by Frankie Rose
CHAPTER FIVE
Reaver
The air inside the tent smelled different from outside—stale, like the heavy material had gotten damp and dried out a hundred times over. It was musty, but thankfully empty. Anybody overhearing our conversation would have thought we were both crazy.
“I know this is hard to hear. But it’s true. I…we think it would be a good idea if you came and lived with us for a little while,” Agatha said breathlessly. Her shoulders tensed, poised for my reaction.
I just blinked. My silence seemed to fill Agatha with panic. She began talking at a hundred miles an hour, her words running into one another.
“There’s a city below this city. It’s been there far longer than Los Angeles has. Below your feet are cavernous halls and tunnels that stretch on for miles and miles. There are the four quarters: north, south, east and west. I’m from the north. They call us the Thinkers. Intellects. To the east are the muses, the Creatives. The south are the athletes, the Warriors. The western quarter is where the Architects come from. They design, build and create everything within our world. At the centre of it all is the Tower. That’s where your father lives.” She finally took a second to pull in a shaky breath.
Elliott Davenport. Alive. The concept wouldn’t sit right in my mind. I’d spent my whole life living with the knowledge that he was dead. And my life hadn’t been like some emo Hollywood movie where I’d mourned not having a father figure. Where I’d dreamed that he wasn’t really dead, but lost somehow and trying to get back to me. He was just dead and that had been okay, because my mom had been everything I needed. And now this small woman was telling me the father I’d never needed had resurrected himself from the dead and smashed my world into tiny, insignificant pieces.
“Your grandfather lives there, too,” Agatha continued. She rubbed her neck self-consciously and lowered her eyes to the compacted earth at our feet. It was mercifully still dry and un-boglike. “He’s been there the longest out of the three of them. The three… Reavers.”
A feather-light shiver raced up my spine and settled with a final judder across my shoulders. “Reavers?”
“Yes. They don’t really have a name for themselves. We call them Reavers. They…take things. Things that don’t belong to them.”
“Like what?”
Agatha shifted uncomfortably, tugging her thumbs on the belt loops of her jeans. “I’ll get to that. First you have to understand, the patriarchal line of your father’s family are the rulers of our society. They have special gifts that set them apart from everyone else. They can…do things. Things that you and I can’t. From the moment they’re born, it’s drilled into them that their biggest responsibility in life is to produce an heir. It’s all very old-fashioned, but it’s all they live for—the continuation of their precious bloodline. Being immortal isn’t enough for them. They’re paranoid. They believe that if they die, they must have a successor to take their place. They aren’t even allowed to receive their gifts until they sire a male heir. That’s when they go through their rites and become a part of the sovereignty.”
Something bizarre was happening inside my head; it felt like a swarm of angry wasps was trapped there, and they were determined to sting their way out. My eyes were burning like crazy. “That doesn’t make any sense."
“Of course it doesn’t. Why would it? You've never heard anything about this before.” Agatha gave me a tight smile.
“So, according to your story, I’m next in line to some royal supernatural bloodline?”
The smile faded from Agatha’s lips. “Not quite. It’s like I said—they have to produce a male heir. Your father already had a son. You…you were unexpected. He never knew about you.”
“Wow. This just gets better. So I was an accident, too.”
“No. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not explaining this very well. It’s a lot of ground to cover in a short space of time. What I meant to say was that the patriarchs of the bloodline have male heirs, because that’s all they’ve ever had. None of them have ever had a female child before.”
I counted to five. I counted slowly just to make sure, but when I reached five, Agatha’s words still didn’t make sense. “Uh…biology’s never been my forté, but isn’t that impossible? Isn’t having a kid a genetic roll of the dice? A fifty/fifty kind of thing?”
Agatha cracked her knuckles. A pinched crease manifested itself between her eyebrows. “Forget about biology. Biology doesn’t apply here. Not the kind they’ve been teaching you, anyway. Once they undergo their rites, these men are immortal. They’re nothing like regular human beings. Genetically, they’re something entirely different. They’ve always had male children. That’s just the way it’s always been.”
“Uh-huh…” Disbelief laced my tone. “Next you’ll be telling me they’re all vampires or something.”
“Ha! Don’t be ridiculous.”
“How is that any more ridiculous than what you just told me?” I snapped.
“It’s all tied in with what I said before. They’re Reavers. They steal from others. They grow powerful from taking other people’s life force. Tell me, if you wanted to steal someone’s life force, would you take their toenail clippings?”
I just stared at her. This conversation was getting weirder by the second.
“Blood is just another part of the body. Your soul is your life force. The soul is key. That’s what they take.”
And suddenly we’d moved beyond the realms of unbelievable into the downright crazy. The fact that I’d let this woman carry on with such a ridiculous tale made me feel slightly cruel, but there was a perfectly good reason for it. If Agatha believed in all this crap, then she clearly was mad, and everything she had been saying was complete nonsense. Including the part about my mom being dead. Especially that part.
“Look, thanks for meeting with me. I appreciate you trying to help me out, but I really have to go now. I have friends waiting,” I lied.
Agatha gave me a sad, almost disappointed look. “No, you don’t. The only people waiting for you out there are the Immundus—your father’s men. They’re human, but they have a direct line to the Reavers. They’re stronger than they should be, and they do have some power. Who do you think put that image of your mother into your head?”
Something about the hint of pity in the tiny woman’s eyes was incredibly annoying. I bristled and pulled myself up straight. “I’m sorry I don’t believe in your fairytale. I choose to believe that I did actually see my mother out there. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“I’m afraid what I told you is no fairytale. This idea that your mother is still alive is the only fantasy here.”
The words themselves were harsh, and yet Agatha managed to deliver them softly. They stung all the same.
“We’re done here. Goodbye, Agatha.”
As I marched out of the tent, the canvas flap snapped on the icy breeze that had materialized out of nowhere, blowing it straight into my face. I pushed it aside and charged across the fairground, wanting to put as much distance between me and Agatha as possible. A sensation at my back told me I was being followed, though. I didn’t need to look back to know the pixie-like woman wasn’t very far behind.
Not for long. Shaking her off shouldn’t be that hard. I was almost at the exit, the illuminated archway throbbing like a gaudy beacon just fifty feet away, when I saw my mother again. This time she didn’t melt into the background. She stood watching me, intermittently visible above the dipping and spinning of a whirling bumper car ride, with a cold, distant look on her face. The breeze caught her hair and tousled it about her face. She didn’t move to brush the hair back out of her eyes; she just stared at me. Her expression was empty, flat and lifeless.
“Mom!”
How could Agatha not see? How could she not see that my mom was standing right there? But Agatha was gone. Instead, when I spun around, there was something else—an elusive streak of black, prowling through the crowds like a si
lent wolf. A flash of green. The suggestion of a curved eyebrow.
Daniel.
I hissed under my breath. Why was he here? If he was with Agatha, then that alone spoke volumes. He must believe everything she had just told me—an excellent reason to avoid him, aside from his terribly annoying attitude. I caught another glimpse of him as he flitted through the crowd, never taking his eyes off me. He wore an old blue Civil War Union coat that swept the backs of his knees, the collar turned up against the cold.
“Damn it.” I pulled forwards, hoping to reach my mom before he could do something irritating like grab hold of me. And that’s when I saw them. My mother wasn’t alone. Standing just to the right, a couple of feet behind her, two men were scanning the crowd. They wore long coats themselves, except theirs were trench coats. In the failing darkness, they pinned me under their gaze. There was something alarming about their eyes: a thin thread of silver circling their irises. They pulsed like glowing silver halos. More coronas, really—a perfect, shining eclipse in each of their cold, dead eyes.