Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (26 page)

I could see very clearly where this was going. “You want to continue the breeding program.”

Lilah interjected quickly, “With changes, Fort. Big changes. No more forced or pressured pregnancies—we still want to build our numbers, but only with women who are open to having a baby. We’re going to stop the deliberate inbreeding—the Ad-hene were trying to exacerbate their traits, breed power and magic back in, but there are too many side effects. Bloodlust, a lack of real empathy, whole-scale psychopathy—these aren’t things that we can deal with in the long term.”

Cole nodded. “In this, Lilah and I are in complete agreement. The elves never cared about the costs, they just wanted to get offspring that were as close to the original as possible. The human side to our heritage is a moderating effect—the naturally born half-breeds, created from two changelings, like Lilah, are extremely stable, with just enough glamour to hide themselves. The five-eighths crosses that come from a half-breed and a three-quarter have a stronger magic, but are still stable.”

Ah, fractions—the inevitable part of any conversation about elf genetics. I looked directly at Cole. “And the three-quarter crosses? Like you?”

Lilah put her hand on mine, giving a small squeeze, silently asking me to pull back. She sounded completely calm, though, almost detached, when she answered the question for Cole. “The most magic, but our most dangerous, with the least control. The most likely to crave violence and death, to get pleasure only from the pain of others.” She nodded at the other Neighbor, and there was an understanding there—I didn’t think that she liked him, but in this they understood each other—this was the viper’s nest that they’d both grown up in. “Cole was, for a long time, the greatest success. His magic is strong, but he has as much control as a half-breed.” Her voice softened. “You’ve seen my sister, Fort. She needs to kill—it’s not a choice for her, but a real need. She can sate the need with animals, enough that she can mix safely with society, but I have to watch her carefully. Most of the three-quarter crosses are like her.”

“And there’s one more set, of course,” I noted, not letting it go unsaid if we were going to have this conversation. “The seven-eighths crosses. The ones that the blood sacrifices were made for.”

“Those babies are dangerous,” Cole said clearly. “Allegra’s son was the first, the other pregnancies still advancing, but I’ve already suggested that we kill them.”

Lilah cut in. “Allegra loves her son, Cole.”

It was clearly an old disagreement, and there was something wholly human in the irritation in Cole’s voice. “He was born with teeth, and she had to stop trying to breast-feed him after only two days because he loved the taste of blood more than milk.” While I was still internally wincing from that mental image, Cole turned directly to me. “You saw what was done to conceive them. They’re too close to the Ad-hene.”

As I looked at Cole, I suddenly realized something, something that set him completely apart from so many of the Neighbors I’d met before, the ones like Lavinia, who had worshipped and idealized the Ad-hene. “You hate them. You’d kill them all, if you could.”

Cole’s pupils contracted quickly, almost disappearing from those unbelievable purple striations of his eyes. “Of course I want them dead,” he replied, his anger almost a palpable thing in the room.

“We’re not talking about that,” Lilah said, quickly. Too quickly, and I could see the warning on her face as she looked at him.

“No, of course not,” Cole agreed, recovering with a clear effort, pulling himself together. “We’re talking about the breeding program.” Calmer, he continued. “We need the stabilizing element of fresh human genetics to help move us toward a strong, sane, and diverse population. The Ad-hene weren’t just inbreeding to themselves—at times they would force full half-breed siblings to breed with each other, and those outcomes lacked any control at all. We need new changelings, and that means that we need access to human women in a controlled setting, with the ability to monitor them, follow their outcomes, and eventually take changeling babies. Lavinia is gone, and I hope that she burns in hell for what she did, but she’d been getting older, and was working on grooming her replacement. We have two different Neighbors of the younger generation who were being considered—one is in medical school right now, and the other is already in an obstetrics residency program. We can start making new changelings again.”

I added things up in my head, and saw what they were deliberately talking around. “It looks to me like you’re missing a pretty big piece of the puzzle. Lavinia used a witch to make sure that every woman who walked in that door conceived a baby with elf semen. After all, what was that success rate of the Ad-hene genes breeding true? Eight percent? Nine?”

“Seven. And yes, we need a witch.” A disdain that almost equaled my own sister’s dripped from Cole’s voice when he mentioned the witches.

Once again, Lilah picked up the conversational ball, showing how often they had been around each other. “After what happened with Ambrose—” At the sound of his name, Cole’s eyes flared again, and his lip curled. Lilah hastily corrected herself, which was definitely interesting. “With Lavinia’s former witch, none of the other witches are even willing to talk with us. They all know that Lavinia was doing the forbidden, and died for it, and that her witch barely escaped a similar fate. We’ve been told very clearly that no witch in the territory will come near us unless we can show them that we have full Scott sanction on this.”

“Well, I can certainly understand why the witches would be wetting themselves with you guys coming by,” I noted. If I hadn’t been present in the room and able to do some very fast talking, my sister would’ve ripped out Ambrose’s intestines—and not because of the very morally gray components of his actions, but just because she’d been getting basic information out of him. The witches avoided Prudence for very good reasons. “I’ll bring this up to Prudence and Chivalry, and if they okay things, then I’ll talk to people on the witch side and see what they think about it. They’re going to want full disclosure on this, you know. No more just cooking things up just because they’re asked to.”

“Really?” Cole asked coldly, his disbelief clear. “Well, how pleasant that they’ve finally located some ethics. I do hope that they used both hands and a flashlight.”

Lilah got up and physically took me by the arm, towing me over to the door and leaving no question that this meeting was officially over. “That’s everything we agreed that we wanted to talk about, Cole, so that’s enough. I’m sure that Fort needs to get home.” As she flipped the lock on the door, she paused and looked at me with deep sincerity. “Fort, thank you. I mean it.”

I gave a small shrug. Lilah and I were the same in a lot of ways, given that we’d both run from our biology as long as we could. But when Lilah had seen bad things happening in her community, she didn’t only just buckle down and do something about it, even if it meant risking her life, but she stayed involved, doing her best to try to help the weaker members of the Neighbors, to protect them. I respected the hell out of her for it, and couldn’t say for certain that I would’ve been able to do the same thing in her position—at least not without trying to weasel my way out of it at first. “I should’ve checked in with you earlier, Lilah. I shouldn’t have let it become an emergency. But give me a call sometime later—we’ll do lunch, something that isn’t about business.”

She gave me a quick smile and a friendly peck on the cheek. “Thanks. I’ll talk with you later. And do give my best to Suzume when you see her.” A quick grin flashed across Lilah’s face, and a hint of her old spirit. “I heard you two are dating.”

I could feel a smile spread across my face, and I teased, “I thought there wasn’t much talking between the races.”

“Oh, there isn’t,” she assured me. “But this one was just too good for anyone to stay quiet about.”

With one last wave, she closed the door, and I headed back to my car. Snow had started falling when I was inside—the eventual payoff from the heavy gray clouds that had hung in the sky all day, making everything moody and grim. It wasn’t supposed to be a big storm, but I had to turn the car on to get the heat going, then pull my ice scraper out of the backseat and spend a few minutes brushing the fluffy accumulation off my windows, headlights, and brake lights, before I was finally able to get into the car and head home, mulling over all the issues that I would now have to present to my siblings and try to get some answers for.

*   *   *

In an effort to numb my brain to everything that was going on, I stayed up later than I had lately, and watched TV. Dan’s parents had gotten him a subscription to Hulu for Christmas, giving us a sudden access to television that we’d agreed was both incredible and that we’d probably have to completely disable when he was in exam time again, so we spent the evening watching an older season of
Top Chef
, with Dan periodically complaining about how more challenges needed to focus on the use of organ meat so that he could get new ideas for the kitchen.

Around midnight, Dan headed off to bed. I watched one last episode, mostly just to have something to look at while thoughts chased around in my head like aimless mice. I unwrapped a Popsicle, the last of the orange ones, and began gnawing at it contemplatively, bliss filling me as the persistent ache in my upper jaw was soothed away. A knock on the door surprised me, surprising me even more when I opened it to find Lilah standing in my hall, her hair mashed under a dark green wool hat that matched her heavy winter jacket.

“Uh . . .” I said eloquently, the only thing running through my head being that I was in my pajamas and flannel robe, with a half-eaten Popsicle in my hand.

“I’m really sorry, Fort,” she said in a rush. “I know that this is incredibly inconvenient.” It was true, but agreeing to it seemed somehow a little rude, so I just gave a noncommittal shrug and opened the door wider so that she could come inside.

“Did something happen after I left tonight?” I asked, wrapping what was left of my Popsicle in a paper towel and tucking it back into the freezer. Unexpected guest or no, I was planning to eat that thing.

“No, nothing like that.” Lilah pulled off her hat and coat, folding them carefully onto the side of the sofa. I suppressed a sigh. Apparently this wasn’t going to be a quick visit. “I wanted to talk with you about Cole.”

“Ah. Yeah, you’d mentioned him before as the one who pushed to kill the Neighbors who’d been working with the Ad-hene on the blood sacrifices.” I sat down. “Kind of a surprise to find him waiting to see me, though.”

“I’m sorry about that, but there was a big meeting going down, and he backed me into a corner in front of a lot of the rest of the Neighbors.” She ran her hands over her hair, patting the hair over her ears in an unconscious habit. Her glamour was back in place this evening. “But I’m sure that you’re going to see a lot of him in the future.”

“Oh? Lilah, don’t get me wrong, but that it not in any way improving my night.”

She gave me a quick smile, but it failed to make a dent in her overall anxiety. “Yeah, Cole can be kind of a dick, but he’s not a bad guy overall. He really does want to protect us, to help with our new direction.”

“But you don’t agree with him.”

“On some things, sure. Not on everything.” She paced the room, looking around. “Oh, you got a new armchair. It looks nice.”

“Lilah, seriously, it’s after midnight,” I begged. “I know there’s something you don’t want to say to me, but you came all the way over here to say it rather than texting me, so please just spit it out.”

“You’re right, okay.” She plunked herself down on the new armchair, arranged her hands carefully in her lap, then looked up at me and opened her mouth. Five seconds later she was up and pacing again, and I threw up my hands.

“Lilah—”

“No, fine.” She pressed her fist against her chin, then said, “You need to call the witches.”

“Yeah, we were just talking about that this evening—”

“No,”
she snapped, then took a deep breath. “It’s about Ambrose, Fort, the witch who cooked up those roofie potions that were given to the girls.”

I sighed. “Listen, Lilah, I don’t like it either, and I don’t think that he’s a particularly good person, but he didn’t know what those potions were for. He should’ve asked, but he didn’t, and I believe that he didn’t know. If he was a doctor, I’d say to suspend his license or make him go before an ethics board, but he’s not—he’s a witch, and he was doing what Lavinia was paying him—”

“Don’t defend him, Fort,” Lilah said, her temper flaring enough that her eyes were significantly more gold than brown. “Iris was given that potion, and we both saw what it did to her. I know all the women who were given it, and I was the one who had to tell them what was done to them, because they still have no memories about what happened, but now they’re having to deal with what was done to them, and that someone was murdered right in front of them when they couldn’t do anything about it.” Her knuckles whitened, and I could see her visibly rein in her temper. Her voice lowered, but the intensity was still there as she looked at me. “I want to hurt Ambrose. I want him to bleed. But I can’t risk what would happen if a Neighbor killed a witch, and that’s why I’m telling you this, Fort. You need to get him out of the city, hide him somewhere.”

I looked at her and understood why she’d come here this late, and hadn’t called me. “This is about Cole,” I said. “He killed all the Neighbors who were involved, and now he’s looking at Ambrose as well.”

“He holds him responsible for what his actions contributed to,” Lilah said dully. “Can’t you understand that?”

“Yes, I can,” I agreed. I leaned over and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing lightly. “I know someone to call,” I assured her. “I’ll get Ambrose away before anything can happen.”

She hesitated a second, then nodded, reaching her right hand over to pat my hand, nodding a few times. I could see the strain in her face, the worry, and it made me terrified to think about the things that she was still not telling me, and that frankly I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to know about.