Children of the Bloodlands

by S. M. Beiko

  “You have to fight it. You have to keep a part of yourself, however small, however deeply buried, alive.”

  Her mouth was cruel. “You would know, would you?”

  He took a step. “I know better than you.” Was this thing that was speaking to him even Roan at all? “The stone. The voices —”

  She turned her head aside. Eli could see the mask splintering, sloughing off by half. It cracked to reveal her amber eye. The one that the Moth Queen had given her.

  “The voices are quiet now,” she said. “The dark even ate them up.”

  Then whatever this infection was had burrowed into the Opal. And the Opal was compromised. The longer Roan stayed anywhere near Seela, the worse it could become. But in this vision she seemed, at least, to be trying to resurface. She was fighting. There might still be a chance.

  “The Moth Queen came to me,” he said, voice so low he didn’t think he’d said it out loud. “She said —”

  “Come back,” Roan said again, this time looking straight at him. She was now sitting in the woods, beneath the sun, and Eli could see all of her. Could feel the Opal.

  “I will,” he said, but he was just on the rooftop, awakening from his doze. He took a cursory look around, but there were no woods, no sun. He was alone.

  North.

  The day had given way to night and, bitter and exhausted, Eli lifted his wings and climbed higher into the dark.

  ~

  The air was strange. The sun was out, warm on my cheek.

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  I blinked. The world came back and I was sitting on the ground surrounded by rock and young, trembling forest. Sitting cross-legged in front of me was Saskia.

  “What . . .” I squinted. I didn’t bother asking where I was, how I’d gotten here. I was just a passenger in my own body. The stone had had its own plan for me. Now this dark pilot burrowing deeper into it had hijacked even that. Didn’t I have a say? Wasn’t I the leaseholder around here?

  I opened my shirt and looked myself over in the daylight. The black spread all the way up to my throat. I checked the rest of me — my hands looked like I’d dipped them forearm-deep in volcanic ash. Instead of being horrified, as I ought to have been, I just sighed. There was a sort of serenity to accepting shit as it hit the fan.

  “You feel better, don’t you?” Saskia asked me. She was frowning, though, as if it wasn’t the outcome she’d wanted.

  “Yes,” I said, and even my voice was neutral, relaxed. “I don’t even feel hungry anymore.” Or like there was anything beyond these woods for me. Staying here could be just fine. I was already forgetting why I’d wanted to leave. “Is who my boyfriend?”

  “The beautiful man with the black wings. The angel.” Saskia put her own charred finger to the dirt, scrawling, drawing. The grass smoked with each line carved. “He was trying to save you. Trying to take you back from Killian.”

  “He’s not my . . .” Man with the wings? Yes. Hadn’t I only just seen him? Hadn’t I just been seeing him, whenever I closed my eyes? “The last thing I’d want is for him, or anyone, to come looking for me. I can manage on my own. He’s got better things to do.” So did all the others. Lives to live. I just wanted to fade away. I think I was getting my wish.

  Saskia frowned. “You think you can stop Seela. But you can’t beat him. You just join him.”

  I got up and knelt next to her, eyes narrowed at her crude drawing in the dirt. Stick figures but with defining features — wings for Eli, who was standing on the edge of a hard line she’d drawn, between what could have been me, but my face was scratched out. Around us was a circle, with three black smudges at the edge of it.

  Tears splattered the drawing, hissing as they hit the ground. I was so startled that my head snapped up.

  Saskia’s black eyes with their bright red centres, their flaming edges, were spilling over. “I really thought you would be different. I really thought you could beat him.” Her whisper was vicious.

  I felt the thing inside me turn over, as if it had heard a noise and its sleep was disturbed. I didn’t breathe, and it turned over again, silent.

  “Saskia.” I grabbed hold of her. “You’re not like the other children, are you? Why?” Even just holding her like this, her skin flaked off and danced in the air, underneath that a feverish glowing warmth. I was coming back to myself, breath by wretched breath. She was infected, too, but there was no hunger in her limp shoulders, no desire to do the evil things her dark siblings did.

  She didn’t look at me; she was staring at the ground, at her drawing. My grip tightened when her huge stare swung back up to me. “I went with Seela to help my brother. The others . . . they did it so they could do things. Have powers. Be part of something. I only ever wanted Albie to be safe. But he wasn’t in the end. He tried to kill your friend Barton, but he failed. Now there’s only me. Daddy used to tell us so many stories, about good people doing scary things because they needed to be done. I thought I could be one of the people in his stories. But now I’m the bad guy. I thought you could be the good guy. Maybe you still can be. Maybe that’s why I’m not like the others. Because I can still hope.” Her tiny burnt arms slid around me, and her small head pressed against the Dragon Opal. “I can hear her in there. The grandma lady. She doesn’t want you to be sad. But she can’t say it herself. Because there’s another you in there. And she is winning.”

  The grandma lady. Cecelia. Or just her memories. She was too far away to help me now. And maybe she always had been.

  I didn’t move, my hands hovering over Saskia’s back. That’s when I realized, in the still unreality of the grove and the trees, that Saskia’s body wasn’t warm at all, and neither was it rising and falling with regular breaths. Could there be a way to save her? To save any of these children?

  To save myself?

  “Look at ye two,” said that snide voice I’d come to hate for all its saccharine human-mimicry. “What a pair.”

  Saskia jumped away, crouching behind me as if I’d protect her. It was the first time I’d ever seen Killian level her with a dark look, his eyes pincers. I had thought Saskia was his favourite, because she was always at his side. But it was obvious he could sense something was wrong with her. That maybe her benign loyalty was a put-on.

  “Away with ye,” he snarled, and before I could stop her she scampered off into the scrub. It was the first time I noticed, too, that in the distance rose the cliffs and the twisted citadel Killian had dragged me to. I could smell the sea.

  I twisted back around. “She wasn’t doing anything wrong,” I said. “Or is that the type of father you are — treat your kids like slaves then cuff them for being obedient?”

  Killian took a long breath through his nose, as if he was trying to compose himself. He smiled. “Is that the type of father ye wish me to be to ye?”

  “I’m not having this conversation again.” That I was echoing Cecelia now wasn’t lost on either of us. “Aaron Harken was my father. You would fail literally every parenting course available, if they were open to demon spawn, anyway.” I got up, made a show of dusting my hands off when I was actually scuffing Saskia’s drawing into obscurity under my shoe. “Besides. Don’t you have enough children as it is? You’ve been busy.”

  Killian chuckled. “Aye. But there will only ever be one of you.”

  “That’s right. And I’m not the droid you’re looking for.” I grunted, and the flames, though difficult, came up, ready to go.

  “Oh kee-rist,” Killian admonished. “Are we doing this again? Thought we were past all that.”

  “We’ll be past it once you’re dead and I’m outta here.” My pores sparked painfully. “If you want this stone, you’ll have to kill me. I’m not going to turn into one of your empty-eyed babies and do anything by your side.”

  “Kill ye?” Now he looked actually angry. “So you’d die defending tha
t bauble? For a Family that would as soon as do as ye’ve said, then take the stone and do gods-only-knows to preserve their standing?”

  “You’re a deluded hypocrite!” I shouted, feeling sweat breaking out on my temples. “You’re the one trying to take the stones for yourself!”

  Killian was very still. “Ye think I want the stones . . . for power? Ye think I imagine I will live beyond my purpose?” He let out a sharp breath. “Don’t ye see? I want to destroy the stones. I want all this madness in the name of Ancient to stop.”

  The flames popped off me, my fists shaking as they lowered. “You’ve killed people.”

  He threw up his hands. “The only ones who’ve died are those who tried to stop me. The ones who knew that what I was doing wasna so daft, but it went against their precious code. And the children, well. They made those sacrifices of their own free will. But you were there in London. You saw it. So we busted up a high street or two. No one died.”

  “You’re lying!” I choked on the accusation, and suddenly I was back in that ruined intersection, the action a frozen tableau around me. The children leaping, Eli reaching, crumbled buildings and fleeing Mundanes and Denizens. There had been hope trees, though. I doubted there was a cure for those. In all it was a stage, a cinematic set-up. But Seela had done something with the —

  “— Moonstone.” I jerked. There had been a flash, a huge aftershock, a buzzing in the air.

  Killian looked me over appreciatively, folding his arms. “Ye do know that the Owls’ primary part in preserving the Narrative is keeping us Denizens and our powers hidden from the rest of the world? Takes a lot of mental energy, but they’ve managed it all these centuries. Survival, ye ken. Let’s just say I disrupted their main signal to do that.”

  When Zabor attacked in Winnipeg, when the flood waters receded and the damage had been tallied, it had all been pinned on a savage storm. I’d known the Owls had been behind that cover-up, and I had been glad of it at the time. But that got me to thinking what other things throughout history had been dismissed as natural occurrences, when they’d really been Denizen activity.

  “So what, you . . . you wanted to lift the curtain? Why?”

  He snorted. “Denizens think they’re above it all. That their actions and deeds and sins are nothing compared to Mundanes, even though we share the world with them. I wanted an equal playing field. I wanted everyone to see that what is about to happen is because of the greed of those who should have been caring for this world. And I will make this world as it’s destined to be.”

  “A wasteland of death,” I said, my nose suddenly filled with the scent of the churning waves and raging sulphur of my nightmares.

  Killian opened his hand. “Will ye walk with me awhile?”

  I stiffened. “Where? Why?”

  “Och, away with the twenty questions,” he snapped. “Where else have ye to be?” And he started off in the direction he’d come. My first thought was This could be the chance to nail him while his guard is down. But the second thought, that wasn’t mine, overruled it: Give him a chance.

  I followed at a distance, so that maybe to my conscience it would seem like I was taking an independent walk of my own. We didn’t talk. The scrubby land around us bordered a marsh. I could still hear the ocean, but we were hiking farther inland. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t turn my head. Saskia was small, and careful, but I knew she was following us.

  “Did ye know,” Killian said all of a sudden, “what would happen to the world if there were no people here?”

  Navigating down a burn, I scoffed. “Yeah, there’s a History Channel show about that . . .”

  “Oh, aye? Didna get much television in prison the past eighteen, me.”

  He was on the high ground, staring out into the open, wind coming up. I joined him there, keeping my distance. “The world is a bloody mess because of us. Not just the pollution — the wars, the rainforest, all of it. Letting us run the place was by far Ancient’s biggest cock-up, yet we think we’re entitled to it all. We’re not. And we aren’t gonna smarten up about it anytime soon, either.”

  Below us was a beach, craggy and rock-strewn, with plinth boulders set around it like hulking shoulders. Suddenly I was down on that beach, or one very similar, and Eli was beside me.

  “Don’t move,” he said. I didn’t. He took one tentative step, then another, his hand out. “It’s another vision, I think.” Then he looked back to me like an afterthought. “Where are you?”

  I frowned at him, carefully moved my head. “I’m here, aren’t I?” But that wasn’t true. I glanced up to the ridge, which was now empty. I was up there, in some other time or dimension, with Killian.

  “It’s not a trick question,” Eli snapped. “I don’t mean here. I mean — there. With Seela.”

  “This,” I glanced about. “When is this?”

  “It’s already happened. Or it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t know.” He seemed to be getting more annoyed with me the more questions I asked. “I could feel the Opal. I’m close now. But it’s hard to keep the signal.”

  “How do you —”

  “He mucked about with the stone. Clever, that. But I’ve had it longer. I know it better.” Eli was within arm’s reach of me. He was looking directly at me, eyes intense, and I felt that thing stir inside. It was getting more aggravated than he was.

  I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing?”

  His hand stopped at the Opal. Fell. “Something’s wrong,” he said, checking my face for the solution. “Something’s different. Your stone, it . . . it’s quiet. I can only hear your voice in it. But that’s not possible.”

  This time it was me who put my hand up, covering the Opal, protective and ashamed. Like it was my fault. “They mucked about with it,” I mocked. But Eli had recoiled when he saw my hand, black and crackling. So there had been no point in hiding the corruption in the Opal, really.

  He was trying to save you, I heard Saskia say in my mind. “I know what you’re trying to do. But you shouldn’t. I can take Seela down on my own. I don’t need you or anyone else risking themselves.” I looked harder at Eli, tried to focus. “Unless you just want the Opal. And the Emerald . . . Well, if I kill him, or he and I kill each other, you’ll have both then. And you can stop what we saw in that vision before it happens.”

  “Risk?” Eli’s face twisted. He was going to call me stupid or insane. A classic biting ironic quip, of course, to underline how utterly fucked I was, and that I must have known it, too. But his hands clenched and instead he said, “And what will you do when you don’t even have yourself to risk?”

  I hadn’t expected his pained expression to cut the heart of me. And just like that, I was back on the burn with Killian. Eli was gone.

  Killian pulled his gaze up from the beach to me — had only seconds passed? There was no recognition on his face that anything had been amiss. “Would you like to know more about her?”

  I started like I’d nodded off and dreamt I’d stepped off a pier. “About who?”

  Killian dropped to the edge of the outcrop, swung his lanky legs over it, and huffed. “Your mother. Ravenna.”

  Moments were moving too quickly and sliding over each other like tectonic plates. How had we gotten onto this subject — and anyway, why was I about to indulge in a heart-to-heart with my super-villain enemy? “Does it matter? You’re going to just spin some more sentimental garbage regardless of what I want.”

  “So ye aren’t interested in learning what she was like? I might be the last person who can tell you.”

  “Oh, sure. And how about I tell you what my dad was like? My real dad, I mean. Aaron Harken. You know, the man who raised me?” However short a period that was, I bit back from saying out loud.

  Killian looked stung, but he was eyeing the water, and he tsked. “A Rabbit, no less.”

  “Get over yoursel
f. For someone trying to undo Ancient, you’re a Family purist now?” Against my better judgment, I sat down, too. “He was a Rabbit and he raised me as his own, and so well that I would have never known I wasn’t really his. Until people decided to break the family I knew, without thinking how it’d make me feel.”

  A drawn silence. Killian nodded. “I should be grateful to him. Yer a pigheaded wee snipe, but that may have been more Ravenna than me.” He brought a knee up, rested his arm across it. “I suppose ye turned out all right.”

  I couldn’t help feeling it, embracing it — that big empty part of me that always wanted to belong somewhere, to somebody. I took a chance and watched him while he watched the sea. Killian’s eyes were mine. Even the shape of his hands, kind of. Here he looked so at ease, so human. How could he have such a monstrous thing inside him? I knew Saskia was somewhere in the brush behind us listening. This whole campaign was full of people with broken hearts wanting to belong to each other. That was human. Was there a chance I could bring them both back? Could Killian be saved?

  “They were only around till I was three,” I said. “After that it was Arnas and Deedee stepping in for parenting duty. Mostly Deedee. When I didn’t go to Zabor as planned, I don’t think Arnas knew what to do with himself. But, to be fair, he’d already lost a lot, too.”

  “What a sorry affair, the lot of it. And Ravenna died for it.”

  “Yep.”

  The wind changed — it was subtle, but the hairs on my charred forearms stood up.

  “How did it happen?”

  I blinked. “Hm?”

  “How did she die?”

  He was still looking straight ahead, but I’d heard his voice, that cocky brogue, break just a little. And it softened me, goddammit.

  “She and Aaron, they were trying to get the targe. To stop Zabor, once they found out I was marked. Aaron opened the Bloodgate, she went in . . . she didn’t come back out again. The Owls found out about the whole thing. It cost Aaron his life.” I don’t know why I was telling him, why it poured out of me, but I let it.