by King, Sadie
In the mosaic room, everyone was waiting. They sat. Vane sat at the left hand of his brother, a Patrician next to a Caesar. The brothers had almost become equals. Sitting side by side, both tasting power, they were as close as they had ever been to love.
Vane’s eyes still burned for Zora. Burned black. Scathing, hating. She still didn’t understand why. Misogyny? Definitely. Man transcending everything it was not. But something else raged behind his eyes, deeper, more primordial. Power wanting to destroy everything it perceived as a threat. These feelings were alien to Zora, and that was why power viewed her as alien to itself, as a danger to its very existence. And no one cared more for power than Vane.
Caesar began with his customary speech. What else could Caesar do but engage in grand oratory? Such was his lot in life.
“All of you I respect greatly, and all of you I love.”
On the last word he fixed his eyes lovingly on Zora. Vane noticed, his face draining of what little color it had.
“This group, this family, is my life. I mean that. My life. I would sacrifice everything, my reputation and even myself, to protect the integrity of who we are. Our sanctity. Our life together. Our vision.
“But integrity is an evolving concept, and life has to evolve. I used to think that our integrity was our strength, and that our strength was our integrity. I used to think that those who hold power ought to hold power, and those who lack power ought to wither on the vine.
“But this should not be our vision, and this can no longer be our life. The law that we all practice, the laws that we all have sworn to uphold—these need to make us all stronger, not simply a select few of us. We should serve all people equally, empower all people equally, not aim to serve ourselves and further our narrow set of—”
Vane cut him off. He rose next to his brother, looking fiercer, more domineering, than Caesar. He didn’t look at Victor, addressing the room instead.
“What are you trying to say, Brother? That we should abandon our founding principles? We all believe, we have always believed, that true equality weakens society, that the weak are a burden on the strong. We do care about the less fortunate, the downtrodden. We are the shepherds, they are the sheep. But to say that the sheep and the shepherd are equal is a terrible lie. A lie that will only lead to chaos.”
All along the room, up and down the table, heads nodded—just subtly enough not to be an affront to the most powerful man there. The rest of them, the sheep of the group, didn’t have the courage, or the righteous anger, of Vane.
Victor looked at his brother with a sadness, an infinite sadness, that Zora had never seen on his face before. He placed his hand on Vane’s left shoulder. The room vanished around them. Grand principles were a thing of the past. They were nothing more than two people linked by blood and a knowledge of good and evil.
“Vane, I’m sorry but I can’t protect you anymore. You can’t be a part of this anymore. You have done so much wrong, my brother, so much wrong.”
Tears brimmed in Victor’s eyes. A few fell down his face.
“Such terrible wrong.”
The light in Vane’s eyes darkened to black, his pupils grew sharp. With every shade of sorrow, of weariness, of suffering, on Victor’s face, Vane wore a shade of fury.
“What do you mean, protect me? Tell me what wrong I have done.”
“Brother, do I have to tell you—think of that poor woman. Dorothy. How she suffered because of you. How they suffered. They most of all. Those innocent people.”
Spittle flew from the corners of Vane’s mouth, sparks from the corners of his eyes.
“Lies. Nothing but lies. All you speak are lies. You know nothing about what I have done. You could never understand what I have done. You are the one who can’t be a part of this anymore. You are unfit to be our leader. I will be our leader from now on.”
Victor stepped forward to clasp his brother in love, to surround him with simple human warmth. Vane stepped back into the coldness behind him, the coldness he carried with him.
“Vane, you are sick. You have a disease. Of mind. Of soul. You have to get help. And you will have to receive justice. I will have to see to it. I can’t protect you from that anymore—but I will do everything in my power to save you from injustice. As I have saved Dorothy.”
These words, of one brother seeking justice for the other—seeking punishment—brought Vane to his breaking point. Coldness erupted into licking fire, a conflagration of inhuman feeling.
“Lies! Lies! I am sick of your lies!”
He swept the deadly pale faces in the room with fire, shouted at them with an urgency that terrified Zora.
“Leave. All of you. This does not involve any of you. Only my brother and me. I am going to end this, end his lies. Silence him once and for all.”
The crowd of sheep hardly needed an invitation, filing out in silent horror. Jack and Zora both hesitated, remaining longer than the rest, but Victor mouthed to them Go, call the police. I’ll be OK. He won’t hurt me.
They started to leave, but at that moment, Vane’s eyes settled on Zora. He saw the expression she bore—love and concern for Victor—and the last resistance to violence in his mind was suddenly overcome.
He rushed around the table, right at her. With unbelievable force, the force of a wild animal, he shoved her back into the depths of the room.
“Not you, bitch. You stay.”
Zora was thrown backward so hard she immediately fell, unable to control her downward motion, not having enough time to cushion her fall. Her head hit the edge of the table, making a resounding crack like the hull of a nut falling onto stone. She slumped onto the ground, barely conscious. With every ounce of strength, she tried to sit against one of the legs of the table, to regain her footing, anything not to be so vulnerable, but she couldn’t move. She felt paralyzed. The dim light in her mind had no power over her leaden limbs.
Seeing this, seeing what he had done to Zora, Jack sprang onto Vane, trying to knock him to the ground, to immobilize him. Victor moved quickly around the table to attend to Zora.
Jack’s strategy seemed to be working. Vane fell back flat onto the ground, his head hitting the hardwood floor of ash. Jack began to pin Vane’s arms and legs to the earth. He came close, so very close to controlling his uncle, but Vane left no margin for error. Vane was a very strong man, and once possessed by the will to violence, the only truly effective way to stop him was to kill him. Quickly, without hesitation.
Jack knew nothing of this—Victor had never told him of his suspicions about his brother, his rage toward the least fortunate members of society, the rootless, the homeless. Jack paid for his ignorance now. Vane’s left hand, momentarily free while Jack grappled with the rest of him, pulled from a leather sheath hidden in his clothing a small curved dagger.
Without hesitation, without any love of an uncle for a nephew, even the compassion of one human being for another, Vane plunged the dagger again and again, several times in quick succession, into the side of Jack’s body. The younger man screamed, turning to deflect the blade, knock it from Vane’s hand. Before he had a chance to, Vane stabbed him once in the side of the neck, up to the hilt of the blade.
Jack rolled off and away from his uncle, blood pooling rapidly around his head. He began to sputter saliva and blood into the air. His death gurgle had already begun. His eyes bulged grotesquely out of his head, every one of his senses fighting to live. It was too late. He urinated and defecated uncontrollably, fouling his clothes.
Vane stood up, the dagger in his hand. Blood was everywhere on him. Victor sprang up to protect Zora.
“That cunt is going to die.”
“No she’s not brother.”
As he spoke, Victor desperately looked around him for any kind of weapon, something he could use to do what Jack had been unable to do—incapacitate Vane. All he saw was the ivory gavel. In an instant it was in his hand.
He swung the gavel at his brother’s head. Much too slowly. Victor was not good
at this, not good at hurting another human being, not good at killing. He had no practice. Vane wove easily out of the gavel’s path. At the same time, the younger brother swung the dagger with lightning speed at Victor’s chest. It sank all the way in, piercing through clothing, then skin, then muscle. Victor groaned. But he was lucky. The blade had missed the left ventricle of his heart by a fraction of an inch. It would not be a fatal wound if treated promptly, but the next kiss of the knife, if it came, might be.
Fighting for his own life, and the life of his lover prone on the ground—he knew Vane would kill Zora the first chance he got—Victor swung the gavel again. Much faster this time. The dull ivory did what he wanted it to do. The gavel caught Vane in the side of the head, and he sank like a heavy stone to the ground, unconscious.
With almost no strength left, Victor sank into the nearest chair. The hemorrhaging from his wound was getting worse. His eyes fluttered to stay open.
With all the commotion around her, and her own fear of death taking over, Zora had pulled herself out of her stupor. She sat against the leg of the table for a moment, still weak, still in shock. She stood. She looked at Jack, already dead. The way he lay there, bloody and still, he seemed like a mannequin to her instead of a human being. Not real. Not alive, but not dead either. She went to Victor. Knelt by his side. He whispered to her.
“Call an ambulance, call the police.”
His eyes closed but he continued to breathe without rasping or rattling. He was not on the verge of death. Not yet.
She put her hands on his chest, bathed them in his blood.
“Victor don’t die, please don’t die, I need you, I love you.”
Victor’s eyes did not open. He put both his hands over his chest, on top of hers. Then released them. His head sagged down.
“Just go. I love you.”
She stood again and started to leave. Her thoughts were only of Victor. Leaving, she looked down at the motionless body of Vane. He seemed to be dreaming, a faint smile on his face. He did not look evil. Far from it—he looked like a man at peace.
In that moment, in that place, something alien to her seized her. A force from another world, a world that Persephone had known, that Pandora had seen, that Zora had glimpsed in passing but never truly known. That no human being should ever know. It flew into her all of a sudden, silently, invisibly, without the light of reason, without the brightness of right and wrong.
Her face did not betray the transformation that had just taken place inside her. The otherworldly spirit that had just possessed her. She continued to look down at Vane with eerie tranquility, simply standing there looking with blank detachment, as though examining a fallen statue.
Slowly, seemingly oblivious to the bleeding of the man she loved, she bent down next to Vane. She picked up the dagger lying near his fallen body. Without any sign of rage or any trace of passion, she sank the blade into his chest over and over, seven times, trying as best she could to hit his heart. Anyone who had looked upon her there in that room, stabbing to death the brother of her lover, would have seen only one emotion on her face: the devotion of a saint.
Five times she found the mark she sought, the heart of the man she knelt beside, prayed for death beside. Her prayer was swiftly answered. She punctured each of his atria twice and his right ventricle once. His heart stopped beating almost immediately. Victor saw none of this, nor heard a stir. Zora killed without a sound, and Vane died without a murmur of protest. Or of remorse.
Zora stood again. This time she ran. She ran with blind speed, not seeing, not hearing, not feeling, not thinking. She didn’t stop for the police and EMT’s who rushed past her, who had already been called, who called for her to stop but didn’t try to stop her. Strange that they didn’t—she was dressed in spatters of blood.
She ran out of the library’s main door, ran past the marble columns and the Latin inscriptions that rose above them, ran down the stairs and onto the lawn in front of the building. There she fell at twilight onto her back, collapsing like wet clay, in the final moments of day. She still could not manage a single thought nor form a single emotion. But she did have one overpowering feeling. In the last rays of the sun, she felt her body would burn to ashes right there on the grass.
And then, finally, this terrifying feeling gave rise to a terrifying thought. Would the new life inside of her burn to ashes as well? Would she burn away to nothing like her mother?
Table of Contents
--Title Page
--Copyright
--Dedication
--Chapter 1
--Chapter 2
--Chapter 3
--Chapter 4
--Chapter 5
--Chapter 6
--Chapter 7
--Chapter 8
--Chapter 9
--Chapter 10
--Chapter 11
--Chapter 12
--Chapter 13
--Chapter 14
--Chapter 15
--Chapter 16
--Chapter 17
--Chapter 18
--Chapter 19
--Chapter 20
--Chapter 21
--Chapter 22