Firstborn Read online

  A floodlight bursts from our right as though triggered by our motion.

  Another lights up from the left.

  But they’re not turned on us. Their twin beams meet on the arch above us, and illuminate a horrific sight.

  What I thought was a crucifix is a flesh-and-blood man, arms outstretched by ropes. Blood is dripping from his feet.

  I scream, drowning out Luka’s startled cry. Because I know that face contorted in death, the mouth a black rictus of pain.

  “Is that him?” Luka says, in the most terrible voice I’ve ever heard.

  I stagger back, fall to my knees, hands over my mouth, smothering the hysterics flying from it, dark things from Pandora’s box. Because in that moment, it isn’t just Brother Daniel on that makeshift cross, but every hope we’ve had—the reason I’ve done this, the promise of a future—hanging there dead, staining the gravel below.

  Flicker of movement in the darkness. Shadows, rushing from the gate. Luka shouts, drags me to my feet and toward the car. A gunshot punches the hood.

  Tires on gravel from the corner of the chapel. Headlights, blocking the drive.

  Black SUVs speeding toward us.

  I get the door open, fall into the seat. A shot cracks the air, shatters the passenger-side window. Luka jerks back, stumbles against the door. Crimson explodes down his sleeve. I scream and grab him by the shirt, haul him in against me.

  “Luka!”

  “Drive,” he says roughly, rolling toward the dash.

  I crawl across to the driver’s seat. Start the car, throw it into gear. Gun forward zero to thirty, plowing one of the forms up onto the hood. Shift into reverse, gears grinding, spin back with a spray of gravel. The form tumbles off as Luka’s open door swings wide.

  I hurl hard persuasion toward the dark convoy. No dice; our back window splinters into a fantastic web of glass.

  I shove us into drive. An instant later, we’re tearing across the grass. Luka’s door slams shut as I weave between the cypress trees I admired just moments ago, each one a killer now.

  “Are you all right?” It’s an idiot question. Luka’s been shot. There’s blood all over. What I’m really asking is: Will you live?

  “I’m fine,” he says tightly. “Try not to kill us.”

  There’s a vineyard just south of the complex; we hurtle down an unpaved lane between the gnarled vines. Headlights leap into the rearview mirror as we reach the end of the row. I veer down the side of the hill past a large estate, cut toward the main road.

  We hit the pavement with a scrape, turn hard left.

  Behind us, the dark convoy appears around the hill, speeding toward us from the monastery drive. My silent command sends a spike through my brain as the lone car between us skids across the road. Not enough to cut them off, but maybe enough to slow them down.

  The SUV that pursued us through the vineyard bounces onto the pavement—and then accelerates, closing the gap between us.

  My last-second turn in to a residential maze of streets throws Luka into the console. The SUV is on us.

  “What are you doing?” he grits out. But the map by which I navigated the way to the monastery is pixel clear in my mind.

  I broadcast a desperate plea. Four blocks later, a car pulls out of a driveway in our wake. The SUV veers into a yard and swings back, still in pursuit.

  Another car backs into the street behind us. And another and another. The SUV clips the first and rams into the second, shoving it into the third.

  I head for the next major intersection, where a car waits as though for an invisible light that will never change.

  I stop, get out, and run to the other side for Luka, whose left shoulder is soaked in blood. I drape his good arm behind my neck, and we hurry toward the other vehicle, already exited by its driver.

  Ten seconds later, we’re speeding toward the main roundabout and taking the second spoke—east on a dimly lit road, trying to outrun the dawn.

  17

  * * *

  We pull over just long enough for me to find and shred a rag from the trunk, do my best to bandage Luka’s shoulder through my blurring vision. He’s pale but alert, and the shot is clean—a deep graze. Or as clean, at least, as a gunshot wound can be, which seems like an oxymoron to me.

  “You need a doctor,” I say.

  “We need to get farther away. I’ll live.”

  My vision is blurring badly. Luka can sense it and insists on driving.

  “No, you’re hurt.”

  “And you’re about to black out.”

  I pull over. We switch seats.

  We head east, south, east again, directly into the first glow of morning. Not trusting that we are safe enough to speak about what happened. Unable to even if we wanted.

  I have lost track of where we are. On the map. In life. I bend low until my forehead rests against the glove box, face hidden from the world. A world I no longer want to be a part of.

  Luka doesn’t try to comfort me. He has no comfort to give. Twice I hear him pound the steering wheel. Exclaim something in Croatian, followed each time with a surge of violent speed.

  My nose won’t stop bleeding. My head pounds. I claw at the neck of my sweater, convinced it’s choking me. I can’t breathe.

  I can’t not see him. Brother Daniel, hanging from that arch. His bulging eyes. His contorted mouth, as though his life had been ripped from it. His hands, purple and swollen.

  I’d say a prayer for him if I knew how. If I thought God heard the words of sinners.

  No, not sinners. The cursed.

  And I don’t know what I’m mourning more—that Brother Daniel’s selfless commitment was so violently repaid . . . or the state of my soul. Because despite my horror, all I can think about is our daughter.

  “Do you think . . .” Luka begins at last. He swipes at his forehead, glossy with sweat. “Do you think he told them anything?”

  “The blood was still dripping from his toes,” I whisper. I don’t say the rest: That the threat in that text was twelve hours old by the time Jester found it.

  But Brother Daniel died more recently than that.

  “They tortured him,” he says.

  Silence, heavy between us. I press my palms to my eyes. “We’ll never find Eva. Oh my God . . . we’ve lost her.”

  “No. There has to be a way. We’ll find Clare!”

  “How?” I demand. “Without a picture? Without knowing her real name?”

  “How many Franciscan nuns can there be?”

  “For all I know, she isn’t even really a nun!”

  No one in this mess is who they seem to be. Everyone is wearing a face not their own—deceiving someone, if only themselves. Luka, with his eyes wide shut, believing if he stays far enough from his family, they’ll be safe from retribution. Claudia, that blood equals loyalty. Piotrek, that her relationship with him is anything more than survival. Jester, that she could trust me, if only because of whom they all wanted me to be.

  That I would somehow save them.

  We drive aimlessly for miles. I don’t know where we’re going, nor do I care. The sun is up, blithe and indifferent, shining more brightly than it has in a week.

  “Even if he told them about her, it doesn’t mean they found her,” Luka says at last.

  I nod, for his sake.

  If fate is merciful, Eva is still safe, wherever she is. Is being moved, even now. Or already in a place that even Brother Daniel himself didn’t know. Having guarded the interests of Progeny so long, he must have known something about their methods of keeping secrets—even from themselves.

  “Now what?” Luka says.

  But I don’t have any answers. All I know is that there is no going to Greece or Turkey for us. Without surety of Eva’s safety, we are tied, once again, to a land haunted by every soul associated with Elizabeth Bathory. Prisoners as surely as if we had been walled up within its borders.

  18

  * * *

  We stop, midmorning, at a clinic outside L
jubljana. With dwindling reserves, I persuade a young doctor to meet us at the back door, gloves already on. I refuse to let her brush me away as she treats Luka, giving him a shot of something for the pain, a bottle of pills for later. After which she leaves town on an impromptu holiday. My suggestion.

  We find a small inn. Take a room under an American name.

  Jones. Because why not.

  Nothing matters now.

  I sit dully in a faded orange chair that smells faintly of cigarette smoke facing a TV that isn’t on.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” I say.

  Luka gazes with half-lidded eyes at me from the bed. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Because neither can he.

  I resolved two days ago to fight. But in the hours like lifetimes since then, I’ve been running just as much as—more than—before.

  At some point, Luka sleeps. I do, too, though my dreams are filled with tortured monks and dying messiahs, dark mouths agape. The archive cache flies past me in a windstorm and I try to catch as many pages as I can before they blow away.

  The last paper I grab is not a page from the collection at all. Just a headline in my hand:

  KILL LIST.

  I jolt awake in the orange chair, heart racing.

  Because it’s true: The cache is a veritable kill list of the most powerful Scions in the world. What’s a Historian with no more Scions to command?

  I get up, go to the bathroom to splash water on my face. Scrub away the blood crusted beneath my nose. Stare at the person in the mirror, water dripping from her chin.

  Is that the face of a mother? A savant, a savior . . .

  . . . a monster?

  Because I may not be what anyone thought, but I’m not ready to roll over and die. As long as there’s a chance Eva’s still alive, I will fight to find her, to hold that small hand in mine.

  But I am no monster. Even if it’s in my blood.

  I turn and lean back against the tiled bathroom counter, racking my brain, the pickax pounding in my head having faded to a dull thud.

  If I could find the Historian, I would gladly rest my moral stance long enough to kill her. I could do that if it meant saving Eva, and Luka. But my only link to her is the voice on the phone Jester tried and failed to trace.

  There’s Nikola. But if what Tibor said was true—that he’s not the one the Historian truly wants—I have no doubt he’d kill me in an instant.

  Shunned by my friends, who do I have left? Tibor, cut off from the underground in exile—presumably without a hunter on him now that they’ve all turned their attention to me.

  But Tibor did give me something in return: a Scion powerful enough to be at odds with the Historian. A surveillance contractor with the means to help me find Eva.

  There are no clear sides in this, Tibor had said.

  I fish the phone from my pocket and click it on.

  Three missed calls appear on the screen.

  Jester.

  The calls came in, minutes apart, around the time we arrived at the monastery. No wonder I didn’t hear them. Their quick succession worries me, and I instinctively dial back.

  She answers on the second ring.

  “Audra? Are you all right?”

  “We’re fine.”

  A moment of silence, and then: “I just saw the police report from Pristava.”

  I’m sure. Another heinous act to add to my public litany of sins.

  “He was dead when we got there,” I say. I don’t go into details. On the other end, I can hear traffic, a truck passing them by. They must have left Munich.

  “Where are you now?” she says.

  “Ljubljana. Luka’s hurt.”

  “Can you get to Graz?”

  “Probably.” I hesitate. “Why?”

  “We’ll meet you there.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t leave Luka. I won’t.”

  “Bring him.”

  This is so not the disowning I expected, and though I don’t say it, I’m wary of her motives.

  My suspicion translates in my silence.

  “I won’t lie, we all felt betrayed,” she says.

  I feel awkward knowing she’s cooped up in a car where Claudia and Piotrek can hear what she’s saying, if not our entire conversation.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “We talked for a very long time this morning. I was angry. We all were. But you should know that Claudia defended you.”

  Claudia, my staunchest critic? I wonder if we’re talking about the same person.

  “She told me what Ivan said about you,” Jester says. “That you never did anything without reason and many things contrary to it. I don’t know what you’re doing in the company of a hunter, let alone how you ever became his lover, knowing what he is. But I saw the proof of life recordings when I downloaded your SIM chips. How he told you to leave him and run. The way he refused to respond in an effort to save you, and tried to say good-bye . . .”

  I’m silent.

  “We also know he must have faked your death so you could disappear. I don’t understand your relationship, and I have to say I don’t approve. But it’s obvious what he’s done for you.”

  “He has nowhere to go,” I say. Just like me. Just like Rolan, wherever he is, if he’s even alive.

  “Well, maybe one day soon none of this will matter. Audra, we have enough on one of the names—the Curia president, Lazlo Becskei—to leak it.”

  “What? Where?” I ask. “You can’t go to the police or the media or Interpol—”

  “To several whistle-blower and international open journalistic sites that publish information from anonymous sources.”

  “You’re sending it to WikiLeaks?”

  She clicks her tongue. “No. To newer organizations committed to government and corporate truth telling. Founded, in part, by yours truly.”

  “Is there anything you don’t do online?”

  “A few things,” she says, sounding vaguely amused.

  “How could you possibly know the day would come that you’d have any hard proof to expose?”

  “You told me.”

  I blink in the fluorescent light of the bathroom.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Apparently there are a few things we have not told one another,” she says wryly. “Anyway, I’m uploading the information on the first one to our servers in Switzerland now. With any luck, it’ll be on the radar of media companies, conspiracy theorists, and watchdog groups by tomorrow morning.”

  “So fast . . .” I breathe.

  “We will release information on one high-ranking Scion every day—or as close to that as possible—for as long as we can . . . or until there is nothing left to release.”

  “That’s— Wow. That’s great.”

  But even as I say it, I know that while the leaks may piss off the Historian, they also won’t shut her down. Not completely.

  I point this last part out to Jester.

  “You’re right. But it will create a breach in her support network of high-ranking and powerful members. Members the others will be forced to cut ties to. More than that, it will scare them. Don’t you see, Audra? This is what she wanted to avoid—the reason she wanted the cache. Without them, she cannot function!”

  “It won’t stop the killing.”

  “No. If anything, it may accelerate it,” she says grimly. “The hunters who have yet to be initiated into the Scions’ corporate ranks—those who haven’t completed their kills—are zealous about their calling.”

  “I’ve heard,” I say.

  “Which is why I am so surprised someone like Luka could abandon it.”

  “It wasn’t easy for him.” The way Luka describes it, it was more like torture. A moral quandary of abandoning what he had been raised to believe was the highest good in order to love what he had been taught to be the worst evil . . . that nearly ended in his suicide.

  “Yes, the Historian may strike back, and you are the top trophy. Which is why
you have to get somewhere safe. Meet us in Graz. Besides, we need your help.”

  I recognize the olive branch for what it is. But she and I both know there’s nothing I can do to help. That my being there will only put them in more danger.

  Something else is bothering me, though.

  “We know who the hunters are . . . We have their names.”

  “But not their targets. Only the Historian has that. Believe me, I have searched.”

  “You could release them.”

  “To what end? Until they kill we have nothing on them beyond a crazy four-hundred-year-old conspiracy theory.”

  I dig my fingers into my hair. “We have the names of the killers before they kill and we can’t even stop them!”

  “This is not Minority Report. But, Audra, this is the first blow any Progeny has ever struck against the Scions. It is something.”

  “I know,” I say.

  I also know it’s not enough.

  “Don’t go to Graz,” I say abruptly. “Go somewhere else, don’t tell me where.”

  “Why—what will you do?”

  “I’ll be in touch. But do me a favor . . . Hold off on releasing any information on Serge Deniel.”

  I can almost hear her frown. “All right,” she says at last. To her credit, she doesn’t ask why. She doesn’t need to; by asking her not to talk about it, I’ve told her enough.

  “There’s something else you should know,” she says, before we hang up. “Another text came for you.”

  I don’t want to know.

  “I’ll forward it.”

  The phone chimes seconds after we hang up. I stare fixedly at the piece of cheap art on the wall above the toilet until I think my heart will beat out of my chest. And then I look at the screen.

  A pity about Brother Daniel. He had such interesting stories to tell.

  I lean over, haul in a ragged breath. But this time, it isn’t just fear constricting my lungs. My fingers begin to shake as I send a message of my own.

  I’m coming for you.

  I pull up a browser, search out the parent company of GenameBase.

  The next call I make is to Serge Deniel.

  19