by Reinke, Sara
He blinked in surprise. His grandmother Julianne, Augustus’s second wife, had read to him from Treasure Island when he’d been very young. She’d never been able to have children, but had doted on Brandon and his siblings as if they were her own, reading the well-familiar tale of buccaneers and buried gold, of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, to him over and over until the cover had fallen off and the binding had worn thin. She’d surprised him with a new copy of the book for Christmas the previous year, inscribed with an eerily similar message: To Brandon – Much love, Julianne.
He didn’t know who “Az” was. He’d never heard of that name, not among the Davenants, or any of the clans, for that matter. But before he could puzzle over it for too long, he felt a peculiar sensation inside his mind, the sort of tingling, electrical charge that only occurred when another Brethren would draw near. As he did, his alarm—only just forgotten—returned in full.
Shit! Shoving the copy of Treasure Island back into its place, Brandon scrambled to his feet. Whirling about, he scampered toward the nearest possible sanctuary—beneath an antique writing desk tucked in a nearby window nook.
Pressed against the wall, wide-eyed with fright, he watched as the library door flew open, swinging wide and banging into the far wall, and a man strode briskly across the threshold.
He was tall, with dark brown hair swept back from his face, and was dressed in a smartly tailored tuxedo. His glossy black shoes fell heavily enough against the floor for Brandon to feel the vibrations beneath his hands and knees. He took no notice of Brandon cowering beneath the table across the room from him; instead, he pivoted in mid-stride, caught the door in his hand and swung it sharply closed behind him.
At any moment, the man would turn around and see him, of that Brandon felt certain. The room was not large, and despite the quantity of books, surely there wasn’t enough there to distract him.
Shit!
He was surprised when the man turned around and, taking seemingly no notice of the boy, walked briskly across the room. Through a mirror hanging on the wall, Brandon could see his reflection as he stood facing a long row of bookshelves. The man reached for the fourth shelf, a book nearly at his eye level, but instead of pulling it all of the way out to peruse or read, he canted it outward slightly, tipping it at an angle.
Immediately, there was a strange, mechanical thrumming in the floor, emanating from the wall. The man stepped back, and through the mirror, Brandon watched as something amazing happened. Years later, when he saw the film version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—and feeling an odd affinity, a sort of kinship with the lonely boy who had lived in the cupboard beneath the stairs—Brandon would be reminded of that moment in the library during the scene in which Harry enters Diagon Alley for the first time. In the movie, the bricks in the wall marking the magical entryway had moved of their own accord, sliding in and out, turning and rearranging to reveal a hidden entrance. In the Davenant library, the books had done very much the same, seeming to come alive along the shelves, and like the tumblers in an enormous lock, jutting outward or retracting inward randomly. After a moment, the bookshelf swung away from the wall, revealing an opening behind it.
It’s a secret passage, Brandon realized as the man stepped through this opening, disappearing behind the bookshelf. After waiting a few breathless moments to be sure he was gone, he crept out from his hiding place.
Now what? he thought.
He knew what Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island would choose.
Holding his breath warily, Brandon approached the bookshelf doorway. When he peeked inside, he saw a long, narrow opening lined with exposed timbers and beams, plaster panels, pipes and stone that ran behind the wall, extending beyond the library. Of the man in the tuxedo, there was no sign; clearly, he’d taken the passage straight ahead, then ducked around a corner and out of sight. The way was lit with intermittently affixed light bulbs, with low wattages that barely provided more than a dim, orange glow.
Moving quickly and quietly, Brandon stole along the passageway. When he rounded the corner, it abruptly dead-ended, much to his surprise. But rather than the backside of another interior wall, or a hidden exit like the bookshelf in the library, Brandon found the corridor stopped at a set of brushed steel doors—an elevator.
Wow, he thought, dumbfounded. He’d seen elevators before; there were dumbwaiters throughout the Noble great house used to transport laundry, dishes and other items from one story in the expansive home to another. Several service elevators, with heavy gates and cargo doors, were used for hauling larger loads, like bed linens and cleaning equipment. Even though these were all strategically placed so as to be discreetly hidden from common view, they weren’t hidden behind walls like this one.
I wonder where it goes.
Brandon reached out, but his finger hesitated before touching the smooth plastic button with the downturned arrowhead etched on it. Wherever it went, it was obviously someplace secret—somewhere that someone in the Davenant family had clearly meant to keep hidden.
But why? Again, he thought of Treasure Island, of Jim stealing out in the dead of night to cut the Hispanola’s mooring lines, setting the ship adrift so the pirates couldn’t use it. Jim Hawkins wouldn’t have been afraid to see what was on the other end of that secret elevator.
And I won’t be, either, Brandon thought, pushing the button, watching it light up, a dim orange glow beneath his fingertip.
He shied back when the dull metal doors slid apart. Inside, he saw an empty cab with smooth, featureless metal walls, and recessed fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Tentatively, Brandon crept forward, stepping across the threshold with his breath bated. There were only two buttons on the console beside the door. Neither were labeled. When Brandon pressed the first one, it didn’t light up, and he assumed it was for the level he was currently on. When he pressed the other, it came aglow at his touch, and the elevator doors slid closed. He felt a gentle lurch beneath him, thrumming through the floor first, then the walls, and then the elevator began to descend.
He had no idea how long it took to travel all of the way down. To him, it felt like hours, and the entire time, he could feel the frightened pounding of his heart through the front of his shirt. He pressed himself into the far corner of the cab on instinct, as if he had hope to hide here should the doors open to reveal the mysterious man in the fine tuxedo, or someone—something worse—on the other side. He didn’t remember breathing, not more than quick, hiccupping huffs, at least not until he felt another slight tremor shiver through the elevator car as it came to a stop.
All of the other Brethren clan homes had been built in the Châteauesque architectural style, all gilded and sprawling, like the manor homes in which their elders and ancestors—like Augustus and Lamar himself—had once lived in their native France. By contrast, Lamar had commanded that a towering, Gothic-style home be erected for his clan. Stately and imposing, wrought from slate-grey stones and graced with none of the Renaissance-inspired accoutrements or accents of the other clan houses, the Davenants’s mansion had always loomed like a simmering thunderhead against the crest of a rolling field of Bluegrass, more reminiscent of a prison than a home.
However, on the other side of those elevator doors, Brandon found nothing resembling the dark and somehow ominous design or décor of the mansion upstairs. Instead, he was greeted by another hallway; this one long, narrow, and nearly industrial in appearance, with a smooth, featureless concrete floor and walls painted a pale, institutional shade of grey. Bright fluorescent panels overhead cast stark, crisp light.
Brandon stepped off the elevator, and felt a soft breeze as the steel doors slid shut behind him. The air in the hallway felt cold and heavy to him, and he shivered.
What is this place?
He couldn’t hear his own footsteps, but crept forward carefully nonetheless. He saw doors along the cinderblock walls, two on each side, with another facing him at the very end of the corridor. None appeared to be marked, and all—at l
east to his experimental tries as he tiptoed past—appeared locked. When he reached the end of the hall, he tried the last door. The chrome knob turned beneath his hand, to his surprise, and he felt the catch release as it opened. He didn’t dare ease it open more than an inch or so, just enough for him to risk a peek beyond the threshold. He couldn’t see much, though, just more bright lights and more pale-colored wall. Taking a deep breath, mustering his courage—like Jim in Treasure Island again—he pushed the door open farther and slipped inside.
The first thing he realized was he’d found the man in the tuxedo. He stood with his back to the door, and thus to Brandon, no more than twenty feet away from him. And he wasn’t alone—a woman had apparently been waiting for him inside the room. With a sharp gasp, Brandon shrank back, pressing himself against the wall and looking wildly about for a place to hide. There wasn’t much to choose from; the chamber appeared to be some sort of medical examination room. He saw IV poles, cabinets, countertops and some portable lights. The man and woman stood near a metal gurney; another stretcher had been parked length-wise along a nearby wall, and he scrambled for this now, ducking beneath its meager excuse for shelter.
Please don’t let her see me, he thought in bright, vivid panic. Because if they did, one of them, or both, would likely drag him by the scruff back to the nursery, and worse—tell Sebastian what he’d been up to. As if that wouldn’t be bad enough, he knew that word would also probably reach his grandfather, too. And then he’d be in real trouble, because in those days, his interactions with Augustus had been few, brief, and generally unpleasant.
Please don’t let them see me, please don’t let her see me, please please please!
Despite the noise his entrance must have made—not to mention his harried effort to hide—neither the man nor the woman noticed or turned around. He could see several large, mysterious machines near them, all of them with lights flashing, as if in operation, and wondered if the sound had muffled any racket he’d caused, keeping him from their notice.
As he watched, the woman moved to stand on one side of the gurney, facing Brandon, while the man in the tuxedo remained with his back to Brandon on the other. When he caught his first real glimpse at the woman’s face, Brandon gasped, his eyes widening in surprised recognition.
His grandmother Julianne—who had read him Treasure Island as a child, had given him his own copy of the beloved book, and was, in fact, his favorite of his grandmothers—had never been as strikingly beautiful as Augustus’s first wife, Eleanor, but then, few women could hope to be. Julianne’s features were plainer by far, but Brandon had always thought she had a wonderful smile, filled with warmth and kindness. She had been a Davenant by birth—as evidenced by the sharp blue eyes that were synonymous with the clan—but had been married to Brandon’s grandfather for more than two hundred years; long enough so that it was easy to forget her less-than-favorable origins or kin.
And yet, there she was, standing in a hidden room at the end of a secret elevator shaft, in the house of her birth clan—and undoubtedly with neither Augustus’s knowledge nor consent. He had come to the birthday celebration, riding in a different car than Brandon and his parents and siblings, but had been accompanied by Eleanor. He had six wives in total, but never brought any of them out socially—in fact, did little, if anything with any of them except for Eleanor. As far as Brandon knew, Julianne should have been at home at the Noble family’s great house. Only she wasn’t.
He could see the profile of a young man lying on the gurney in front of her, his wrists and ankles visibly restrained. He was naked, with a towel draped discreetly to cover his groin. Thin tubes ran seemingly out of his skin from different points in his body: his shoulder, hip, knee, calf. The tubes were filled with something red—blood, Brandon realized. They draped down from the table, connecting to several of the bedside machines.
The man in the tuxedo appeared to be arguing with Julianne. Brandon could tell by her posture—her hunched shoulders, the way she twisted her hands together. Her eyes were downcast and nearly mournful, and as the man in the tuxedo waved his hands emphatically around, she nodded, offering only mumbled replies that Brandon couldn’t discern.
After a long moment of berating, the man in the tuxedo spun smartly on his heel and marched back toward the door—and Brandon. Terrified, Brandon shrank back, trying to make himself small, to hide farther beneath the gurney as he approached. But the man seemed distracted and in a hurry, breezing past Brandon’s hiding place and out of the room with his fists balled, his brows narrowed and his mouth turned down in a grim scowl.
For a long moment after he’d gone, Brandon couldn’t move. Neither, it seemed, could Julianne, who remained by the gurney. At last, though, as if satisfied the man was truly gone, her stance relaxed. She seemed to release a long, shuddering breath she’d been holding for far too long, and leaned over the young man on the gurney before her, appearing to check on the tubes, and the machine’s apparent progress. After a moment, she touched the man’s face, pressing her hand to his cheek. Although he remained unresponsive, there was something nearly tender about this interaction. Her expression softened as she brushed the man’s hair back off his brow then let her hand trail lightly down the slope of his neck, grazing his chest.
He watched her lips wrap themselves around two small sounds—a name: “Aaron?” Then, after another moment, her mouth moved again. “Can you hear me, Az?”
That strange name again. If Brandon hadn’t just seen it written inside the front cover of Treasure Island moments earlier, he might not have understood or recognized it at all. She’d also called the man Aaron. Was it a nickname or something? he wondered. And if the man, Aaron, was the Az from the book inscription, had she been the one who’d written it?
As Brandon hid beneath the stretcher and watched, Julianne moved around the table, disconnecting the tubes from Aaron’s body. She gathered them together in a messy network of loose coils in one hand. Then she moved briskly to one of the nearby counters, opening a cabinet beneath and shoving all of the spent tubing into a trash can. She kept glancing at her watch as she did all of this, her expression anxious, as if she worked under a pressing deadline—or some kind of threat if she was late.
After disposing of the tubes, Julianne bent over to look at one of the bedside machines, then lifted something from the top of it: a plastic pouch that appeared to be filled with blood. Again, she walked around the gurney, stopping at each machine and collecting similar bags. When at last, she had them all—a half dozen or so—she brought them to the countertop again, and placed them into a large plastic bin that looked curiously like a picnic cooler to Brandon.
After the last bag of blood had been tucked inside, Julianne closed the lid and, with a grimace, hefted the cooler from the counter. She stumbled a little bit with its obvious weight, then set it on the floor. She then opened an overhead cabinet and began pulling out supplies. Her back was to Brandon, so he couldn’t see what she was doing. When she’d finished, she turned and walked toward the young man on the gurney, carrying something long and slim in her hand—a hypodermic syringe.
Again, her face softened; again, she caressed Aaron’s cheek. Then she drew aside the towel, revealing his upper thigh. She then slid the needle of her syringe into the meat of Aaron’s leg here, depressing the plunger and holding it in place for a long moment before withdrawing it. Brandon winced just to watch, but Aaron didn’t move at all, not even a flinch.
“I’ll come back,” Brandon saw Julianne say once she’d disposed of the needle. Leaning over, she stroked his hair and pressed her lips lightly against his brow. “I won’t be long, Az. I promise.”
Then, hoisting the cooler in her hands again, she carried it toward the exit. Terrified, Brandon shrank back, trying to make himself small, but he needn’t have bothered. Burdened by the cooler, Julianne lumbered past Brandon’s hiding place and back into the corridor without as much as a glance in his direction.
When she had gone, Brandon remained
unmoving beneath the gurney, even though to do so left his shoulders hunched and his neck craned at an unnatural position, one that grew all the more uncomfortable with each passing moment. Finally he crawled out and, hanging onto the gurney with shaking hands, stumbled to his feet.
Why was Grandmother Julianne here? Brandon wondered. And what in the hell had she been doing in that secret medical lab?
This latter seemed fairly obvious. She’d been draining the man on the gurney—the one she had called Aaron—of blood. But why?
Curious, yet still somewhat scared, he crept toward the gurney. He expected the man, Aaron, to be human; it would be more than a decade yet before he’d meet Michel Morin and the rest of his clan, or learn about how some of the Brethren had chosen to feed from each other, instead of using humans for food. As he had been raised since birth, Brandon still believed it was an abomination to feed from another Brethren, forbidden by their laws.
Thus, he was shocked to find a Brethren man bound to the gurney. He could tell by opening his mind tentatively. He couldn’t sense Aaron’s thoughts; his mind seemed strangely closed, a feeling Brandon had dismissed as his own youthful inadequacy in wielding his telepathy. But he could still sense Aaron, that inherent, tingling sensation that was unmistakable and unavoidable whenever Brethren drew near.
He’s like me, Brandon thought, surprised and horrified. He saw that each of the blood-filled tubes had been connected to some kind of plastic port protruding from Aaron’s skin. There was blood smeared and streaked around the bases of each port. Aaron laid still, his eyes closed, his skin the ashen color of putty from blood loss beneath the stark lights of surgical lamps.
Most horrifically, however, Brandon could see something now that had been out of his view from his hiding place. Although they had restrained Aaron’s right arm to the gurney at the wrist, on the left side—the side farthest from the doorway—his arm lay strapped to a stainless steel panel, perpendicular to his body. From his wrist to his shoulder, the skin had been peeled back, then removed in broad sheets to reveal the glistening, bright red meat of his musculature beneath, the straps of ligaments and tendons, the pale hint of exposed bone.