terrible moment passed. A sigh escaped her and she started to speak.

  “You already know you come from a long line of talented killers. There are rumors, legends mostly, that both our races have been…watered down. We’re our own offshoots. There are those who believe we used to be much, much stronger. Much deadlier.”

  I stroked my finger down the edge of my blade. Yes. I’d heard stories of such, back in Aneris Hall. I’d brushed them off. That old reclaiming the glory days shit.

  Es, either unaware of my distraction or ignoring it, continued to speak. “Once, the were population and vampires numbered much smaller than they do now. And if my kind had done what they were charged with doing, eventually yours would have wiped out the stragglers and there would be no more vampires, no more weres. Nothing but humans.”

  “Charged with…”

  The look on Es’s face turned haunted. “Charged with. We can heal the body, mend broken bones, ease the pain of childbirth, but to understand how to do that, one must understand the human body. We were the healers of the world, Kitasa…and nobody knows more about how to destroy the body than the ones who also heal it.”

  Unblinking, her eyes stared into mine. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  I gave a short, tight nod.

  “Babes were murdered in their mother’s wombs. Women died while carrying. When they’d realize what we were up to, we’d flee…and they’d chase us. And your kind would wait.”

  “Vampires bear no young.”

  Es lowered her head. “No.” She shook her head and rose from the table, carrying the mug of tea over to the sink and placing it inside. Her hands rested on the edge and she stared out the window. “Vampires bear no young. But they did take mates, leave behind families. They even loved…for a time. Until their souls withered and faded. It’s a slow process, Kit. One that takes years. The longer you believe you can cling to your humanity, the longer some thread of it will try to linger on. If you wanted to get to one of them, just get to their families. The witches got to many of the families.”

  Fuck…

  I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until Es turned her head and looked at me. “That sums it up nicely, doesn’t it? We were bred to exterminate one race, and safeguard another. And you…” She flexed her hands. “You were bred to hunt. To kill.”

  “Apparently none of that took very well. Witches are pacifists now. I’m more than just a hired killer—my family? They stay in their halls and play war games and talk about the good old days of honor and battle. We’re…”

  Nothing, I realized abruptly. The fabled aneira race were bunch of fools, gathering around and clinging to a time when they’d been something more.

  I looked at Es. “They’re nothing now.”

  “They are. You, however, are far more.”

  I didn’t agree with that. Shrugging uncomfortably, I looked away. “The point is that grand plan obviously failed. What kind of hunters are the aneira now? Aside from the warrior born, witches don’t lift a hand to defend themselves, even under threat of death. And the vamps and weres are still here.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Nothing went according to plan, it seemed. But that’s all for the best.”

  Something small and ugly inside me wondered. Was it for the best that creatures like Jude still existed?

  Damon, no; I didn’t want werekind annihilated, but vampires…

  “You can’t have one without the other,” Es murmured. “With one breed of monsters, you have the other. They are their own check and balance system—they fight over territories and perceived insults. They cull the population of the other. And…” She looked down, staring at something I suspect only she saw. “There was a belief that we were next.”

  My heart froze. “What?”

  “If we’d accomplished what we were meant to do, we would have been next, Kit.” She turned around and rested against the counter, arms crossed over her chest as she watched me. “Those who made us believed that mankind was the race intended to rule this earth. As long as there was any creature that could be perceived as a threat, then mankind could never truly be the dominant force.”

  “Are you saying...” The words trapped themselves in my throat.

  “We were made to fix the problem, Kit. Then we would become a problem ourselves. But we would be much easier dealt with than immortal creatures like vampires or weres. Easier to kill, really.”

  “So we would have been next,” I said softly.

  “That was the fear.” She watched me. “We are far from immortal, Kit. As you well know. We’re harder to kill than humans, but we can definitely die.”

  Closing my eyes, I processed that. How much of this did I believe? How much did I need to believe?

  “You choose to believe what is needed for you to get your job done…and you’ll know what that is.”

  I shot her a dark look. “I hate it when you do that.”

  “I’m sorry.” She shrugged a little. “It’s not intentional.” She sipped her tea and turned her head, staring out the window at the rolling green fields that surrounded the house.

  Blowing out a breath, I glanced down, saw I still he
ld my blade. Tucking it away, I focused on the matter at hand. On Pandora. I’d come looking for information.

  That was still true.

  “I don’t know how much of this I believe to be fact. I know my order believes it to be true. That much I know. Whether that means it is true…?”

  “What happened to throw this great plan out of order?”

  “It was called the Great Purging,” she said, lowering her mug to the table. She spread her hands flat on the table, her gaze locked on something I couldn’t see. “The name alone brings up terribly warm feelings, doesn’t it?”

  “Positively cheery.” I wanted to throw up a little, just thinking about what sort of things that brought to mind. “I don’t suppose I can assume a happy end, right? I mean, our races were created—that tells me something with a lot of power was in play. Any chance you all rose up and destroyed whoever it was?”

  She blew out a breath. “There was an uprising, yes. But not the kind you hope for. The tide had turned…few weres left in the world and most vampires lived in hiding, creeping out only to try and increase their numbers. That wasn’t going well, either.”

  “So what happened to change things?”

  “Her name is lost to time. She is our Nameless one. Our founder of the Green Road. Legend says she’d gone to a village, seeking out a were who lived there in secret.” Es stared off into nothing, her voice soft and distant, as she recounted a story she must have heard a hundred times. “On her way, she was attacked. A vampire, one of the older ones who had built up a tolerance to daylight. He recognized her as a witch. She was one of the purgers—a killer of unborn babes, a woman who rendered women childless in her quest to rid the world of the plague of monsters.” Her tone was thick with anger, scathing and dark and her eyes flashed with pure rage. “The plague…that was what they were told to think. How they were raised, what they were created for. Brainwashing…all of it.”

  She surged up from the table and I caught a hint of her magic—the first time it had ever slipped out of control. It slammed against my shields and I caught a hint of something that made me think of wind and air—but nothing light or soft. These were no spring breezes.

  It was like a hurricane—a cold one, tinged with ice, and deadly with it.

  Slowly, I shifted my gaze up and met her eyes. Something flickered in her eyes and that magic—the winds and ice and chaos—was cut off.

  Es turned away from me and moved to stare out the window. “The Nameless One had a knack for fire and managed to burn him and as she tried to flee, a man appeared. He saved her life.”

  Over her shoulder, she glanced at me, a small smile on her face.

  “She’d been injured, and as she lay there, she watched this man shift into a giant monster…the kind she’d been taught to fear, to hate. To destroy. He saved her from another monster. The stories say she was certain he’d turn on her and kill her.”

  “That’s not how the story goes, though, is it?”

  “No.” She sighed and lifted a hand to press against the glass. “No change happens overnight, though. She was killed, years later, by her own, still trying to convince others. It was her daughter who finally made others see. The girl had the gift of sight. She saw what was coming. Discontent had been brewing between your kind and mine—I think whoever created us had hoped we’d turn on each other and handle that problem for them when the time was necessary, but along the way, the Nameless One had managed to convince enough witches, and even a few of the aneira that something wasn’t as it should be. We began to see what we had done, what we’d let ourselves become. Murderers. Killers of innocents. It broke something inside us. And that is when the tide turned. We withdrew from the …battlefield. We withdrew, but the very essence of what we were had become damaged. So we changed what we were…that is why only the warrior born among us fight. Even now.”

  I realized, as those words faded away into the silence of the room, she did believe the legend. Maybe not all of it, but enough. “Things aren’t the same now. You all can let yourself off that leash…so many witches have died because they wouldn’t defend themselves.”

  “It’s not wouldn’t, Kit,” Es murmured. She turned and looked back at me. “It’s couldn’t. Centuries, perhaps even millennia after this…war ended and we still carry it inside us, racial scars that will never fully heal. The vast majority don’t even understand it but try to force a pacifist to fight and see what it does to her, to him. It tears them apart.”

  Them… I blinked, staring at her. “You’re warrior born?”

  “I am the mother of this house.” Her gaze locked with mine, those pale eyes clear and direct. “I am all that stands between them and those who would harm them, in the end.”

  “You have warriors here,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around that. Es, calm and gentle Es was a warrior.

  “And I am the strongest. It’s my place.”

  Groaning, I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and tried to process everything. All of this information, everything about Es, about Pandora’s Box. I rolled it all through my head and tried to figure out the next step.

  “This…legend…story, whatever. You got any idea how far back this goes? How old any of us are? How old she is?” The older she is, the harder it will be to kill her…

  “Green Road has existed for millennia. She is far older.”

  Millennia. My brain ached just thinking about it and an icy sweat broke out along my spine. My grandmother was old…old, not ancient. She’d seen a couple of centuries come to pass and she probably had another one left in her before the world would be rid of her. Not soon enough—age brought strength.

  “She’s strong.”

  Curling my lip, I muttered, “I’d already figured that out.”

  “She’s not infallible.”

  “Nothing is infallible. Even the supposedly immortal have weaknesses,” I said, shrugging restlessly. Knowing that didn’t make me feel any better. “But that woman has walked the earth for how long?”

  “She’s been around for millennia.” A far-off look entered her eyes and then she sighed, a deep, wracking sound that seemed to come from her very soul. “But she hasn’t walked the earth all that time. She sleeps, and awakens as she chooses…and sometimes, her body weakens and she takes another.”

  “Takes another?” Those words froze something in the very pit of my stomach. As the heat gathered in my hand, I clenched it into a tight fist and tried to ignore it. It was easier that time around because I had something to think about. Something that maybe I could hate. Slowly, I turned and stared at Es. “Just what does that mean? It’s not like she can just pick one up at the grocery store.”

  “No. Any woman of her bloodline who is with child will suffice for her.”

  Her eyes, nearly colorless, practically burned into mine.

  Any woman of her bloodline…

  Blood crashed in my ears, all but roared while rage and horror tore into me, leaving nasty, gaping holes behind. “You say she does this when she wakes…what causes this? Why does she sleep anyway?”

  “It’s her cycle. You know everything works in a cycle, Kit.” Es rubbed the spot between her eyes, a weary expression on her face. “From the records we have, she’ll glut herself…on power, chaos, the things that drive her. Then she falls into a rest. When she wakens, she’s weaker, tired. And it’s time for her to cast off the old body and find a new one.”

  She came toward me, the weariness on her face fading. Her eyes gleamed, all but glowing with intensity. “We kept it safe, you know. The Order of Witches, for centuries, we kept it safe. And then it was stolen.”

  We kept it safe—

  “Oh, fuck me,” I snarled. I spun away and drove a fisted hand into the wall as the understanding hit me. The vase…the witches had hidden the vase. From Pandora.

  I felt like I’d been punched in the chest.

  And Es just continued to talk, merrily chatting away.

  “We kept her hidden, where she couldn’t s
ense any of the outside world. If she’d just stayed where we’d hidden her, tucked away inside…”

  “Tucked away…” Hand throbbing, I turned to look at her. I’d donned the mesh-lined gloves again and when I’d slammed my fist into the wall, the weighted mesh had dug into my skin. My knuckles were already complaining and it was a nice distraction, one I didn’t have time for. “Just what do you mean, tucked away?”

  Es lifted a brow. “The vase is a portal…and a world. Her world. Her home. Her prison. She’s been trapped inside for more than eight hundred years. The witch Brighid of the Blue Sky locked her in and all the houses found a way to spell the vase so that she wasn’t able to sense anything happening outside the world. It drained her of her ability to rouse herself. It kept her…quiescent. But the vase was stolen. Outside of our protections, we can’t maintain the spells. She’s awake now. Awake and aware.”

  And ready to play Invasion of the Body Snatcher.

  Sucking in a breath, I turned away. One thing at a time. One thing at a time.

  My mind was still stuck on the pregnant bit. A pregnant woman of her bloodline. Why?

  I eased that to the side until my brain was a little more ready to think it through. A minute. I just needed a minute. The more concrete problem was one that needed an answer , too.

  “Who stole it?”

  Es stroked a finger down the embroidery of her sleeve. “They believe it was the work of several people. A witch we had to cast from our house and he was working with a witch unknown to us. Vampires are also involved—we caught their…reek…on the grounds.”

  “The witches?”

  “The one we’d cast out is dead. I believe his conspirators saw him as a means to an end—Adjo was always weak. He was used and once his usefulness was at an end? They disposed of him.”

  “I need to know more about him…Adjo.”

  “I’ll make sure the information is provided, but nothing about him will help you, Kit. He was just a pawn.”