Hope (The Descendant Trilogy Book 2)

by Theresa M. Jones

  “Enter.”

  He obeyed and closed the door behind him. I could feel his anger at being humiliated. I could smell the blood on his skin, not his own blood.

  “Were you fighting?”

  He nodded. But didn’t speak.

  “Explain to me what happened.”

  He tensed, and since I was curious, I browsed around in his thoughts. He was angry after I left. He was still angry at me. Frank had them show their skills by fighting each other. Hadrian had killed three men before Frank stopped him.

  “We were told to fight, so I did.” He acted nonchalant about it though I could tell he enjoyed the kill. My lust for him grew. I could see the sweat that still clung to his clothes, revealing his rippling chest and abdomen.

  “Follow me.” I commanded.

  “Yes, Leader.” He said, rather dully, as if he was still annoyed at my dominance.

  We wove our way through the maze to my bedroom. I had my way with him then and enjoyed every minutes of that wonderful hour. When I left my room, my lust was satiated, and my blood lust satisfied. He lay on the floor, still breathing heavily and bleeding. He would recover soon and I’m sure he would come back for more.

  I called to Nigel as I left my bedroom to go to my office. I was tired of these games and needed to get things taken care of.

  Nigel, come to me now.

  Less than a minute after being in my office, Nigel arrived. “The Horsemen will retreat if we do not open the Fifth Seal soon.” I paused, to see how much he knew already. His thoughts were clear enough. Damien had told Nigel that he had opened the Fourth Seal already.

  “Virus 542 has not been released, the Russian humans still fear the fallout that would occur.” He nodded understanding, so I continued. “Frank is the general here, helping me build my army, but I need you to help me finish opening the Seals. Without opening more the Horsemen will evacuate and close off again. We cannot allow the Horsemen to leave us. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Leader.”

  “Good. You will go to Russia and persuade the President and Chairman there to release the virus. Then go to the American President and persuade him to release his virus as well. If they both release their biological weapons, we will have enough death to warrant the Fifth Seal to open, my Great Tribulation will occur.”

  “Yes, Leader.”

  “Go. It is time.”

  Chapter 8

  History

  ***Allison***

  “So what are we doing today?” I asked him as I stood at the open window. It was still pretty early, the sun had just barely risen above the horizon.

  Autumn on an island was different than I was used to. The air seemed clearer, the colors brighter, the light more intense. Every single morning that I was there, I felt stronger, better. And I had, at least for that moment, an intense rush of serenity and joy that I was who I was, and was with the person I was with. That my life was the way it was, despite the adversities I had to face. Any worries I might have had seemed trivial at that moment. They dissipated in the crisp morning breeze that blew in and wrapped my russet hair around me.

  We had already eaten breakfast, so when I turned around I saw David step out of the bathroom, water still shimmered off his shoulders and hair from his shower. I had chosen to shower first while he made us some food, and while he showered, I had been just laying back, on that bed made for an angel, waiting patiently for him. Now that he was out, I was ready to get going and do something. My patience could really only last so long.

  Within the last week since being here, David and I had done everything you could think of and more. He tried to teach me to fish, both with an actual line, and then with my hands, which ended up a terrible disaster. I may be strong and I may have Power, but trying to grab a slimy fish before it slips through your fingers is just not a gift I possessed.

  It was fun, however, to try and catch the fish with my Power. I had been too frustrated with the poles and with my bare hands that I decided to try and capture the fish in a barrier of Power. I made a sort of force field, just not letting anything pass through it, so when the fish swam close to it, I just closed off the other side. It was actually fun. Finally I had found a way to fish and it make it fun. But David thought it was cheating.

  We had also climbed up a large hill. Considering I grew up in southern Texas, it looked more like a mountain, but David assured me it was only a hill. The green trees and brown trail beneath my feet painted a picture I had never seen before. And even though I was from Texas, where it was always hotter than Hell, this was a whole different kind of hot. It continued to get more sticky and humid as the day went on, the warm salty breeze encircled us.

  In the trees were some sort of monkeys that David called lemurs. They made weird sounds, and had it been dark, they would have been scary with their giant eyes and quiet rustling of leaves. They flew from one branch to another, like a leaf falls from a tree, so smooth and soft.

  That day we had hiked to the top of the hill, from there we could see almost the whole island. Thankfully, we move faster than the powerless, our speed and agility made it easier for us. We made it to the top only a little after noon, with enough time to stop, rest and eat the picnic David carried up on his back.

  At the top there was a circle of flat grass, a meadow of sorts. Not like the meadow I loved back at the Compound. There were no flowers really, just bright green healthy grass, tall looming trees that shaded a large portion of it, and a table right in the middle. It was like it was meant for an intimate picnic between lovers or friends. And David and I were both. So it was perfect.

  It was the perfect honeymoon, now coming to an end. We had only two days left of the week and then we would be on our way home. It was a bittersweet thought, because though I loved it here and have had more fun than any one person should be allowed to have, I missed Sam more than I thought I would. Even with all the activities that David continued to plan and execute, he couldn’t distract me from the longing I had for my daughter.

  “Well…I thought today we could just stay in. Just lounge around here.”

  I tried to determine if he was being serious. Doing nothing all day sounded like fun, but didn’t sound like David. His eyes looked sincere, but his smile was mischievous. “Just stay here?”

  The mansion we were staying in was huge and imposing. We hadn’t really even gone through most of it. We came into the lobby, we ate in the kitchen, and stayed in a bedroom with a bathroom on the side. But that was it. I hadn’t really had an opportunity to wander or snoop around, though it would be a lie to say I didn’t want to.

  “I thought I could show you around here, tell you some of the history of The Order.” He paused briefly and studied my face. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me then. Was it excitement showing through? Wariness at the unknown? But he added, “There is a library too.”

  And then he knew he had me sold, whether I was before or not.

  He walked to the bed, but before he could sit next to me, I was up. “We have been here for almost a week and you never felt the urge to tell me that there was a library here?”

  I was joking, but I made my tone serious. Standing in front of him, I tried to seem taller and stronger, to be intimidating in my faux anger, but he wasn’t buying it. He wrapped an arm around my back and pulled me closer, catching my lips with his own.

  I’m not an innocent woman. I have been with men in the past, but it was still so new and different with David. He was so passionate, in even the smallest embrace. In that kiss that started as only a peck on the lips, I could feel his desire boiling over, which only made me want him more.

  My hands went to him immediately. I needed him to be closer. I could breath in his taste, feel him on my tongue. I could feel his love for me, seeping into my skin, warming me from my fingers to my toes.

  He lessened the kiss, and rested his head on my chest. It was such an intimate position to be in, with my arms around him. “I can hear and feel your heart beating.”<
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  I had no response to that. I too could hear and feel my heart beating. It was going crazy. Fluttering wildly out of control like a drunken hummingbird, happy and careless and free. He always had this effect on me, from the very beginning.

  I sucked in a full deep breath, held it tight, then let it go. I noticed my pulse calming, going soft like a river after a storm.

  He pulled back and looked me in the eyes, green jewels staring into my soul. “I love you!”

  In any other mans mouth, the words would mean less. It wasn’t just that his voice boomed so deep that it resonated to my very bones, it was the vehemence with which he said it.

  I tried to make my voice as sincere and beautiful as I answered, “And I love you too.”

  We finally separated ourselves from one another, mostly. David left only his hand on my back as he led me out the room and down the hallway. It was the same hallway that you came to when you went up the stairs from the lobby. But this time, we ventured further than normal.

  After passing several doorways that David paid no attention to, we came to a stop in front of a set of larger than normal doors. The doors were similar to the others, in that they were the deep wood, with intricate carvings and golden handles. But they were taller and broader.

  He turned the handle, but before he fully opened it, he turned to me.

  “Close your eyes.” He demanded.

  I had to fight the urge to roll my eyes at him, closing them would be too cliché. But I did as I was told, he was trying to be sweet, and I loved him for it. Surprises are always fun. Well…usually.

  He grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me forward, I knew from the smell we were in the library then. The smell of old books, paper and ink, and imagination. Books have the best smell in the world.

  There was dust and a heavy feeling in the room. It felt like the doors hadn’t been opened in ages, and the smell of books was being stifled and held in for too long under a scorching sun. It was too quiet in that room. The mansion was built so well, the walls so thick, that you could never hear the outside world while inside. You couldn’t hear the ocean, or the wind, or even the lemurs on the trees. But usually you could hear a clock ticking, or a candle flickering, or even the buzz of electricity in the lights. But not in this room. It was still. Quiet.

  Until it wasn’t.

  I could both feel and hear the electricity as he lit up the room, the red behind my eyelids almost made me flinch. The urge to open my eyes now was nearly unbearable.

  I felt his warm hands slide up my arms, he rested them just above my elbows. I could feel his warmth and smell him grow closer as he leaned toward me and kissed me so softly I almost wasn’t sure he did it at all, like a soft touch of a feather.

  “Open your eyes.” It was just a breath, a whisper. Not an order, but a request. An offering so sweet.

  My eyes had adjusted to the light, even when they were closed, so when I opened them, I didn’t have to flinch away. I stood in the middle of a large room, a wall on both sides, and in front was a curved, semi-circle wall with a large window showing the ocean, bright blue glittering with the early sunrise.

  But that wasn’t the most beautiful sight. What was breathtaking was how tall the walls were. The walls had to be at least two stories high, the tallest room I had ever seen, outside of the Compound. It was almost just like the library in the cartoon Disney movie, Beauty and the Beast.

  And there were shelves and shelves of books, there had to be millions of them there, in that one room. On both walls was a tall ladder on wheels that would slide horizontally along so that you could reach the books higher up. At the corner of both walls, were spiral staircases that led up to a platform so you could walk along the top and reach all the books far up off the ground.

  I walked up to the closest wall and glanced at the books there, they were all written in a language I didn’t understand, but recognized to be Latin.

  David, who had followed me to the wall, explained, “This section holds the books written in Latin. As you go down you will find French, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and at the end of this section is Russian. I think there are some German too, and probably others that I haven’t mentioned.”

  As he was talking he pointed to the end of the section, I noticed now that the walls were separated by thick wood in the shelves, like a built in divider.

  “Beyond this section, there are the hieroglyphs and lost languages, mostly from Africa and Egypt, some from Ancient Greece too.” I nodded again. So he continued, “The next section has different histories, told from different point of views and from different time periods.” As he went, he would point to the different sections.

  “Then there are classic literature, poems, stories, etc. Just the Classics. Beyond that are the memoirs and books about specific people. There is a section for health and wellness, and fitness. That section also has the weapons and defensive skills books too.

  “The ones directly across from us is all knowledge based books, like school books, science books, philosophy. It’s such a large section because schoolbooks have changed, as what children are taught in school has changed. The last section is fiction, mystery, romance, and science fiction.”

  Ironically my favorite section, the fiction, is the smallest section of all. But even with him explaining about each of the sections, he never pointed up. Up where the platform was on both sides. Even from the distance, I could tell they had to be old books. All different sizes, some small and thin, some huge and thick.

  “What about up there?” I pointed to the top.

  He smiled down at me, grabbed my hand and led me to the staircase on this side of the room. “Come with me and I’ll show you.”

  As I spiraled up the stairs, I came to realize the room was even taller than I thought. I would be terrified to climb up to the top of the ladder just below the platform. At least there was a little iron gate at the edge of the platform, so I wouldn’t fall off. The gate matched the staircase perfectly, and it wasn’t until I got up there that I realized the designs in the iron were angels. Just like at the Compound, everything was surrounded by angels.

  At the top of the staircase, I looked down at the room. My breath caught as I tried to really take everything in. It was so much. Again he grabbed my hand and led me to the middle of the room, oblivious to my awe.

  “On both sides, up at the top, we keep every book that mentions our history. The history of the Order, anything on Angels, almost all the mythology, both Greek and Roman. We keep it all up here.” His eyes were alive with excitement.

  “Have you studied the histories a lot?”

  “It is easier for me, since I have descended from Minerva, I not only can teach people, but I learn faster as well. It’s almost like an extension of me, these books. When I pick one up, I can feel the knowledge flowing up my hands and into me. Not literally…but almost.”

  I thought back to our old lessons in the Hall back at The Compound. I thought of everything he already taught me and wondered how there could be more. How could there be so many books filled with history of the Order?

  “At the end we have lists of every person born with Power, all the way back to the Primitus. That’s how we research genealogy and find out who has descended from whom.”

  This had often been a topic of conversation. When I first learned about my Power, most of the Council believed that I was the prophesied Descendent. The one destined to save the world from the Rising. But they could never track my ancestry back to all of the nine. Plus the fact that I had a child out of wedlock kinda ruled me out of being descended from Castafonda, the chaste one.

  We sat together after grabbing a few books to look through. We both leaned back against the shelves and I could feel the spines of the books against my back. I looked over at him and saw him reading, completely absorbed in whatever book he was looking at. I was going through a book of genealogy and history, trying to determine if my grandmother also had Power.

  15 February 1715

 
We, all members of the Order, have decided that we could no longer hope the children could control the Power. We all had our own experiences, on our sixth birthdays. It was up for much debate. Is it the right thing, to bind the Power until the child has grown to be an adult? Should we hope that in time we might be able to teach the children to control the Power before it consumes them? But we can wait no longer. This year alone we have lost ten children, all still before their seventh birthdays, who were never able to master the Power and thus it consumed them, burning them from the inside out.

  I glanced up at David, “Hey,” he looked up at me. “So, the reason the Order decided to bind the Power in children was because if they didn’t, the children died?”

  “Yes, that’s what I understand. Not all of them, of course. But too many to ignore.”

  “Why?” But even as I asked it, I understood the decision. I remembered when I first received my Power, on my 21st birthday. I remembered the pain, the searing agony of the Power flowing through me. I have since mastered it, I could control it, bend it to do my will, but it wasn’t like that at first.

  “I have read many accounts of The Order, the teachers and the parents trying every way they could to teach the children how to control it. And of course, it worked sometimes, or we wouldn’t be here. But as I understand it, too often the children couldn’t handle it. They didn’t understand how.” His eyes were sad, regret filled him. Being a teacher, he felt it his duty to teach all, and I couldn’t imagine failing a child.

  I didn’t answer him. Instead I decided to keep reading.

  We have come together, to create a toxin and prayer that we believe will bind the Power. We cannot and do not want to kill the Power, just to bind it until we can later release it. We hope that it will last for at least ten years, but we are not sure how long it will last. We pray for the day when our future generations have come to master the Power at a level we have not been able to, so that we may never have to bind the children.