Some time later, after the cleanup had begun, the two of them finally made it out of the Old City and down to Amiel Yishai’s tent city, which had become a crude headquarters in the wake of the DarkWorld’s devastation.
The Loci labored on bringing relief and aid wherever they could. Though many of them were still grieving over the death of the greatest of them, the death of Guardian, it wasn’t unusual to see pained hugs exchanged between individuals wearing Rings of Dominion. Wilhelm was spotted playing with the local children while providing power to a bank of ambulances and their equipment.
Alex spoke first as they wandered through the sparse tents together. “Why did you bring me down here?”
“We’re here to meet someone.”
“No more surprises, I hope,” Alex remarked.
“Just one,” he said.
“Hello, you two,” said a voice somewhere behind them, a voice Alex didn’t recognize.
They turned. The strange old man with only one hand was standing ten feet away, smiling.
Alex’s jaw fell at seeing him talk, but then she got it. Of course. “Hector?”
The old man smiled wider. “Hector.”
“So,” Alex said conversationally, “you’re finally going to tell us who you are?”
“Do you really need me to?” the man replied. “You haven’t guessed?”
Alex grinned at the man next to her, the man who was most decidedly not Daniel Cossick. “I think I’d like to hear you say it.”
“My name is Frank Borrows,” he said, his gaze going back and forth between the two of them.
Alex nodded. It was huge, but not altogether surprising. “Grant’s father. Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
Frank looked at her companion and couldn’t suppress a knowing smile. “Like father, like son, I suppose.”
Alex looked at the man beside her, and back at Frank Borrows. “So . . . you know?”
“I don’t know anything,” Frank replied. He said no more on the subject, but threw her a faint wink that no one but Alex could have possibly seen.
“I owe you an explanation, both of you,” Frank picked up the conversation.
Alex sensed that he was about to tell his story, so she grasped the hand of the man next to her and settled in to hear it.
“After all these years, after so much struggle and pain and sacrifice . . . he really did it. I always knew he would. You have no idea what a relief it is knowing that it’s finally done.”
His audience of two said nothing, waiting patiently for him to continue.
“My son was destined from the moment of his birth to be the downfall of the Secretum of Six. He is the last in a line of sacred custodians, a line that stretches back for generations all the way to the time of Noah, and even further. The Secretum believed that no one in the ‘External’ world knew of them and their plans, and that was exactly what we wanted them to believe.
“When my son was born, I had already been made the latest in this line of protectors. My own father—the man you knew as the previous Keeper of the Secretum, Maximilian Borrows—was bypassed for the role, because the custodian before him knew that my father was an immoral man. My father spent years bitter over this dishonor, and jealous of me, his own son.
“While I was busy working for the Appointed, I attempted to infiltrate the Secretum and gain the confidence of one of their acolytes. Her name was Cynthia, and not only did I gain her confidence, I won her love, and she mine. She was born into the Secretum but disenfranchised with it and their secretive plans and manipulations. When I came along, she found the way out that she’d long sought. She brought me into the Secre-tum, I was given their brand, Cain’s Lament, and I learned all that I could about the organization from the inside.
“But what I saw was big enough and frightening enough that I knew this ‘secret society’ had grown past the point where the resources of the Appointed could overcome them. We’d known of their existence and some of their manipulations of surface society, but the true scope of their aims was astonishing to me. So Cynthia and I came up with a plan; we would turn ourselves in to American authorities. In exchange for our cooperation and inside information on the Secretum, we would be assigned to a special military unit dedicated to taking the Secretum down. We were even given military ranks, though this was largely ceremonial.
“Unknown to me at the time, my father learned of our actions, and Cynthia’s true heritage. When she became pregnant with Grant’s sister, she asked to be relieved of her duties so she could raise our children. My superior, a man who came to be my best friend, Harlan Evers, happily agreed. When Cynthia became pregnant again, a few years later, my father learned of the Secretum’s belief that the one male child in all the world who was born from the line of Cain
and
the line of Seth
both
—a boy who resulted from the union of an External and a Secretum member—would grow up to become the Bringer.
“My grandfather used this information to gain entrance to the Secretum, and he used his considerable influence and charismatic personality as well as his profound familial connection to the Bringer to seize control of the Secretum as its newest Keeper. His appointment did not go uncontested. He was an outsider from the line of Seth. The first to ever join the ranks of the Ruling Council. Devlin was next in line for the job of Keeper before my father came along, and I understand that there was a bitter rivalry between them.
“But rather than following the dictates of the prophecy, my father secretly became obsessed with twisting the prophecy and using it for his own purposes. He wanted power, and he meant to use Grant to get it. He believed that, despite the prophecy’s statement that Oblivion would be born in the Hollow, he could mold and shape Grant into taking control of Oblivion’s powers
outside
of the Hollow, without bringing forth Oblivion himself.
“Learning of my father’s beliefs about Grant, I came up with a plan of my own. With Cynthia dead, there was a way I could see to it that Grant stayed out of his grandfather’s clutches until he became a man: I had to die as well. My father would not want his personal connections examined too closely—a requirement, should he ever try to gain custody of Grant in my absence. So I arranged my own death to save Grant’s life.
“With that accomplished, I faded into obscurity while returning to my role as the custodian of the Appointed. I watched over my son from a distance, always keeping an eye on him and doing what I could to help him. This is a role that has now, at last, come to an end. It was almost fifteen years ago when the Secretum began putting its endgame into motion, by giving out the first Ring of Dominion to a British librarian, a remarkable woman I believe you knew.”
“How did you lose your hand?” Alex asked, eyeing the prosthesis that was in its place.
Frank sighed. “The custodian, the warrior of the Appointed, is always identifiable by a mark. A perfect circle that wraps around the wrist and touches its other side. It was probably decayed beyond recognition by the time Grant saw it on my detached hand in London, so I doubt he even noticed it. But the mark is passed by a symbolic gesture. A dying touch, from one hand to another, from the last warrior to the next.
“Unfortunately, the speech center of my brain was damaged during the aforementioned faked death, and the secret of this dying touch was known only to the one person in all the world bearing the mark. Meaning I alone knew who and what I was, and that I meant for Grant to be the next in line as custodian of the Appointed. But I had no way of telling him, and he believed me dead anyway, which was better for him, for his protection.
“So after he was Shifted—something I wasn’t prepared for—and molded by his grandfather into the Bringer, I took drastic measures. I cut my hand off and placed it in a hidden location while it still bore that dying touch meant only for Grant. And made absolutely sure that he found it.”
“But how could you be sure?” Alex’s companion asked. “That hand being where it was, falling out of the ceiling and scratching my—um,
his
—hand like that . . . It was totally random, wasn’t it?”
Frank smiled. “That’s how I meant it to appear. Before leaving the Secretum and turning ourselves in to the Americans, Cynthia and I undertook quite the daring adventure within the halls of the Secretum’s underground city. When we made it out alive, we had four Rings of Dominion in our possession, which we held in secret. We never even told Harlan about them. Those Rings were still in my ownership at the time I cut off my hand, so I decided the time had come to put them to use.”
“How?” Alex asked.
“He gave them to us,” Mrs. Edeson spoke up, stepping forward. Neither of them had seen her standing in the background, waiting for her part in the story to become clear. “Ryan, Charlotte, Cornelius, and myself. We all became Ringwearers after Grant did, didn’t we? None of us were Shifted like the rest of you. We simply received the Rings, along with a job offer from a member of the Appointed. We were to draw as much attention to ourselves as we could, in the heart of London, in an attempt to bring Grant Borrows to us. And we were given very specific instructions on where to leave that hand. If Grant hadn’t found that building on his own, thanks to the clues planted by Mr. Borrows, we were going to have to steer him toward it somehow. My apologies for the deception and all the trouble we gave you, but we were under strict orders to ensure that Grant found his father’s hand and thereby claimed his birthright.”
“That’s why you and your son are both Ringwearers,” Alex said. “No two people related to one another have ever been chosen to be Ringwearers, but then everyone else was chosen by the Secretum. You were chosen by
him
.” She pointed at Frank.
“Yes,” Frank confirmed. “I told your friend Ethan Cooke that Grant wasn’t what he appeared to be.”
“You sent him the messages?” Daniel asked. “Gave him clues and pointed him in the right direction?”
Frank nodded. “I recruited him into our group. We’ve learned to be very careful when approaching potential new members. I had to be sure that he was an honorable man before I could extend the invitation.”
Frank closed his eyes and reveled in the feeling of the warm, soothing sun. “I believed that I could destroy the Secretum from within by joining it, but it was my son who ultimately realized my goal.
“The Secretum believed that man’s free will was a flaw in our design. So everything they did was an attempt to remove
choice
from the human equation. It’s human nature to desire control. We want to control our lives, our surroundings, our paths, even our loved ones. Because we can make our own choices, we believe that this gives us
control
over our lives and everything that happens to us. But in our design, we were given
choice
; we were
not
given control. It’s an important distinction—and one the Secretum never understood. Our free will is not a stumbling block. It’s the defining characteristic of our subsistence—and the very universe itself.
“The Secretum’s grand plot was doomed to fail from the beginning, because in their arrogance they chose their greatest enemy to be their Bringer. And now it’s done. The Secretum is dead. And there shall be no more sacred custodians of the Appointed.”
Alex thought idly of Payton and how the last time she’d seen him, he was absently scratching at a curved scar on the back of his hand.
She couldn’t help smiling to herself.
The sun filtered down between white clouds as two people sat under a very familiar bus stop.
“So. Why are we here?” Alex asked.
Seated beside her, he squeezed her hand. How was he going to answer that question? There were almost more answers than he could possibly give.
“It was one year ago today that we first met, right here at this bus stop,” he replied. “I had to—I needed to see . . .” he struggled for the words. He sighed. “I had to know for sure that it was all real. That it happened. I thought it would bring us both some closure, to come back here to the beginning.”
“And does it?”
“Not really,” he said. “I mean, nothing’s the same, is it? I’ve changed, you’ve changed—
so much
has changed from that first moment we met right over there in front of that store. Most people are lucky if they get a second chance in life. I think I’m on something like my fifth. I may look and sound like Daniel Cossick, but we both know he’s dead.”
Alex tilted her head sideways, watching him carefully, determined not to rush him.
He looked down at the hand that was clutching hers. His right hand had only four fingers now. Remembering what the mercenary Konrad had once attempted to do to him, he’d come up with the idea of having his right middle finger removed. Alex argued against it, of course, but he had no desire to wear Daniel’s Ring, or any other Ring, ever again.
Payton had done the honors. Doctors at the hospital wanted to surgically reattach the severed finger, but they were baffled when he refused. He convinced them to simply sew up the wound, so that was what they did.
Alex, on the other hand, still wore her Ring. As did most of the other Loci, who were still out there in the world somewhere, doing good, helping people, and righting wrongs. They were reporting now to the organization known as the Appointed, which had changed and grown and had made itself and its existence known to the public at large.
Ethan, now head of the Appointed, personally saw to it that the Seal of Dominion and the silver and blue Ring of the Keeper had been thrown into the deepest part of the ocean, where they would never again be seen by human eyes. With Alex’s blessing, Ethan took the Appointed public, along with Grant’s story and that of the other Ringwearers. The people of earth were hungry to learn of the man who was unwillingly transformed into a hero, was twisted into something evil, but sacrificed himself to save the world. All 299 Ringwearers became famous as superheroes, but Grant’s story was the most famous of all. And as far as anyone knew, his story ended in his death. Some refused to believe that he was really gone, and “Guardian Lives!” became a popular phrase appearing on everything from bathroom stalls and graffiti-painted walls to T-shirts and posters held high at sporting events.