by Ted Dekker
“I can’t guarantee he’ll survive it,” Corban said, reminding her yet again.
“We’ll know soon enough,” she said.
Watching Corban, she wondered if she was ready for Rom to die. So much history…. But looking at him, eyes pried open, she knew he was dead to her already.
She said nothing as Corban carefully slid the other end directly into Rom’s jugular without any indication of pain from Rom but a flick of his eyes.
She gave a curt nod, and the alchemist glanced at her. Lowering his eyes, he twisted the small valve. The dark blood in the primed tube began to flow.
Her blood. Maker’s blood.
She felt nothing but a slight drawing against her vein as she opened her hand, eyes locked on Rom. He breathed heavily, fists clenched, a thick vein twitching along his neck.
She glanced at Corban, who seemed to be monitoring the flow through the tubing, glancing every few seconds at the great clock at the back of the senate. Time seemed to slow.
“Is it working?” she said.
At first she thought Corban hadn’t heard her.
She glanced at Rom. The vein along his neck had started to twitch.
“Yes,” Corban said.
The twitching became a visible spasm. His eyes stared at the ceiling, pried open by the steel devices, but she knew they would be as wide with horror without them.
What did he see? she wondered. For her, it had been the tearing of her soul. Her conversion had wrenched her from the womb of stasis, of a beautiful nothingness that was neither Bliss nor fear, that held no dreams or memory. A place where she was aware of the very molecules in her skin. There she’d felt more than heard the silence of a world unseen by natural eyes, as though she had one finger in this world and another in its mirror image.
Saric had ripped her away from it all. From the only wholeness she had ever truly known.
Now, staring at Rom, she remembered the blackness and the creeping tar of fear that had pulled her from that place. Of pain. Of the realization of dark life. She’d entered it as one squeezes oneself flat to enter a flat world, as though through the crack of a door. Impossible and excruciating at once.
Sweat beaded and dripped down the sides of Rom’s chest, over his ribs, along his brow. He jerked and grunted fiercely into his gag. His arms were rigid against his sides, his wrists straining against the rope.
Feyn glanced at Corban, who was leaning over Rom’s head, looking at his eyes.
Rom arched up off the table, heels dug into the stone, his back impossibly bent. He arched up higher, muscles locked, arms corded tight and rigid. Hips so high, arching up at such a sharp angle that Feyn wondered if it was possible that he could break his own back. Were it not for the band holding his head down, she was certain he would have twisted so far that she might hear the snapping of his vertebrae.
The gag muffled a ghastly scream.
“What’s happening?” she demanded.
“The change, my liege. You reacted similarly.”
Rom screamed again, panted against the gag, at the exertion of his muscles, at the obvious pain. The sound devolved into one long string of screams.
She’d never heard Rom like this, so beyond himself. Gone was the self-possessed man. A demoniac lay in his place; monsters warred in his veins.
“It’s killing him.” The sound of her own words chilled her.
“Give it time, my liege. Come, come see!” He gestured, moving aside. For the first time since her own conversion she gripped the edge of the table, slid closer against it to lean over his head.
“His eyes. You see? His eyes!”
The green, once so vibrant, had begun to dull to a milky hazel. She watched enraptured as they paled until they were white, surrounded by bloodshot eyeballs. For several seconds they remained pallid. An inky swirl spooled into the iris of his left eye, like black ink poured into water. It flooded through the iris, along the inside ring, and then appeared in the right, as though a black serpent had slithered through his head. His eyes clouded over—the churning of the Byzantium sky before a storm—and then blackened to obsidian. They seemed to harden before her gaze.
Rom’s clenched teeth had bitten off his screams, replaced with desperate pulls of air through his nostrils. Dark marks appeared on his chest. No, not marks, but the creeping black of his veins under his skin. Up from his neck, over his jaw and toward his cheek, like cracks in glass before it breaks.
He fell back to the table and began to shudder. The shaking started from his feet through his legs and to his torso. He quaked with it, more and more violently until the table shook with him.
“It’s killing him!”
Corban glanced up at her with a blank look. In his view, the loss of Rom might be a pity if only for intellectual and scientific reasons, but Feyn realized that she’d cared, for a moment, whether Rom lived or died.
But of course she did. If he died, he wouldn’t survive to tell her the location of the Sovereign hideout.
Blood stained the gag. He had bitten his tongue. A drop slid down his cheek toward the table. Not red blood.
Nearly black.
Her eyes darted to his irises, searching for any glimmer….
A faint light behind the dark orbs mushroomed. Her pulse quickened at the familiar sight of new life. It brightened and blazed for an instant, causing those eyes to seem to glow, before receding, leaving only a ring of gold around his irises.
The quaking stopped. His body went slack. His breathing stopped. Rom’s eyeballs twitched and then went still, fixed on the ceiling.
For a moment she and Corban stared, the alchemist with tilted head.
“Is he dead?” she demanded.
“Maybe he wasn’t strong enough.”
Feyn turned away from the table with a last, doleful look at Corban. “Now he’s no good to me at all.”
“My liege, forgive me.”
She turned back, was about to tell Corban to take him away, that he might as well conduct all the experiments he wished while the body was still fresh, when the form on the table sucked in a breath through the bloody gag.
She whirled back.
He was still, as though lying in repose. Corban bent over him, peered into his eyes.
“Take his gag off!” she said, coming closer.
The eyes within the grips roved toward her as Corban removed the gag and then the instruments holding his eyes wide.
Rom blinked. Stared at her strangely. It was the look of one on the brink of a question, or of recognizing a face.
“Get him off that table.”
“My liege, I’m not certain whether—”
“Seth. Radus.” She snapped her fingers. “Get him off.”
The Dark Bloods strode down the central aisle and up the side stair of the dais. They untied him and lifted him up.
“In the chair,” she said, pointing to the seat behind the table once occupied by the Sovereign.
Rom was unsteady on his feet as the pair hauled him to the chair and dropped him into it.
Once more, he looked from them to Corban and back to her, where his gaze lingered.
“Lower your eyes,” she said.
He hesitated and then looked at the floor.
For a long while she studied his drooping form, his arms draped like empty sleeves over the chair arms.
“So….,” she said, rounding the table to stand before him. “Now you’ve experienced what I once did. Do you know where you are?”
He remained silent. Surely he wasn’t able to resist her.
“Answer me!”
“Yes,” he said quietly. His voice was low and raw.
“And who I am?”
His answer came late, hardly more than a whisper. “Feyn.”
“And what are you now?”
“I….” She saw his eyes blink again, still fixed on the floor.
“Let me be more specific. Whose are you?”
He glanced up.
“Lower your eyes,” she snappe
d.
He dropped them again.
“Who do you belong to?”
“To you,” he said.
“Which makes me what to you?”
Slow again. Too slow. She felt her pulse quicken. Perhaps his making wasn’t complete.
“My maker,” he finally said in a quiet, rasping voice.
“Your maker. And as such you are bound to my word without compromise.”
She glanced at Corban, who was taking the scene in with interest. Seth and Radus stood off to the side.
“Now tell me.” She paced three steps before him and stopped. “Where are the rest of the Sovereigns?”
She could see his gaze turning this way and that, as though watching a rodent scurrying across the floor. A slight tremble shook his hands.
“I ask it again. Where are the rest of your people?”
The tremor ran up into his arms to his shoulders, as though he were straining against a great weight, muscles fatigued.
She tilted her head.
“Speak!”
He remained mute.
She shot a harsh glance at Corban, who quickly dropped his gaze.
“Was this not successful?”
“By all accounts, it was. But we’ve never turned a Sovereign. His body has converted, but his mind may take some time to complete, my liege.”
“How long?”
“Perhaps an hour. Perhaps longer.”
“Longer? We don’t have longer!”
“He claims the virus will be released—”
She cut him off with a half-raised hand and turned her attention back to Rom. The virus would be released in three days if he’d been telling the truth. The thought of it brought a chill to the back of her neck.
“So. You resist me. You resist the very blood in your veins.”
No answer.
Feyn stepped up to Rom, seized his neck with one hand, and jerked him to his feet. Then higher, until his feet dangled inches from the ground. She stared up into his face, her own arm shaking with rage more than exertion. She rarely displayed her own strength so openly.
Saric had created far more than he’d anticipated the day he’d made her.
“You will understand one thing, Rom Sebastian. I am your maker now. Your loyalty is to me. You will obey me without thought or hesitation. It would behoove you to understand this, and quickly. It will be far less painful for you.”
She released his neck with a slight shove. He slid off the edge of the chair and crashed to the floor, too weak to break his fall.
She swooped down, seized him by the cheeks, and turned him toward the two warriors standing nearby.
“Do you see them? Those two?”
“Yes,” he managed through heavy breath.
“Radus, hand your sword to Seth.”
The man drew his short sword with a hiss of steel and held it out to Seth, who took it.
“Seth, kill Radus.”
Radus’s eyes widened slightly—and then completely as Seth shoved the blade up under his rib cage, to the hilt.
Radus fell to his knees, hands on the sword sunk deep in his chest.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she whispered against Rom’s ear. “Do you not understand that my power is absolute?”
She heard him swallow. Felt him tremble.
“Seth.”
“Yes, my liege.” His voice was like a purr. He was ready, she knew, to do anything to please her. That he, in fact, relished it.
“Take out your sword.”
He slipped his blade free of its sheath, eyes steadied on Rom, narrowed to catlike slits in anticipation.
“Cut your throat.”
His head snapped up. For the first time in her service, he stared at her wide, with a hint of question. But his loyalty could not be compromised.
He lifted his sword and slowly, eyes fixed on his maker, dragged the blade across his throat. For a moment, he stood there, shock and devotion warring on his face. Blood gushed from the wound and spilled onto the dais between them.
Ah, but he was magnificent! She’d been right in thinking he was the pinnacle of her creation.
He staggered only one step before collapsing on the floor, draining of the dark blood that gave him life.
“I will give you some time to collect yourself,” she said, shoving Rom’s face away. “The next time I speak, you will obey.”
She stood, brushed herself off, and looked at the collapsed form of Seth with a slight moue of regret.
“Corban.” The alchemist was visibly trembling.
“My liege?”
“Take him below. Send word when his transformation is complete—body, mind, and soul.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
JORDIN AWOKE with a start, eyes wide, heart pounding in her chest. The events of the previous night cascaded into her mind with the thunder of a waterfall.
She sat up, gasping. The drapes of the large bed were closed around her, the faint glow of a candle throwing shadows across the ceiling, reminding her that she was not dead or suffocating.
Roland had left her alone to sleep. And to remember.
She’d taken Sovereign blood and died a hollow death before being reborn in an explosion of love. But the beauty of that moment had fled as quickly as it had come.
She pushed aside the curtain and stared at the candle on the nearby table as Jonathan’s words filled her mind. Why do you forget?
She didn’t know why. But with that forgetting, she’d lost her sense of identity. Fear had pushed her to a breaking point, and she’d wept, acutely aware of her own misery in the wake of having felt so much beauty in her rebirth.
Why had the beauty left her so quickly?
She’d forgotten not only what it meant to be Sovereign, but the particulars of her existence.
Jordin blinked.
But she knew now, didn’t she? Precise details of the Sovereign Sanctuary returned to memory. The passage through the ruins. The canvas flap. The large chamber with the circular seats…. her own small room with the worn curtain over the doorway. What had been hidden by the fog of Immortality was clear for the first time since her arrival at Roland’s Lair. As were the details of the underground labyrinth that led to the Citadel. Other specific memories strung through her mind: places, people, dates…. each of them falling into place, one after the other.
But Jonathan hadn’t been referring to that forgetting. His words had questioned her very soul. The being of Sovereign. The abundance of life he had promised.
That had not come back to her.
How could she remember what she’d never known? Or had she known it once in those first days as a Sovereign?
Her chest felt hollow. Her eyes misted as the truth settled around her, thick as the darkness, heavy as the pelt on the bed. Whatever peace Jonathan had promised was as absent now as it had been before becoming Immortal.
Perhaps more so. Next to the memory of her recent rebirth, her emptiness only seemed to run deeper, a gorge cut by the river of her reconversion.
She’d rediscovered her memory only to find herself…. lost.
But she knew the way to Feyn. That was all that must matter now. Time enough to discover the source of her misery later, assuming she still had the emotion left to feel it.
Jordin threw the covers off and slid out of bed, dressed still in the short black dress. She stumbled to the door, flung it open, and ran down the corridor, her mind suddenly consumed with only one thought.
She had three days to return both Feyn’s and Roland’s heads to Mattius or the virus would be released. And somehow, after knowing the Immortals as they were now, she understood that their extermination would deeply offend Jonathan. Dark Bloods were one thing, but she’d seen the humanity in Roland’s eyes last night and….
She meant to kill him.
Jordin pulled up sharply, halfway down the vacant hall. Kill him? The prince who only loved with passion and hated in misery like herself? He’d treated her with tenderness last night. He’d give
n up his bed for her, left her alone.
She hurried on, shoving the dilemma aside. Nothing would matter if they didn’t first kill Feyn. Time was too short.
She burst through the door at the end of the corridor, veered toward the right flight of stairs, and flew down them, hand on the rail, watching her bare feet to be sure of her footing. Only when she’d descended halfway did she glance up and see that perhaps a dozen Immortals were seated at the long dining table on the main level, that their heads had turned, all of them staring at her.
At the head of the table sat Roland, leaning against the carved high back of the chair.
She flushed at the sight of him, felt a slight smile tug at the corner of her mouth.
And then she noticed Kaya. Sitting to his right.
The sudden heat that flashed up Jordin’s back surprised her. The girl had no business being near him!
Jordin had told Roland precisely how much Sovereign blood she would need, no more. The rest was for Kaya. But only now did the urgency for Kaya’s seroconversion fill her.
She gathered herself and continued her descent, more slowly now, aware that her hair and dress were tossed and wrinkled from a night in Roland’s bed.
Jordin crossed to the table and stopped three paces from Roland. He made no effort to rise or pull a chair out for her, choosing instead to stare expectantly. Gone was the tender man who’d held her briefly last evening.
Here was the prince, making a show of command before all of his Rippers and the girl sitting at his side who obviously worshiped the very air he breathed.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Talk,” he said.
“In private.”
“You have no secrets here.”
“No?”
“No.”
Her irritation swelled.
“If we have any hopes of stopping the virus, we have to leave now,” she said, assuming the revelation would be new to all except Michael, who leaned back in a chair three down from the prince, arms crossed.
Her glance at him confirmed Jordin’s suspicion. But Roland didn’t break focus.
“So you remember everything.”
“Yes.”
His gaze was heavy on her for several long seconds; silence was thick in the great chamber. His right arm rested on the table, and he lifted a single finger—a dismissive gesture. Immediately all the Immortals except Michael and Kaya rose. Then, with a glance at the others, Kaya did as well.
