Chapter 7

INTERMISSIO: THE HYAENA

Six months earlier

The others called her the Hyaena, but the title fit poorly: In the precincts of the Templo, she never laughed.

The patient who lay before her in the hospital bed knew the name bothered her—he called her daughter instead.

She called him the Praenuntius. The Harbinger. She’d never asked whether he preferred his real name. It didn’t matter if he did: She wasn’t allowed to use it. And the Hyaena always followed the rules.

The patient stared up at her with eyes the color of new-turned soil. Eyes that had long ago forgotten how to cry.

“Time for your test,” the Hyaena told him, moving around the windowless chamber with practiced efficiency.

He didn’t respond. It wouldn’t have done him any good.

She powered up the computer and folded the thin blanket back from the bottom of the bed. His feet were overlarge and tangled in an old man’s knobbly veins, but the soles were smooth as a baby’s. She tightened the straps around his ankles, then winched the restraints around his wrists. She bent down to retrieve a final strap that dragged off the side of the bed—then froze at the feel of his fingertips brushing against her hair.

She remained crouched beneath his touch, her breath shallow. Will he kill me? she wondered, not for the first time. Will he tear free of his bonds and rip my head from my body? But his fingers, constrained by the bindings around his wrists, only stirred the errant wisps of her hair.

She took a careful step out of reach, then stood swiftly, hands on hips. “That’s not allowed.”

His mouth opened with a gummy pop, and he spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Your hair feels like the antennae of butterflies.”

On the way to her monthly appointment with the patient, she’d noticed the first butterfly of summer fluttering above a rosebush on Fifth Avenue. She’d had no time to appreciate its beauty, much less imagine the touch of its antennae on her palm, but she raised an unconscious hand to her hair, wondering if the Praenuntius was right. At her gesture, the patient’s chapped lips pulled back from yellowed teeth. It took her a moment to recognize the unfamiliar expression as a smile.

“How do you remember what butterflies feel like?” she asked, for surely he hadn’t been near one for a very long time.

“Time passes strangely for me. I’ve forgotten much, yet some things I remember still.” His eyes fluttered closed as if to better conjure the memory. “I lay against stone. I had a single visitor. She looked like a moth, pale gray and plain. But when she lifted into the air, she danced like a bright copper coin.” His eyes snapped open. “You remind me of that butterfly, daughter.”

In that moment, the Hyaena remembered her real father. He, too, had lain in a hospital bed for longer than anyone could endure. Poked and prodded by those who believed they did what was best, but who only prolonged his agony. Even at the end, her father had seen something in her that no other man had—something bright and precious and strong. She’d tried to be worthy, tried to bring him solace in the end. She had no such words of comfort for the Praenuntius. What does one say to an old man who should know better than to love you?

The Hyaena gathered her instruments from the cabinet and arranged them neatly on a metal rolling tray, then picked up one of the digital stopwatches. Next, she adjusted her surveillance earpiece so it nestled more firmly against her skull; her superiors rarely spoke during the tests, but it was her duty to be prepared.

The patient looked away from her preparations and stared straight up at the bare white ceiling. His pupils contracted in the cold glare of the fluorescent bulb. “I wish I could see the sun again,” he said.

Then, at the beep of the stopwatch, his entire body tensed.

She plunged a scalpel into his heart.

His body seized, each limb straining against the straps that bit into his flesh. His head flew backward, exposing the loose, wrinkled skin of his neck. She waited patiently until sixty seconds had passed, then yanked the scalpel free of his rib cage. Blood pulsed across his chest in a red, rhythmic tide. It pooled in the hollow of his belly, then streamed onto the rubber sheets. He gasped. His gnarled hands clutched into fists. Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and the tide ceased to flow. He lay motionless.

The Hyaena checked for his pulse and felt nothing but inert flesh. She clicked off one stopwatch and started another before placing both back on her tray. She reached for the sponges and bucket.

The first twenty times she’d killed the Praenuntius, she’d vomited in the pail, yellow bile swirling with bloody water. Now she felt no more than a mild twinge of pity. She wiped the blood from his body, revealing the thin lines of white, pink, and red that covered his chest like cuneiform. The wound from last month’s test remained crusted with brown. The one from the month before was livid red. Infected perhaps. She made a note of it on the computer.

In her life, the Hyaena had seen suffering of all kinds. Children abandoned, men maimed, women defiled, whole neighborhoods drowning in sorrow. But nothing like the agony this man suffered at her hands. Slow torture without end, trapped in a room with no hope of release. Yet she had no choice. This was the role she’d been assigned.

She finished mopping the sheets, squeezed a bloody waterfall into the bucket, then washed her hands in the utility sink. She picked up the stopwatch. Five minutes since death. Her thumb hovered over the button. Any second now …

But nothing happened. The Praenuntius still hadn’t breathed. His skin, always pale from his centuries without sun, had taken on a grayish cast. Worse than she’d ever seen it. For the first time in years, she started to worry.

Then, as if a silent windstorm had ripped through the room, everything before her eyes suddenly blurred. She sat back heavily on her stool, pressing a palm against the sudden emptiness in her chest and wondering if she was having a heart attack. It felt as if a great hand had reached into her gut and hollowed her out, yet somehow, bizarrely, she couldn’t find the will to panic.

She saw her reflection in the polished tray before her. Her face calm, detached. Bored, almost. She watched the image dispassionately as all color fled her cheeks. As her veins turned cold and her limbs refused to move. This is what it feels like to have my soul removed, she decided. She looked at the Praenuntius. Have I truly killed him this time? Has his death caused this?

Then the sensation of apathy fled, the world stopped spinning, and her body was her own again. She gasped aloud with the sudden return to feeling. She had no time to wonder what had happened—a voice in her earpiece rasped to life, demanded attention: “Do not let him go.” She recognized the voice instantly. Old and feeble, almost as weak as the Praenuntius’s, yet the words echoed in her brain like those of her own conscience. He was another father to her. Not the man who’d given her life and died years before, nor the one who now lay dead at her hand, but the Pater Patrum, the Father of Fathers.

She leaped into action, tossing down the stopwatch and grabbing the suture needle from her tray. She’d never done this before, but pressure didn’t scare her, it steadied her. After she’d closed the wound and attached the IV for the blood transfusion, she removed the defibrillator paddles mounted on the wall. She spun the charging dial, one eye on the motionless patient. Somehow, she still expected him to take a sudden, harsh breath as he had a hundred—a thousand—times before without any help from her.

But his face was the color of silt. His chest as still as marble.

She pressed one paddle against the sunken flesh of his left breast and the other on the laddered rungs of his right rib cage. His entire body jerked with the electric shock, then flopped back with a thud.

Wait for another charge. Repeat. The voice in her ear did not speak again. It didn’t have to. But she could hear the Pater’s breathing. Heavy. Panicked.

One more time. Charge. Shock. Pray. Wait.

Charge. Shock. Pray.

Breath.

The Praenuntius coughed back into the world, his chest heaving with effort. When the coughing subsided, the sobs began.

She’d never seen him weep.

“Good work, Hyaena,” said the Pater in her ear. Rare praise to be treasured, but she barely heard it.

She couldn’t help herself: She broke the rules and released the straps around the patient’s wrists so he might hide his tears beneath his fingers.

Another woman might have thought he wept because after a thousand years of trying, his captors had finally killed him.

She knew he wept because they hadn’t.

“Why?” he gasped between his sobs. “I’m the Praenuntius. The Harbinger. Surely now I’ve delivered my final message. Why not let me die?”

Her earpiece hissed. “There is much we learned from his death,” the Pater said in her skull. “There is even more we can learn from his life.” She started to say as much to the Praenuntius, but when he lifted his hands from his face and stared at her with red-rimmed eyes, her words drained away. She’d never seen such desperation.

“I will give you what you need.” His voice was rough with tears. “But only if you promise to kill me again. And leave me dead.”

Before she could respond, the Pater spoke. “I will come to him myself. Leave now, Hyaena.” The hum in her earpiece fell abruptly silent. The man who ruled her life didn’t wait to see if she obeyed his order. He simply knew she would.

“What do you mean … you’ll give me what I need?” she asked the patient.

The Praenuntius raised a hand toward her. She took a quick breath—but didn’t pull away. He placed his palm against her cheek. It was warmer than she’d imagined it.

“Promise me first.” His forefinger rested on her temple, his thumb on her jaw. “Promise to let me die.”

It was not her place to do so. She was only the Hyaena. But this man had called her daughter.

She let him draw her closer until their foreheads met. His eyes were pools of liquid darkness. She heard the Pater’s footsteps in the hall.

“I promise,” she whispered.

His smile quavered, infinite relief warring with infinite regret. “Then tell your Pater,” he said, releasing her, “that my death will be only the first of many.”

In the monitoring room, the Hyaena hit Pause on the video, the Praenuntius’s words still echoing in her brain. The images from the hospital bed were nearly six months old now—six months she and the rest of the Host had spent preparing and training for the most important mission in the history of the world.

They’d taken the first step a week ago, when, for the first time since the Praenuntius had come into their power centuries before, they’d captured another Deathless One—she wouldn’t call Hades a god, for he was only a Pretender. He’d fought with the strength of ten men until they’d hauled him aboveground. Then they’d watched as he aged forty years in forty seconds. His skin grew slack, his muscles atrophied, his black hair streaked with gray. No one could explain why.

When they’d brought him to the bull’s back a few days later, she’d turned away at the last minute. Even then, she couldn’t escape the carnage—the sacrificial flames turned the new-fallen snow the color of blood. When she looked back, the man was Deathless no longer.

The door to the monitoring room swung open. She came to attention as the Heliodromus Primus entered, his features sharp as an axe. He wore a well-tailored dark suit today, not his ceremonial robes. Without his customary mask, his expression was easy to read. Arrogance, disdain, suspicion. He worries that my success with the Praenuntius will raise me in the Pater’s regard and threaten his own standing, the Hyaena knew. As the second-in-command, the Heliodromus served as the Pater’s enforcer, always testing the Host’s other initiates to make sure of their loyalty. Recently, he’d applied special scrutiny to the Hyaena.

He looked over her shoulder at the frozen image on the monitor. “You’re watching that video again,” he said coldly. “Are you having second thoughts?”

“No,” she snapped, swallowing a more pointed rebuttal that she knew would only fan his ire. “I am proud of how far we’ve come.”

“Yet you care for the Praenuntius, and he for you. Don’t try to deny it—I’ve seen the video, too.”

She followed his gaze to one of the monitors, where a live image of the windowless room showed the old man asleep, his chest moving with irregular breaths, his body now a wasted shell, his skin chalky white. He looked more skeleton than man.

As he watched the Praenuntius on the screen, the Heliodromus’s lips twitched—the closest he ever came to mirth—then he spared a glance for the Hyaena. “You want to keep your promise to him. You don’t like the way we use him, do you?”

Because I’m not a sadist, you sick fuck, she thought, no matter how hard you try to make me one. But she said only, “We are all instruments in the Pater’s hands, our only purpose to craft a better world.” That means you too, Heliodromus, despite your delusions of grandeur.

He nodded, and put his hands on his hips, casually moving aside the hem of his suit jacket. She knew the move was deliberate; he wanted her to see the curve of the long leather whip he wore looped over his shoulder. The sign of his rank. A silent threat. She’d seen the stripes it could draw upon an initiate’s back.

“We are instruments indeed.” His fingers strayed to the whip’s narrow tip, rolling it like rosary beads. The Hyaena wondered what she would do if he actually drew the whip and raised it against her. Would she submit as she was sworn to do? Or grab that nasty little tip and loop it back over his neck?

The Heliodromus lowered his chin, staring at her as if he knew the treasonous thoughts in her mind. “The battle has begun,” he warned her. “The true battle.”

She knew he spoke not of the silent war they waged for the Pater’s favor, but of the greater conflict they’d both dedicated their lives to. The Hyaena’s anger drained away. He is right to remind me.

She didn’t try to stop him as he stepped to the computer console. “The arsenal is being assembled, even as we speak,” he said as he deleted the video file from the hard drive.

“Yes, Heliodromus,” she said, bowing her head.

“The Pater demands you look forward, Hyaena, not back.” His words were as sharp as his whip and just as effective. He no longer toyed with her, and she respected him more for his bluntness.

With his hand on the door, he stopped to glance once more at the live feed from the old man’s room. “The Praenuntius and his kind are obsolete.” His eyes flicked toward her. A final warning. “See that you don’t become the same.”