Firstborn Read online

But it doesn’t come.

  14

  * * *

  “Does it hurt?” Claudia asks.

  “Not yet,” I say and swipe at my nose, but my fingers come away clean.

  I don’t understand it. There have to be more than seventy people in that line.

  “Maybe you’ve gotten stronger.”

  “Maybe.” But even the simplest persuasion comes with a cost. And though I haven’t felt any pain, the adrenaline burn leaves my limbs heavy.

  “So . . . has anyone seen Tibor?” I ask with levity I do not feel.

  She hops up to sit on the edge of the roof, back to the sidewalk below. A breeze rifles through her hair. She looks like a model in front of a wind machine on a fashion shoot.

  “No. No one knows where he has gone. His court has scattered to the streets, though we hear some of them have defected to Budapest, where Nikola has offered protection.”

  “Protection from Tibor?” I say strangely.

  “No, stupid. From you. Nikola has declared you outlaw. Saying that you’re in league with the Historian.”

  “What?”

  Pot, meet kettle.

  “It’s the most frightening thing he could say—a Firstborn ally of the Historian. They don’t know what your powers are. No one has documented what a Firstborn can do for generations. There are rumors that you can start fires from a distance. Move objects. Kill on sight.”

  My brows lift.

  “Well, they’re going to be disappointed,” I murmur.

  “Obviously.”

  We stay there long enough to take in the night air. To steal a few last glances of the festival.

  We should go down there, I think. Take a night and pretend that we are no one. I think of the way Tibor said the same about himself: What am I? Nothing. And I wonder if he’s down there even now, on one of those spinning rides.

  Luka finds us on the rooftop. Even with his bruises, he’s so good-looking that I wonder what he saw in me—once he got past wanting to kill me. If I glamoured him or something with a supercharisma I didn’t know I had. And I’m well aware that between the emotional revelation of Eva’s existence and our quick escape from the cruise ship, we haven’t had much of a reunion.

  He comes over and slides his arms around me. After the last week, I want him close. Want to imagine what it will be like when we go back into our room downstairs, alone. I just need one moment of normalcy between us. All of us. Even if it’s just to look longingly out at the rest of the world. Luka might be my husband, but Claudia, Piotrek, and Jester are my family.

  He smiles, but fatigue and tension have deepened the bruises below his eyes.

  “Jester’s got the photos downloaded.”

  By the time we return, Jester’s not only got the photos loaded but has the first one projected onto the wall.

  I perch on the edge of the sofa in front of a carafe of coffee, several liters of water, a platter of olives, cheese, dry ham, bread, and a plate of small cakes. I gesture at the platter and glance at Piotrek, brow raised.

  “Arrick,” Piotrek says around a mouthful.

  “Is the door locked?” I ask, not sure I trust our host, no matter what Tibor says.

  “Checked it myself,” Luka says.

  I pour myself a cup of coffee, gulp half of it down, still wondering about the missing migraine.

  “I’ve put these more or less in chronological order, tried to group related items together. Run them through translation software for the American,” Jester says with a wry smile, beginning the slideshow. Image after image in rapid succession.

  “They’re going too fast,” Claudia says. “I can’t read them.”

  “This run-through is for Audra. If there are patterns to be found, she has the best chance of finding them first.”

  I take each of them in, eyes scanning the image, and then the translation. Crumbling documents hundreds of years old. Journal entries. Purchase receipts. The translations aren’t perfect, but they’re clear enough to crack the meaning on images already in memory but not understood. To watch the story unfold . . .

  Twelve families. Peasants. Meager purchases: an animal here or there, a small shop. One of the men awarded a piece of land for saving a minor noble in a war against the Turks. Humble inroads into the merchant class by the mid-1600s—a generation after the death of Elizabeth Bathory, shortly after the time her exiled children return from Poland to Hungary.

  I stare at the slow march of history as the descendants of those families convert to Catholicism, become landowners—not only in Hungary but in Moravia and Vienna. One of them finds work in an aristocratic print shop. Several more are recognized for their service under the Habsburg king in driving the Ottomans from Hungary. Two of them become squires. Several more serve under the Turks in Wallachia. Scions, flourishing on both sides of the conflict in a fraternity that transcends political and religious borders. I can’t help but think back to Tibor’s words about hedging bets, playing both sides.

  Scions, fighting against the Protestant Reformation and later in the drive for Hungarian independence, winning power and affluence. A progression of stealth operations behind the scenes of Europe’s great events. The increasing ability to pick mostly winning sides in conflicts—and be rewarded.

  Travel to France on a diplomatic mission that coincides with the marriage of Marie Antoinette . . .

  Service rewarded under Napoleon Bonaparte . . .

  An early 1800s obituary for a Prussian man who went mad and took his life. A Polish woman who leapt into a river. Victims, no doubt, of the Scions, who are by now avid merchants, a few of them landed lower nobles and courtiers.

  Claudia curses, leaning back hard into the sofa as image after image drifts by. You don’t have to look for long to get the general idea.

  I sit forward as we reach the 1900s, my eyes drawn to the names, the growing industrial wealth. The wire transfers. The stock and corporate purchases. The political careers, the bank takeovers. The first Scion elected to the European Parliament, in 2004. The deaths of several models, rising rock stars, a young comedian, a chef, a mission worker, an international student.

  I shudder. That could have been—was, once—me. Their deaths are ruled suicides, overdoses, self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Accidents.

  Government bribes by construction company giants. Tax fraud. Environmental crimes. Money trails. Securities fraud. Kickbacks. World sporting event bidding corruption. And an entire trail of evidence and witnesses for each—not to mention a few would-be whistle-blowers . . . several of whom died convenient, tragic deaths, their accounts never brought to light.

  We have names. We can trace families. Novak, Luka’s surname, among them. Though it’s common enough, I felt the imperceptible tension in his shoulders as it flashed onto the screen—once, twice, earlier. They are the same names as those on the Scion map I discovered in the bank vault in Vienna along with my mother’s notes. The document might very well have been made from this cache—an early shorthand attempt at the genealogy of the original families involved. But here, now, is the evidence behind their rise.

  All the while, something nags at the back of my mind.

  “What I’m not seeing is what the Historian wanted from this pile,” I say at last. “Is anybody seeing it?”

  “We’re not seeing anything this fast,” Piotrek mutters.

  “What we don’t have is the name of the Historian herself,” Luka says.

  “Herself?” Claudia says, eyes wide, looking to me for confirmation. “Kuja!” she spits, before falling into rapid conversation with Piotrek in what I assume to be his native Polish.

  “Jester, are the names Otto Errickson, Attila Bertalan, or Cristian Alexandrescu on any of these documents?”

  “Just a moment,” she says, searching as Claudia, Piotrek, and Luka turn quizzical glances to me.

  “No,” she says a moment later. “None of them. Why?”

  “They were all Historians. Somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred years ago
.”

  “How can you know the names of three Historians?” Claudia says.

  “They were on the Scion map I recovered from my mother’s notes in Austria—the ones you hid for me.”

  Piotrek leans back into the sofa with a low whistle.

  “But the Historian’s office had its own line down the side,” I say. “Like it was a progression of its own.”

  “Chosen not by family or birth,” Jester says. “But then by who? The Historians before them?”

  “I assume. The three people recorded there—all men—didn’t have the same surnames.”

  “A Scion not known to other Scions,” Piotrek says.

  “Which means no Scion actually knows who the Historian is either,” I say and have to catch myself from looking to Luka for confirmation. Instead, I point to the wall.

  “A secret office,” Luka says slowly, as though working it out in his mind, though I know he’s really just telling the truth. “That the Scions give allegiance to because it appoints hunters from their families . . . and then helps raise them up through the favors of other Scions at the Historian’s bidding.”

  “All of them living posh lives in the open. All of them former killers,” Claudia says with disgust as the parade of images continues.

  “But these Scions are all trading favors,” Jester says. “Which means that none of these people in here—these power players—can actually be her.”

  “We’re talking about a puppet master,” I say. “Who came into power sometime in the last year.”

  “The last year?” Piotrek says. “How do you know this?”

  “Because the date was on the Scion map. She’s new, whoever she is. And apparently radical.”

  “So that’s why the killings have been different.”

  “You said Nikola’s aligned with her,” Claudia says. “Could he know who she is?”

  I glance at Jester, who has been obsessed with Nikola on Tibor’s behalf for some time. But she only shrugs. “You’re the one who saw them together,” she says.

  I frown, thinking back to the night I met her—alone in a cavern with them both. Nikola could have ripped off her mask at any time and known her face.

  Of course, she also could have had him instantly killed by any one of the guards outside. So I guess there’s that.

  “Someone has to know who she is,” Jester says. “Someone who takes her orders. Someone who sends her commands out. Who was corresponding with you in your negotiations for Luka’s proof of life?”

  “A voice. On the number you tried to trace,” I say dully.

  “It’s an anonymous, chipless phone out of Asia. What about Rolan’s contact?”

  “Same guy. I got him from Rolan.”

  “If the last Historian knew who his successor was going to be,” Piotrek says, “this one knows who hers will be. There has to be someone who finds the document with her appointment when she dies.”

  “A legal proxy of some kind,” Luka says.

  “Yes.”

  The page with Serge Deniel’s stock purchase appears on the wall.

  “Stop,” I say and point. “I want to know who he is. Can you find out?” Jester drags the document out of the queue.

  I watch till the end. Perhaps twenty minutes in all. Until the images, imprinted in my brain, have begun to blend together. One on top of the other.

  I lie back on the sofa, close my eyes as Jester starts from the beginning again for the others. The images fly apart, a maelstrom behind the dark lids of my eyes that makes me feel vaguely motion sick, like a bad case of the bed spins.

  I discard the first three hundred and fifty years of the story; they’re no use to us now. Lay the rest on a mental canvas, begin to shift them around. Toss out those more than fifty years old. No, thirty. Connect money transfers with corporate takeovers, conglomerates with political offices. Legal awards to planned bank failures. Fraud with corporate rises. Wealth with power.

  Until the images blur. Until the names run together.

  It’s barely 1:00 A.M. when I haul myself upstairs, leaving the others to their grim cinema. I am weary in a way I didn’t know was possible, the sleep of yesterday having been only enough of a teaser to make me more tired.

  Luka appears in the doorway, rubbing his forehead, and closes the curtain in front of the door.

  “You look terrible,” he says. His slight, lopsided grin only accentuates the black circles beneath his eyes, the bruises healing to a greenish tint on his cheek.

  “Speak for yourself,” I say, falling back onto the daybed. I stare up at the ceiling. I’ve never known how to give in willingly to sleep. For the last week it’s come as a tidal wave after I’ve pushed myself to the brink of persuasion-induced stroke, and nights spent at court before that.

  He lies down beside me. A moment later, he finds my hand, lifts it to his lips. I turn and lay my head on his shoulder, slide a knee over his thigh.

  “They’re going to find out,” he says quietly against my fingers. “About me.”

  They are the words I’ve been dreading.

  When Luka was taken, I obscured the portion of the Scion map with his name before I delivered it to the Historian—who promptly burned it. And though I haven’t thought about this moment since rescuing Luka, I think I’ve known in the back of my mind that it was only a matter of time.

  I close my eyes, will him not to speak. But Scions cannot be persuaded.

  “I’ll have to go,” he says. “Maybe not tonight, but tomorrow or the next day.”

  He turns onto his side. “Say you’ll come with me,” he says, eyes intense.

  It would be so easy to say yes.

  “We belong together,” he says. “Come with me.”

  “This isn’t finished. And until it is, Eva—” I catch myself, aware of the fact that the door isn’t closed, and then whisper, barely above a breath: “She is not safe.”

  He doesn’t answer. After a beat of silence, he looks away.

  “Luka . . .”

  “This will never be finished,” he says. “So what then? I walk away from you? Don’t you see? I don’t know how to let you go!” He clasps me in his arms, eyes locked on mine.

  He’s home and heat and comfort. Above all that, he’s mine. I know it in my soul. He’d die for me—for Eva.

  And that’s the problem.

  “You seemed fine enough letting me go when the Scions had you,” I say.

  “What I wasn’t fine with was you getting killed trying to save me. I was trying to protect you. Both of you!”

  “How is you dying not leaving us?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Isn’t it? What about the rest of your family? Aren’t you worried about your parents?”

  He falls back to stare at the ceiling, shakes his head with an exasperated sigh. “Of course I am. I even called my father’s house once, from a burner phone. No one answered. And I couldn’t have said anything if he did. As far as he knows, I’ve disappeared.”

  “He lives alone?”

  “My mother left him a few years ago. I haven’t talked to her since my nineteenth birthday.”

  “Wow. I’m . . . so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

  “You did,” he says dully. “You just don’t remember. When we named Eva, it was like you were trying to give a part of her back to me, I think.” He rubs his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. My grandfather was the Scion. They don’t know anything about it.”

  “Of course it matters. You could tell your dad you’re in trouble. He could help hide you until it’s safe . . .”

  “No.”

  “No parent could turn their back on their own son—”

  “I can’t, Audra!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m more of a danger with either of them than if I stay far, far away. You of all people should understand that!”

  His words cut. I shove angrily away, but he grabs my arm and pulls me back.

  “I made my choice!” he hisses,
something desperate in his eyes. “Don’t you get it? I left that life forever! For a new one—with you.”

  I’m breathing hard. Furious and horrified. At him, for what he just said. For his stubborn love. For his willingness to leave me. To not leave completely. At myself, most of all.

  “We both did,” he says more quietly.

  But I have no recollection of that choice. There is only this: the shards of the life I woke up to . . . just in time to watch it crumble to pieces.

  Someone downstairs calls my name. Alarmed, no doubt, by the ruckus.

  “We’re fine,” I call.

  “Audra!” Jester shouts, more loudly.

  I get up from the bed, and this time Luka lets me go. I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, push through the curtain to lean over the rail of the balcony, find the others still gathered on the sofa. “Sorry. Everything’s okay.” Except that it’s not.

  “I think you’d better see this.”

  “I’ve seen all of them already.” But even from here I can see she has paled. Claudia is staring across the room at the wall.

  “Not this.”

  “What?” I say irritably as I head downstairs.

  “I must have downloaded this from one of your SIM chips,” Jester says and points to the image projected on the wall.

  It’s a text message:

  You did not deliver as promised. But I know where you’ve been.

  Beneath it is a photo of the monastery in Košljun.

  15

  * * *

  There are moments that shatter your existence.

  I stare at the monastery and in that single glance feel Eva fall away from me.

  “Luka!” I shout. “Luka!” He appears on the balcony, takes one look at me, and then hurries down the stairs.

  “That’s him, isn’t it?” Jester says.

  “The one working for the Historian,” I say, words tumbling over one another. But my tongue won’t work fast enough to keep up with my racing mind. “The—the same one who answered Ivan’s phone the night he died.”

  “What is it?” Luka asks, obviously alarmed, and then follows our gazes to the wall.