The Complete Chosen Trilogy (The Chosen #0)

by N. M. Santoski

  Nolan couldn't resist. "Grandmarie?"

  "She hated Grandma—said it made her sound old. Azar wouldn't let me call her Marie, so they compromised." Pyrrhus looked so uncomfortable that Nolan let it go.

  "So what's the plan?"

  "We'll keep driving straight up to Conleth—we can take turns driving," Gia said.

  "Oh no we won't!" Pyrrhus cried. "No one drives this car but me!"

  "Pyrrhus, be reasonable. You can't drive for 19 hours straight! We need to get there quickly. I have a license. I'm not asking you to let Nolan drive it."

  "Hey!"

  "Well, once we teach you to drive and you get a license, you can drive, too," Gia soothed.

  "Gia, please—this car..."

  "I am a very safe driver!" she protested.

  "Just drive," Nolan bit out. "We'll fight about it when he gets tired."

  ***

  Alan's hand shook as he dialed Manas' cell phone number. "Hello?"

  "I need to meet you somewhere."

  "I'm a little busy, can this wait?"

  Something in Alan snapped. "No, this cannot wait! My marriage has been essentially dissolved thanks to you! I need to see you, now!"

  Manas, to his credit, did not voice his shock. "I'm at Caer Anglia—it's time to flush out these Aeroni vandals once and for all. Come and join me."

  "My mother is with me. We should be there by tomorrow morning."

  "I'll have rooms opened for you. Should I assume I can still give you Aqua lodgings? Or has she banished you completely?"

  "Frankly, I don't give a damn. I'll sleep on the floor. See you in a few hours."

  He snapped his phone shut and threw it into the backseat, still seething.

  "Alan."

  His name was the first word Mara let pass her lips since their departure. She was shaking, too, her hands refusing to cooperate. Instead, she twisted them in her lap.

  "Mother?"

  "Hasn't this gone far enough?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't you... we should be trying to find Nolan, not running to the Warringtons."

  "Not you, too. Mother, please. I've just lost my wife and my unborn child. Please don't make me lose you, too."

  "I refuse to choose between you. You are both my sons, and I love you equally. We should be united as a family. This is how Warrington wins—he sows discord until your head is so turned you don't know if you can trust your own blood."

  "I don't know what to think anymore. My whole world is twisted."

  "Let's just stop, then. Stay off the grid until we can find out what's really going on."

  His mother was practically begging, but her words left a sour taste in his mouth, and he bit back automatically. "Stay off the grid like Nolan? Hide in a cave? No, thank you. I'm going to Caer Anglia... if you'd like me to drop you off somewhere, by all means let me know."

  "I have nowhere else to go."

  "That settles that, then."

  ***

  "How are we going to get into Conleth?" Gia asked. "Isn't it one of the most secure Courts?"

  "The most. The most secure," Pyrrhus corrected. "You forget—I am Lord Younger. No doors are barred to me in my own domain."

  She snickered at his pompous tone. "Seriously."

  "Seriously, our versions of baileys are keyed into blood and numina both. My father cannot revoke my entry, nor the entry of anyone I deem acceptable."

  "And what if he's there?" Nolan asked. "Will he know who breached the baileys?"

  "He'll suspect. Hell, he probably will know. It's a risk we have to take."

  They were approaching a sprawling Queen Anne mansion surrounded by yards of white painted wrought-iron fence. Instead of entering through the main driveway, however, Pyrrhus gunned the engine of his car and continued down the twisting road.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Family entrance. Remember our discussion?"

  "I wanna see this," Nolan said, leaning back.

  They pulled onto a gravel drive and up to a perfectly ordinary mechanical gate.

  "What's so special about this?"

  Pyrrhus shushed them and reached out with a fingertip to the box that controlled the gate. When his finger was within an inch of the button, a flare of light ignited bright red around the entire box. There was the slightest bit of resistance before his hand slid through as though the barrier didn't exist. He pressed the button, and the gate opened with a groan.

  "There we go," he said.

  "Surprisingly simple," Gia said thoughtfully. "You don't have to bailey the entire property... just the security access panel."

  "Hey! No stealing our ideas! That's... professional espionage!"

  "Nolan, tell him... Nolan?"

  He wasn't listening. While they were squabbling, Pyrrhus pulled into the family garage, and Nolan was spellbound.

  The garage was full of cars. Old cars, new cars, top of the line cars, custom cars... the Ignis were clearly gear heads.

  "Wow."

  "This is why no one drives my car but me."

  Nolan gawked at a blue 1955 Thunderbird as they drove by it to park. “Nolan, honestly! We’ll buy you a car when this is all over,” Gia said with a laugh. She used her knuckle to nudge his mouth shut and pushed him toward the door, where Pyrrhus beckoned.

  “Grandmarie awaits.”

  ***

  Manas was sitting in his father's office, studying the reports from Selocrim's lieutenants. These Aeroni vandals were slick, to be sure, but they were still in the building, he just knew it. He was studying the family trees of the current students, tracing back decades of rifts and insults and feuds, trying to find the connecting thread.

  The door slammed open with bruising force, and Manas was swept from his desk in a torrent of water and drenched paperwork. Before he could even try to get his legs under him, the door slammed shut again and Alan Aeron was on his side of the desk, dragging him to his feet by his neck.

  "I should kill you right now."

  "Nice to see you t—wrok!" he choked as Alan tightened his grip.

  "My wife—my wife! —is pregnant and scared and injured. Am I there with her? No! You and your ideas!"

  Manas' feet were starting to scramble against the floor for purchase.

  "You've ruined my relationship with Leiani faster than Nolan ever did! Why did I ever trust you?"

  On the verge of losing consciousness, Manas summoned the large stone paperweight from his father's desk straight into the back of Alan's head. He stumbled, letting Manas fall to the floor and knocking the desk lamp over, plunging the office into darkness.

  Manas propped himself against the wall, trying to rub his bruised windpipe. His whistling breaths sounded loud in the quiet office, accompanied by the steady drip of water from the ruined paperwork on the desk.

  Finally, he felt recovered enough to speak. "Did that make you feel more in control? Attacking me for something that your brother was responsible for?"

  Alan, still nursing the beginning of a goose egg on the back of his head, said nothing.

  "Keopelani ended your marriage because your connection to Nolan puts her daughter in danger. She doesn't want her granddaughter to have a lunatic uncle running around the country stirring up trouble. Separating yourself from him didn't work. There's only one way to solve this now."

  At first, Manas thought Alan had slipped into unconsciousness when he did not react to his words. Finally, from the dark recesses of the office, he spoke.

  "How?"

  "Nolan has to die."

  A beat, then Alan repeated, "How?"

  "We have to lure him here. Once Nolan is dead, Leiani will be yours again. You will have your wife and your baby back." In the darkness of the office, the next admission came almost too easily. "My mother is dying. Only the Swordsmith can help her, and Nolan Aeron would never lift a finger to help me or mine. My father will be here within the week. Help us end Nolan, and we'll all have what we need."

  Slowly, Manas began to feel the water in
his hair and clothing recede. When the office was dry again and the dripping stopped, he heard some rustling before the door to the office opened, letting a beam of light in to blind him as he peered around the desk. Alan was a hunched silhouette in the doorway.

  "I'll be back in the morning to discuss it."

  With that, he was gone.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Marie Aeron McClellan was a woman who was clearly a beauty in her younger years. She was sixty-three now, but the shadow of that younger woman remained in the shape of her cheekbones, the slope of her lips, and her arresting eyes. They were neither blue nor grey, but somewhere in between, and at the moment they were fastened on her youngest brother's youngest son.

  "Hello, Grandmarie," Pyrrhus said, but she held her hand up for silence. She looked over Nolan from head to foot, slowly.

  "You are Trevor to the life," she rasped. "I hope you haunted my father every day until he died."

  Nolan stiffened, and Gia stepped in to heal the breach. "Hello, Mrs. McClellan. It's a pleasure to finally meet you." She reached her hand out, but Marie's eyes were focused on her other one.

  "How dare you?"

  "Excuse me?"

  Marie snatched her left hand from her side and pulled it into the light, examining the ring glittering there for a moment more closely. "That's my mother's ring. I've been searching for that ring for twenty years. How dare you flaunt it so openly! Give it here this instant."

  "I will not!" Gia said, affronted. "This is my engagement ring." Nolan put his arm around her and opened his mouth to confront her when Pyrrhus spoke.

  "Grandmarie, please," he practically begged. The tone of his voice caused all three of them to pause and turn to him. "We aren't here to fight. We have questions for you that I hope you can answer for us."

  Marie patted his cheek. "Pyro, when I find myself wishing there was more of my Pele in you... because Vulcan knows you look just like your own father... her spirit comes out in unexpected ways. I apologize, girl," she said to Gia. "Of course the ring it yours—it just surprised me. Please—sit down."

  They sat, Nolan tucking Gia into the circle of his arm protectively. Pyrrhus sat with his grandmother, letting her pat his hand occasionally.

  "I don't know what questions you could have for me that I could have any hope of answering—I've been trapped in these damn mountains for years, and your father has no intention of letting me go any time soon. Any information I have for you would be hopelessly out of date."

  "Grandmarie, the information we need from you is older than that. We need information on the Swordsmith."

  Nolan watched as Marie's face closed off. "What could I possibly know that would be of use to you?"

  Pyrrhus took a deep breath. "We need to know what happened between Warrington and John Aeron."

  "Nothing."

  Gia raised an eyebrow. "Nothing." The sarcasm in her voice was palpable. "Michael Warrington attempts to destroy an entire bloodline—the oldest one! —over nothing?"

  "You are presuming my father was innocent."

  "He was! He would never—he loved my father!" Nolan protested.

  Marie shrugged, her face twisted. "As you say. I can only speak to what was said."

  "Before that," Pyrrhus interjected. "Before the tragedy of Trevor's death. What did they fall out over?"

  Marie took a breath. "Before Trevor was born, my father did not have an Heir. My mother had me, a Gravis to bring honor to her name. She had my brother, Eric, who would be killed in action in Vietnam... A war in which my father encouraged him to enlist, by the way."

  She paused, but didn't give them time to comment. "John, despite his old name and high status, was missing the only thing to make his legacy complete—an Heir of his own numina. As my mother got older and the possibility seemed more remote, other Council members began to shove the ladies of their family forward as... alternate options."

  Nolan squirmed. Marie read his disgust and smiled at him for the first time. "I'm happy to see that this is one of the old ways that you do not agree with, nephew. If my father really wanted an Heir of his numina, he would have been better served taking a human girl, anyway. Numina always breeds true with humans. I've always wondered if there are bastard Aerons scattered through Europe after Father's World War II tour... but I digress. To give him his due, he refused. Whatever his misdeeds while at war, his opinions at 40 were not those of him at 25."

  She took a small sip of tea and let her audience hang for a moment. "My mother was pregnant eight times in twenty years. Of the eight, four never drew breath. One—my brother George—died at two years old of causes they never uncovered. I was twelve when he died, and I will never forget my mother's pain. I was my parent's oldest—born when Mother was eighteen and Father still was a year away from enlisting. Eric, as I said, was assumed to be my parents' youngest and last child. Father reconciled himself to the fact that he would not have an Heir. He threw himself into his work at Caer Anglia... he was Proctor there for many years. I suppose he thought that shaping the minds of the next generation would be some sort of substitute. His star pupils were Magnus Leith... and Michael Warrington."

  Nolan's eyebrows shot up while the other two were still doing the math. "That would make Warrington..."

  "He celebrated his 65th birthday last year."

  The three teens reacted with various degrees of shock.

  "Impossible!"

  "He doesn't look a day over 40!"

  "I always assumed he was a classmate of my father's!"

  "They were my father's protégées. They were similar to John...and to you, nephew... in that they both took their seats at a young age. My father took them in hand and taught them what it meant to lead an entire numen when they were little more than children. They bonded in a way that my brother Eric and I were jealous of."

  "What happened?" Pyrrhus asked.

  "Trevor was born when Warrington was only thirteen. Just as Michael felt that it was his time to step into the sun as my father's right hand man, a baby who did nothing more than be born with the right combination of genes supplanted him. It only added insult to injury that Trevor wasn't a particularly powerful Fulmen... barely enough to register, but he did register, and that's all that mattered."

  "So Warrington got mad. That still doesn't make sense. Why try to destroy them?"

  Marie opened her mouth, and then closed it, looking away. Pyrrhus reached out and took her hand. "Grandmarie, if you even have a suspicion, that would be helpful."

  "It has been said..." She took another rattling breath that turned into a cough. Nolan leapt for a glass of water while Pyrrhus gripped her hand until the spasm passed. She waved the boys away. "It has been said that Michael spent much of his twenties and thirties in the company of Alixandra, Lady Tempus... learning her secrets. She is almost two thousand years old, and she keeps track of the numen of the world. Michael spent years tracing families and lore, trying to find a way to take back what he'd begun to think of as his right."

  "The Sword," Nolan said, his fists clenched in his lap.

  Marie nodded in his direction, acknowledging the truth of his words. "The Sword."

  "The Sword of the Nine is always held by a Fulmen—everyone knows that," Gia protested.

  "Do they now?" Marie said with a bit of bite. "And what if there were no Fulmen left to claim it? Would we all collapse into dust—or worse, be merely human? Or would another be able to step into the role of Swordsmith?"

  "There must be thousands of Fulmen around the world!" Pyrrhus said.

  In response, Marie held up two fingers.

  "Two thousand?"

  "Two."

  "Two—Selocrim and I are the only Fulmen left? That's--"

  "Impossible?" A ghost of a smile touched the corner of Marie's lips. "A popular word today. I am uniquely placed, Nolan. An old woman whose blood is the most ancient of them all, the only pure line left, but a woman who has no purpose. The daughter of a Council member, the grandmother of a future o
ne, yet I am less than nothing. I was used for my body, and then discarded once I was no longer of use. And yet... I have friends. I hear things. Whispers reach me of atrocities across the Sea... and who would pay attention to an old woman's correspondence?" Every word was laced with sarcasm—Pyrrhus came by it honestly from both branches of his family tree. Under the sarcasm was pain.

  "I realized what was happening a few years ago, and I started reaching out to the network of numen that still knew and respected me as John Aeron's daughter—those who knew nothing of his reputation or our estrangement. I can't say I'm sorry that my father is dead," Marie said, eyes dry. "Innocent of Trevor's death or not, his mistakes as Swordsmith were legion." She reached to the side of her chair and pulled out a small blue box. At first, Nolan thought it was a shoebox.

  "If you are to avoid your grandfather's mistakes, you must learn what they were." She beckoned him forward and placed the box in his hands. It was strangely cool to the touch.

  Nolan lifted the lid and found, to his surprise, a small collection of little brown books. He picked up the oldest looking one and held it up, raising an eyebrow.

  "My father was an avid journalist. That is his journal from World War II. They continue onward sporadically through his life until Trevor's death. Take them."

  When it seemed he would protest, she waved a hand at them all and looked at Pyrrhus. "Learn from them, Nolan. Warrington's hatred of our family runs deep, and it's only because I follow the traits of my mother and have expressed a disdain for my father and anything associated with him that I remain mostly unscathed. He will not stop until the three of you are dead, and he has taught his son to follow in his footsteps." She clutched at his wrist. "Finish this, in the name of all that is holy." She blinked and seemed to realize where she was and whom she was talking to. She released him as if he burned her and turned her face away. "I want to be alone. You've gotten your information. Leave before you are caught."

  Pyrrhus leaned in and kissed her cheek. "I love you, Grandmarie."

  She didn't respond, but gave her first smile since their arrival not tainted with malice or sarcasm. "Go. I expect, one way or another, that I will not see you again."