I looked into Samuel’s eyes and could see the sadness there. The Brotherhood was like family, and I knew that this story, like so many others, would end in tragedy.
Samuel continued to speak with tears slowly leaking from the corners of his eyes. “They were my first two initiates, and I had spent every day with them over the last two years teaching them our ways, how to fight, and was overjoyed when they passed their trials and started to receive their marks. When they didn’t show up for breakfast, I knew something was wrong. Jason was a large man and could be counted on to never miss a meal.”
He took a small second to compose himself. “Before I even made it to the barn, I could see the blood leaking from under the door. Both of the initiates were dead. Their weapons had never even been drawn, and their bodies were nearly ripped in half. Just the simple force behind an attack like that was hard to contemplate. None of the livestock had been touched that night. When Father Thomas came to personally examine the bodies, he suspected immediately that it was the Fallen.”
I could hear the anger start to creep into Samuel’s voice. “Others argued that the Fallen could not enter church grounds. Father Thomas simply pointed toward the lifeless bodies of our brothers, as if to ask, ‘What other proof do you need?’ That night, we waited for them to come again. They did. We killed three of the Fallen, and for a while, everything went back to normal.”
I got up and poured us each a glass of water. Samuel looked relieved to have a moment to gather his composure after finishing his tale. After a few minutes of him looking at his glass of water, he looked up at me, and I motioned for him to continue his story.
“Over the next few months, we did not lose any more livestock, and life at the church went back to normal. We had work to do, and of course, killing the Fallen who continued to breach our walls was one of our tasks from time to time. Losing brothers in battle was something you had to try and get used to, or it would overwhelm you. I immersed myself into my daily chores and spent every other waking moment training to hone my skills. As time ticked by, we started to notice other small thefts from in and around the church. Holy artifacts, cups, crosses, and relics had all gone missing. It seemed as if nothing was safe from the thieves’ hands. Again, we knew something was happening that we could not explain. We rounded up all of our holy goods and moved them to one room. Father Thomas and I were guarding the room the night they came for us again. We slew five of the Fallen inside the church itself. Something that was unheard of in the Brotherhood. The Fallen entering a church was something new for all of us. Not to mention a church that has had additional holy wards placed around it.”
I held up a hand, motioning for Samuel to stop. “It is a common misconception that the Fallen cannot enter consecrated ground. The younger ones or newly turned can and do move freely in and out of church grounds. The freshly turned can even go out in the sunlight, although it makes them uncomfortable. As they age and the Demon inside them grows and they become stronger, they lose the ability to take direct sunlight, and consecrated ground becomes first a discomfort, and at some point, impassable. The Demon inside the Fallen is what makes them stronger, but it ages slowly. I would expect the ones you have seen are young for the Fallen, less than twenty-five years removed from life as a mortal. They would move and act almost the same as a person would, only slightly faster and stronger. It is not until they are about one hundred that they start to move with incredible speed and strength of maybe three times that of a mortal man.”
I could see his eyes widen a little as I was telling him things he clearly did not know. I could see him start to fidget a little bit, anxious to get back and share this new information with Father Thomas. “Samuel, it is time for you to finish up your tale and be off to Father Thomas with my answer. I will loan you a horse so you can make good time back to your church.”
Samuel finished his glass of water, setting it back on the end table. Buying himself time, I assumed, to compose his thoughts for his final chance to sway me. In truth, I had already decided that we would help the Brotherhood with this. If for no other reason than to find out more about what these Fallen were doing. I wanted to keep the man slightly off balance, though. It helped me to see the truth in his words and actions. When Samuel seemed to have composed himself and was ready to talk, I motioned toward him to let him know I was ready to listen.
He started in a rough voice and then it evened out as he continued to speak. “After we had slain the Fallen, we took their bodies outside to burn them. While we were burning them we could see one man standing just outside of the light. He was watching us burn his fellow Fallen. We had never heard of the Fallen mourning each other. The Fallen’s leaders would normally not care if they lost underlings in combat. For them, it has always been about winning, knowing their ranks can easily be replaced. When the man noticed us watching him, he nodded to us to let us know that he knew he had been seen. In the next instant, he was gone. We have not for the life of us been able to figure out why the Fallen have started acting so different, and why they would risk coming onto consecrated ground to steal holy relics. We are out of our depth, and we need your help.”
I sat back in my chair, thinking about what Samuel had just told me. I had never seen a Fallen show anything but indifference to the death of one of its own. Self-preservation and control of the nest have always been top priority. Something interesting was going on here, something new, something different, something that needed to be investigated by the best that I had under me. I sent a message out to my assistant for him to summon them to my office.
“Samuel, it would be my pleasure to look into this for the Brotherhood. Tell Father Thomas that I will try to come and see him personally sometime in the next three days.” I got up and shook his hand. “My assistant will show you the way out and get you that horse.” He said his thanks and was gone in the swirl of his cassock.
3
Adam
My two most promising pupils were an odd pair. It was unusual for a male Gifted and a female Lycan to work together. We had only just begun to rebuild trust with the Lycans. The Gifted and the Lycans had been at war a few centuries before my students were even born. During the Dark Ages, the Council had waged a bloody war against the Lycans. Never before or since have two armies of the Pretenders clashed in such a battle. Lycans in full battle armor versus the best spell weavers of the Gifted. It was truly something to behold. The conflict was long and bloody, and when it was over, there was no clear winner. Peace agreements were signed, and both parties declared they would not engage in open warfare again. It was an uneasy truce, and many smaller conflicts and deaths have occurred since then, including one that resulted in the deaths of Sarah’s parents centuries after the peace agreement was signed. It was still not unheard of for one of the Gifted to go missing when traveling through Lycan territory. The tenuous peace remained intact, but unspoken hostilities remained.
The war then spread to the New World once it had become clear the colonies had established a firm foothold. The Council was looking to expand its rule, while I was trying to establish something new. The deaths of the Lycans here put me in a precarious position. Trying to form an alliance while picking up the pieces of the Council’s actions against the Lycans was proving harder than I thought. Without Sarah’s help, it would have been an impossible task.
In truth, it had been some time since I held any real sway with the Council. My move to America had more to do with me setting myself apart from their actions than it did with extending their influence. My goal in America was to build something we could be proud of, to right the wrongs that had happened within the aristocratic Council. Our first step was with the Lycans. The next step was to bring the rest of the races—collectively we call them the Pretenders—into the fold. We would all need to stand together against the rising tide of the Demons.
All Pretenders were creatures that preyed upon humanity. Their human camouflage was the perfect way for them to walk amongst their prey, unseen for what
they truly were. They were able to hide from us in many different ways, some of them could shift between forms, some used magic to hide their true appearance, and even more disturbing, some of them used to be human.
Our job as the Gifted was to make sure that they never revealed themselves to humanity, and in our efforts to ensure they remained hidden, we had hunted the Pretenders to the brink of extinction many times. In an effort to end the bloodshed, we created the Accord, clearly setting forth the laws all Pretenders must follow, ensuring that every race knew what would happen if humanity was ever endangered. Any unprovoked attacks on humans were punished, quickly, and severely. Most of the Pretenders did a great job of either hiding or policing their own people. But when word of a breach in the Accord reached our ears, we were forced to take action. The Gifted would not hesitate to kill any Pretender that stopped them from reaching their goal. We were judge, jury, and executioner.
As a result of the Gifted’s role as the protectors of humanity, trying to get the Pretenders to unite with us against our common enemy—the Demons—was problematic. Just like most predators in nature, they tended not to play well with others. The Lycans and the Fallen were natural enemies as old as time itself. The Fae only worked with other Pretenders as long as they could use them. Convincing them to unite with us against a new common enemy was an insurmountable task, but the Demons rising to our plane of existence made trying to unite us a necessity. The Demons would use the centuries-old hatreds to try and divide us. The might we could wield by standing together would be too much for them, but divided, all of us would surely fall. The only thing standing in the way of our world being invaded was the Gifted and the few Lycans that chose to stand with us.
Sarah Atsidii was a Lycan of untold abilities, faster and stronger than others of her kind. She was a rare silver-backed Lycan, something that is only born into the world every other generation. She was able to heal from wounds at an astonishing rate, even for one of her people. She was also unique in the fact that she could change forms faster than normal. Her status among her people grew by the day. Her willingness to help us helped attract more Lycans to our cause. I had paired her with the strongest Gifted that I had at my disposal.
John Blackthorn had become a master at wielding two swords at once. The complete control he had over his gift at a young age was unheard of. For him, the use of magic was almost instinctual in its nature. He worked harder than any student I had at mastering his physical abilities. He worked even harder because his magical abilities came to him so easily. The last thing he ever wanted was for other members of the Ascendancy to question if he was willing to work as hard as they were. He spent so much time working with the other Gifted, their skills had grown considerably. His help made us a fighting force and gave us the chance to secure the West Coast of the United States from the Demons.
Now that these two had been working together for some time with fantastic results, I was hoping to use them to change the path of the Ascended. I knew that they had been trying to keep their relationship a secret out of fear of what I, and others, would think of them. It was time to bring their relationship out into the light. The 1900s had arrived, and with a new century, the world was changing.
The Twenties were proving to be an age of innovation, and the transition to a new mechanical world was firmly underway. It was time for the Ascendancy to embrace the changes around us and welcome a new age. All around the country, humanity was evolving at a furious pace. The things I had grown up believing were no longer relevant, and it would be the youth of the Ascendancy that would usher us into the future.
We had for the most part been able to keep the Demons in check. But the Demons were starting to grow their numbers faster than we thought was possible, and without help from the other Pretenders, the Gifted alone could not possibly win this fight. Not only were we spread thin trying to contain the Demon outbreaks, but we now had a new threat to contend with. Just like in any ecosystem, as a food source grows, so do the predators. Until now, we had been so fixated on wiping out the Demons, we had missed the rise of one of our oldest enemies—the Fallen. A particularly strong nest of the Fallen had descended into San Francisco, and it was time to root them out. I was hoping my two apprentices would be up to the task.
Our information on the Fallen was extremely limited. We knew that a new vampire had entered the city and quickly brought all the other nests to heel. We had already spent most of the summer destroying the smaller nests. I had some of our agents working on the issue before the Brotherhood had shown up in my office today. Unfortunately, to date, we had only been able to reach and destroy the outliers of Fallen society. So far, we had failed to make any real headway in gaining information from them. The only thing we learned was that there was a new Fallen in charge. His name was like a whisper in the wind. Dimitre.
Dimitre had isolated himself from the rest of his followers by putting one of his younger Fallen in charge of each of the outlying nests. This helped him to ensure they did not have enough information to damage his network throughout the city. The Fallen he had brought with him from Europe were older than most of the vampires in America. So they had been able to take control of the nests within the city without too many issues. We knew this would lead to animosity between the local Fallen and the new Fallen trying to take over. I wondered if we might be able to exploit the deteriorating relations between the Fallen of this city. The younger Fallen tended to just follow the elders’ more established rule. To not follow the leader of your nest left you with one option, death. So far, we had not been able to identify and isolate any of Dimitre’s followers from the nests before destroying them. We had hoped that capturing one of his followers might help point us in the direction of a nest in the city.
As the summer went on, we destroyed many of the outlying nests with no success in extracting information or capturing one of the Fallen for questioning. For each nest we destroyed, a new nest would pop up in a new location. Each new nest was more secure, and hidden better than the last. The only thing we had accomplished so far was to eliminate some of the older Fallen in the nests. As far as we could tell, none of the Fallen we had destroyed had direct ties to Dimitre. His underlings had an uncanny sense of when not to be at the nests we were attacking. The only good news we had was that newer nests had newer vampires and therefore weaker ones. The bad news that came with that was that more people were being turned than before we started our campaign. Bleeding Dimitre’s strength a little at a time was not going to get the job done without placing more humans at risk.
Rumors were starting to spread that Dimitre was a vampire lord sent from one of the oldest nests in Europe. If that was true, we needed to find him as soon as possible and release his hold on the city. So far, we had been able to keep the murders and disappearances from being discovered by the human authorities. Our luck would not hold out forever. Nor would our anonymity. At some point, I knew for certain the local authorities would catch on and get involved. We had to get this under control before that happened, and we had to do it fast.
One of our goals as members of the Ascendancy was to keep the activities of the Pretenders hidden and to keep our human counterparts in the dark. I was looking forward to pulling Sarah and John away from their current task of slaying Demons and put them on the trail of the Fallen infestation. As much as I knew they would hate it, Sarah and John were our best chance at a quick resolution. With two of our best, we could strike quickly, taking the fight to the Fallen and gaining the advantage before Dimitre had the entire city under his control.
When I called John and Sarah to my office, I was again struck by how different they were. John walked with an easy grace and a lopsided grin on his face, and Sarah walked with a barely suppressed tension in her muscles, like she was ready to spring into action at any second. She always kept her face neutral, but I had learned how to read the smallest expressions that came across her face.
Today, she looked worried. They both did in their own way. John was sho
wing it by forcing his easy-going nature even further into being casual with his leg draped over the side of his chair. Sarah sat straight upright with her hands in her lap and blank expression guarding her face.
“I’m sure you know why I called you here today?” I let their silence play out. Only John showed the slightest tick by looking at Sarah once out of the corner of his eye. Neither of them spoke, so I continued talking. “It has come to my attention that you two are involved in a relationship.”
I could see both of their bodies tense, and John started to rise from his chair to speak. I held up my hand to silence him and motioned for him to sit back down. “I can understand why you would think I would be concerned about it, but in truth, I am extremely happy for you. I would prefer you not hide it from anyone going forward. I have a feeling the relationship between the Lycans and the Gifted will be the difference in our battle with the Demons. I know both of you will be able to deal with anything else that might come your way because of it. I think as our two most important young leaders that your relationship will only serve to further our cause.”
Sarah, always the one to think before she spoke, sat quietly, contemplating what I’d just said. John preferred to wear his emotions on his sleeve and acted accordingly. It made them a pair of opposites. As I anticipated, John was the first to speak. “Adam, we thought you would be angry with us. We know that the Council would not approve. It wasn’t long ago they were hunting the Lycans to the brink of extinction. It was not something we planned. It just happened over time. One day, we just fell in love.”
I followed John as he looked over toward Sarah with a smile on my face, and she said, “I actually hated him when we started working together, but at some point, his stubborn and cocky attitude wore me down.”
Ascendancy Origins Trilogy Page 3