“You keep saying that like I’m supposed to care,” I said.
“You should!” he snapped. “Your life is in danger. You need to know what’s going on.”
I looked at Felicia. She had that scared look on her face she gets when she thinks I need to do something I don’t want to – like I’m gonna fuck up my whole life if I don’t follow her advice. I sighed.
“Fine,” I said. “Sit down. But as soon as you’re done, you’re history.”
“Sure,” he said, shaking his head. “Would you excuse us for a moment, Ms. . . . I don’t believe I got your name.”
“Felicia Fox,” she answered.
“And she stays,” I added.
“Sassy, there are things I need to warn you about,” Ash said. “Things The Order doesn’t want you to know.”
“Then she definitely stays,” I said. “I need to know what I’m up against, and I don’t trust you, Ash. Her I do, so she gets to hear it too. Besides, if you don’t tell her, I’m just gonna do it myself after you leave.”
His jaw clenched as he tried to think of a way to argue with me. Then his shoulders sagged, and a defeatist expression set up camp on his face. He looked like a sad puppy. It was cute.
“Fine,” he said, dropping into the chair next to me.
“What’s this about you being a sex-demon?” Felicia asked, reseating herself.
“Half a sex-demon,” Ash protested. “I’m a half-breed incubus.”
“What does that mean?” Felicia prodded.
“That my father was an incubus, but I don’t have all his powers. Can we get to the important stuff?”
Felicia looked fascinated by the idea of sex-demons, half-breed or otherwise. I wasn’t sure she was going to let it go.
“Sure,” she said.
Ash relaxed ever so slightly. He dropped his voice and leaned close to me.
“The Order isn’t telling you everything,” he began.
“I’m gonna have a heart attack and die from that surprise,” I said, oozing sass and sarcasm.
“As you’ve already been told,” he continued, “Eli Silverman was your father. He was also a field commander for The Order. Only Director Scott outranked him in our particular cell.
“He was searching for you because he and The Order believed you are the N’Chai Toroth.”
“The nuh-what tuh-what?” I said.
“N’Chai Toroth,” Ash repeated. “It’s a foretold destroyer. According to The Prophecies, the N’Chai Toroth will sunder the magical world and reshape it anew. It’s a ghost story, really. Everyone is afraid of what this person will do.
“Eli believed you were the N’Chai Toroth. That’s why he went looking for you, and it’s why The Order is recruiting you to slay D’Krisch Mk’Rai. The N’Chai Toroth is prophesied to emerge by slaying a dragon.”
My brain struggled to keep up. This was like some damned fantasy novel. The Chosen One rises from humble roots to set the world right. Was he really telling me I was Harry Potter?
“What made them think Sassy is this person?” Felicia asked before I could tell Ash he was full of shit.
“Several things,” Ash replied. “First is the dragon’s constant flaunting of The Veil. The Order is very concerned about his potential run for Congress.”
“Wait, what?” Felicia said.
“Didn’t I mention that part?” I said. “This dragon masquerades as Dirk McCray.”
“Holy shit!” Felicia said. “Sassy, you can’t kill him. You’d never get away with it. He’s too public a figure.”
“That’s what I told them,” I said. “They insist they can make it so I won’t get caught.
“Except now, Mr. Ash here is telling me they aren’t being honest with me.”
“Don’t confuse the issues,” he said.
“I’m not,” I said. “When someone isn’t honest with you about one thing, you have to assume everything they say is suspect.”
“Why else do they think Sassy is this Chosen One?” Felicia asked.
“Sassy is immune to magic,” Ash explained. “That’s one of the reasons they want her to slay the dragon –” He turned his gorgeous eyes from Felicia to me. “—you can’t be burned by his fire. But that is also one of the foretold traits of the N’Chai Toroth – she can’t be harmed by magic, despite being magical herself. It’s one of the reasons she’s supposed to destroy the supernatural world and bring a new order. Her power is unconventional. It’s different somehow.
“Eli was convinced he’d sired the N’Chai Toroth. That’s why he was looking for you.”
Hot anger exploded through my heart. He came looking for me now? Now that I had some use to him? Now he wanted me?
“If he was so damned interested in me, why didn’t he look for me before?” I said, fighting back tears. “Why couldn’t he have raised me to be this special Chosen One instead of abandoning me?”
Ash studied me for a moment. I could feel the dam cracking. If he didn’t stop looking at me like that with those big, beautiful, sympathetic eyes soon, I was going to start bawling.
“Sassy, he’s been searching for you your whole life,” Ash said.
Felicia about broke her neck whipping her head in my direction. Her jaw fell open. As for me, it was like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. There was nothing to breathe.
“What?” I whispered.
“Your mother hid you from him,” Ash said. “He’s been looking for you since the day you were born.”
My world crumbled. For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted to know who my father was. I’d wanted to know why he couldn’t be there when I was growing up. Why he didn’t want to play games with me. Why he didn’t want to hold me. Why he didn’t want to see me whup ass in martial arts tournaments or graduate from high school.
Now, Ash was telling me he did. He’d wanted to be there, but Mama wouldn’t let him. I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t believe him.
“Bullshit,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from cracking.
“Sassy, I—”
“No, fuck that noise, Ash!” I practically shouted. “You people are magical. He couldn’t look into his crystal ball or cast some sort of spell to find me? He searched his whole life to find a girl whose mama he knew, but he couldn’t figure out where I was until I was twenty-five? Bullshit!”
“Sassy,” he said, his tone sympathetic, his eyes sad. “Magic is exactly why he couldn’t find you until now.”
“What?” I said.
The tears were building up at the edges of my eyes. I was losing the battle. If he didn’t stop, I was going to turn into a blubbering mess.
But I couldn’t quit listening. I wanted to know, even though I didn’t.
“Sassy, your mother paid a witch to cast a spell on you and her,” he said. “She used magic to prevent your father from finding you.”
My whole world exploded.
Fourteen
T ears poured from my eyes like rain during a thunderstorm. Felicia took my hand and squeezed. It didn’t help. Ash had punched me in the gut. He’d driven a perfect blow into my emotional solar plexus, and all the air raced from my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get a grip on any of this.
Mama had told me my dad left before I was born. Whenever I asked about him, she got angry. She wouldn’t tell me anything. If I pressed, she’d threaten to beat me. One time, I got mad and told her I had a right to know. She gave me the worst whupping I ever got in my life. Dad was a forbidden subject to her.
Ben tried to be helpful. He’d lost his dad to an Army training accident. We were fighting these wars overseas, but it was when his dad came home that he got killed. He could barely remember him. I think he was two when he died. So he tried to say how he understood what it was like not to know his father.
I appreciated the effort, even when I was little. But it didn’t help. Ben may have grown up without a dad just like I did, but he at least knew who his father was. He knew his dad was a hero. Me? I knew
shit. I wasn’t allowed to know. And if I asked, I got beaten.
Now, Ash was telling me my dad had been looking for me all along. He’d wanted to find me, but he couldn’t. Because Mama prevented it.
“Why?” was all I could manage through a flood of tears that threatened to drown me.
Ash sighed. I didn’t know if it was because I was crying and he felt sorry for me, or if the truth was too hard to tell. Either way, it pissed me off.
“Why?” I demanded, slamming my uninjured fist on the table.
Several people around us to turned to look. Embarrassment and anger warred for control of me.
“Mind your own God-damned business,” Felicia scolded a hipster couple a few tables away who were looking at me.
They turned away quickly, throwing a few furtive glances in our direction when they thought we weren’t looking. Ash sighed again.
“We shouldn’t be talking about this in public,” he said, clearly uncomfortable.
“Tell me why my mama hid me from my father,” I growled.
Ash sighed a third time. If he did it again, I was going to hit him.
“When Eli found out your mother was pregnant, he became very interested,” Ash said. “I don’t know what the nature of their relationship was before he knew she was pregnant, but he was excited by the possibility of another child, even though it was outside his marriage.”
“Wait,” I said. “He cheated on his wife with Mama?”
“Yes, but—”
“Did she know he was married?” I pressed.
“I don’t know,” Ash replied. “He never told me that. Like I said, I am not familiar with the details of their relationship before your conception became known to him.
“Regardless, your mother thought it was suspicious that a married man should be so interested in a lovechild. She kept asking him why, but he evaded.
“Then one night, she got him drunk. With his inhibitions lowered, your mother got Eli to tell her everything. There were signs on the night you were conceived, Sassy, that led a number of Prophecies scholars to think the N’Chai Toroth’s birth was imminent. When the ultrasound showed you were going to be a girl, Eli became convinced it was you.”
“The N’Chai Toroth is supposed to be a woman?” Felicia asked.
“That’s not a hundred-percent certain,” Ash answered. “But most scholars believe the language of The Prophecies refers to a female destroyer.”
“Men,” Felicia commented. I nodded.
“What do you mean?” Ash asked.
“Leave it to men to believe their world will be destroyed by a woman,” Felicia said.
“That’s not the point,” Ash protested. “It’s the language of the ancient languages and the sight given to—”
“Shut up and tell me about Mama and me,” I said.
Ash looked shocked, then confused. He really was sweet. But he seemed to have little emotional intelligence about this sort of thing. He shrugged and resumed his tale.
“Eli told your mother that you would do great things, that you would have power untold. That you would destroy the world and remake it in your image.
“Well, your mother didn’t want that for you. She was afraid Eli and his friends would use you to do whatever they wanted. Who knows? Maybe she was also afraid of what you would become and wanted to prevent it.
“Regardless, your mother decided there was no way Eli Silverman was going to make her little girl his pawn in some game of magical Armageddon. No one knows how she did it, but she found a witch and paid her to cast a spell, hiding you and her from Eli and The Order.
“Eli tried to find her as soon as she vanished. But the magic was strong. Despite bringing the full resources of The Order to bear, Eli couldn’t find you or your mother.”
Ash fell silent, as if he’d answered all my questions. I had a thousand more, but I was so stunned, I couldn’t articulate any of them. Mama had been a married man’s mistress? A married, White man? She’d found out I was the Chosen One and had hidden me away? She’d somehow contacted a witch and had her cast a spell on me? This was all way too Harry Potter. Suddenly, it felt like I didn’t know Mama at all.
“But if the magic was that powerful, how did he find her now?” Felicia asked.
“Someone outside The Order found her,” Ash said. “We don’t know who. A lot of people speculate it was a member of The Arcane Council, but it could have been a wizard or a medium.”
“Arcane Council?” Felicia said.
“The governing body of the magical world,” Ash explained.
“So Eli had Sassy’s name and address and was on his way to meet her when he was murdered?” Felicia said.
“Correct,” Ash replied. “That’s why Ephraim hates you so much, Sassy. Not only did he want to be the one to slay D’Krisch Mk’Rai, not only did his father die trying to recruit you, Eli has been searching for you for twenty-five years. Ephraim feels like his father was more interested in a lost, illegitimate daughter than in his own son who was there all along.”
Shit. No wonder the little bastard was jealous of me. I was the unknown kid who came between him and his dad. He was never going to forgive me for that.
“Ephraim also doesn’t want his father to have sired the N’Chai Toroth if it wasn’t him,” Ash added.
Oh, this was just great. This was dandy. Ephraim wanted me out of the way. Hell, he might even want me dead. No wonder he had tricked me into injuring myself. If I couldn’t fight the dragon, he would have to. And that would prove I wasn’t the N’Chai Toroth. That would make damn sure he didn’t have to live with Daddy’s secret lovechild being more special than him.
I was so fucked.
“Well, he doesn’t have to worry about it anymore,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Ash asked.
“I quit. You saw me walk out earlier tonight. I’m out of the picture, so Daddy’s Jealous, Little Boy doesn’t have to feel threatened.”
“Sassy, I don’t think you understand,” Ash said.
“I understand perfectly.”
“No,” he said. “This is prophecy. It’s your destiny. Destiny can’t be avoided.”
“Bullshit!” I said. “Ain’t no such thing as ‘destiny.’ That’s a made-up concept. It presumes the idea that everything is fixed and unchangeable. But people have free will. Don’t hand me this destiny bullshit, Ash.”
He looked shocked, like no one had ever told him anything like that before. I would have laughed if I weren’t reeling from everything he’d already revealed.
“Sassy, that’s not true,” he said. “Magical forces put their mark on certain people—”
“Ain’t no fucking marks on me!” I said, my voice rising. “I can choose to help you people and slay your dragon, or I can choose to tell you to go back to where you came from and leave me the hell alone. I’m going with the second option.”
“Sassy, destiny doesn’t work like that,” Ash said. “It may be that you will fulfill the role Fate intends by doing nothing. Perhaps by not working with us, you’ll sunder the magical world. But if you’re the N’Chai Toroth, you can’t avoid it.”
“Ash—”
“No, listen to me,” he said, leaning in and looking at me more seriously than he ever had in the short time I’d known him. “If you don’t fight D’Krisch Mk’Rai, Ephraim surely will. He’s not qualified to do it. He’s a talented warrior and a captain in The Order, and his metallic skin makes him formidable in a fight.
“But Mk’Rai is a powerful dragon. Ephraim doesn’t have your immunity to magic. If he attempts to kill Mk’Rai and fails, there will be major repercussions. Among the reasons The Order wants Mk’Rai dead is his constant flaunting of The Veil. They fear this run for Congress he’s contemplating will bring everything down.
“And while Ephraim is a good fighter, he’s reckless. If he messes up the assassination, it’s entirely possible Mk’Rai will just reveal himself in the fight. That will be bad for your world and mine.
“Sassy, if you are the N’Chai Toroth, you cannot avoid fulfilling The Prophecies. But choosing to do it by refusing to participate will be so much worse than if you fight. You’ll at least be in control of the outcome if you face the dragon. And you’ll reduce the impact on your world.”
I stared into those glittering black eyes. He was absolutely serious. He was convinced I was this chosen destroyer, and I was gonna bring the world to ruin if I didn’t do what I was supposed to. I didn’t even know where to begin with this bullshit.
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing it.”
“Sassy—”
“No, fuck you, Ash,” I said. “You don’t get to lay some damned guilt trip on me. I didn’t ask for any of this. I don’t want to be part of it.”
“It doesn’t matter what you want,” he said, a tiny note of anger in his voice. “Whether you asked for it not, you’re involved now.
“The Guild of the Blade has a contract out on your life. They’ve made only two attempts.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Felicia asked.
“The Guild makes three attempts to fulfill a contract,” Ash explained. “If they are unsuccessful three times, they rescind the contract.”
That was interesting. Funny how nobody at The Order had explained that little detail when they told me I needed to work for them to protect my life.
“Well, then I’m golden,” I said. “I just have to survive one more attempt, and I’m good.”
“You’re not listening to me,” Ash said. “The first time, The Guild sent one assassin – a powerful demon. You surprised him. The second time, they sent three. You survived because The Order arrived in time to bail you out. If there is a third attempt, The Guild of the Blade will surely send a host of killers. It will not want to damage its reputation by being unable to fulfill the contract. You won’t survive this time, Sassy, especially if you don’t have The Order’s protection. They will kill you.
“And even if they don’t, it won’t stop there. D’Krisch Mk’Rai won’t let it go. He’ll send someone else for you. Maybe, he’ll even come himself. This absolutely will not stop until he or you are dead.
“Whether you want this destiny or not, it has found you. It cannot be avoided.”
Sleeping Dragons Page 11