By a Thread

by Nyna Queen

  Oh, she’d so regret this.

  “You know what—fine. Whatever. I’ll think of something.” Although what completely eluded her at the moment.

  The only thing she knew was that they had to leave this place. And sooner than later.

  This place—the first place she’d come to think of as home since she’d been forced to leave the only real home she’d ever known in her life. The one place where she had ever felt safe until the world taught her that nothing ever stayed safe. Not for people like her anyway.

  The thought burned down her throat like bitter medicine and brought her back to a small paltry hotel room, where she pressed against the cold plastered wall, while her mother shouted at the blond stranger in the adjourning room.

  She hadn’t meant to hurt anybody. Hadn’t meant to … But the cheeky neighbor boy had taken her cuddly toy Bobble and threatened to rip off his head if she didn’t give him the sweets she’d received from the nice old cleaning lady. She was only six then and he was nine and almost double her size. And she’d felt so helpless, so small, as she watched him squeeze the stuffed bunny in his pudgy fist, the sound of ripping tissue loud in her ears …

  She remembered it all, like a movie played in slow motion: the nasty smirk on his fat, piggy face. The ringing of his laughter echoing from his lips. Bobble hanging limply in his grip, his stuffed limbs dangling sadly.

  And suddenly something had snapped inside her. It felt like something woke and ripped free, vibrating through her body, pushing through her skin. The world flashed white for a split second and then it slowed, turning clear and sharp, and suddenly there was a second awareness in her, a sweet, wild, powerful awareness. And that awareness wasn’t scared. It was angry. So incredibly angry.

  She’d just meant to push him—like he’d pushed her so many times—but that push had sent him flying into the wall on the opposite side of the street. And when he’d raised himself off the ground, screaming and crying like an over-sized baby, she saw the red welts on his shoulders under the ripped fabric of his t-shirt and when she looked down, shocked, black claws protruded from her fingertips, glistening with drops of red blood. His blood.

  She didn’t understand. Didn’t know what was happening to her. She just stood, frozen, while the neighbor kid screamed and screamed and screamed. Luckily her glands were just in development at the time, her venom was not yet potent enough to kill. But the damage was done. Oh, she’d never forget the look on her mother’s face, who, called by the mayhem, came running out of the hotel. It all rushed back to her now: the yells, the slaps. Her mother grabbing her at the scruff of her neck and tossing her into their room. Asking how she could have deceived her so. Oh, she’d always known that something wasn’t quite right with the little girl. Always been too bright, too curious for a kid her age. Started walking at the age of seven months, hardly ever falling, either. She also heard things she wasn’t supposed to hear. It was uncanny. But sometimes, she wouldn’t understand the most logical things, and when she looked into those blue eyes she had the feeling that … something … was looking back at her. Something else. Something wild and cruel. And now she knew why. Oh yes. Just how? How was it possible she’d birthed something like her?

  The words reverberated in Alex’s head now as they did then, as her mother screamed them into her face, each scream like a blow, while tears trickled down her cheeks, dripping onto her shirt. Unable to make sense of the fury in her mother’s eyes. Unable to make sense of anything.

  And then her mother locked her in like a rabid mutt and contacted him. The man who had sired her. Nobody ever told her the full story, but over the years she’d puzzled out most of it by herself. Apparently, her sire, a trueborn small entrepreneur by the name of Alexander Nicholas Sylvaigne, came through Merryweather County on a business trip and due to a heavy storm was forced to spend the night in a hotel in the halfborn district. He and his entourage visited the hotel bar that night, where her halfborn mother was working as a waitress at the time.

  Naturally, she was fascinated by him: he was rich, handsome, and so way out of her league he could as well have been from the moon.

  Somehow, she managed to get him drunk to the tips of his ears and they spent a wild night together on the hotel roof beneath the stars. Her sire left the next morning—horribly hungover no doubt—but not without leaving something behind. When her mother found out several months later that he’d gotten her knocked up, he’d been nothing but a pretty memory. Why she’d kept the child, Alex had no clue—she never would miss out on an opportunity to complain about how having a child ruined all her chances with the guys. Maybe she was afraid of getting an abortion as the cheap procedures offered by halfborn quack doctors often resulted in disasters. Or perhaps she thought the child would be a living reminder of that one legendary night that had brightened up her dull existence. Maybe she even thought if she presented him with his child it would make him abandon his trueborn life and family for her. If so, she was clearly disappointed.

  Alex didn’t know for sure if she really informed him of the bastard child he had sired, but she supposed so, because whenever her mother talked about him, her mouth would go rigid and her eyes would blaze, and she’d call him “that irresponsible prick” or something along those lines.

  When Alex found out that she did, indeed, have a father, like all the other kids, she’d spend a couple of pointless months waiting for him. He was her father. Surely, he’d want to see his daughter. But he never came.

  Yet that day, the day when she hurt the neighbor boy and her mother called him, he came. Whatever her mother told him to convince him to come, Alex didn’t know, but she heard enough of their “grown-up conversation” to have her own thoughts on the matter.

  The child was his shame as much as hers, her mother told the stranger, not bothering to keep her voice down. Oh, if she’d had any clue, just the slightest clue what was slumbering inside the little brat, she’d have drowned her right after giving birth. But she hadn’t and now they had to count the cost.

  She told him “to take care of it” or she’d make his indiscretion public, wouldn’t that be a pretty scandal, and what exactly would his family think about it, hmm? It probably was the leverage she’d used on him to make him come in the first place. And the only reason why she dared to talk to a trueborn in such a bold way. She didn’t care how he did it, as long as she never had to face that shaper-brat again!

  He could have done that. He could have killed her right there and then and dumped her body into the nearest garbage ditch and nobody would have blamed him for it.

  But somehow, her sire took pity on his chit of a halfbreed daughter and less than an hour later she sat in the back of a strange, fancy car—she’d never seen a magic coach before—her small shabby backpack on her lap, packed with a toothbrush, a change of clothes and Bobble, her stuffed bunny, whose head was drooping from his half-severed neck, as it took off to an unknown destination.

  Her mother didn’t say goodbye, didn’t even look out of the window to get one last glance at the child she’d birthed and raised. Gone. Just like that. No gaze, no word, nothing.

  For a while she just sat there, terribly afraid of the tall, formidable stranger who radiated power and magic, and waited to be abandoned beside a road like people sometimes abandoned their pet dogs, when they no longer wanted them.

  Turned out her sire had no such plans. Instead, he took her home with him to his family seat in the Province of Elysea. As part of the trueborn minor nobility without any notable political standing and relevant blood ties, the family wasn’t particularly rich, but they possessed a small manor estate a little outside the city. After straying from one cheap boarder hotel room to the next, it looked like a palace to Alex and when they drove up the neatly cobbled driveway she pressed her nose against the window, and pinched herself, convinced she must be dreaming. Still did, when two blond boys curiously bolted out of the mansion, until they asked her if she had some sort of quirk. They were her elder half-brot
hers, Makesh and Kizdan, the children of her sire and his trueborn wife.

  It was a good thing, too, that their mother had passed away in a riding accident about a year ago, or she surely would have died upon finding out about her husband’s fling—and what had grown out of it.

  That didn’t mean there were no objections against her being there. Only the closest family circle was informed of her existence, but they protested her presence, acting as if he was planning on housing a convicted mass murderer. Since paternity was hardly deniable—she was the spitting image of her father—they implored him with the obvious arguments: A bastard? Bad enough, but a shaper? The disgrace! The scandal, if ever it became known to anybody on the outside. He couldn’t just think about himself here, he had to think about what it meant for the whole family, for his sons.

  Especially her sire’s only sister, “Aunt” Sheila, couldn’t calm herself about the possible debasement they were facing.

  But her sire, who’d always secretly wished for a daughter, dug his heels in and wouldn’t budge. So, she stayed. It wasn’t always easy, but she stayed.

  Of course, she wasn’t allowed to go to public school with her brothers, but her sire, having a silent fondness for that misbegotten daughter of his, home-schooled her in all the elementary subjects like math, reading, writing, and history, as well as basic magic theory and application, whenever his time permitted it. He also taught her how important it was to keep her true nature a secret. When her brothers had lessons at the mansion, she sometimes was allowed to join in, too.

  She was the family’s dirty secret, but at that age, it didn’t matter much. She had a nice home with a huge beautiful garden full of pretty flowers, all the food and books she ever wanted, and her half-brothers thought she was fun to play with. It was easily the happiest time in her life.

  Then, when she was eleven her sire got sick. It was a rare immunological disease that had his body decaying at an accelerated speed. All conventional treatments and magical healing therapies failed in the end, and the family didn’t possess the means for any of the experimental healing procedures offered at the upscale medical academies and colleges. All they could do was watch him fade in front of their helpless eyes.

  Alex remembered him calling her to his room one night, about ten months into his sickness. She remembered sitting at his bedside, the once tall, impressive man reduced to a shadow of himself: papery skin stretching too tightly over the bones sticking out from his face, eyes deep in their sockets over hollow cheeks, blond hair thin and dull. She remembered the strong smell of sickness and decay in the room mixing with antiseptics in her nose. She remembered his hand weakly patting her head and that she had thought, horrified, that he already looked more like a corpse than a man. She also remembered the guilty feeling of revulsion when his dry, cold fingers brushed her cheek.

  “Whatever they say … it’s not your fault,” he told her between rattling breaths. “You’re a good kid. You … can’t help … what you are. My … poor, unfortunate child.” A cough shook him then and she sat completely still, afraid he would die on her.

  “Don’t … let them stomp on you, because … of what you are,” he said, taking her fingers in his. “Don’t let them turn you into less than you are. You are my daughter.”

  His eyes found hers, suddenly focused and forceful in his sunken face. “But you … must control it. Promise me! Promise your daddy you will … learn to keep it under … control.” Another cough rattled him, but his fingers held tight, never letting go of hers. “Nobody … must … know what you are. Promise me, you’ll be a good girl … Promise it.”

  She had promised, frightened by his sudden intensity.

  He died a couple of days later. She had just turned twelve.

  The following events blurred in her memory; faces drifting past, people talking, meaningless words and phrases that couldn’t fill the sudden void that raged inside her. There was a funeral where she stood in the back, watching from afar, unnoticed, alone, while rows and rows of people in black with oh-so-grief stricken faces grabbed her brothers and told them their consolations. Nobody told her they were sorry, no “sweety, it will be okay,” no “he’s in a better place now.” Just emptiness. Most of them didn’t even know that she existed, and the few that did made a point of pretending they didn’t.

  It felt like she was walking through a long, endless tunnel that slowly faded out.

  A testament was found. The land and holdings went to the boys, of course, but her sire had opened a savings account in her name and left her a considerable amount of money with an appropriate deal for interests. No fortune by any means, but if handled carefully it was enough for her to get by until she was old enough to make a living of her own. He must have saved every last penny over the last year to be able to give this to her.

  Aunt Sheila was scandalized. There was just no way her brother would have seriously left anything of value to this little mongrel that had bullied its way under his roof and ensnared him with her shaper-magic. The very thought!

  She contested the will. And suddenly everybody agreed that the sickness must have afflicted his mind. Why, he had acted rather odd as it drew to the end, had he not?

  The will was nullified and everything—the house, the money—fell into the trusteeship of Aunt Sheila as the nearest living relative, including the custody for the children. She agreed to take the boys, but she made it clear that she wouldn’t tolerate a crawling little insect under her roof. Telling her that she was considered a spider and that spiders were by scientific definition not insects, but arachnids hadn’t exactly endeared Alex to her aunt. Not that it made any difference. The next day she was stuffed into a coach, together with the foul little backpack she’d carried upon her arrival at the manor, and it took off, while her brothers stood at the upper window, two pale faces in the gloom of the afternoon, becoming smaller and smaller.

  They dumped her at a scruffy halfborn orphanage in Mount Roddent County, where filthy kids fought over the leftovers of the day and the supervisors yelled at them and pushed them around.

  At first, the other children assumed the newcomer—small and delicate as she looked—would be an easy mark. They quickly learned that she was better not messed with. She always remembered to keep her promise to her sire and kept her true nature well hidden, but by now her shaper abilities were fully developed and she didn’t need her teeth and claws to hold her own even against of the older and bigger children. Soon most kids were afraid of the blond nut-job who fought like she had nothing to lose and mostly gave her a wide berth. It suited her just fine.

  When she was fourteen, one of the supervisors decided she was old enough to be broken in. He was her first kill. When he pinned her to the floor and tried to push into her, the spider tore free from the leash she’d put on it and she ripped into his throat, splattering the moldy walls with his lifeblood. The taste of his blood, both bitter and sweet, told her that there was no way back now. She took what little belongings she had and left the orphanage before his blood had even stopped dripping from his neck.

  Since then she’d roamed around, a leave drifting on the rough currents of life, working herself from one crappy job to the next, never staying in a place for long.

  Except here. The Bin had been the first place in more than nine years where she’d remained for longer than ten months. True, it hadn’t been all sunshine and roses, but at least it had been … something. A start. A chance. Her apartment, her job, her colleagues: Mitja, John, and Romanova—even Darcy, who could be such a pain in the ass … And now even that had fallen apart.

  The back of her eyes grew hot.

  It wasn’t fair! Didn’t she deserve anything?

  Alex tried to swallow, but her throat was suddenly so tight it hurt. She blinked, trying to get the dust of the past out of her eyes but it just kept coming.

  Out! She needed to get out. Just out. Before she split at the seams and the pain inside her spilled all over the floor.

  With immense ef
fort, she wiped the emotions from her face and cleared her throat.

  “We’ll leave as soon as dusk falls,” she said. It was in just a couple of hours and she couldn’t risk running around with these kids in plain daylight. She knew the Bin. As soon as word got out that two trueborn children were missing, everybody would hold out their eyes and ears. And most wouldn’t care if they sold their information to the good or the bad guys. As far as Alex was concerned, there was no good option anyway.

  She ripped off her soiled apron and dropped it on the floor, glancing at the kids.

  “Why don’t you two get a little rest, while I get us something to eat. And some new clothes for you,” she added as an afterthought seizing them up and down. “You look like a bloody carnival.”

  Without waiting for them to respond, she headed for the door. Then hesitated in the doorstep.

  What? Worst thing that could happen was that they made a run for it as soon as she was out of sight. On second thought, that was probably the best thing that could happen.

  She snatched her leather jacket from the racket and fled from the apartment, running as much from the past as from what lay right in front of her: another stony road that led to only hell-knew-where.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  NOT my fault.

  The Informant hurried down the carpeted hall at a crisp step toward the study that lay at its end. Modern sculptures and floral bouquets in tasteful vases flashed by him, unappreciated by his attention, as he told himself again and again what he’d told himself all the way here. It’s not my fault. It’s not my damn fault.

  His fingers curled into a tight fist, crumbling the gossamer paper that held the written communiqué he’d received from one of his messengers about an hour ago.

  This day had started out so promising. Quite promising indeed. But here he was, crawling up to the master like a lamb to the slaughter, about to make his amends.