Whom Jonathan had loved.
Lead him, Jordin.
She needed him as much as he needed her. She couldn’t afford to leave him feeling dejected—too much was at stake. Already he was turning away as though he might call for Rislon or dismiss her.
She took a quick, deep breath and reached a hand to his shoulder.
“Roland. Please. I’m here because the stakes are as high as I’ve said. From the day you left, I despised your choice. I would never come to you unless it was my last option. You want the truth? That is it. There’s more, I’m certain, but I need your help to remember it.”
He stepped away, and her hand slid off his shoulder. But then it came.
“The keys to the Sovereign lair! The Citadel!” she blurted out.
He threw back the rest of his wine, set the glass down, and, casting her a dark glance, began to pace, hands on his hips. He looked more like a sulking lion than an Immortal prince. But then, his predicament was as uncertain as hers, wasn’t it? For a moment, she wanted to comfort him.
Comfort him? This man who’d seen to the massacre of so many Sovereigns only a year ago! What would stop him from taking the lives of those who remained in short order?
Nothing.
And here he was, shrouded in comfort. But for as magnificent as he appeared, he exuded misery.
As did she.
Why do you forget?
A heavy weight settled into her heart. She was filled with Jonathan’s blood but without peace, a hollow vessel, a vacant thing.
Jonathan had abandoned them all.
The air itself felt too thick to breathe. Despair edged into her mind. Her only cogent thought was that she must not allow Roland to sense it.
But it was already too late. She couldn’t hold back the tears that filled her eyes. She stood frozen, hating herself, as one slipped down her cheek.
And then they flowed silently, unrestrained. No amount of will could stop them.
Roland had stopped his pacing and was watching her, but her vision was too blurred to see his reaction.
“I’m sorry….,” she managed, turning half away. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
“It’s all right.”
His voice was low and soothing, and it pulled a sob from the deepest part of her heart. She had to gain control. Her show of emotion was unbecoming, if not for an Immortal, then without question for a newly made Sovereign. What would any Immortal—let alone the world—think of such a reaction from one claiming to have the love, joy, and peace of Jonathan’s blood in her?
Roland crossed to her, put a hand on her arm, looked down into her face. She stared up and saw the face of a gentle man, not the powerful warrior who’d hunted Sovereigns and conquered women. He brushed her tears away with his thumb.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She finally found a semblance of control.
“I’m lost,” she whispered.
He stared at her for several moments, touched her cheek, and then drew her to his chest. They stood still, her breath too hot in the air between them, her tears too mortifying on the black silk of his shirt.
His arms too willing to be strong around her.
He released her, and she hauled in a heavy breath as he strode for the door, where he turned, hand on the lever.
“You will sleep here tonight, alone and undisturbed. Find yourself, Jordin. If what you say about this virus is true, the lives of my people will depend on it.”
Y
OU SHOULD be honored,” Feyn said, gliding along the length of the heavy stone table on the dais. “It was on this very spot that I came to new life.”
The man on the table did not speak. Corban had fastened a gag around his head and trussed him like a sacrifice—binding his hands and feet, cutting away his shirt, securing his head with thick bands to the surface of the table. But she had a feeling he wouldn’t have responded. He was given to quiet in this last stage of his zealotry. Soon the delusions that propped up all his naïve beliefs would collapse.
She would show him suffering. And she would also show him perfect peace.
Feyn turned away. “You realize that it’s a kindness I do you,” she said, her voice carrying perfectly throughout the tiered chamber.
The electrical lights in the old Senate Hall had been turned on, dimly illuminating the paintings of another millennium on the ceiling. Just above the dais, a large dark blot above the place where the senate torch once burned day and night obscured what might have otherwise been a priceless work. She’d often thought she could just see an image resembling a hand, forefinger extended, emerging from the edge of the black mar that had only darkened over the years. It was meant to burn forever, that torch.
Until the day she extinguished it.
She turned back as Corban finished his preparations, propping Rom’s eyes wide open with metal instruments that looked wickedly like clamps but had the opposite effect. Rom lay faceup, eyes wide in the stainless steel frames. The scissorlike handles gleamed above his temples. Corban had asked to study the change in Rom’s eyes during his conversion, and Feyn had granted the request.
His breathing was labored, if steady. Controlled, though audible enough to betray what had to be an accelerating heartbeat. He thought he knew what was coming.
He had no idea.
She hadn’t touched the table since entering the chamber, standing back as Seth and another of her Dark Bloods lifted Rom onto it. Though she wouldn’t trade who she was today—for which she ultimately owed Saric gratitude—she’d never been able to repress revulsion at the sight of the stone table since the day of her making. She would’ve had it destroyed had it not been the symbol of the Sovereign’s presence in the theater of world government. It was as much a tangible reminder of the Sovereign’s headship over Order as the Sovereign was the visible hand of the Maker on earth.
No one had known that the table was the main reason she’d stopped attending senate hearings. After that, it hadn’t been such a leap to disband the senate entirely.
“Soon, the burden of loyalty for your people—indeed, of any knowledge that troubles you—will be gone,” she said. “You won’t live in misery, hiding from the sun as you have. You’ll eat from my table. You may even sleep in my bed, if I grant it. And you’ll know peace absent of struggle, loyal to one will alone: mine. Think on that in the hours to come. You’ll need something to cling to.”
Corban folded his hands behind the table, waiting. When she nodded, he lifted a simple stainless steel stent attached to a clear rubber tube with a second stent on the opposite end. She suppressed a shudder with sheer willpower, conflicted by the urge to kiss the instrument of her own conversion.
“My liege,” Corban said, gesturing to the space beside him.
“You realize this is an honor I didn’t give even Corban,” she said, coming round the side of the table. “But Corban won’t begrudge you, will you, Corban?”
“Your will is perfect, my liege,” the alchemist said.
But of course the man was jealous. Which one of them wouldn’t have bitten off his own arm for the opportunity to receive what Rom was about to receive: a full dose of their Maker’s blood drawn directly from her.
She lifted the hem of her heavy sleeve. Blood red, hemmed in gold, black onyx glittering along its edge. Folded it back, baring the dark vein just below the surface of her skin.
The mitigating factor of Corban’s envy—aside from his inherent desire to please her—was his own curiosity. He seemed aware of nothing but his precise movements as he wrapped a tourniquet around Feyn’s upper arm and applied astringent to the vein. She felt the cold bite of steel as he slipped the stent into her arm.
“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.