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Snow fluttered gently to the ground outside the windows of Lukas Alexiou’s home. He relaxed into the chair at his desk and sipped the two fingers of bourbon he allowed himself each evening. His office was dark, deliberately so. Most of his home’s residents thought him asleep on this brisk December night.
At times, it paid to encourage others in their beliefs, however misguided.
He stared into the night at the quietly drifting snow. If only his own thoughts were as peaceful, his own life. He rubbed a single fingertip over the ache gathering behind his forehead. Marco could be such a child at times. He, of all people, should have trusted Lukas’ judgment. His brother should have loved him enough to understand why they could no longer attack the People openly.
Prudence demanded patience. Lukas possessed more than his share of each.
He sipped the bourbon, savoring its slow burn. Marco was no longer content to hide in the shadows of his elder brother’s rule. He fomented rebellion among the other families and openly sought the counsel of their uncle. Pinico would never rest until he had plunged them into an out and out war with the People.
War was not the answer here. Clinging to the hatred bred by the generations-long blood feud between his people and the Daughters’ would only bring an end to them both. Why did his closest family refuse to see this?
A sound behind him alerted him to another’s presence in the room. Lukas inched his hand under his chair to the handgun holstered beneath the seat.
“Leave that,” a familiar, emotionless voice said.
He swiveled around, set his bourbon on his desk, and switched on the small lamp placed on one of its corners. Soft light flared, illuminating a spare circle of space. A woman stepped into the light, her masked face nearly obscured by the hooded coat she wore.
He rose and bowed. “Ankana.”
The woman inclined her head in a single nod.
He curled his fingers around the edge of his desk, stilling their slight trembling. Hope rose, thick and sweet and so strong he could barely draw a breath around it. “Why have you come?”
“It is time.”
That breath left his lungs in a rush. He sank slowly into his chair and stared at her, his mind racing, his heart tumbling beneath the emotions her simple words had roused. It had been so long. He had done so many things, terrible, necessary things, and now, they had all come to fruition. “I shall leave on the morrow.”
“That is best.” She slowly drew her gloves off, one at a time. They were black leather, thin, the palms slick from years of wear. “You are not yet ready, child.”
Lukas stared at the narrow hands revealed by the gloves. Memory flashed through him, hard and fast and viciously painful, of those hands touching his forehead, forcing him to remember lives long dead. Each one ended in a brutal death, each one was him, and not, and each time, he bowed under the weight of a burden that was his alone to bear.
So much pain. So much suffering, endless centuries of it pressing against his mind, sloughing away sanity and reason.
The tremble begun in his hands spread to his arms, to the fluttering beat of his heart, overtaking him in a rapid surge of fear. He sat and clenched the arms of his chair tightly between stiff fingers and met Ankana’s cool gaze behind the impersonal serenity of her flat, wooden mask. “I accept what you willingly offer.”
She moved slowly around the end of the desk and knelt before him. “Such a good child. Fate shall be kind to you.”
He bit back the bitter laugh rising through the fear. Fate had been unkind to him from the moment of his conception to the present and seemed to linger best on what harmed him most. It would be worth it, though. Some day, everything he and Ankana had been working toward would come to pass. He would have his reward; if not the love his heart craved, then surely an end to the misery he had endured for far too long.
Ankana raised her hands and cupped his face. Her skin was cool, smooth, and somehow as comforting as a mother’s touch.
An image flashed into his mind accompanied by a ripple of discomfort. Seven women sat around a campfire, light and shadow flickering across their smiling faces. This was the way it always started, with the seven women and their shared joy.
Another image leapt into his mind, and the discomfort twisted into the first tendril of pain. A sleeping city, a strong moon shining down, a warm, desert breeze blowing across the land.
He panted through the steadily increasing agony, knowing what was coming, knowing he couldn’t stop it, and dreading it all the same.
Seven women crept forward, spears raised, expressions fierce. They slid over walls and into homes, unchaining the women bound there, shoving their spears through the men’s chests as they lay helpless in sleep.
In the city, a cry arose. Other voices joined in, raising a chorus of warning through the darkened homes. Men spilled out of their beds and onto the streets, the closest weapon they could find held aloft as if that alone would halt the justice raining down upon their heads.
Sweat broke out along Lukas’ skin. Why did she always show him this first? He knew the legend, knew what had begun that day or on one very much like it. He knew the consequences of what those women had done, and still, Ankana dragged him through it over and over again, as if the memory were not already ingrained into his mind so deeply he could never forget.
A young warrior stirred from slumber and raced outside, a sturdy, fire-hardened spear in one hand. He fought against the crowd racing away from the melee, searching for the cause of the alarm, and came upon a scene that had haunted Lukas since the moment Ankana had shared it with him.
A woman lay on the ground, her dark eyes turned toward him, her life’s blood slowly ebbing out of her through a wound in her side. The warrior dropped his spear to the bare dirt ground and held his hand over hers, pressing them both into her wound. “I’ll get help,” he murmured. A healer, someone, anyone who could staunch the flow of blood and save the woman lying there, her beautiful features contorted into a grimace. She whispered something so softly it was lost among the grunts and screams of the raging battle. He leaned closer, placing his ear next to the gentle curves of her lips, and listened intently as her broken voice recited words he had no hope of understanding.
Lukas closed his eyes. Not this. Please not this, he prayed, but the vision continued, unmindful of his plea.
A sharp pain erupted in the warrior’s side. He touched a hand there and stared disbelievingly at the crimson liquid staining his fingers. The woman’s lips ceased their movement and her eyes fixed on the sky above them. A second pain joined the first, this one higher in his chest, shoving him forcefully against the woman’s prone body. The warrior grasped her fingers in his own and recited a litany to the goddess of death as a cold blackness crept around the edges of his awareness.
Lukas squeezed his eyelids as tightly together as he could, panting through the pain filling him, made by wounds he’d never received. Please let it be over. Please let that be the only one.
That image faded and was replaced by another and another and another in a dizzying rush of time after time, captured in single moments scattered along history’s meandering paths. Death, always death, rushing up to meet Lukas with the eagerness of a child awaiting Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, the Reaper’s icy fingers flipping through the centuries as if they had taken only moments to live.
“No,” Lukas murmured, unaware of his own voice over the scenes raging through his head and the tight fist of agony squeezing the breath from his lungs.
Again and again, he witnessed the deaths of men who somehow became him. Again and again, their fear and pain etched their way into his consciousness, shoved into his mind in wave after relentless wave of sound and fury.
He gritted his teeth against it, gritted his teeth against the scream rising in his throat. His fingers clawed into the chair’s arms, bruising his skin as the past poured unceasingly over him.
“Only one remains,” a woman’s voice said, and the images ground to a halt.
A spear hung in the air, its sharpened point hovering ten feet away from Lukas’ heart. He faced it as calmly as he could, uncertain what to do in the face of this new vision.
Ankana walked slowly out of the darkness into the sphere of light surrounding him and the spear. “This is your destiny, Shadow.”
She rested a single fingertip on the butt end of the spear and pushed gently. Under the force of her touch, the spear spiraled slowly forward. Lukas’ gaze fixed on the weapon. He tried to step aside, tried to force his limbs away from the spear’s deadly trajectory. They were frozen in place, unmoving, no longer his to control. His heart leapt into a frantic beat as the spear came ever closer, moving faster and faster toward its target.
“This is the moment you were born to fulfill.”
No, not this, never this. Had he not endured a hundred deaths in precisely this manner? Had he not earned a better death somewhere along the way, in the years of sacrifice since his thirteenth birthday, in the manner in which he had halted the war between himself and the People?
The spear leapt forward and thudded into his chest, slicing cleanly through flesh and bone and the fragile tissue of his heart. A raw scream burst from Lukas’ throat, and in the vision, his life bled slowly away, taken by the hand that had promised to save him.
