We all swing around to see her standing in the doorway, clad in black from head to toe like someone attending a funeral. My stomach turns at the sight of her. During the drills, she always wore black while she watched the masked ones torture me.
When she enters the room, I bite back the bitterness and that tiny, terrible flicker of dread. I’m trying to forgive her and I’m not afraid of her.
I’m not afraid of her.
“Little one. Gunnar. I’m glad you made it back home safely.”
“What happened?” Jonathan asks. “Where is everybody? What’s going on?”
She pauses. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. Why don’t you sit down?”
“For God’s sake, old woman!” Jonathan cries. “Just tell me!”
Ingrid lifts an eyebrow at his tone but she doesn’t lose her temper.
A bad sign.
She sits down on the sofa, her back ramrod straight, and motions for Jonathan to sit next to her. When he stubbornly remains standing, she sighs. “Your father passed away an hour ago. I’m sorry.”
“What?” And now he does sit down, clumsily, as if his legs have lost all feeling.
“I’m afraid there’s been an…” She bites her lip, and that small movement is enough to make my stomach contract in fear. Ingrid has never been the type to mince her words. “…An unfortunate incident. There was nothing anybody could do.”
“What happened?”
“The half-dragons turned on him. He used the men against them, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Jesus.”
“It was his own fault,” Jonathan’s grandfather says gruffly. “I told him not to push them, but he wouldn’t listen. He never did understand what it means to be the Alpha.”
“So what happens now?” Jonathan’s face is as white as a sheet.
“You know what happens now, boy.”
“No!”
“I am too old to control them, and you are still too young.”
“You don’t understand! They didn’t turn! He was going to kill them; that’s why he used the men. They were just protecting themselves!” He points at me. “They told her all about it. That’s why we’re here. To help them.”
The old man closes his eyes. “Then it really is a tragedy.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re too late. The slayers are doing their dirty work. It’s over.”
But he’s talking to thin air because Jonathan is already up and running and the rest of us are following behind, sick to our stomachs.
When we get outside, the scene that greets us is like something out of a big-budget horror movie.
There are bodies everywhere, bloodied and broken and ripped apart, too many bodies to count, the sight of it so unreal that we all come to an abrupt halt and then simply stand around dazed, unable to believe our eyes.
A man is lying in the rose bushes, his dead open eye staring straight at me. It takes me a while to recognize him as the guy who drove us to the Pendragon mansion on the night I first came here with Ingrid. David, I think his name was, an Israeli ex-soldier who always spoke so politely that he seemed more like a butler than a bodyguard to me.
I look at his dark hazel eye. His arm caught in the thorns.
Yes. I’m almost sure his name was David, this man with the dead eye and the broken neck and the half chewed-off face.
There’s another man lying right next to him, another Pendragon security guard, but I only know this because he’s wearing army fatigues and clutching an assault rifle in his one hand, the one still attached to his body. I have no idea who it is. I can’t tell because his neck is bent at a weird angle and his head seems to have been—–
Oh, Jesus.
There’s more, much more, too much for me to take in: somehow my vision has narrowed to a single point so I can only see things in glimpses by moving my head from side to side, focusing on one atrocity at a time and ignoring the bigger picture.
A severed leg in the lavender hedge. Mutilated bodies strewn across the lawn. A headless body in a pool of blood. Corpses floating face-down in the swimming pool. Bloodied limbs and soft, squelchy, fleshy things that were meant to stay inside people’s bodies but are now lying out here in the open, thrown across the paving stones like pieces of butchered—–
“Shhh.” I only realize I’m making a high, keening sound when Gunn reaches out and hugs me close to him. “Don’t look.”
He presses my face against his warm chest and for once, instead of pushing him away, I inhale deeply, shuddering for breath like someone who’s been underwater too long.
Gunn smells like home. Like safety and comfort.
Like a place where something like this could never happen.
I close my eyes, allowing myself a couple of seconds to be weak, to draw strength from the reassuring size and strength and familiarity of his body. More than a couple of seconds, maybe.
A minute.
Five minutes.
Then I force myself to step away.
“Where are the Pendragon women?” I ask, looking past Gunn to Ingrid, who’s standing a few feet behind him. “I need to…” Even though my voice sounds surprisingly level, I find that I don’t know how to finish the sentence.
It was the Pendragon women who did this.
I understood that right from the start.
Some sound must have escaped my lips again, a sob perhaps, because Gunn reaches out a hand to me. “Sweetheart. It’s okay. You don’t need to do anything right now. This isn’t your fight. It has nothing to do with you.”
His eyes are filled with such loving concern that I almost rush back into his arms. But then I realize it’s also the kind of look you’d give a dog frightened by fireworks, or a cat caught in the sprayer.
I take another step away from him.
“It’s got everything to do with me. They’re my sisters, and if I can do anything to save them I will.”
“They’re not your sisters,” Ingrid says. “They’re nothing like you.”
I don’t even bother to reply. Instead I follow the sound of raised voices to the bottom of the garden and into the woods.
I find them at the lake.
Someone has arranged the bloodied, mangled corpses of the Pendragon women in a neat row, all six of them lying next to each other. The sight is almost too macabre to be real.
Catherine and Anne, the grandmothers, lie at one end, their bodies bullet-ridden and soaked in blood. Next to them lies Robyn, Jonathan’s mother, and his aunts, Elizabeth and Michelle, their limbs resting at strange angles, broken and twisted. Nearest to me is Amber, Jonathan’s sister, who must’ve been shot with a canon because there’s a hole in her chest as big as my head.
I feel the tears starting to run down my face as I stare at their shattered bodies, the sight made even worse by the fact that their faces are untouched by any sign of violence and look strangely peaceful, as if they’re merely sleeping.
Even in death they are horribly, upsettingly beautiful.
When I finally find the strength to look up, I see that Jonathan and Zig are standing a few feet away. They are talking to Zig’s grandfather, a sinewy, dried-up old man with the same menacing aura and silver eyes as his grandson. Zig’s face, I notice distractedly, is as white as a sheet, and there’s so much pain in his eyes that he looks almost human, like a young man instead of a killer. Zig’s grandfather is holding a horribly familiar weapon of bone and skin in his hand.
At first I assume I can’t make out what they’re saying because there’s this strange, buzzing sound in my ears. A low hum that makes me feel strangely detached and a bit dreamy. But then I realize that they’re speaking a foreign language, German or Swedish or something, the words sounding guttural and ancient in their mouths.
I listen to them arguing for a while, my brain foggy and slow, unable to figure out what’s going on. And then, when I finally try to speak, I have to swallow a few times because my tongue seems too thick and too heavy in my mouth, like an organ
never meant for speech.
“Why are you arguing?” I ask, not understanding what’s left to say with the battle done and everyone dead at your feet.
“Jess!” Jonathan looks startled, as if he’s forgotten all about me. “Please! You have to stop them!” He comes running towards me, his frightened, dull green eyes now without a shred of bloodmagic.
“What’s going on?” I ask dully.
“The slayers!” He grabs my shoulders, his hands on my skin as cold as ice. “You have to stop them! They want to murder mom and Amber. My grandmother. Everybody.”
“Oh, Jonathan.” I give a quick glance at the bloodied corpses at our feet. “I think you need to accept that… They’re gone, Jonathan.”
“No! You don’t understand!” He shakes his head, his teeth chattering with urgency. “These are just… They’re just their human bodies. They’re not really in there.” He points to the lake. “That’s where they live. As long as they remain alive in the lake, these bodies can always be fixed.”
I frown, not sure I understand what he’s telling me. Is he trying to say that these women are still alive in their spiritforms? That their consciousness somehow survived despite what happened to their bodies?
Oh God. If only my brain didn’t feel so foggy and slow. If only this buzzing in my ears would stop. I close my eyes and give my head a quick, hard shake as confused flashes of my conversation with the Green Lady flickers through my head.
Nothing but a great vessel of consciousness…natural for a dragon’s consciousness to linger after the death of its body…a single knot becomes part of a great net…
“Jess! For Christ’s sake, you can’t flake out on me now!” The naked desperation in Jonathan’s voice makes me open my eyes.
“So they’re still alive in some way?” I point to the lake. “In there?”
“Yes! For now. But the slayers want to kill them.” He looks down at his mother’s dead body. “You have to stop them!”
Jonathan’s mother’s name was Robyn. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, her physical perfection almost inhuman. Even now, lying here, she seems… magnificent. Like the broken marble statue of an ancient goddess.
“Jonathan. I’m so sorry.” Under her untouched, exquisite white face, Jonathan’s mother’s body is ripped apart by bullet holes, her flesh shredded beyond any hope of repair. “There’s nothing the slayers can do that hasn’t been done already.”
“No! You don’t understand! While they remain alive in the lake, their human bodies can always be fixed. Always! We’ve done it before, there are earthkeepers who can heal any—–” He stops abruptly, his body shaking and his teeth chattering. “Jesus, Jess, you’re a fucking earthmaster! You could do it for sure. Easy!”
I swallow past the tightness in my throat. “Healing can’t bring someone back from the dead, Jonathan.”
“They’re not dead! Didn’t you hear a word I said? They’re alive and healthy and whole!”
Alive and healthy and whole.
The words seem obscene, standing where I’m standing, seeing what I’m seeing. When I can’t get myself to look away from the corpses at my feet, Jonathan grabs my shoulders again, his punishing grip reminding me of that day when he almost strangled me. He must remember it too, because he takes one look at my face and then abruptly lets go, holding his hands up, palms towards me, as if I’m the one who needs to calm down.
“Jess. Please. You need to listen to me. I know you don’t understand what’s going on, but trust me on this.” He makes a despairing motion towards the bodies, his hands shaking. “I know what it looks like, okay? But it means nothing. In every way that matters my family is still alive, which means that any competent healer could fix this, never mind an earthmaster.”
The hope in his eyes is terrible to witness. “Jonathan—–”
“No! Just listen to me. The issue here isn’t that I’m delusional or crazy with grief or any of that shit. It’s that the slayers want to kill them—–and once they do that, it’s over. Do you understand what I’m saying? Nothing will be able to bring them back, because they will be dead.”
I look into the glassy eyes of his sister, Amber, staring into nothing.
“A slayer brings death to dragons, true death, so if you don’t stop them right now, I will lose my entire family.” He snaps a hand in front of my face and I blink once, slowly. “Jess! Are you listening? Do you understand what I’m saying? You need to help me. Please, you need to stop them!”
“There is nothing she can do to stop me, boy.”
Zig’s grandfather has the kind of deep, sonorous voice you usually only hear in dramatic movie trailers. I tear my gaze away from the corpses at my feet to find him standing in front of us, on the other side of the bodies, his wrinkled face closed and forbidding. “I will do my duty whether I like it or not, and I will not be held back by Ingrid’s young ward, no matter how much power she may have.”
“You d-don’t understand,” Jonathan stutters over his words with urgency. “This is all a misunderstanding! The half-dragons didn’t turn, I promise you! They didn’t do anything wrong. My father wanted to murder them!” He looks back in the direction of the house, tugging at his shirt in a gesture of despair. “I know it looks bad back there; I totally get why you’d think they’d turned. But it was self-defense! He obviously ordered his mercenaries to attack—–”
“Stop!” Zig’s grandfather says. “You are not telling me anything I do not know. I have lost a son today; I know well what happened here.”
Wait…what? He lost a son?
It takes a while for my sluggish brain to make the connection.
That would mean that Zig’s dad…
I look at Zig, who stares back at me without a flicker of emotion. If I hadn’t glimpsed that devastated look on his face earlier, I would’ve thought his father’s death didn’t affect him at all.
“So this is revenge?” Jonathan's face is now deathly white. “The life of my family for the life of your son?”
“No. Such vengeance would be pointless, for it was not the half-dragons who killed Sigurd. It was your father.”
“My father killed a slayer?”
“He used his real name against him,” the old man says. “And by doing so, he destroyed all our covenants and treaties, as well as any shred of trust that ever existed between my family and yours.”
“But…” Suddenly that desperate flame of hope is back in Jonathan’s eyes. “If you know this is all his fault, why do you want to slay the half-dragons? They’re innocent! You said it yourself! They only killed to protect themselves!”
“I’m sorry, boy. I know you still imagine that there are traces of your mother and your sister to be found in those pitiful creatures, but they have long since left behind any trace of their humanity. They are monsters now. The women you knew are gone forever.”
“That’s not true! You can ask Jess, she spoke to them, they’re still themselves, they never left us, it was just a lie my—–”
The old man stops him with a raised hand. “I’ve heard her theories about the half-dragons. But she’s wrong.”
“I’m not wrong.” I hear my own voice as if it’s coming from a distance. “I have seen them and spoken to them, and they’re not monsters at all.”
“You have seen them in dreams and visions,” Zig’s grandfather says dismissively. “Don’t you know that they are masters of Enthrallment, and that they breathe illusion in the same way we breathe air?”
“But they’re more than illusion too! They reached out to Jess in dreams because that was the only way to communicate with her…”
For the next few minutes Jonathan tries to convince Zig’s grandfather that the half-dragons aren’t mindless monsters, telling him about the warnings I received and the times they helped us without Jack Pendragon knowing anything about it. I listen in silence, my tongue still strangely thick in my mouth and my ears still buzzing. Around me everything seems hyper-defined and yet strangely unre
al. The breathtaking beauty of the lake. The blank expression on Zig’s face. The innocent blue sky above. The ruined bodies on the ground below. The desperate flow of Jonathan’s words—–
“Are you okay?”
Gunn is standing next to me, that concerned-about-my-pet look back on his face.
“I’m fine.”
“I suspect she must be in a state of shock.” Ingrid’s voice comes from somewhere behind me. “This is absolutely typical of…”
I block out her voice because it’s suddenly clear to me that I will have to force myself out of this strange and disturbing paralysis I’ve sunk into. If I don’t act now something terrible is going to happen. I only need to be brave for a little while.
When I’m pretty sure my body will obey my brain’s commands, I step forward.
“No!” I say, as loudly as I can, interrupting Jonathan’s desperate pleas. “You can’t kill them.”
Zig’s grandfather shifts his cool silver gaze from Jonathan to me.
“Jack Pendragon ordered his mercenaries to kill them; they were fighting for their lives. What they did, they did in self-defense.” I’m amazed to hear how normal my voice sounds. “A slayer has a duty to protect the innocent, and these women are innocent.”
“I know very well what my duties are,” the old man says in his deep, gravelly voice. “And I do not relish the task that awaits me. But I have no other choice. Without the Alpha to control them, they cannot be left alive.”
It takes my stunned brain a few seconds to realize that he just handed me the solution to this whole mess. “Jonathan can be the Alpha,” I say, relieved to find the answer so obvious.
“Yes!” Jonathan cries, “I can! Tell him, Jess! I’ve done it before; that’s what I’ve been trying to—–”
Zig’s grandfather silences him with one look. “Jonathan will never be able to master the half-dragons. He’s too young and too weak; they do not fear him and will never submit to his will.”
I look at Jonathan. At the bodies of the Pendragon women at my feet. At the lake where, apparently, a part of their consciousness still remains.
“You’re right,” I say. “They do not fear him. But they love him and they’ll do anything they can to help him.”
Treasurekeeper Page 21