Firstborn

by Tosca Lee

  Now others are looking to me to save them, and I want to, but there is a life inside me that I have to put first. That I will put first.

  I am not the person I thought I was. I am not Audra Ellison. I am not a normal person—even for the Utod.

  Luka shows up before midnight at the address I texted. He holds me so tight I can barely breathe. He is crying, and I am, too. For us, for the baby, for the world—the real world, as we know it. The only one.

  He gets on his knees. “Marry me,” he says. I refuse.

  “Marry me,” he insists. “I’ll protect you—and our baby—the rest of my life.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I will regardless. I’ve renounced the calling. We run, live, and die—together.”

  We’re married the next night. The bride and groom both wore jeans.

  But there’s something else I haven’t told him about.

  Audra!

  We leave the next day for Spain. Go on from there to Italy.

  We chose the hospital carefully—through the help of the good brothers on Cres Island, who know the place.

  Luka and I take turns holding her through the night. Memorizing the sounds she makes, her tiny fingers. The smell of her hair like down against my cheek.

  We leave Eva in a warm incubator set into a wall, with a little door on each side—one for leaving her . . . another so others can take her.

  And with that, a part of me has died.

  The minute we’ve gotten a safe distance away, I collapse, and Luka doesn’t have the strength to hold me up.

  No one speaks when you enter the Center for the final time. There’s no need. You’ve gone through the counseling, tests, and a checklist of preparations to get the plastic bracelet you wear the day of treatment. The one that saves a life.

  They don’t need to know why you’re doing it anymore. Or that you lied about it all.

  A nurse takes me into the room, and I lie down on the table. I give her the sealed packet, the only thing I brought with me.

  And I think of Luka, already waiting. I told him I knew I’d love him again.

  I will.

  They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die. But they don’t tell you that every detail comes screaming back to life. That you taste each bite of every meal you savored, feel the shower of every rain you walked in . . . smell the hair against your cheek before that last parting kiss.

  I will come back for you.

  That you will fight to hold on to memory like a drowning person gasping for poisoned air.

  Then everything you knew is back. And you are alive. Again.

  22

  * * *

  “Audra.”

  An instrument blips from somewhere nearby, incessant as a heartbeat.

  “Audra, can you hear me?”

  Fingers brush my cheek. A hand squeezes mine.

  I want to go back. Stop, suspend it forever. Because for an instant between deaths, I was with her—with them both.

  And it was heaven.

  But heaven slips away, too quickly . . . is gone.

  It hurts to breathe.

  “Audra,” a fierce whisper over me. I open my eyes.

  Luka, unshaven, a bandage above his brow.

  “What happened to you?” I croak out. My throat hurts. Everything does.

  Luka kisses my hand, which has a plastic tube taped to the back of it, presses my fingers to his cheek.

  “You remember me,” he says with unmistakable relief. He gets up, kisses my forehead. “Stay here.”

  Like I’m going anywhere.

  “She’s awake,” I hear him say to someone outside the room.

  My gaze drifts from the monitor and IV stand to the ornately tiled ceiling. Lingers on an oversize piece of art. Beside my bed, the curtains have been thrown back from an eight-foot window. Green garden beyond the balustrade outside.

  This is no hospital.

  I try to shove up. Pain shoots through my chest.

  A woman comes in, followed by Luka. At my grimace, she strides to my bed, eases me back into what have to be one-thousand-thread-count linens.

  “You won’t want to do that,” she says.

  “I noticed,” I grit out.

  “Do you know who you are?”

  “Yeah.” What I don’t know is who she is.

  I look at Luka as she takes my vitals. A few minutes later she produces two pills from a bottle and hands them to me along with a cup of water from the dresser.

  “For the pain.”

  “I can do that,” Luka says, taking it from her, holding it for me to sip.

  “Where are we?” I demand as soon as she leaves.

  “France.”

  “France?”

  His brow furrows. “Audra, do you remember . . . what happened?”

  I search his eyes, not sure what answer he’s looking for.

  “We were driving to the airport in Slovenia,” he says. “We went off the bridge . . . into the river.”

  I stare at him, and as I do, it comes back in flashes. The SUV, rolling through the air. The weightlessness . . . the cold. Luka, frantic to free me.

  “The window quit working. I couldn’t get the door open, had to wait for the car to fill up.”

  Luka, talking to me in my dazed state as he held my chin up above the rising water. Telling me to breathe deep, even as the cold stole the breath from my lungs.

  “You nearly drowned,” he says.

  But what he really means is, I did.

  Because I remember floating, and not just from the water. I saw him stagger onto the bank, limp form in his arms. Heard his jagged breaths as he worked over my body with trembling arms, pounding it once—twice—in desperation as sirens sounded in the distance.

  “When was that?” I say, panic rising in my chest. Because that’s more than a five o’clock shadow on his cheeks.

  “Two days ago.”

  “Two days?”

  “We were on our way to meet Serge Deniel. This is his place.”

  Adrenaline shoots straight to my heart.

  “Who knows we’re here?” I say, reaching, this time, for help. He slides an arm beneath my shoulders and props several pillows behind me.

  “No one,” he says, quietly. “I didn’t want to risk trying to contact the others from here, and your phone is somewhere at the bottom of that river. Serge offered to have someone take me to town, get anything we need, but I didn’t want to leave you and I don’t trust any phone I don’t buy myself.”

  Two thoughts collide in my mind at once. First, that it’s too much to take in. I don’t want to hear about phones, about Serge Deniel, about the river. The constant need for secrecy and security, to move unseen. The supreme effort it takes to stay alive in this life. To simply live.

  Second, that Jester, Claudia, and Piotrek have got to be freaking out.

  Claudia. Now I remember the girl she was at sixteen. The way I entered her friendship with Katia, whom she idolized. Claudia’s jealousy.

  It’s like waking up from Oz and realizing they were all there—including others like Andre, who seemed untouchable in his dark leather the night I met him, black diamond around his eye. Now, no longer alive.

  And then there was Luka, new to me two short weeks ago, but with whom I’ve already lived a lifetime of passion, loss, and grief.

  I lay my hand on his, but it slides away as he reaches toward the nightstand.

  “Check this out,” he says, holding up a small tablet. He touches it on, brings up a news site.

  It’s a breaking story about allegations of corruption and murder against Hungarian Supreme Court Judge Lazlo Becskei.

  “It broke,” he says, looking at me. “It’s out there.”

  I lift a finger, scroll down the page. Evidence simultaneously leaked by Cryptileak, InvestIGate, and Anonymous Alley, and subsequently published by eleven similar sites. A video clip of Lazlo himself, avoiding reporters.

  “She really did it . . .”
<
br />   “And this,” he says, paging to another headline: NEW EVIDENCE IN IMF CHIEF FRAUD CASE.

  “This is awesome,” I whisper, impulsively reaching for Luka, and then grimace.

  His eyes are tired as he clasps my hand, but there’s a hardness around them I’ve never seen before. “It isn’t everywhere. Not yet—”

  “But it’s enough to send the others scurrying to cut ties with them,” a form says from the doorway.

  I recognize him instantly from his online photos, which must have been taken a few years ago because he looks closer to forty-five in person. He’s dressed in a pair of slacks, the sleeves of his button-up shirt rolled to the elbow as though he’s just taken a break from his office to go wash dishes or change a tire. A working man’s kind of billionaire.

  He shuts the door behind him and moves toward my bed. Luka lowers the tablet. The headline blares from atop the wool blanket beside me.

  “They are all wondering, Who is next? Is it me? Because they know their sins. No high-ranking Scion will sleep well tonight.” He stops to consider me, and for a minute I’m afraid he’ll do the European thing and try to kiss me, in which case I’m glad I have the worst breath in the world. He extends his hand. “I am Serge.”

  I watch myself take and briefly shake it. Cannot reconcile the image of our hands locked—in alliance, if not friendship.

  I was this close to moving beyond the boundaries of loyalties, of history, of time. And now here I am, remarking on something as unlikely as a handshake, bound by all of them again.

  He gives an uncomfortable laugh, which is the last thing I expect. “This is very strange, no?” he says, sitting down in the chair Luka abandoned in favor of my bedside.

  “No. I mean yes. I suppose I should thank you.” Because I’m pretty sure that had I landed in a hospital, I would never have had the opportunity to wake up. And a part of me is still undecided how I feel about that.

  He clasps his hands loosely together in front of him and shrugs. “It is obviously in my interest to protect you, given what you know about me. Which is why you should know you are safe here. These grounds have every security, including an underground escape, which I have shown your husband in case the occasion should arise.”

  My brows lift at the mention of my husband, and I glance at Luka, not sure if that’s something Serge learned on his own or Luka volunteered. Either scenario is awkward given that I’m having this conversation in a—admittedly high-quality—hospital gown. I pull the blanket a little higher, and Luka takes my hand.

  “How do I know we’re not your prisoners?”

  “You are free to go, any time. My chauffeur will take you any place you like. My pilot as well. After all, you made it very clear that I am the one . . . at a disadvantage. Which is why, now that you are awake, I would be very relieved if you made a call to let your associates know you are safe.”

  I know I need to—not for Serge’s sake, but for theirs. But like Luka, I don’t trust any of the electronics in this place. Nor do I trust that the rooms aren’t monitored.

  “We will, soon,” I say.

  “Until then, I believe you are safest here, in the home of your . . . enemy?” he says, ironically. “Though I believe you may find me to be a very useful friend.”

  23

  * * *

  “Speaking of friends, what exactly did Tibor tell you?” I ask, eyes narrowed.

  He leans forward, gaze leveled on mine. “That we both want the same thing: To end the day of the Historian.”

  “I know why I would want that,” I say slowly, glancing from Luka’s unreadable expression back to Serge. “Why would you?”

  “This war—this vendetta—what use is it to us anymore? We have our power. We have had our revenge. It was always about revenge, if not on Lady Bathory herself, then on her descendants. To take from them all that they gained on the backs of our forefathers and mothers.”

  “I thought it was revenge for the killings.”

  “Do you truly believe there were killings? Over six hundred of them? That she bathed in the blood of innocent girls?” he says with a laugh.

  “No. I think she was smart, independent, and rich. Which would have been fine except that she was also a woman. One the crown owed a lot of money after her husband died. No one wants to owe a woman who can’t be controlled. Don’t you think?” I say with a slight smile.

  “What I think is that it doesn’t matter except to those obsessed with her story.”

  “Kind of hard not to be obsessed when you’re being hunted.”

  “I was speaking of the Historian, whose job it is to be consumed with Erzsebet Bathory’s sins, real or imagined. So that, unlike her, they never die. But four hundred years later, what do they matter? This vendetta was never between you and me, but between people buried now for centuries. Any wrong done by Erzsebet herself has long since been paid for. We have won. But we have not evolved.”

  “You haven’t won. You’ve just become the exact thing you accused her of being.”

  Serge sits back, lifts a shoulder. “I am ashamed to say that we agree.”

  “And yet your freshman class keeps killing us.”

  “Yes, there are those of us who did as we were told. Who damned ourselves in the eyes of God for the Historian’s unholy mission. And for that, we were rewarded. But what reward is this?” He spreads his hands. “When we know hell waits for us?”

  “Obviously plenty of you think it’s a pretty decent trade-off.”

  “I never wanted this for my children. Thank God, they never have to make that decision. They died in their innocence. They are in the bosom of God.

  “What I am saying is that even if we were utterly convinced of Erzsebet Bathory’s guilt, what need do we have today, to kill? We are a fraternity committed to the advancement of our brothers and sisters—and we have been wildly successful! What point is there to kill? If you ask me: none. If you ask the Historian, though, it is an edict straight from God as alive now as it was the day the twelve founders formed their alliance. The Historian is no equalizer, but a terrorist.” His hand slices the air between us. “I want no part of it, anymore!”

  “How convenient, now that you have your . . . what is it? Billions?”

  “Look around, Audra! No man in my position possibly believes that money makes him happy. After you have spent your first million, and lost your next five, and your wife has left you, and you become twenty times more wealthy than before but lose your children and no longer know who your friends are . . . you learn this.”

  “Or you just know it because you have principles,” I add.

  He acquiesces with a shrug. “What I am saying is that for the Historian, this is a religion. One I have lost.”

  “If it isn’t about the money or power anymore, then go. Walk away.”

  “That is the thing. There is no walking away! Don’t you understand? The Historian has damning information on all of us—often in our own voices and written by our own hands. A full and complete list of our sins.”

  “So do we,” I say. “So what’s the real reason you want the Historian gone?”

  “Do you know why the Scion head is called the Historian? Because it was the office responsible for keeping the genealogies of the Progeny. So that we would know when the day had come that we had eradicated the last of Erzsebet Bathory’s heirs. But also, so that we would have a record of the flourishing of our own descendants. We might as aptly have called him the Genealogist.”

  “Makes sense.” Especially given that others—from the Franciscans with their Progeny Book, and the Progeny who created and passed down the far-too-incomplete Scion map—have attempted to do the same.

  “The Historian kept, by way of the memories reported to him and a Progeny genealogy rumored to have been stolen from the Franciscans, the most accurate record of the Progeny in the world. And a full listing of those with rights to the Scion inheritance. Because of that jealously guarded record, handed down from Historian to Historian, he posses
sed sole power over the appointments of new hunters, and the deaths of discovered Progeny. Until about forty years ago, when power shifted with technology.”

  He looks down at his hands and sighs. “I own, among my holdings, the parent company of the world’s largest genealogy and ancestry DNA sites. For that reason, I have been integral to the Historian’s operation. I provided the names of Progeny—yes, even you—and potential hunters from the descendants of the original Council of Twelve with records more complete than the Historian’s own. Your husband became a hunter, I am sorry to say”—he glances at Luka—“because of me. I have hated this responsibility more even than the single act of murder that made me a Scion twenty years ago. Last year, I decided I would no longer provide victims for killers.”

  “Why not?” Luka says.

  “The Historian demanded that I sign over full, anonymous access to the database. I refused.”

  He pulls out his phone, shows me a picture of two golden-haired children, arms around each other. He points to one, and then the other. “My son, Enzo. My daughter, Celeste. A truck struck and killed them eight months ago as they walked to school with their mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  He clicks the phone off, and the screen goes dark. “It was ruled an accident, as is so much associated with the Scions. The Historian—this current Historian—is not content to exterminate the Progeny of Erzsebet Bathory, but wants only absolute power for the office. A monster willing to murder his own to achieve it.”

  I close my eyes. Not just at the story of the children, which hits closer to home than I’d like, or at the revelation that the Historian would pursue a traitor from the Scion ranks. But because of the pronoun his.

  Which means Serge doesn’t know who the Historian is.

  Unless, of course, he’s testing me.

  “I take it things weren’t always this way,” I say.

  “No. Our forefathers believed fervently in our cause. They would sooner die than betray it. But the time of the Scions is past. We are a relic, as is the Historian himself.”