Firstborn

  He’s laughing softly, brokenly, in the scant space between us, hands cupping my face.

  “June fifteenth . . .” I say. I won’t speak her name. “Was the most intense pain I’ve ever felt in my life. The hardest, worst pain . . . And ten hours later, the most amazing, crazy love and the deepest, most horrible grief . . .” I choke out the words. “Worse than losing my parents. Worse than dying. Knowing what we were about to do. What we had to do. That was dying.”

  He tilts his forehead against mine, holds me against him.

  He makes love to me that night. Gently, careful of my ribs, which cracked as he tried to save me. He doesn’t know that this is me being saved—here, now, as his shoulders shudder above me.

  27

  * * *

  The third and fourth Scions debut on the anonymous sites late that night.

  “We need to leave,” Luka whispers, a few hours before morning.

  He’s been quiet, though I know he hasn’t been sleeping.

  “We will,” I say. “As soon as I get what I need from Serge.”

  “Have you considered that all it would take is one call for him to turn you over? He’d be a hero.”

  “Not with Jester’s finger on the button. Besides, we have a deal.”

  He stares up at the ceiling in the darkness. “The day we leave here won’t be soon enough,” he murmurs.

  Turns out, he doesn’t have to wait long.

  Jester calls just as the sun slants through the eastern window of our bedroom.

  “Audra?” Her voice wavers.

  “What’s wrong?” I say, instantly awake, pushing up with a grimace from the tangle of sheets and Luka’s arms. He reaches past me to the bedside lamp, turns it on. His eyes are rimmed in shadows but alert, and I wonder if he’s slept at all.

  I hear Claudia in rapid conversation in the background. A few seconds later, she’s drowned out by Piotrek. His voice rises in a torrent of Polish, which ends with a guttural cry.

  “Audra,” she says, audibly struggling, and I realize she’s crying. I have never heard Jester emotional in my life.

  “What’s happening?” I demand, alarm pricking, cold, along my spine.

  “The Bucharest court—”

  “Bucharest . . .” I glance at Luka.

  “Romania,” he mouths.

  “There was an explosion in the tunnels beneath the city, where the underground is. It wasn’t the biggest court, not like Budapest, but at least thirty people died. They say they were homeless junkies and orphans, living in the sewers. They were Progeny, Audra! Killed! Five more were gunned down by police across town. The news is saying they were armed robbers. They were still wearing their masks . . .” She breaks down, sobbing.

  I fall back against the pillow with a slow exhalation.

  “Piotrek had friends there . . .”

  “What kind of explosion?” I say, dangerously.

  “Some kind of gas leak, or so they’re reporting . . . but the ones who left early, out in the morning, they posted about it and the shootings on the bulletin board . . . they saw them gunned down by police. They were not robbing! They were not carrying guns!”

  “It wasn’t a gas leak.”

  “I would have said maybe, that it was possible. We meet underground. We live underground—we have been driven there through the centuries . . .”

  “But what?”

  “A text came in to your old phone tonight—just before.”

  I feel sick. I’m afraid to ask.

  “Forward it,” I say.

  I hand the phone to Luka. Get up from bed.

  He talks to Jester in low tones as I pace away, fingers digging into my hair. I turn on my heel, stalk back to the bed as he raises the phone to show me.

  We can create leaks, too.

  I grab the phone.

  “Jester, you need to move.”

  “We are. We’re moving now . . . What about you? What will you do?”

  “We’re leaving.”

  “For where?”

  “Budapest,” I say, not knowing the answer until I hear myself say it.

  Someone grabs the phone on the other end. Claudia.

  “I want to come,” she says. “I want to come with you.”

  “It isn’t safe.”

  “Nowhere is safe!” she practically shouts at me. “I can’t stay here, not like this. Not while they’re killing people we know, people Piotrek loved . . . Do you know that he’s crying over the fact that he wasn’t there to die with them? Because he was here, protecting me!”

  “He doesn’t mean it,” I say. “He’s alive, and he feels guilty. You’ve been through it, too.” We all have. “He chose to protect you because he loves you. And you have to stay. Someone has to protect Jester.”

  I hear the phone, jostled against her cheek. A moment later, she says, “I’m coming. Piotrek will stay with Jester.”

  “Claudia . . .”

  “My place was always with you. Ever since Katia died—”

  “Claudia, Katia died because of me.” I make myself say it, because Claudia’s anger at me, always so near the surface, is the best chance I have of keeping her safe.

  “No. Not because of you. Because of them. You may be Firstborn, but I am no small person. My father may not have been of the blood, but I, too, have gifts . . . and helped teach you to use yours!”

  “I know,” I say, closing my eyes.

  “I’m coming with you. It’s settled.”

  “You’re your own woman, Claudia. You make your own choices.”

  “Ivan believed in you. I believe in you,” she says with conviction.

  And my greatest fear is that I will never live up to that desperate belief.

  “Meet me at my old flat in Budapest,” I say.

  She falls silent.

  “Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” she says strangely. “Do you?”

  “Meet me there. Tomorrow night.”

  “I will,” she says and hangs up.

  I glance at Luka, silent all this while.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

  “No,” he says. “Even if I did, there’s no way I’d let you go without me.” But as he says it, the faint frown lines around his mouth have deepened.

  I climb onto the bed and kiss him. Do I imagine it, or does he hold me closer than the night before, and linger over my lips a moment longer?

  After he’s disappeared into the bathroom to shower, I wrap myself in a robe and text back that number of the oil-slick voice I will never be able to scrub from memory.

  You have made a bad mistake.

  I drop the phone on the duvet, barely recognize the fact that I’ve sent out a mental call for help by the time the nurse and two bodyguards come to the room.

  “Get me Serge.”

  28

  * * *

  By noon, the news station permanently on three screens in the parlor outside my bedroom is consumed with interviews about early associates of Lazlo Becskei and the woman from the IMF and, now, the bank conglomerate associated with her and the president of the EU’s Parliament.

  Only a tiny blip of news about some gas explosion in Romania. Gang violence in the streets that resulted in five deaths.

  They don’t say that they were all under the age of twenty-two, and unarmed. That only shows up on the leak sites. Because unlike the political and business giants splashed across the headlines, the victims of the gas leak are, for all practical purposes, nobodies.

  I text Jester, asking the names of our next three leak subjects. I’m nervous, pacing, by the time she responds nearly thirty minutes later.

  I don’t know if this is a good idea anymore, Audra.

  I text her back:

  No. We shut her down. Completely.

  The names come through five minutes later.

  I’ve exchanged the pajamas for a top, leather jacket, and jeans from the wardrobe Serge’s people have supplied us with. The makeup artist is here, with a small camera
crew.

  Luka paces along the back wall while the makeup person exclaims about my hair, and finally takes out a pair of shears to fix it properly before dyeing my roots. I’m impatient with the entire process, ready to be gone. But I also know that looking like an urchin isn’t going to serve my purpose.

  An hour later, I don’t recognize myself.

  I glance around for Luka, but he’s apparently stepped out. Rolan stands, arms crossed, in his place, but raises his brows when I look at him. And I can’t tell if that’s approval or he’s just weirded out.

  It takes me three tries to record what I need. I’ve already given Serge the list of my other demands: a plane and a non-Scion pilot, money, a car in any city we arrive in. And last, a look at his database.

  His technical person is there by the time we finish, the GenameBase database live on a huge monitor.

  I scroll through it, clicking from page to page. From the arterial branches of one Scion family to another, marriages and issue branching like capillaries across the screen. But I’m distracted, the sound of Jester’s voice, of Piotrek’s cry still in my ear.

  After forty-five minutes, I stand.

  “You’re done?” the guy says.

  I nod, having seen enough. I don’t say that I’ll review it later, on the plane, from memory.

  Serge comes to oversee our preparations himself, but his brows knit together.

  “Something has happened, I think, to make you leave so swiftly,” he murmurs, studying me sidelong.

  But it doesn’t feel swift. It’s already late afternoon. Given the chance, I would have been gone by morning.

  “The Historian’s scared. That’s what’s happened.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it. What will you do now?”

  “Scare him some more.”

  He smiles then. “Your plane is standing by.”

  The sun is setting by the time we arrive at Serge’s hangar. Luka, Rolan, and I each carry a bag of clothes. Luka carries an additional knapsack filled with cash. The two men are both grimly silent in the presence of my new bodyguard—a pale-skinned man with broad shoulders stretching the back of his tailored suit jacket.

  “I wish you would take more men with you,” Serge says, having accompanied us.

  “Did you forget?” I say with a dangerous smile. “I’m Firstborn. I don’t need your men.”

  He glances around and tugs on his suit jacket, but does not ask what exactly that means. And I’m happy to let him wonder.

  As we board the private jet, I glance at the two men in the cockpit.

  Shame about those bedbugs.

  The pilot swipes at his neck as the copilot scratches beneath an arm.

  At least Serge has been true, so far, to his word about keeping Scions away from me.

  We’re wheels up within five minutes. Within ten, we’re thirty thousand feet in the air.

  Luka gets up and heads back to the galley. Returns a few minutes later with espresso and two plates, sets one in front of me. I wrinkle my nose.

  “You need to eat,” he says.

  “I’m not hungry,” I say, sliding low in the white leather seat. My mind is churning, familial trees sinking their branches into the nether reaches of my brain like roots. I’m searching for the three known Historians: Otto Errickson, Attila Bertalan, and Cristian Alexandrescu. And they are there, descended from the original twelve families. Men with parents and siblings. Two of them with wives and children. None of them with the marker that designates them as initiated Scions.

  But something else has been scratching at the back of my brain ever since I sat down at that monitor this morning, though I haven’t been able to put my finger on it yet.

  “You used to love this. Remember?” Luka says, sitting across the polished burl wood table from me. He cuts into the small portion on the plate. Foie gras on brioche.

  I give him a small smile. “Yeah.”

  He holds up a forkful. “Come on. I ordered this just for you.”

  I eat it to make him happy.

  “I didn’t realize we had a menu.”

  “You were busy getting a haircut,” he says, rubbing his face. He looks exhausted, but when he turns his eyes on me, his gaze is wistful. “Have I told you how frighteningly beautiful you look?”

  “Hmm. ‘Frighteningly beautiful.’ Not sure how I feel about that one.”

  “No wonder your kind make exquisite supermodels.”

  “Yeah, well, this makeup isn’t staying on forever.”

  “It isn’t the makeup.”

  I eat more after that, stomach growling to life after that single bite. All the while, I’m twisting familial trees like three-dimensional holograms, combing through the branches and stripping away leaves.

  Not the initiated Scions. Not the hunters—and apparently not all of them managed to make it to full Scion-hood, several of them having died in their twenties through the centuries. Missed marks, lost kills.

  I’m also seething. For the nameless, faceless Progeny who lost their lives this morning. For those no doubt injured, burned by the blast. There had to be some survivors, surely. Serge has said he will put out an inquiry for any burn victims admitted to hospitals this morning in Bucharest. But he knows as well as I do they’d have to be dying—in enough agony to want to die—to show their faces there.

  My leg bounces against the table, the jitters having returned in full. Sitting here like this, I can’t keep the thought at bay: Did I bring this on? Is this my fault?

  I’m the one who told Jester to speed up the leaks. And I stand by my conviction to go after them all—as many as we can, as fast as we can. But I also wonder if those deaths in Bucharest are at least in part on me.

  “You knew there’d be repercussions,” Luka said in private to me earlier. “That it couldn’t possibly be bloodless.”

  But that’s the thing. I hoped—had allowed myself to believe, somehow—that it might be.

  I get up, pace past the sofa where Rolan dozes, a magazine over his face. Stare out the window, wish I had run a lap around the hangar before boarding. Because right now, given a parachute, I’d gladly jump.

  I’ve drained three more cups of coffee by the time we touch down in Brussels. My phone chimes as we taxi into the hangar.

  You are the one who is mistaken. You have bitten the ankle of a giant. And now others will be crushed for your actions.

  My thumbs move furiously across the screen.

  All I see is a coward scurrying around in hiding like a rat.

  I search for and send a gory picture of a bloody, dead rat along with it before removing the SIM card.

  I call Serge from Luka’s phone as we deplane.

  “Where’s our guy?” I say.

  “He’s left the office,” Serge says. “We’ve got him going into a dinner meeting on Rue de Rollebeek,” he says. “I’m sending the address.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d mind putting in a call there for me—about a birthday boy?”

  Serge actually chuckles as he gets off the phone.

  But as we get into the black car waiting for us and our bodyguard slides behind the wheel, Luka takes me by the wrist.

  “What are you doing? Is this really necessary?” he says.

  “It is to me.”

  “Then let me do it,” he says.

  “No,” I say, slipping on a pair of oversize sunglasses despite the fact that it’s dark. “I need to do it.”

  Which isn’t true. The fact is, I want to do this.

  “This isn’t a joke, Audra!” Luka says.

  “You’re telling me? We just lost at least thirty of our own!” I shout, pointing out the window.

  He looks away, jaw twitching.

  My phone pings with a photo. A European guy with a long face and neatly trimmed beard. Salt-and-pepper hair.

  We arrive outside the restaurant twenty minutes later. I get out of the car the moment it pulls up at the curb, before Luka can stop me. And then he and Rolan are out and following me into S
artre’s bistro at a rapid clip.

  I step past the maître d’, gaze roving over the well-dressed elite dining on fine bone china. I spot him at a power table in the corner, in deep conversation with another man.

  Blaise Garcon. Interpol Deputy Special Representative to the European Union. A young guy—about thirty-five—for such an important position.

  But then again, he’s been a Scion for about ten years.

  He glances up at the three of us as we arrive, a pleasant enough expression on his face—

  Until I take off my shades.

  “I’m guessing you know who I am,” I say. His companion, meanwhile, has gotten to his feet with a surprised smile and effusive French.

  Garcon sits back very slowly, hand lowering toward his jacket.

  “Uh-uh,” I say with a smile. “I’m only here to give you a message. Besides . . .” I glance around us. Heads at every table have turned. Fifty witnesses to our encounter. “Your friend and all these people seem to think I’m some famous French actress.”

  I drop a folded paper onto the table in front of him.

  “What is this?” he says, looking at it like it’s a piece of filth.

  “Special delivery.”

  Garcon’s face turns white when he flicks it open and reads.

  You’re next.

  I step away as several waiters come carrying a dessert with one lit candle and begin to sing.

  “Many happy returns,” I say, before we slip out.

  29

  * * *

  By the time we land in Budapest early the next evening, we’ve paid visits to Italian Senator Giada Borghi and the office of the German financial conglomerate Gerald Schelert.

  Or rather, Borghi’s chauffeur, since I never actually saw the senator but persuaded her driver to give me a ride around the Palazzo Madama in her black Mercedes. I left the message taped to the back of the front seat:

  Send my regards to the Historian.

  A.E.

  It’s the same note I delivered to Schelert’s assistant, which was admittedly harder, given the security of the financial group’s twin skyscrapers. It was a concession to Luka that I didn’t attempt to deliver the message to the man himself.