Brandon cracked open another can of beer and watched images flash across the television screen in the apartment above Valien’s garage. Had he felt so inclined, he could have used the remote control to turn on closed captioning so he could follow the storyline of the soap opera in progress. He could have even tried reading the actors’ lips, although on TV, with its quick cuts, multiple angles and voice-overs, this was usually impossible. But he didn’t really feel too inclined. In fact, even though his gaze was directed toward the TV, his mind was a million miles away…or, to be more specific, a little more than a decade in the past.
He’d first seen Aaron, the man from his dream, when he’d been eleven years old. The occasion had been when Lamar Davenant, the patriarch of the Davenant clan, had turned five hundred years old, and his family had hosted a lavish affair at their 22,000-square-foot mansion. Brandon’s twin sister, Tessa, had lived in that sinister place for three years before following him in his escape from Kentucky. However, Brandon had only been past its daunting threshold to commemorate Lamar’s half-millennial survival. That had been more than plenty.
“I don’t understand why the children couldn’t stay behind,” Brandon’s mother, Vanessa, had fretted. They had all ridden together in a stretch limousine from the Noble great house to the party: Vanessa and Sebastian, Brandon’s father, along with the twins, older brother Caine and younger sister Emily. Their youngest sibling, Daniel, had not yet been born.
Jackson had come to live on the farm at this point, and Brandon had learned to lip-read with a fair amount of proficiency. As he sat between his father and Tessa on the jostling car ride, he’d been looking directly at his mother, and was thus able to understand her perfectly as she spoke.
Vanessa had been dressed exquisitely; they all had—Brandon and Caine in matching miniature versions of Sebastian’s finely tailored Armani suit, Tessa and Emily wearing modified dresses in pale champagne shades designed to match their mother’s Alexander McQueen evening gown.
“Because Lamar Davenant is a living legend—at least in his own mind,” Sebastian had replied with a wink in Brandon’s direction, the better for the boy to read his lips. “And he doesn’t want any of us, young or old, to forget it.”
Sebastian had been trying to make Vanessa smile, but Brandon had been able to sense his father’s own apprehension about the evening’s festivities. They were both nervous about visiting the Davenants; one needn’t have had telepathy to be aware of the anxiety Brandon’s parents all but radiated in waves. Vanessa sat ramrod straight in her seat, her posture rigid and tense, her fingers toying restlessly with the lap of her silky dress, while on more than one occasion along the limousine ride, Brandon’s father had reached out, draping his hand atop hers, offering his wife clumsy but reassuring smiles.
They had both been right to be apprehensive. In essence, they had all been entering into enemy territory. The Brethren clans all lived together, functioning as a communal society, but it was no secret that they did not always agree with one another in matters affecting or influencing that society’s control. Even though the Nobles had held dominance for the last few centuries, prior to that, governance had long belonged to the Davenants—longer than anyone could probably estimate, and a hostile rivalry existed between the two clans for that reason alone.
The Davenants had never been able to reclaim their previous authority, because they had suffered numerous, tragic losses of male heirs—the deciding factors of clan dominance. An unfortunate series of circumstances following the Brethren’s transplantation from rural France to America had eventually culminated in the Davenants yielding that power to Augustus, Brandon’s grandfather, who had held fierce claim to it ever since. As a grown man, Brandon was only now beginning to learn about those circumstances, but as a child, he’d heard plenty of rumors—like some sort of blight had begun to strike the Brethren clans, and the Davenants in particular, killing their children in droves, many shortly after birth. Many more began to die well into adulthood from equally mysterious, ominous causes. Bad blood, it was called, and the Davenant clan in particular was said to be cursed with it…all save Lamar. And the secret of his life’s longevity was as enigmatic—and laden with sinister rumors—as that of the brevity of his kinsfolk.
“I’ve heard he drinks the blood of the Abomination,” Caine had once said. Caine had loved to regale his younger siblings with horrific, often gory tales—that is, when he wasn’t pummeling, pounding, or otherwise tormenting them. According to Caine, the Abomination had been the “first Brethren,” the original creature from which their species had come; it had been captured in France, brought with them to America, and held prisoner ever since in the Beneath, a network of catacombs and tunnels interlacing the farmlands the clans owned.
Brandon now knew that this legend had been born from tragic circumstances; Naima Morin, the half-human daughter of the exiled Morin clan, had been banished to the Beneath in the early 1800s. Labeled an “abomination” because of her human heritage, Naima had been left to slowly starve to death in the catacombs by none other than Lamar Davenant. Clearly unbeknownst to Lamar, she’d escaped shortly thereafter, and had lived in hiding with her clan in California ever since.
As a boy, Brandon had believed his brother’s stories about the Abomination, and had been appropriately horrified by his description of Lamar’s feeding from it in order to stay alive. “His family goes hunting for it in the Beneath,” Caine had explained. “They corner it, trap it, drain it nearly dry, then release it so it can recover. Then they deliver the blood to Lamar. I’ve heard he drinks a glass of it each night with his dinner—just like wine.”
Like his parents, Brandon had felt nervous on the night of Lamar’s five hundredth birthday party. Unlike Sebastian and Vanessa, however, Brandon’s feelings of uneasiness had nothing to do with Brethren clan politics—which he, as a child, had little to no understanding of at that point. Instead, he felt anxious simply at the prospect of being someplace unfamiliar, surrounded by people who were virtual strangers to him—and who, he felt certain, must have wished he was dead.
It was no secret that Brandon’s disabilities made him different from any of the other Brethren. His throat had been slashed, his ability to hear lost as the result of an attack when he’d been very young—too young for his inherent healing abilities to have fully developed. The Brethren had always prided themselves as species as being superior to humans; their ability to heal had always distinguished them, allowing them a level of physical and physiological perfection no human could ever attain. Deaf and mute, Brandon was seen as damaged—worse, as defective, as if his injuries and lack of metabolic maturity had been of his own doing.
As a result, Brandon suffered profound ostracism from his fellow Brethren. There had been no attempts to disguise this exclusion and prejudice, and even his own family had shared in it. He was a frequent target of bullying by Caine and some of his older cousins. With the exception of his father and, occasionally, his mother, Brethren adults tended to overlook him, or worse—look through him, as if he wasn’t even there, something to be disregarded, like a throw rug or piece of furniture. The Elders had ordered that he communicated solely through notes written in the gilded notebook he wore on a chain around his neck, instead of with telepathy or American Sign Language, which he’d learned through Jackson. That the Elders had conceded to allow Jackson as Brandon’s exclusive tutor at all was astonishing.
Jackson was deaf, like Brandon—the first person Brandon had ever met who was disabled as he was. Unlike Brandon, however, Jackson had not let his deafness isolate him from the world. Through him, Brandon had begun to understand that he, too, could have a productive, rewarding life—one in which his handicaps did not define him—and because of Jackson, Brandon had begun to dream of something better for himself, a life beyond the Brethren farms…a life in which he was not discounted.
Brandon wished his father had let him spend the night with Jackson instead of trussing him up in the uncomfortable, itchy suit and tie and forcing him to attend the Davenant party. Even if Jackson had decided they’d spend the time working on spelling words or reading—even if he’d wanted to do math all night long—it would have been better by miles than enduring the cool scrutiny of other Brethren adults, the not-so-guarded whispers from the other Brethren children, and the stares. Always the stares.
Upon their arrival at the Davenant great house, they had been received by Lamar’s grandson, Martin, and a tall, redheaded Brethren woman introduced as Monica, his wife. Tessa was to be Martin’s bride upon her eighteenth birthday; a seeming eternity away at that naïve and tender moment.
“There’s your husband,” Caine had teased Tessa in a sing-song kind of hush, digging his elbow into her side. Brandon had watched his lips move and discerned the words; likewise, he’d seen his twin sister scowl and hiss in reply.
“He is not!”
“Not yet anyway,” Caine persisted, and this time when he’d elbowed her, Tessa had jammed her elbow right back at him.
“He’s old and ugly and there’s no way the Grandfather or Grandmother Eleanor would ever make me marry him,” she seethed.
Even at that young an age, Brandon could have told her that hope had been futile. Tessa’s fate had been decided after lengthy and thorough consideration by their grandfather, Augustus, and the other clan Elders—as had all of their impending marriages, including Brandon’s own. Not even being the dominant Elder gave Augustus the authority or ability to go against the ancient rituals for determining betrothals.
Martin and Monica had exchanged greetings with Sebastian and Vanessa in cool, curt fashion while another pair of Davenant wives—these dressed more drably than Monica, who wore a strapless, floor-length evening gown encrusted with sea-foam-green sequins—took their overcoats.
“The children…” Monica said with a pointed, if not somewhat contemptuous glance at Tessa, “…will go with Sarah to the nursery.”
Brandon felt a sudden swell of alarm at this. He’d convinced himself that things would be alright, that no one would bother him as long as he was with his father. No matter what anyone thought of him, they minded their manners whenever Sebastian was nearby—even Caine kept his fists and feet to himself and his spittle in his mouth where it belonged. He found himself suddenly clutching Sebastian by the hand, shying reflexively behind him.
Sebastian had managed to dislodge him after a moment, and leaned down to look Brandon in the eye. “I want you to stay close to Tessa,” he said, pressing his palm to the boy’s cheek. “She’ll play with you, won’t you, Tessa?”
“Of course,” Tessa replied brightly, and she probably had every good intention of doing exactly this. But once inside the nursery, with the sixty or so assembled children from other clans spread out in a broad swath, diverging onto the shelves of games, toys and storybooks, temptation had proven too strong.
She stuck closely to her twin for awhile, but he caught her eying another group of girls her age longingly as they pretended to be ballerinas twirling across the floor. When he tapped her on the shoulder to draw her gaze, then flapped his hand in a shooing gesture—go on, he was saying—she managed to look appropriately sheepish and rebuked.
“Are you sure?” she asked, and he shrugged, trying to pretend like it didn’t matter, the sideways glances he’d already caught other children shooting at him, or the way the other boys had deliberately given him a wide berth, lest he take a mind to try and wander toward them, wanting to play.
“Thanks, Brandon!” Tessa exclaimed, scrambling to her feet, pausing long enough to give him a quick hug and a fleeting kiss on the cheek before darting off. Almost immediately, she and the other girls fell together in a comfortable swarm, their eyes wide, their lips flapping with excited chatter as they talked about plies and grand jetés and other French terms for ballet maneuvers Brandon neither recognized nor understood.
Abandoned, Brandon found a quiet corner to himself, and sat cross-legged on the floor, watching as children darted past him, running this way and that. Although he could feel the floorboards beneath him thrumming with the heavy patter of their nonstop footfalls, he couldn’t hear the thunderous din. While he could see their mouths open wide in laughter, or moving in delighted conversations, he couldn’t hear a sound. He saw Sarah Davenant, the matronly young wife who had delivered them to the nursery, across the room from him, her gaze fixed intently in his direction. She stood next to another drably clad Davenant bride, and it was only his ability to lip-read that allowed him to eavesdrop on their murmured exchange.
“…should have rightly died that night, they said,” Sarah was saying.
“He was too young to have healed like he did as fast as he did,” the other said, and Sarah nodded her head, her expression solemn.
“It’s not natural,” she remarked, and Brandon cut his eyes away, his shoulders hunching, shame blazing in his cheeks.
As a child, Brandon hadn’t understood how he had survived his childhood attack. But as a twenty-two year old man, Brandon had come to learn the truth. Augustus had broken Brethren law forbidding them to feed from one another, and had given his blood to heal Brandon. Because this act endowed Brethren with considerably greater telepathic abilities than those who fed solely from humans, Augustus had spent the next ten years trying to keep Brandon’s burgeoning psychic abilities a secret from both the Elders and himself. This had proven to be the source of a great deal of tension between them—sometimes violent tension. But if Augustus’s secret had been revealed, it would have cost him not only controlling dominance over the clans, but would have cost him and Brandon their lives
Caine and his bullying friends had taken up residence just outside the nursery’s bathroom. Here, they had formed an intimidating blockade, and for every child who tried to pass, they would muscle in and prevent them.
“Pay the toll to the troll,” Caine would demand, usually offering the child a rough shove backwards, a cuff across the cap of their head, or a punch in the shoulder. Payment would then consist of the poor kid getting down on his or her hands and knees to polish the shoes of Caine and his friends with their shirt sleeves, letting each of them take turns socking him in the arm, or going on a scavenger hunt for the most improbable sort of thing Caine could imagine.
Like a book without pictures in it, Brandon thought with an inward snicker. He spent several hours trying his best to ignore the insistent need in his own bladder, hoping against hope that his father and Vanessa would arrive to take them home, until at last, that need had grown urgent.
There was no hope of getting past Caine. He’d seen the so-called “pay the troll” game before, and it had always ended badly for him. And usually with him wetting his pants if he refused to give in to Caine’s demands. He had even once forced Brandon to lick all of his friends’ shoes—more than twenty in all—until the sick taste of polish had made him retch.
Brandon’s only recourse was to rely on the same Davenant women he’d seen talking about him earlier in the evening. When he approached them, timid and hesitant, and offered his hand-written plea to the dour-faced Sarah, she had exchanged pointed glances with the other woman as if to reiterate how unnatural Brandon was. With a put-upon sigh that suggested she bore undue burdens, Sarah rattled off directions to an alternate bathroom to him. However, she spoke so quickly, her thin lips keeping close together as though she spoke through gritted teeth, he hadn’t been able to distinguish much more than the words “left,” “hallway,” and “fourth.”
“And no dawdling,” she added, her brows narrowing in stern emphasis. Brandon nodded meekly, keeping his shoulders hunched as he scurried out the nursery door.
The interior of the Davenant mansion was as imposing and austere as the outside. The floors had been lined with blood-colored runners, while the dark-stained, wood-paneled walls seemed too close together, the corridors too narrow and claustrophobic, as if the house meant to swallow you whole. Dismal landscapes and portraits of grim-faced ancestors hung in gilded frames, and all of the doors along the intertwining passages had been closed. One hallway looked pretty much identical to another as a result, and although Brandon tried hard to follow Sarah’s hasty instructions, he couldn’t find the bathroom.
Where am I? he wondered with a growing sense of panic as he opened the fifth or sixth in a series of doors that proved to be to the wrong room. He knew if he didn’t hurry and return to the nursery, he’d be fussed at for “dawdling.” Whatever that meant. But if he didn’t find a toilet in a hurry, he’d wind up wetting his pants. Then word would undoubtedly get back to Sebastian, and embarrass him—worse than this, it would embarrass Augustus. And then he would really be in trouble.
He turned in a bewildered circle in the middle of a seemingly endless corridor, realizing to his mounting dismay that not only could he not find a bathroom, but now he had no idea how to get back to the nursery. He hadn’t passed by another living soul in his trek, or seen a room that wasn’t shadow-draped and unoccupied along the way, either, so there was no one he could ask, no adult he could turn to for help.
Hurrying now, nearly running, he began throwing open doors all along the hall. He ducked into empty bedrooms, hoping in vain to find an adjoining restroom. He struggled not to burst into frustrated, anxious tears, even though he could feel them clogging up his throat and stinging in his eyes, threatening at any moment to obscure his vision and slip past his lashes.
And then he threw open a door and froze in the threshold, eyes widening in sudden surprise. His tears were momentarily forgotten, as was his bladder, and he uttered a soft, wonder-struck sigh.
Books. Look at all of the books.
The room was filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, each stocked to overflowing capacity with leather-bound tomes. Brandon had always loved to read; it was a passion he’d thought lost to him when he’d lost his ability to hear, and thus to receive tutelage at the great house with his siblings and kin. But Jackson had been teaching him, and Brandon had quickly come back to the appropriate reading level for his age—and well beyond—thanks to his tutor.
Look at them all, he thought again, venturing timidly into the library. He could smell the books, a thick and heady mix of leather and aging paper. In one corner of the room, a trio of tall, thin windows stood, with a solitary lamp on a mahogany table in front of them the only source of dim, golden light in the room. In another corner, he saw a large globe on a wooden stand, and in another, a full suit of armor.
His grandfather, Augustus, had a library at their own great house, but Brandon hadn’t been allowed to enter without an adult present, like his father. Jackson had a makeshift library in the guesthouse he called home, a spare bedroom he’d lined with shelves. Brandon was allowed to visit anytime he wished, and to borrow as many books as he’d liked; Jackson kept all of the shelves stocked especially with Brandon in mind, mostly works of fiction, or books about science, astronomy, geography, and other topics Brandon enjoyed.
If the Davenant library reflected the reading preferences of those who used it most, Brandon quickly realized they had pretty boring tastes. He perused the shelves, his nose wrinkling at titles such as European Political Thought: 1660-1700, The Paradox of American Power and The True Law of Free Monarchies.
Make that really boring taste, he thought. And then he’d spied a solitary row with titles he recognized; a small collection of nearly a dozen books, tucked away on a bottom shelf as if forgotten or unused.
Tarzan of the Apes. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And Brandon’s all-time favorite: Treasure Island.
With a gasp of delight, he squatted and reached for this last, pulling the book from the shelf, and blowing the thin layer of dust off the top of it. Hands trembling with anticipation, he turned back the cover, and found a neatly penned inscription inside: To Az – Much love, Julianne.
He blinked in surprise. His grandmother Julianne, Augustus’s second wife, had read to him from Treasure Island when he’d been very young. She’d never been able to have children, but had doted on Brandon and his siblings as if they were her own, reading the well-familiar tale of buccaneers and buried gold, of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, to him over and over until the cover had fallen off and the binding had worn thin. She’d surprised him with a new copy of the book for Christmas the previous year, inscribed with an eerily similar message: To Brandon – Much love, Julianne.
He didn’t know who “Az” was. He’d never heard of that name, not among the Davenants, or any of the clans, for that matter. But before he could puzzle over it for too long, he felt a peculiar sensation inside his mind, the sort of tingling, electrical charge that only occurred when another Brethren would draw near. As he did, his alarm—only just forgotten—returned in full.
Shit! Shoving the copy of Treasure Island back into its place, Brandon scrambled to his feet. Whirling about, he scampered toward the nearest possible sanctuary—beneath an antique writing desk tucked in a nearby window nook.
Pressed against the wall, wide-eyed with fright, he watched as the library door flew open, swinging wide and banging into the far wall, and a man strode briskly across the threshold.
He was tall, with dark brown hair swept back from his face, and was dressed in a smartly tailored tuxedo. His glossy black shoes fell heavily enough against the floor for Brandon to feel the vibrations beneath his hands and knees. He took no notice of Brandon cowering beneath the table across the room from him; instead, he pivoted in mid-stride, caught the door in his hand and swung it sharply closed behind him.
At any moment, the man would turn around and see him, of that Brandon felt certain. The room was not large, and despite the quantity of books, surely there wasn’t enough there to distract him.
Shit!
He was surprised when the man turned around and, taking seemingly no notice of the boy, walked briskly across the room. Through a mirror hanging on the wall, Brandon could see his reflection as he stood facing a long row of bookshelves. The man reached for the fourth shelf, a book nearly at his eye level, but instead of pulling it all of the way out to peruse or read, he canted it outward slightly, tipping it at an angle.
Immediately, there was a strange, mechanical thrumming in the floor, emanating from the wall. The man stepped back, and through the mirror, Brandon watched as something amazing happened. Years later, when he saw the film version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—and feeling an odd affinity, a sort of kinship with the lonely boy who had lived in the cupboard beneath the stairs—Brandon would be reminded of that moment in the library during the scene in which Harry enters Diagon Alley for the first time. In the movie, the bricks in the wall marking the magical entryway had moved of their own accord, sliding in and out, turning and rearranging to reveal a hidden entrance. In the Davenant library, the books had done very much the same, seeming to come alive along the shelves, and like the tumblers in an enormous lock, jutting outward or retracting inward randomly. After a moment, the bookshelf swung away from the wall, revealing an opening behind it.
It’s a secret passage, Brandon realized as the man stepped through this opening, disappearing behind the bookshelf. After waiting a few breathless moments to be sure he was gone, he crept out from his hiding place.
Now what? he thought.
He knew what Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island would choose.
Holding his breath warily, Brandon approached the bookshelf doorway. When he peeked inside, he saw a long, narrow opening lined with exposed timbers and beams, plaster panels, pipes and stone that ran behind the wall, extending beyond the library. Of the man in the tuxedo, there was no sign; clearly, he’d taken the passage straight ahead, then ducked around a corner and out of sight. The way was lit with intermittently affixed light bulbs, with low wattages that barely provided more than a dim, orange glow.
Moving quickly and quietly, Brandon stole along the passageway. When he rounded the corner, it abruptly dead-ended, much to his surprise. But rather than the backside of another interior wall, or a hidden exit like the bookshelf in the library, Brandon found the corridor stopped at a set of brushed steel doors—an elevator.
Wow, he thought, dumbfounded. He’d seen elevators before; there were dumbwaiters throughout the Noble great house used to transport laundry, dishes and other items from one story in the expansive home to another. Several service elevators, with heavy gates and cargo doors, were used for hauling larger loads, like bed linens and cleaning equipment. Even though these were all strategically placed so as to be discreetly hidden from common view, they weren’t hidden behind walls like this one.
I wonder where it goes.
Brandon reached out, but his finger hesitated before touching the smooth plastic button with the downturned arrowhead etched on it. Wherever it went, it was obviously someplace secret—somewhere that someone in the Davenant family had clearly meant to keep hidden.
But why? Again, he thought of Treasure Island, of Jim stealing out in the dead of night to cut the Hispanola’s mooring lines, setting the ship adrift so the pirates couldn’t use it. Jim Hawkins wouldn’t have been afraid to see what was on the other end of that secret elevator.
And I won’t be, either, Brandon thought, pushing the button, watching it light up, a dim orange glow beneath his fingertip.
He shied back when the dull metal doors slid apart. Inside, he saw an empty cab with smooth, featureless metal walls, and recessed fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Tentatively, Brandon crept forward, stepping across the threshold with his breath bated. There were only two buttons on the console beside the door. Neither were labeled. When Brandon pressed the first one, it didn’t light up, and he assumed it was for the level he was currently on. When he pressed the other, it came aglow at his touch, and the elevator doors slid closed. He felt a gentle lurch beneath him, thrumming through the floor first, then the walls, and then the elevator began to descend.
He had no idea how long it took to travel all of the way down. To him, it felt like hours, and the entire time, he could feel the frightened pounding of his heart through the front of his shirt. He pressed himself into the far corner of the cab on instinct, as if he had hope to hide here should the doors open to reveal the mysterious man in the fine tuxedo, or someone—something worse—on the other side. He didn’t remember breathing, not more than quick, hiccupping huffs, at least not until he felt another slight tremor shiver through the elevator car as it came to a stop.
All of the other Brethren clan homes had been built in the Châteauesque architectural style, all gilded and sprawling, like the manor homes in which their elders and ancestors—like Augustus and Lamar himself—had once lived in their native France. By contrast, Lamar had commanded that a towering, Gothic-style home be erected for his clan. Stately and imposing, wrought from slate-grey stones and graced with none of the Renaissance-inspired accoutrements or accents of the other clan houses, the Davenants’s mansion had always loomed like a simmering thunderhead against the crest of a rolling field of Bluegrass, more reminiscent of a prison than a home.
However, on the other side of those elevator doors, Brandon found nothing resembling the dark and somehow ominous design or décor of the mansion upstairs. Instead, he was greeted by another hallway; this one long, narrow, and nearly industrial in appearance, with a smooth, featureless concrete floor and walls painted a pale, institutional shade of grey. Bright fluorescent panels overhead cast stark, crisp light.
Brandon stepped off the elevator, and felt a soft breeze as the steel doors slid shut behind him. The air in the hallway felt cold and heavy to him, and he shivered.
What is this place?
He couldn’t hear his own footsteps, but crept forward carefully nonetheless. He saw doors along the cinderblock walls, two on each side, with another facing him at the very end of the corridor. None appeared to be marked, and all—at least to his experimental tries as he tiptoed past—appeared locked. When he reached the end of the hall, he tried the last door. The chrome knob turned beneath his hand, to his surprise, and he felt the catch release as it opened. He didn’t dare ease it open more than an inch or so, just enough for him to risk a peek beyond the threshold. He couldn’t see much, though, just more bright lights and more pale-colored wall. Taking a deep breath, mustering his courage—like Jim in Treasure Island again—he pushed the door open farther and slipped inside.
The first thing he realized was he’d found the man in the tuxedo. He stood with his back to the door, and thus to Brandon, no more than twenty feet away from him. And he wasn’t alone—a woman had apparently been waiting for him inside the room. With a sharp gasp, Brandon shrank back, pressing himself against the wall and looking wildly about for a place to hide. There wasn’t much to choose from; the chamber appeared to be some sort of medical examination room. He saw IV poles, cabinets, countertops and some portable lights. The man and woman stood near a metal gurney; another stretcher had been parked length-wise along a nearby wall, and he scrambled for this now, ducking beneath its meager excuse for shelter.
Please don’t let her see me, he thought in bright, vivid panic. Because if they did, one of them, or both, would likely drag him by the scruff back to the nursery, and worse—tell Sebastian what he’d been up to. As if that wouldn’t be bad enough, he knew that word would also probably reach his grandfather, too. And then he’d be in real trouble, because in those days, his interactions with Augustus had been few, brief, and generally unpleasant.
Please don’t let them see me, please don’t let her see me, please please please!
Despite the noise his entrance must have made—not to mention his harried effort to hide—neither the man nor the woman noticed or turned around. He could see several large, mysterious machines near them, all of them with lights flashing, as if in operation, and wondered if the sound had muffled any racket he’d caused, keeping him from their notice.
As he watched, the woman moved to stand on one side of the gurney, facing Brandon, while the man in the tuxedo remained with his back to Brandon on the other. When he caught his first real glimpse at the woman’s face, Brandon gasped, his eyes widening in surprised recognition.
His grandmother Julianne—who had read him Treasure Island as a child, had given him his own copy of the beloved book, and was, in fact, his favorite of his grandmothers—had never been as strikingly beautiful as Augustus’s first wife, Eleanor, but then, few women could hope to be. Julianne’s features were plainer by far, but Brandon had always thought she had a wonderful smile, filled with warmth and kindness. She had been a Davenant by birth—as evidenced by the sharp blue eyes that were synonymous with the clan—but had been married to Brandon’s grandfather for more than two hundred years; long enough so that it was easy to forget her less-than-favorable origins or kin.
And yet, there she was, standing in a hidden room at the end of a secret elevator shaft, in the house of her birth clan—and undoubtedly with neither Augustus’s knowledge nor consent. He had come to the birthday celebration, riding in a different car than Brandon and his parents and siblings, but had been accompanied by Eleanor. He had six wives in total, but never brought any of them out socially—in fact, did little, if anything with any of them except for Eleanor. As far as Brandon knew, Julianne should have been at home at the Noble family’s great house. Only she wasn’t.
He could see the profile of a young man lying on the gurney in front of her, his wrists and ankles visibly restrained. He was naked, with a towel draped discreetly to cover his groin. Thin tubes ran seemingly out of his skin from different points in his body: his shoulder, hip, knee, calf. The tubes were filled with something red—blood, Brandon realized. They draped down from the table, connecting to several of the bedside machines.
The man in the tuxedo appeared to be arguing with Julianne. Brandon could tell by her posture—her hunched shoulders, the way she twisted her hands together. Her eyes were downcast and nearly mournful, and as the man in the tuxedo waved his hands emphatically around, she nodded, offering only mumbled replies that Brandon couldn’t discern.
After a long moment of berating, the man in the tuxedo spun smartly on his heel and marched back toward the door—and Brandon. Terrified, Brandon shrank back, trying to make himself small, to hide farther beneath the gurney as he approached. But the man seemed distracted and in a hurry, breezing past Brandon’s hiding place and out of the room with his fists balled, his brows narrowed and his mouth turned down in a grim scowl.
For a long moment after he’d gone, Brandon couldn’t move. Neither, it seemed, could Julianne, who remained by the gurney. At last, though, as if satisfied the man was truly gone, her stance relaxed. She seemed to release a long, shuddering breath she’d been holding for far too long, and leaned over the young man on the gurney before her, appearing to check on the tubes, and the machine’s apparent progress. After a moment, she touched the man’s face, pressing her hand to his cheek. Although he remained unresponsive, there was something nearly tender about this interaction. Her expression softened as she brushed the man’s hair back off his brow then let her hand trail lightly down the slope of his neck, grazing his chest.
He watched her lips wrap themselves around two small sounds—a name: “Aaron?” Then, after another moment, her mouth moved again. “Can you hear me, Az?”
That strange name again. If Brandon hadn’t just seen it written inside the front cover of Treasure Island moments earlier, he might not have understood or recognized it at all. She’d also called the man Aaron. Was it a nickname or something? he wondered. And if the man, Aaron, was the Az from the book inscription, had she been the one who’d written it?
As Brandon hid beneath the stretcher and watched, Julianne moved around the table, disconnecting the tubes from Aaron’s body. She gathered them together in a messy network of loose coils in one hand. Then she moved briskly to one of the nearby counters, opening a cabinet beneath and shoving all of the spent tubing into a trash can. She kept glancing at her watch as she did all of this, her expression anxious, as if she worked under a pressing deadline—or some kind of threat if she was late.
After disposing of the tubes, Julianne bent over to look at one of the bedside machines, then lifted something from the top of it: a plastic pouch that appeared to be filled with blood. Again, she walked around the gurney, stopping at each machine and collecting similar bags. When at last, she had them all—a half dozen or so—she brought them to the countertop again, and placed them into a large plastic bin that looked curiously like a picnic cooler to Brandon.
After the last bag of blood had been tucked inside, Julianne closed the lid and, with a grimace, hefted the cooler from the counter. She stumbled a little bit with its obvious weight, then set it on the floor. She then opened an overhead cabinet and began pulling out supplies. Her back was to Brandon, so he couldn’t see what she was doing. When she’d finished, she turned and walked toward the young man on the gurney, carrying something long and slim in her hand—a hypodermic syringe.
Again, her face softened; again, she caressed Aaron’s cheek. Then she drew aside the towel, revealing his upper thigh. She then slid the needle of her syringe into the meat of Aaron’s leg here, depressing the plunger and holding it in place for a long moment before withdrawing it. Brandon winced just to watch, but Aaron didn’t move at all, not even a flinch.
“I’ll come back,” Brandon saw Julianne say once she’d disposed of the needle. Leaning over, she stroked his hair and pressed her lips lightly against his brow. “I won’t be long, Az. I promise.”
Then, hoisting the cooler in her hands again, she carried it toward the exit. Terrified, Brandon shrank back, trying to make himself small, but he needn’t have bothered. Burdened by the cooler, Julianne lumbered past Brandon’s hiding place and back into the corridor without as much as a glance in his direction.
When she had gone, Brandon remained unmoving beneath the gurney, even though to do so left his shoulders hunched and his neck craned at an unnatural position, one that grew all the more uncomfortable with each passing moment. Finally he crawled out and, hanging onto the gurney with shaking hands, stumbled to his feet.
Why was Grandmother Julianne here? Brandon wondered. And what in the hell had she been doing in that secret medical lab?
This latter seemed fairly obvious. She’d been draining the man on the gurney—the one she had called Aaron—of blood. But why?
Curious, yet still somewhat scared, he crept toward the gurney. He expected the man, Aaron, to be human; it would be more than a decade yet before he’d meet Michel Morin and the rest of his clan, or learn about how some of the Brethren had chosen to feed from each other, instead of using humans for food. As he had been raised since birth, Brandon still believed it was an abomination to feed from another Brethren, forbidden by their laws.
Thus, he was shocked to find a Brethren man bound to the gurney. He could tell by opening his mind tentatively. He couldn’t sense Aaron’s thoughts; his mind seemed strangely closed, a feeling Brandon had dismissed as his own youthful inadequacy in wielding his telepathy. But he could still sense Aaron, that inherent, tingling sensation that was unmistakable and unavoidable whenever Brethren drew near.
He’s like me, Brandon thought, surprised and horrified. He saw that each of the blood-filled tubes had been connected to some kind of plastic port protruding from Aaron’s skin. There was blood smeared and streaked around the bases of each port. Aaron laid still, his eyes closed, his skin the ashen color of putty from blood loss beneath the stark lights of surgical lamps.
Most horrifically, however, Brandon could see something now that had been out of his view from his hiding place. Although they had restrained Aaron’s right arm to the gurney at the wrist, on the left side—the side farthest from the doorway—his arm lay strapped to a stainless steel panel, perpendicular to his body. From his wrist to his shoulder, the skin had been peeled back, then removed in broad sheets to reveal the glistening, bright red meat of his musculature beneath, the straps of ligaments and tendons, the pale hint of exposed bone.
Oh, God…! Brandon thought as he stumbled backwards, eyes wide in horrified disbelief. He felt his stomach give a clumsy lurch, and he whirled, clapping his hand to his mouth. Doubling over, he vomited, his belly wrenching in tight, pained knots, twisting over and over until there was nothing left to come up, and he could only stagger weakly, leaning against Aaron’s gurney for support.
Oh, my God, he thought, trying vainly to spit the bitter taste of bile from his mouth. Oh, my God, his arm…! Did Julianne do that to him?
Shivering, he looked over at the grisly ruin of Aaron’s flayed arm, but jerked his gaze away as again, his stomach roiled in nauseated protest. I don’t think he’s breathing, he thought, because he hadn’t been able to discern any tell-tale, rhythmic rising or falling of Aaron’s chest. Oh, God, I think Julianne killed him—he’s dead!
Aaron’s hand clamped fiercely against Brandon’s, and had the boy been able, he would have screamed out loud in bright, startled terror. Aaron’s eyes flew open, along with his mouth, and Brandon didn’t need to hear to know he suddenly sucked in a large, gulping mouthful of air, as if breaking the surface after too long a time underwater, his lungs desperate for breath. His entire body tensed, his back arching off the gurney, the tendons and muscles in his neck suddenly standing out in taut, strained relief beneath his skin.
Holy shit—! Brandon tried to backpedal in wild, frightened start, but Aaron held him fast, his hand crushing Brandon’s, his fingers ice-cold and strong. He clung to the boy like a drowning man might a line tossed from shore, and when he turned his head in Brandon’s direction, locking gazes with him, his eyes were bright blue and dazed.
“Please,” he gasped, the word echoing in Brandon’s mind as he repeated it telepathically, his mental voice weak but urgent. Please…
Jerking his hand free from the man’s desperate grasp, Brandon staggered clumsily backwards. He staggered into a nearby table and nearly fell onto his ass, knocking over a tray of medical tools as he tried to reclaim his balance.
Aaron craned his wrist against the cuff buckled tightly to bind him. His eyes were round, glassy with pain and delirium. Please… he begged again.
I…I’ll get help, Brandon hiccupped, still stumbling backwards for the door.
No, Aaron pleaded, his fingers splayed wide as if he wanted to reach out to Brandon. No, please…don’t…!
I’ll get help, Brandon promised him. I’ll get my dad. I…I’ll be right back…!
He ran back down the passageway in a wild sort of daze, not stopping to consider the risk of running into Julianne or the man in the tuxedo. He ran all of the way to the elevator, then rode it up to the library. Panting for breath, he raced through the corridors of the Davenant great house until somehow making his way back to the ground floor, and the ballroom where all of the party-goers had gathered. Pushing and shoving his way against a seemingly endless tide of tuxedo- and gown-clad adults, he at last staggered headlong into Sebastian and Vanessa.
Dad! he’d gasped, as Sebastian had caught him by the shoulders, his eyes widening first in surprise, then in bewildered concern.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Dad, there’s a man behind the wall, Brandon exclaimed, clutching at Sebastian’s hands. I saw him. His arm’s all torn up. Grandmother Julianne was there—she cut up his arm. Please, he’s hurt.
“What are you talking about?” Sebastian said.
Come with me, Brandon pleaded. I’ll show you. He’s hurt, Dad. He needs help!
Vanessa had noticed Brandon’s arrival, and her face had grown pale, her eyes round. She caught Sebastian by the sleeve, and he shrugged her off, nodding sharply as if to say, Yes, yes, I know. To Brandon, he offered a clumsy semblance of a smile, taking the boy’s shoulders again and trying to steer him toward the door. Brandon, you shouldn’t be here. Come on, let’s take you back to—
Dad, no! Brandon tried vainly to duck away from his grasp. Please, you’re not listening to me!
Sebastian opened his mouth as if to argue with his son, his brows narrowing sternly. Before he could say a word, however, something drew his attention, and he averted his gaze. All of the grown-ups around them had looked in that same direction, and Brandon had turned to look, too, just in time to see Lamar Davenant making his grand entrance.
Brandon knew this with certainty, even though he’d never seen the old man before, not even in photographs—because there were no others among the Brethren who could have been, much less looked, that old. He arrived by wheelchair with the man in the tuxedo pushing him from behind down a ramp while Davenant sons flanked them on the adjacent stairs. The man delivered Lamar to a landing on the stairway that overlooked the ballroom. Here, with the man in the tuxedo on one side and another man—his son, Allistair—on the other, Lamar clasped his gnarled hands against the balustrade and hoisted himself to his feet.
“My apologies for my late arrival,” he rasped into a microphone that had been positioned on the railing, awaiting him. “Any rumors that might have been spreading about my untimely demise have, I’m afraid, been greatly exaggerated.”
Laughter had rippled through the crowd at this, a polite, somewhat terse sort, as if everyone had indeed been saying as much, and suddenly wondered whether or not Lamar had somehow read their minds.
Brandon felt a tremulous mix of both terror and awe. It was like realizing he’d just seen Abraham Lincoln—or perhaps more appropriately, the Bogeyman, someone whose very existence seemed more legend than possible truth.
You have to go, Sebastian told Brandon in his mind, just as Vanessa seized hold of him by the wrist and began marching with him through the crowd toward the exit.
But, Dad…! Brandon had pleaded, staring frantically over his shoulder at his father, but Sebastian had been firm.
You have to go now, Brandon.