by Keary Taylor
“If the Bitten come at us all at once, it won’t be enough,” he says, shaking his head.
And a light goes off in the back of my head. “When I was taken to Roter Himmel, I think I made an ally. Noriko, of the House of Himura. She said she would come to our aid if it came to actual war.”
Something sparks in Henry’s eyes. One eyebrow rises in shock. “The House of Himura is the fourth largest House in the world.”
“She said it’s the third,” I correct him.
“You should get in touch with her—now,” he says. “This thing could boil over any minute. It’s picked up incredible momentum in just the last week.”
I nod. “I’ll take care of it.”
We stand there, looking at each other for a moment and the air settles back down.
“There’s so much we need to talk about,” Henry says. “So many things I need to explain. So many things I want you to tell me about.”
I nod. “It’s a good thing we have time.” I smile, and it’s actually genuine. “Get yourself cleaned up. Say hello to Rath. I’ll see you in a little bit.”
I see admiration in his eyes when he nods in agreement. A proud little smile curls on his lips as he watches me walk to the door. And I’m still in awe, that when I walk out this door, that I could just walk back in, and Henry will still be there.
THE HOUSE MEMBERS BOMBARD ME with questions. They want answers, just like I do. But I don’t have them yet, and I can’t decide how much they all should know, anyway.
So we wait.
Not long, but an anxious, unsure two hours pass by, Rath gone with my father. I’m trying not to get jealous, but it’s a little hard when I only got twenty minutes or so. But down in the ballroom, we all just kind of wait around to see what’s going to happen.
“You okay?” Ian asks as he rubs a hand over my back.
I shrug, staring into the distance emptily, waiting.
To pass the time, I showered, rinsing all of Henry’s blood down the drain. I dressed in black slacks and a thin blue button up shirt. I need to look the position of a leader right now, even if my status is a little unsure at the moment.
Finally, I hear a door close and a few moments later, Rath walks around the corner. I meet his eyes anxiously and he joins at my side.
“Your father is getting dressed,” he says. “He will be out in a moment.”
I swallow, nodding.
The House gathers, twenty people behind me, including Elle. Ian stands to my one side, Rath to the other. The rest of my family surrounding me.
A minute later, the sound of a door opening echoes throughout the House. Shoes click over the wooden floor, growing closer and closer.
My heart leaps into my throat.
I am as nervous for this as I was for King Cyrus’ arrival.
Henry rounds the corner, and I’m both stunned and not surprised one bit.
Just two hours ago, my father’s hair was long, his beard wild. Henry is now trimmed, clean cut. His hair is cut even, combed away from his face. His jaw is hugged by a neatly trimmed, short beard.
He wears a black suit, accompanied by a black shirt and tie.
His eyes are severe and serious, his lips in a thin line.
He looks every bit the part of a Royal.
Every bit a Conrath.
“I don’t know that I need an introduction,” he says, looking around at everyone. It’s hard to place his accent. Slightly British, a touch of Boston, something a little unidentifiable, some quite American. “But in case you were wondering, I am Alivia’s father, Henry Conrath.”
The ballroom has fallen completely silent and everyone tightens just a bit, leaning forward to catch his every word.
“I know you all thought I was dead, and that was exactly the intention I executed,” he continues. “I have my reasons, and one of those being that I have been fighting in this war, something I could do much more effectively if everyone involved truly believed me gone for good.”
He takes two steps forward, folding his hands in front of him, and I realize then just how similar his and Rath’s mannerisms are. “But before I go into all of that, we need to get a few things laid out.” His burning eyes meet every one of the House members, staring at them in a way that makes me think he can see straight into their souls.
“I may have built this House back in 1799, but when I willed it on to Alivia, I meant it,” he doesn’t look at me when he says this, but continues to scan the crowd. “This House is hers. I mean that physically and in leadership. I have seen the way she treats you, the way she leads, and I would not dare try to replace her.”
Ian slips his hand into mine, giving a reassuring squeeze. A hand is placed on my shoulder from behind, reaffirming that they do indeed have my back.
“Nor would I want to,” Henry continues. “Along with my name goes the reputation of House abandonment, and I won’t deny the title. I had my reasons for leaving the monarchy system, and I do not intend to amend that.”
But now, when my heart is racing and I’m so terrified of what Henry is saying, that he will leave and abandon me because of my tie to the House, his eyes meet mine. I cannot mask my emotions.
“My daughter is here, though,” he says, his voice lower. “And I will not leave her again. If she will have me, as an unincorporated individual, I ask her to let me stay in her presence.”
The tears spring into my eyes immediately as I rush forward, wrapping my arms around my father, squeezing hard. “Of course. I need you here.”
He holds me, squeezing back, lifetimes of emotions pouring from this severe man. There are a million unspoken words flowing between us. But none of them require any sound. Only two racing hearts, beating as one.
Someone starts clapping, and soon it’s nearly the entire room applauding our reunion. I laugh into Henry’s shoulder and am surprised when a small chuckle rumbles in his own chest.
We release one another, and now, I choose to stand at my father’s side.
“As to the matter of this war,” he begins again when everyone settles down. “I do not know who is in charge of it. I have visited the other Houses in America under guise and none of them have suffered attacks, so it appears that this is personal to my family, in addition to being a civil war. And their numbers are impressive. I’ve taken out well over one hundred of them. I’ve found cells within a two hundred mile radius around Silent Bend. I’ll share everything I know with the right individuals, but as you already know, be alert.”
There’s finality to Henry’s statement, telling us he’s done with his address. After a few awkward moments, the House members disburse, most of them heading to the dining room for lunch.
Rath stands just removed, looking unsure of what to do with himself.
So I usher Ian forward, turning to my father.
“Henry, I want to introduce you to someone, though I’ve heard you’ve met before,” I say, flashing Ian a smile as he walks to my side and slides his hand into mine.
Ian extends his other hand, shaking Henry’s. “Yes,” Henry says. “You were a lot younger then, a lot…angrier.”
Ian chuckles, looking somewhat uncomfortable. “That sounds about right. I’m working on that.”
“So, uh,” Henry says, something steeling in his gaze as it drops to my left hand. “I see Alivia has a ring on her finger. That’s new.”
Oh, the awkwardness I never anticipated having.
But am eternally grateful that I do.
“I figured if we ever found you I’d ask for permission then,” Ian says. And he actually sounds sheepish. It’s adorable. “So, um-”
“Save your breath, son,” Henry says, tapping him on the shoulder. “Can’t give my permission to someone I hardly know to marry my only daughter.”
I’m floored. My jaw actually drops.
Henry winks at me, and then walks in the direction of the dining room.
“Did…” Ian stutters, looking between Henry’s retreating form and me. “Did that really just ha
ppen?”
“I think my father just told you no,” I say, my mouth still hanging open. I look back to Rath, who walks up to my side. He nods his head.
“He told you no,” Rath confirms. “But don’t worry. Just prove to him that you’re never, ever going to hurt or abandon his daughter, and you might earn it in the next…century or so.”
“Rath!” I cry out in shock and disbelief.
A hint of a smile cracks on his lips, literally the first I’ve ever seen there.
“Did you just make a joke?” Ian asks in shock. “I think—I think Rath just made a joke.”
He instantly regains his composure and shakes his head. “Of course not,” he says. “I’ve always been clear about my feelings regarding the relationship between the two of you.”
“Yeah, but, Rath,” I say, my voice coming out like a teenager who’s been told she can’t date the captain of the football team. “Things have changed so much. You can’t-”
“Your father is different,” he cuts me off, clearly not wishing to continue the previous conversation. “In the past five minutes, I’ve seen him smile more, seem more light-hearted than I have in years of knowing him. You two together, it’s good for him.”
Rath walks away to join Henry in the dining room.
I shake my head. “The secrets this family holds,” I breathe, thinking again of the picture I saw of Rath down in the lab.
Ian shakes his head, blinking several times quick in disbelief. “Well, this day has certainly taken multiple changes for the strange.”
THERE’S A MEETING IN THE evening. Henry briefs Anna and Ian, our two heads of war and security. Tactics and talk of civil war, something Anna is so familiar with. We plan and talk and speculate.
And as night falls, almost every single member of the House is sent out to hunt. To track down the Bitten—and kill them. Only a small crew of Rath, Trinity, me, and Henry are left at the House to defend it if need be.
But there are things Henry and I need to discuss. So, just the two of us, we turn the key in the floor of the ballroom and descend into the lab. Once inside, we close up the door again.
“So, I know of the passageway in my bedroom, the well behind the painting in the hall, the armory hidden in my bedroom,” I say as Henry turns to his lab. “How many other secrets does the Estate hold?”
“Enough to survive,” Henry says, looking over his shoulder at me with a coy smile.
“Henry Conrath, master of secrets,” I say with my own, shaking my head as I walk to his side.
He gives a short little chuckle, heading to the refrigerator and pulling a small container out. He pulls on a set of gloves and takes a small, glass slide from the box. He moves to a microscope and sets the slide underneath it. Looking through the eyepieces, he studies them for a moment.
“Take a look at this,” he says, waving me over and stepping aside.
I look down through the eyepieces. I’m not sure what I’m looking at, some sort of cells, obviously. But they almost look crystallized, even though they seem to be moving around. They’re very much alive.
“I took those cell samples from myself about a year and a half ago,” Henry says as I continue to study them. “Generally, when separated from the body, cells should die within hours.”
“But these are still very much alive,” I say as I look over at him, my brows furrowed.
Henry nods and walks over to the fridge, waving me to follow him. He goes to the one with the animal blood and all the GENESIS vials. “The reason those cells are still alive, and the reason I was able to fake my death, is this,” he says.
And everything starts clicking into place immediately.
I’ve seen someone escape death before. Seen them recover from a stake to the heart. Seen someone truly immortal.
“You recreated what Cyrus made to turn himself,” I breathe in realization.
Henry nods. “It wasn’t easy to test—it’s taken me years of research, and the ultimate test subject was myself. I wasn’t really even sure if it truly worked until that night the Bitten broke into my home.”
“So you really might have died?” I ask in horror that he would take such a risk.
“I’d done other tests,” Henry says, attempting to sound reassuring. “None to that scale yet, but I was fairly certain it would work.”
“Fairly,” I grumble under my breath, shaking my head.
“In science, sometimes that’s all you can ask for,” he says, raising an eyebrow. I find myself mirroring the action.
“I have to say, you don’t strike me as the scientific type,” I say. “When and why did you get into all of this?”
Something instantly darkens in his eyes, and it’s a fearful and sad thing. “The why is not an answer you want to hear. Some secrets need to be kept to myself, I’m afraid. But the when is a simple answer of: a long time ago.”
It makes me sad, knowing that Henry will never tell me all of his secrets. Parts of him will always be a stranger to me. But we are all individuals, and we have to keep our identities.
“Okay,” I accept, because I have to.
I slide my hand into my back pocket and pull out the picture of Rath. I study it for a moment, trying to make out the grainy details, drawing so many conclusions; only none of them make sense to me.
“Can you tell me this one?” I ask, turning the image around for him to see.
His eyes narrow and he reaches out to take the photograph. As he studies it, I see the many years flash across his eyes. There’s a big, great story here. One I’ve been dying to know since I stepped foot in this house.
“I see you found all of Rath’s old photographs,” Henry says as he takes a seat at one of the tables, continuing to stare at the picture. “He was so fascinated when I brought the huge, bulky thing home. He took so many pictures for me. He was so timid when he asked me to take a picture of him.”
A small smile begins to form on his lips, but he keeps it carefully controlled.
“Henry, that picture had to be taken before 1875,” I say quietly as I roll another chair over to sit in front of my father. “I know Rath isn’t a Born, but how is he still alive?”
Henry’s eyes finally rise to meet mine, and I see the hesitance there. The conflict. The regret.
He lets out a deep breath and lays the picture on the tabletop beside the microscope. “You know our country was a very different place in the seventeen hundreds. I built this House at the end of the eighteenth century, and with the start of the plantation, slaves were just an accepted reality, however much I hated the concept.”
I’m not sure I want to hear the truth of this story. To hear Rath’s past that is suddenly becoming too real and uncomfortable.
“In 1823, there was a slave auction and I attended. There was a young man there, not quite twenty years old. He was brought forth a bloody mess. He’d been whipped brutally, to the point I wasn’t sure how he was still standing.”
“I’ve seen his scars,” I suddenly recall. On a morning where I needed to speak to him immediately, I stormed into his room, and he’d nearly killed me on startled instinct. He’d climbed from his bed with no shirt on, to reveal a crisscross mess of pale scar tissue on his chest and back.
Henry nods. “He was in bad shape. But the look in his eyes. I’ve not seen that kind of darkness and hopelessness in a very long time. It was apparent in them that he was giving up hope, and I could not blame him.”
Emotion thickens Henry’s words; his eyes grow distant and foggy. “I bought him and brought him home to the plantation. With the other workers’ help, we nursed him back to health. I asked him his name every day for two weeks, but he wouldn’t say a word to me. He would only stare up at the ceiling in anger, as if he was willing himself to die.”
Tears spring into my eyes and my own throat chokes up. It’s so hard to imagine. My father’s strong, rock-solid right hand man, giving up on living.
“But he healed,” Henry continues. “He wouldn’t ever say a word to me, b
ut he did work. Harder than anyone I’d ever had. He went home to the workers’ house every night, and for a while, I did not see him much because of our alternating schedules.”
It’s hard to imagine, how my father managed to run a plantation when back then, he didn’t have any sun goggles.
“I asked him his name, every time I saw him, for months,” my father says, touching his fingers to the image. “And I talked to him. He would never respond , but it didn’t matter. I just told him stories. Of my short time in Boston. Of my life in England. My travels. I talked to him about my brother. Never telling him of my night patterns, what I was. But I just talked.”
I lean an elbow on the table, resting my head in my hand, so engrossed in this story I’ve been dying to hear.
“I wasn’t even sure he was listening for a long time.” Henry does that little, nearly soundless chuckle. “I thought perhaps he was just…tuning me out. But something changed, slowly. He wasn’t so stiff whenever he was around me. He didn’t always look at me like he wanted to kill me.”
Henry’s eyes fall and he grows quiet for quite some time. He grabs a pen from the table and twirls it between his thumb and forefinger. It’s so very apparent. This is not an easy story for my father to tell.
“Then one day, he did something, that, were I human, would have saved my life. He didn’t know it at the time, but I would have survived. But he risked his own life to save mine.” The emotion once more grows thick in his voice. “He didn’t even hesitate.”
Henry suddenly smacks the pen back down on the table and I jump, so enraptured in his story that I didn’t see it coming.
“The next day when I asked him his name, he replied that it was Rath,” Henry says as he looks up and finally meets my eyes. “Nothing more. No explanation. Not at the time. But I didn’t miss it. Rath of the Conrath plantation.”
As I always suspected, Rath’s name is indeed a formation of my father’s surname.
“Over the next few years, Rath would become more and more valuable to me, both in business and friendship. He helped me run the plantation. He was smart. Organized. He grew into himself as a man, as my most trusted friend, rivaling Elijah. He was so much more to me than a slave. He was essential to the success of the plantation.”