Dark Vengeance Part 2

by Reinke, Sara

  “Because Lamar Davenant is a living legend—at least in his own mind,” Sebastian had replied with a wink in Brandon’s direction, the better for the boy to read his lips. “And he doesn’t want any of us, young or old, to forget it.”

  Sebastian had been trying to make Vanessa smile, but Brandon had been able to sense his father’s own apprehension about the evening’s festivities. They were both nervous about visiting the Davenants; one needn’t have had telepathy to be aware of the anxiety Brandon’s parents all but radiated in waves. Vanessa sat ramrod straight in her seat, her posture rigid and tense, her fingers toying restlessly with the lap of her silky dress, while on more than one occasion along the limousine ride, Brandon’s father had reached out, draping his hand atop hers, offering his wife clumsy but reassuring smiles.

  They had both been right to be apprehensive. In essence, they had all been entering into enemy territory. The Brethren clans all lived together, functioning as a communal society, but it was no secret that they did not always agree with one another in matters affecting or influencing that society’s control. Even though the Nobles had held dominance for the last few centuries, prior to that, governance had long belonged to the Davenants—longer than anyone could probably estimate, and a hostile rivalry existed between the two clans for that reason alone.

  The Davenants had never been able to reclaim their previous authority, because they had suffered numerous, tragic losses of male heirs—the deciding factors of clan dominance. An unfortunate series of circumstances following the Brethren’s transplantation from rural France to America had eventually culminated in the Davenants yielding that power to Augustus, Brandon’s grandfather, who had held fierce claim to it ever since. As a grown man, Brandon was only now beginning to learn about those circumstances, but as a child, he’d heard plenty of rumors—like some sort of blight had begun to strike the Brethren clans, and the Davenants in particular, killing their children in droves, many shortly after birth. Many more began to die well into adulthood from equally mysterious, ominous causes. Bad blood, it was called, and the Davenant clan in particular was said to be cursed with it…all save Lamar. And the secret of his life’s longevity was as enigmatic—and laden with sinister rumors—as that of the brevity of his kinsfolk.

  “I’ve heard he drinks the blood of the Abomination,” Caine had once said. Caine had loved to regale his younger siblings with horrific, often gory tales—that is, when he wasn’t pummeling, pounding, or otherwise tormenting them. According to Caine, the Abomination had been the “first Brethren,” the original creature from which their species had come; it had been captured in France, brought with them to America, and held prisoner ever since in the Beneath, a network of catacombs and tunnels interlacing the farmlands the clans owned.

  Brandon now knew that this legend had been born from tragic circumstances; Naima Morin, the half-human daughter of the exiled Morin clan, had been banished to the Beneath in the early 1800s. Labeled an “abomination” because of her human heritage, Naima had been left to slowly starve to death in the catacombs by none other than Lamar Davenant. Clearly unbeknownst to Lamar, she’d escaped shortly thereafter, and had lived in hiding with her clan in California ever since.

  As a boy, Brandon had believed his brother’s stories about the Abomination, and had been appropriately horrified by his description of Lamar’s feeding from it in order to stay alive. “His family goes hunting for it in the Beneath,” Caine had explained. “They corner it, trap it, drain it nearly dry, then release it so it can recover. Then they deliver the blood to Lamar. I’ve heard he drinks a glass of it each night with his dinner—just like wine.”

  Like his parents, Brandon had felt nervous on the night of Lamar’s five hundredth birthday party. Unlike Sebastian and Vanessa, however, Brandon’s feelings of uneasiness had nothing to do with Brethren clan politics—which he, as a child, had little to no understanding of at that point. Instead, he felt anxious simply at the prospect of being someplace unfamiliar, surrounded by people who were virtual strangers to him—and who, he felt certain, must have wished he was dead.

  It was no secret that Brandon’s disabilities made him different from any of the other Brethren. His throat had been slashed, his ability to hear lost as the result of an attack when he’d been very young—too young for his inherent healing abilities to have fully developed. The Brethren had always prided themselves as species as being superior to humans; their ability to heal had always distinguished them, allowing them a level of physical and physiological perfection no human could ever attain. Deaf and mute, Brandon was seen as damaged—worse, as defective, as if his injuries and lack of metabolic maturity had been of his own doing.

  As a result, Brandon suffered profound ostracism from his fellow Brethren. There had been no attempts to disguise this exclusion and prejudice, and even his own family had shared in it. He was a frequent target of bullying by Caine and some of his older cousins. With the exception of his father and, occasionally, his mother, Brethren adults tended to overlook him, or worse—look through him, as if he wasn’t even there, something to be disregarded, like a throw rug or piece of furniture. The Elders had ordered that he communicated solely through notes written in the gilded notebook he wore on a chain around his neck, instead of with telepathy or American Sign Language, which he’d learned through Jackson. That the Elders had conceded to allow Jackson as Brandon’s exclusive tutor at all was astonishing.

  Jackson was deaf, like Brandon—the first person Brandon had ever met who was disabled as he was. Unlike Brandon, however, Jackson had not let his deafness isolate him from the world. Through him, Brandon had begun to understand that he, too, could have a productive, rewarding life—one in which his handicaps did not define him—and because of Jackson, Brandon had begun to dream of something better for himself, a life beyond the Brethren farms…a life in which he was not discounted.

  Brandon wished his father had let him spend the night with Jackson instead of trussing him up in the uncomfortable, itchy suit and tie and forcing him to attend the Davenant party. Even if Jackson had decided they’d spend the time working on spelling words or reading—even if he’d wanted to do math all night long—it would have been better by miles than enduring the cool scrutiny of other Brethren adults, the not-so-guarded whispers from the other Brethren children, and the stares. Always the stares.

  Upon their arrival at the Davenant great house, they had been received by Lamar’s grandson, Martin, and a tall, redheaded Brethren woman introduced as Monica, his wife. Tessa was to be Martin’s bride upon her eighteenth birthday; a seeming eternity away at that naïve and tender moment.

  “There’s your husband,” Caine had teased Tessa in a sing-song kind of hush, digging his elbow into her side. Brandon had watched his lips move and discerned the words; likewise, he’d seen his twin sister scowl and hiss in reply.

  “He is not!”

  “Not yet anyway,” Caine persisted, and this time when he’d elbowed her, Tessa had jammed her elbow right back at him.

  “He’s old and ugly and there’s no way the Grandfather or Grandmother Eleanor would ever make me marry him,” she seethed.

  Even at that young an age, Brandon could have told her that hope had been futile. Tessa’s fate had been decided after lengthy and thorough consideration by their grandfather, Augustus, and the other clan Elders—as had all of their impending marriages, including Brandon’s own. Not even being the dominant Elder gave Augustus the authority or ability to go against the ancient rituals for determining betrothals.

  Martin and Monica had exchanged greetings with Sebastian and Vanessa in cool, curt fashion while another pair of Davenant wives—these dressed more drably than Monica, who wore a strapless, floor-length evening gown encrusted with sea-foam-green sequins—took their overcoats.

  “The children…” Monica said with a pointed, if not somewhat contemptuous glance at Tessa, “…will go with Sarah to the nursery.”

  Brandon felt a sudden swell of alarm at
this. He’d convinced himself that things would be alright, that no one would bother him as long as he was with his father. No matter what anyone thought of him, they minded their manners whenever Sebastian was nearby—even Caine kept his fists and feet to himself and his spittle in his mouth where it belonged. He found himself suddenly clutching Sebastian by the hand, shying reflexively behind him.

  Sebastian had managed to dislodge him after a moment, and leaned down to look Brandon in the eye. “I want you to stay close to Tessa,” he said, pressing his palm to the boy’s cheek. “She’ll play with you, won’t you, Tessa?”

  “Of course,” Tessa replied brightly, and she probably had every good intention of doing exactly this. But once inside the nursery, with the sixty or so assembled children from other clans spread out in a broad swath, diverging onto the shelves of games, toys and storybooks, temptation had proven too strong.

  She stuck closely to her twin for awhile, but he caught her eying another group of girls her age longingly as they pretended to be ballerinas twirling across the floor. When he tapped her on the shoulder to draw her gaze, then flapped his hand in a shooing gesture—go on, he was saying—she managed to look appropriately sheepish and rebuked.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, and he shrugged, trying to pretend like it didn’t matter, the sideways glances he’d already caught other children shooting at him, or the way the other boys had deliberately given him a wide berth, lest he take a mind to try and wander toward them, wanting to play.

  “Thanks, Brandon!” Tessa exclaimed, scrambling to her feet, pausing long enough to give him a quick hug and a fleeting kiss on the cheek before darting off. Almost immediately, she and the other girls fell together in a comfortable swarm, their eyes wide, their lips flapping with excited chatter as they talked about plies and grand jetés and other French terms for ballet maneuvers Brandon neither recognized nor understood.

  Abandoned, Brandon found a quiet corner to himself, and sat cross-legged on the floor, watching as children darted past him, running this way and that. Although he could feel the floorboards beneath him thrumming with the heavy patter of their nonstop footfalls, he couldn’t hear the thunderous din. While he could see their mouths open wide in laughter, or moving in delighted conversations, he couldn’t hear a sound. He saw Sarah Davenant, the matronly young wife who had delivered them to the nursery, across the room from him, her gaze fixed intently in his direction. She stood next to another drably clad Davenant bride, and it was only his ability to lip-read that allowed him to eavesdrop on their murmured exchange.

  “…should have rightly died that night, they said,” Sarah was saying.

  “He was too young to have healed like he did as fast as he did,” the other said, and Sarah nodded her head, her expression solemn.

  “It’s not natural,” she remarked, and Brandon cut his eyes away, his shoulders hunching, shame blazing in his cheeks.

  As a child, Brandon hadn’t understood how he had survived his childhood attack. But as a twenty-two year old man, Brandon had come to learn the truth. Augustus had broken Brethren law forbidding them to feed from one another, and had given his blood to heal Brandon. Because this act endowed Brethren with considerably greater telepathic abilities than those who fed solely from humans, Augustus had spent the next ten years trying to keep Brandon’s burgeoning psychic abilities a secret from both the Elders and himself. This had proven to be the source of a great deal of tension between them—sometimes violent tension. But if Augustus’s secret had been revealed, it would have cost him not only controlling dominance over the clans, but would have cost him and Brandon their lives

  Caine and his bullying friends had taken up residence just outside the nursery’s bathroom. Here, they had formed an intimidating blockade, and for every child who tried to pass, they would muscle in and prevent them.

  “Pay the toll to the troll,” Caine would demand, usually offering the child a rough shove backwards, a cuff across the cap of their head, or a punch in the shoulder. Payment would then consist of the poor kid getting down on his or her hands and knees to polish the shoes of Caine and his friends with their shirt sleeves, letting each of them take turns socking him in the arm, or going on a scavenger hunt for the most improbable sort of thing Caine could imagine.

  Like a book without pictures in it, Brandon thought with an inward snicker. He spent several hours trying his best to ignore the insistent need in his own bladder, hoping against hope that his father and Vanessa would arrive to take them home, until at last, that need had grown urgent.

  There was no hope of getting past Caine. He’d seen the so-called “pay the troll” game before, and it had always ended badly for him. And usually with him wetting his pants if he refused to give in to Caine’s demands. He had even once forced Brandon to lick all of his friends’ shoes—more than twenty in all—until the sick taste of polish had made him retch.

  Brandon’s only recourse was to rely on the same Davenant women he’d seen talking about him earlier in the evening. When he approached them, timid and hesitant, and offered his hand-written plea to the dour-faced Sarah, she had exchanged pointed glances with the other woman as if to reiterate how unnatural Brandon was. With a put-upon sigh that suggested she bore undue burdens, Sarah rattled off directions to an alternate bathroom to him. However, she spoke so quickly, her thin lips keeping close together as though she spoke through gritted teeth, he hadn’t been able to distinguish much more than the words “left,” “hallway,” and “fourth.”

  “And no dawdling,” she added, her brows narrowing in stern emphasis. Brandon nodded meekly, keeping his shoulders hunched as he scurried out the nursery door.

  The interior of the Davenant mansion was as imposing and austere as the outside. The floors had been lined with blood-colored runners, while the dark-stained, wood-paneled walls seemed too close together, the corridors too narrow and claustrophobic, as if the house meant to swallow you whole. Dismal landscapes and portraits of grim-faced ancestors hung in gilded frames, and all of the doors along the intertwining passages had been closed. One hallway looked pretty much identical to another as a result, and although Brandon tried hard to follow Sarah’s hasty instructions, he couldn’t find the bathroom.

  Where am I? he wondered with a growing sense of panic as he opened the fifth or sixth in a series of doors that proved to be to the wrong room. He knew if he didn’t hurry and return to the nursery, he’d be fussed at for “dawdling.” Whatever that meant. But if he didn’t find a toilet in a hurry, he’d wind up wetting his pants. Then word would undoubtedly get back to Sebastian, and embarrass him—worse than this, it would embarrass Augustus. And then he would really be in trouble.

  He turned in a bewildered circle in the middle of a seemingly endless corridor, realizing to his mounting dismay that not only could he not find a bathroom, but now he had no idea how to get back to the nursery. He hadn’t passed by another living soul in his trek, or seen a room that wasn’t shadow-draped and unoccupied along the way, either, so there was no one he could ask, no adult he could turn to for help.

  Hurrying now, nearly running, he began throwing open doors all along the hall. He ducked into empty bedrooms, hoping in vain to find an adjoining restroom. He struggled not to burst into frustrated, anxious tears, even though he could feel them clogging up his throat and stinging in his eyes, threatening at any moment to obscure his vision and slip past his lashes.

  And then he threw open a door and froze in the threshold, eyes widening in sudden surprise. His tears were momentarily forgotten, as was his bladder, and he uttered a soft, wonder-struck sigh.

  Books. Look at all of the books.

  The room was filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, each stocked to overflowing capacity with leather-bound tomes. Brandon had always loved to read; it was a passion he’d thought lost to him when he’d lost his ability to hear, and thus to receive tutelage at the great house with his siblings and kin. But Jackson had been teaching him, and Brandon had quickly come ba
ck to the appropriate reading level for his age—and well beyond—thanks to his tutor.

  Look at them all, he thought again, venturing timidly into the library. He could smell the books, a thick and heady mix of leather and aging paper. In one corner of the room, a trio of tall, thin windows stood, with a solitary lamp on a mahogany table in front of them the only source of dim, golden light in the room. In another corner, he saw a large globe on a wooden stand, and in another, a full suit of armor.

  His grandfather, Augustus, had a library at their own great house, but Brandon hadn’t been allowed to enter without an adult present, like his father. Jackson had a makeshift library in the guesthouse he called home, a spare bedroom he’d lined with shelves. Brandon was allowed to visit anytime he wished, and to borrow as many books as he’d liked; Jackson kept all of the shelves stocked especially with Brandon in mind, mostly works of fiction, or books about science, astronomy, geography, and other topics Brandon enjoyed.

  If the Davenant library reflected the reading preferences of those who used it most, Brandon quickly realized they had pretty boring tastes. He perused the shelves, his nose wrinkling at titles such as European Political Thought: 1660-1700, The Paradox of American Power and The True Law of Free Monarchies.

  Make that really boring taste, he thought. And then he’d spied a solitary row with titles he recognized; a small collection of nearly a dozen books, tucked away on a bottom shelf as if forgotten or unused.

  Tarzan of the Apes. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And Brandon’s all-time favorite: Treasure Island.

  With a gasp of delight, he squatted and reached for this last, pulling the book from the shelf, and blowing the thin layer of dust off the top of it. Hands trembling with anticipation, he turned back the cover, and found a neatly penned inscription inside: To Az – Much love, Julianne.