Firstborn Read online

  I turn away, cuddling Eva, memorizing her face. The little whorl of her ear. Her sparse hair—dark blond, like mine. The furrow of her feathered brow as she stares at me with Luka’s blue eyes.

  I cradle her head in my palm, kiss her chubby cheek. “Next time there’ll be no good-bye,” I whisper.

  I pretend not to hear when another monk comes to say the boat is waiting. Or when Clare calls the children, saying it’s time for them to go.

  Too soon, Clare takes her from my arms. My breath leaves me all at once, like a sucker punch to the gut. Eva begins to fuss, and I try to make shushing sounds that come out as sobs instead. She begins to wail, and even as my heart shatters I tell myself it’s because she is like me. That her eyes recognize patterns, faces, and that she knows me. And I hope that I am right, and that she does—in case it has to be enough to last a lifetime.

  2

  * * *

  The minute Clare, Eva, and the other children are gone from sight, Brother Daniel’s hand is on my shoulder. He’s talking, saying something, but my attention has vanished with my baby, and it’s all I can do not to scratch and kick my way past him to chase after her. I can feel her leaving me.

  “Where will they take her?” I demand.

  “You know I cannot tell you that,” he says, trying to steer me the opposite way. And for a moment I have the sense that this must be what it’s like to be the ward of a mental institution.

  “Are you sure she’ll be safe? Will you be able to check on her?” Adrenaline is sizzling in my veins and I don’t have the time or luxury to run or swim to exorcise it.

  “Yes. I promise.” Brother Daniel stops, turns toward me. “And one day, Audra, you will see her again. I believe it. I have prayed for it. As I have prayed for you since you were small.”

  I stagger after him, pressing the heels of my hands to my eyes. And though his words are meant to be reassuring, they’re not. Because prayer’s what you do when you have no options left.

  Luka deserves to know—that we have a daughter, and that she’s safe. But chances are he’ll never live to meet her.

  I feel sick.

  “Is there a bathroom around here that I could use?” I ask, and Brother Daniel escorts me down a visitors’ hallway.

  I lock myself inside the restroom, slide down the chilly wall.

  My breath comes in ragged wheezes, the result of a toxic cocktail of exhaustion and grief. At Luka’s pending murder. At letting my daughter go—again. My mind may not remember her, but my body knew—perhaps in the same way that it knew Luka, and reached for him, even as I questioned whether I could trust him not to kill me.

  My heart won’t stop pounding in my ears. I squeeze my temples, eyes shut, and wonder if I’m having a panic attack.

  Because I don’t like the thoughts that are coming to me.

  The first is that my odds of getting Luka back alive, assuming I could find the so-called diary, were slim to none to begin with. Even if the Historian were to release him, she could never afford to let me survive now that I’ve laid eyes on the information in Brother Daniel’s vault.

  The second is that no hunter can harvest my memory of Eva if my brain is too damaged or has been dead too long.

  Third, I threatened to drop myself into the Danube just the other day if the Historian’s lackeys laid one more hand on Luka. It was enough then to stop their brutality. And she could have killed me the night I met her in the Budapest underground, but she needed me to decipher my mother’s notes. Which means there is something—something—she wants very badly in that cache of information.

  And the minute she knows I’ve found it, I have no more leverage to keep Luka alive. I’m a dead woman again, either way.

  And Eva is an orphan.

  My last thought is this:

  Screw them!

  Because I will not let them take one more thing—one more person—I love from me while I’m still breathing and alive enough to do something about it. And I will not die a victim.

  If the information in the vault truly is a weapon, then by God, I’m going to wield it.

  I shove up from the floor, remembering the pings that exploded from my phone after I emerged from the vault with Brother Daniel earlier.

  I pull out the phone, slide the screen to life, and note the time with alarm: 1:47. The longest I’ve spent in a single location, even to sleep, since leaving Budapest.

  Claudia: Well??

  Claudia: Anything?

  Jester: Audra, what is happening?

  Jester: We are worried.

  Claudia: Piotrek is about to leave for Croatia if we don’t hear from you and it’s your fault.

  The last one was just twenty-eight minutes ago.

  I tap out a quick reply:

  Am fine. Hold tight.

  A rap on the bathroom door.

  “Audra? Are you all right?”

  For a dead girl, I sure have a lot of people worried about me.

  “Fine,” I call, moving to the sink to splash water on my face. My eyes are red, grainy from lack of sleep. I squint at myself in the mirror. But all I can see is the masked face of my enemy, the Historian.

  My name is Audra Ellison. I am twenty-one years old . . . and you have just poked the mother bear.

  I emerge from the bathroom to a relieved-looking Brother Daniel, and move with him swiftly down the hall.

  “You look like a new person,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “Just more of the one I was before.”

  I follow Brother Daniel to the storeroom sealed with the biometric lock and the archive he has risked his life to curate. Seventy-nine Franciscan monks have died in its service through the centuries—three of those murders in the last two weeks alone.

  “The true diary,” Brother Daniel called the collection, gesturing to the piles of intercepted letters, testimonies, pictures, e-mails, and articles that he spent hours removing from their locked drawers this morning. Some of them crumbling from age. Some of them printed as recently as this year. My own mother contributed to this account before she died.

  It’s now after 2:00 P.M., and Rolan has been waiting at the jetty this whole time.

  “The guy who brought me here,” I say. “Can someone let him know I’m okay?” I ask.

  I volunteer you.

  “I’ll take the message myself,” he says.

  I thank him and watch him go, already sensing the slight drop in my adrenaline from that tiny act of persuasion alone. Just enough to help me focus.

  I wonder what Brother Daniel would think if he knew that Rolan is a heretic—a member of the secret, fanatical sect that left monastic life a century ago in order to infiltrate the Scions by essentially breeding themselves in. Which technically means he’s a Scion hunter with the ability to harvest my memory. As far as the Historian knows, I’m in Rolan’s custody.

  But right now, he’s the only non-Progeny I trust, other than Brother Daniel.

  Alone in the vault, I work my way through the first pile, taking photo after photo with my phone. Not all the items are in English, but it isn’t hard to make out the story of account ledgers, money transfers, news stories on deaths, accidents, and suicides. IMF rulings, a brief crash in the European market a couple years ago. Investors who profited from the crash. The rise of a media mogul. A large merger. Stock surges. A squelched investigation. All the makings of one of those conspiracy theory string boards, and just about as linear.

  I move swiftly. For all I know, we might be hundreds of kilometers from Luka, and he has less than two days to live. Don’t think about the fact that if a single one of these cases could be proven, it might take years and hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of dollars to convict. Or that I am not powerful or acquainted enough with foreign law to know where or how a person would even begin.

  The adrenaline building in my veins makes me feel like screaming, but I pause when I get to the heavy book of Bathory’s descendants. It is the only complete genealogy of its kind. How many of the
victims in this book had children whose names were never recorded?

  Eva’s face floats before my eyes. Her baby smell clings like a gentle touch. I grab the front of my shirt and lift it to my face, inhale deeply. There it is, just faintly. Proof that she is real.

  I force the thought away and take pictures of several e-mails I can’t make sense of until there’s only a small stack of printouts and clippings left. There’s a flash drive, too. I shove the items into one of the folders there, pocket the thumb drive, and let myself out, closing the vault behind me.

  I jog down the corridor, willing my phone to regain a signal. The moment the first bar appears, I dial Claudia.

  “What’s taken you so long?” she snaps, her accent heavier when she’s irked.

  So much I could say. So much I don’t dare. I settle for: “I’ve got it.”

  Silence. And then an audible exhale. “Oh my God.”

  “I need Jester.”

  “She found it,” I hear Claudia whisper. Someone grabs the phone.

  “Audra?” Jester says, strange incredulity in her French voice.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to start uploading pictures.”

  “Pictures? No! It’s not safe. You have to come here.”

  I’ve just let myself through the door at the end of the private corridor when Brother Daniel meets me in the outer hall.

  He’s visibly upset.

  “I’ll call you back,” I say and abruptly hang up.

  “I tried to send your driver away,” Daniel says. “I told him you no longer need him . . .” And then he notices the folder in my hands. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “You cannot leave—not now!”

  “I’m sorry. I have to. I’ve already been here too long.”

  “We have a safe house waiting for you on the mainland. We will arrange your safe passage tonight, after dark. Please! Eva is young, many years away from coming into the legacy. There is time.”

  “No. There isn’t.”

  I don’t tell him about Luka. That I have just over a day to make a single effort to get him back.

  Just then Rolan appears behind him.

  “We need to go. Now.”

  “You cannot be here! This is a private wing!” Daniel says to Rolan. “Please,” he says, turning to me. “There are things you do not know.”

  I hesitate. What else could there be?

  “You cannot just leave like this. As you are.”

  I know what he means is having seen and learned all that I have. With the archive’s location and contents in my memory. My getting killed by a hunter now would expose it all.

  “Audra,” Rolan says.

  I don’t know what’s happened to put that urgency in his voice, but right now I’m not going to question it.

  “Start the boat,” I say. “I’m right behind you.”

  He disappears down the hall, and I turn to Brother Daniel.

  “What things?” I ask.

  “Your powers of persuasion, of charisma . . . We were the ones who helped those before you learn to exercise their gifts,” he says, drawing me aside. “Let me help you, teach you!”

  “I’ve already . . . exercised them.”

  He shakes his head. “Yours are not like the others’,” he says, fingers biting into my arm. “They are stronger—more deadly. If you do not learn to control your powers, they will destroy you. You will lose everything you are fighting for!”

  I feel those words like ice on the back of my neck.

  But if I don’t at least try to save Luka—now—with the hope that one day we’ll see Eva again, there is nothing to fight for.

  “Tell me now,” I say, drawing him along with me toward the courtyard, and out.

  “It is more than I can tell you here!”

  “Talk fast,” I say, pulling my hat from my pocket, tugging it down low over my head.

  “The harder you try to impose your will, the worse it will be for you. The more you act out of desperation, the more it will cost you,” he says, breathing harder but keeping up with my swift clip. “Your ancestor, Erzsebet, was given to seizures. The same could happen to you. There is a physical cost. No, this way,” he says, taking me out through a side exit, toward the jetty.

  This is not news to me. Incessant nosebleeds have become a way of life—most recently in Bratislava just before Luka was taken. But as far as I know I have never suffered any seizures or debilitating brain damage.

  Well, that last might be debatable.

  My phone pings. Jester.

  Do NOT send photos. Unreliable.

  Daniel keeps talking as we move. “There is a spiritual repercussion as well, Audra. The adrenaline you burn by using your gifts, by reacting out of fear, by holding to what you love too tightly—”

  “You’re telling me not to be afraid? Not to care?” Fear of losing what I love is the sole thing that has driven me since the day I erased my memory. Unafraid is the one thing I don’t know how to be.

  He stops on the edge of the jetty, where the last of a group of perhaps fifteen tourists is boarding a ferry bound for the larger island of Krk. The private boat Rolan and I arrived in is nowhere to be seen. Rolan stands, one foot on the gangway, waiting.

  “I’m telling you that if you cannot control your mind, your gifts will destroy it. As they nearly destroyed your mother. I wish you would not go. I fear I will not see you again in this life.”

  In that moment, I feel for Daniel. I really do. And wish I could reassure him.

  But right now I can practically feel the minutes ticking down.

  “I’ll come back. I promise,” I whisper, rising up on my toes to embrace him. “Keep my daughter safe.”

  “She is safe. But as for you . . .”

  “Eva’s all that matters.”

  Daniel’s brow furrows in dismay as I release him.

  “There’s one more thing I need you to do,” I say. “Pack up the contents of that vault tonight. Send them somewhere I would never know to find them.”

  He nods as Rolan gestures impatiently from the gangway.

  “Please do not make me regret the day I let you leave like this,” he says.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  I hurry to the ferry and board, turn back toward the dock as we pull away.

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe the smartest thing I could do right now would be to flee to a safe house on my own.

  But Eva is, for the moment, safe beyond even the reaches of my vulnerable memory. And Rolan is my sole hope of keeping Luka alive.

  Brother Daniel clasps his hands, watching us go. I offer a wave, and to my surprise, Rolan does, too. No. Not a wave. He’s making the sign of the cross, his tattoo visibly displayed on his wrist.

  The double-barred heretic’s cross.

  Brother Daniel staggers on the dock, eyes wide, already shrinking in the distance.

  3

  * * *

  “What happened to our boat?” I mutter to Rolan halfway across the turquoise bay.

  “Better to leave in a group,” he whispers, doing his best to sit forward, blocking me against the gunwale as I pull a wad of toilet paper from my pocket and feign seasickness.

  Easy for him to say. He’s not the one risking an aneurysm by having to persuade the others on the ferry they haven’t seen my face on the news.

  Just another tourist. One who might barf at any moment. Look away, folks.

  But I’m grateful for the burn as it siphons off the adrenaline and my knee slows its jackhammer bounce against the wale. Five minutes ago, I was ready to jump out of the boat and swim my way to shore.

  My nose is bleeding by the time we arrive in Punat on the larger island of Krk eight minutes later.

  “We’ve got problems,” Rolan says the minute we’re back in the car. It smells like stale coffee and Turo Rudi chocolate bar wrappers.

  “What now?” I ask. I don’t kno
w how many more revelations I can take today. Especially of the problem variety.

  “They found Gregor’s body.”

  “Whose?”

  “The other hunter I killed the night we left Budapest.”

  This is how far I’ve come. That I can forget the fact that just three days ago we dumped the dead body of Rolan’s Scion partner in Budapest’s inner city.

  “So they’re onto you. That you’re helping me.”

  “The body hasn’t been identified.”

  “Yet.”

  “Yet. And there are Scions on the police force.”

  “Which means the Historian could find out any time.”

  With Luka still in custody.

  “That’s not all. I had to give them something. They’re undoubtedly tracking this car. We were in one place so long, I had to tell them you were close—very close—to finding the diary. And so I took the liberty of telling them you now demand proof of life every six hours for the next twenty-four.”

  He pulls out his phone, thumbs through to a video. Today’s proof of life, which came in just over an hour ago.

  I exhale a sigh of relief.

  Until I start the recording.

  Luka, bound in the same metal truck trailer as before. He’s gagged, but the blood has been cleaned from his face. His left cheek is purple, an eye swollen mostly shut. But I release a slow breath if only because he looks far more alive than he did two days ago.

  The minute his eyes fasten on the screen, they widen in horror and he begins to thrash in his bonds. And then I realize: I wasn’t there when the video came in. All Luka saw was Rolan, staring back at him from the other side of the camera where I was supposed to be.

  “She’s alive,” I hear Rolan say. “I’ll relay the message that you are, too.”

  Luka quiets, chest heaving.

  The video ends and I click the phone off.

  “Thank you.”

  Rolan nods.

  “So if they’re tracing this car, and we were on Košljun nearly four hours . . . They’re going to think I found something.”

  He glances sidelong at me.