Bloodline (Whyborne & Griffin Book 5) (27 page)

I opened all my senses to the maelstrom. The scent of the
sea intensified: cold water and ancient things, deep as time. The stones of the
bridge pressed against me, and I could almost taste the quarry they’d been
taken from centuries before. Wind stripped the heat from my skin, but at the
same time, I could hear the hiss and crackle of fire.

I threw aside every mental barrier and called on the
maelstrom. And Widdershins answered.

~ * ~

Energy flooded into me, a feeling of power like nothing I’d
ever experienced, even with the dweller. The dweller had been a separate
thing—but this magic wasn’t. This magic
was
me, or I was it. Or
maybe there had never been a me at all.

Lightning danced across the sky, the electric lamps going
out all at once. But it didn’t matter, because the entire world was filled with
light. The arcane rivers burned in my sight with blue fire, pouring in from the
land and the sea, meeting in a swirl of current, which became a gigantic
whirlpool, slowly rotating counterclockwise. The eye of the magical storm lay
in the center of the bridge, but the energy didn’t simply disappear, draining
off to some deep place in the earth. Instead, a huge spire of blue-white light
shot up from the center, vanishing into the clouds above.

“What is he doing?” Fiona shouted, sounding panicked. “Dear
God, look at his eyes!”

I rose to my feet. The world around Theo shimmered as he
shaped it to his will, giving me plenty of warning of the spell he meant to use
against me. I tore the energy from him, and he cried out in shock and fear.

They hurled wind at me, and lightning, tried to drown me in
the rain. None of it touched me at all, unraveling before the sheer flood of
power moving through me. I should have been cold in the soaking rain, but
instead I burned from within. Steam rose from my skin.

I ignored them and ran for the spire of light only I could
see. The very heart of the maelstrom.

Heat blazed through the scars on my arm. My coat and shirt
turned to ash, the same blue-white light of the maelstrom pouring from the
scars. Fire burned along my nerves; my breath was wind, my blood the sea, and
my bones the earth which held it. I could see the thousands of flickers of life
in the city and the ocean, feel the press of their feet on my streets, hear
their laughter and taste their tears.

Miss Lester and Amelie had been right. Widdershins did
indeed know its own.

My feet no longer touched the bridge, my body buoyed up by
magic. I left off fighting the spells the Endicotts cast, and instead drank
them down, absorbing their power into the vast sea that was myself and the city
and maelstrom all at once.

They sought to destroy me. To destroy everything. I would
not let it happen. I would not.

With all the howling power of the vortex backing my will,
the earth spell responded as easily as breath. The bridge shattered into
rubble, dragging my cousins down into the river with it. Fins cut the water,
the river boiling with ketoi, and Fiona let out a startled scream. Then the
water closed over her head, and she was gone.

Theo clung to a broken pier, his spectacles askew and his
face masked with blood. “Even if you succeed here, this isn’t over,” he
snarled. “Others will come. You’ll be hunted like the monster you are.”

“Let them try,” I said.

Clawed hands grasped his shoulders and legs, and he
screamed. The sound cut off abruptly.

Amidst the churn of ketoi and blood and shattered stone,
Persephone broke the surface. She held Mother’s body in her arms, limp and
unmoving. For a moment, our eyes met. Then she dove beneath the water, carrying
Mother with her, and was gone.

I hung suspended between water and sky, earth and cosmic
fire. My clothes were charred and tattered from the arcane power, but my pocket
watch floated free, still connected to the scraps of vest. Lightning arced on
its surface and played around the chain.

The Endicotts were dead, but the wave they’d raised was
almost on us now. I could hear its distant roar, like the growl of some great
beast coming to feed upon us all. Magical energy had turned into physical
force, which would grind on until it spent itself against the land.

Or unless something else took the energy from it first.

I could make myself a conduit between the power of the wave
and the maelstrom. If I could feed the energy through me, the wave would
dissipate.

And what would it do to me?

I didn’t know. And it didn’t really matter, anyway. There
was no other choice.

I concentrated on the distant wave, feeling it as I felt
everything in Widdershins, through my connection with the maelstrom. I closed
my hand on the pocket watch, curling it to my chest, as if by protecting the
picture inside I could protect Griffin as well.

Then I stretched out my scarred hand and drew the energy of
the wave into me.

Arcane fire poured through me, but this time it burned. I
screamed, back arching, and it seared through my very soul. I tried to feed it
into the maelstrom, to ground myself, but it was too much, too fast. My heart
stuttered in my chest; my mouth tasted of burning iron. My bones were hollow,
veins nothing but conduits for the forces funneling through me. Even the air in
my lungs turned to fire. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t,
couldn’t—

The light went out. A moment later, icy water slammed into
me, quenching the fire and closing over my head.

~ * ~

“Ival! Breathe, damn it, breathe!”

I opened my eyes. My legs still lay in the shallows of the
river, but my shoulders rested against something warm. Figures leaned over me,
silhouetted in the light from lanterns. For a moment, their identities escaped
me, my mind still half expecting to feel the city around me like an extension
of my own body, to see the arcane fire. Then I blinked, and everything came
into focus again. “Griffin?” I mumbled. “Christine? I thought I told you to
stay at the museum.”

“Oh, thank God.” Griffin clutched me to him. I returned the
embrace, feeling as weak as a newborn.

“If you really thought we’d stay behind, while you risked
your life, I’ll—well, I’ll be damned insulted.” Christine scowled at me
from Griffin’s side. She was soaked the bone, and with a start, I realized she
must have come into the river after me.

“Wh-what happened?” I managed to ask. “The wave—”

“Whatever the Endicotts were doing, you stopped it.” Griffin
leaned back and stroked my face. “God, you scared the hell out of me.”

“Your wound—”

“Hurts like the very devil. I’ll need help getting back to
the motor car.” He grimaced in pain. “Perhaps I’ll just stay here the rest of
the night, actually.”

I managed to sit up, afraid to put any weight against his
injured torso. “Persephone—she had Mother.”

“I saw.” Griffin shook his head. “When you left, I had an
idea. I thought Stanford must surely have one of the summoning stones on him.
It was in his pocket. We thought we could call the ketoi back and have them
help you. We met Fenton on the way here, and he brought us as quickly as he
could. Christine threw the stone in and the ketoi came. Persephone had
Heliabel, but…I don’t know if she was alive or not by then.”

Persephone had dove down with her body. Taken her to the
sea. But for burial or transformation, I didn’t know. And the silent river
offered me no answers.

A sob tore through me, and I couldn’t hold it back. I wept
for Mother, and Guinevere, and Emily, and maybe even for myself. Christine took
my hand, and Griffin held me close, and we sat in silence on the riverbank
while the black waters rolled out to the sea.

Two weeks later, I sat in my new office at the Ladysmith.
The tall window behind me let in a flood of late afternoon light, which proved
a welcome addition to the lamp on my desk. I puzzled through scraps of broken
clay tablets, trying to discern the cuneiform stamped into them.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?” Miss Parkhurst’s voice
drifted from her desk just outside the door.

Rather than demand my resignation, the board and president
seemed to regard me as something of a hero. Why, I hadn’t the slightest
idea—my own brother had threatened them, and I’d participated in damage
to valuable museum property while thwarting his actions. Not to mention
everyone had witnessed me using sorcery and heard a ketoi call me her brother.
My reputation had gone from slightly eccentric scholar to hybrid monster-sorcerer
in a single evening. It all seemed a bit out of bounds even for one of the
library staff, let alone the Antiquities Department.

But they’d been quite insistent the next day I not only
remain, but accept a new office and a personal secretary. Although bewildered,
it wasn’t an opportunity I’d pass up. Even though she wasn’t the most senior
member of the secretarial pool, I’d insisted quite strongly on Miss Parkhurst.
Unfortunately, neither she nor my new office could keep Christine from barging
in whenever she pleased, but perhaps it was to be expected.

“I don’t need an appointment to see my own son!” Father
snapped.

I sighed. After our confrontation, I’d not expected him to
ever speak to me again. But the events of Hallowe’en had come as a heavy blow. Stanford’s
betrayal, losing Mother…

I still saw that moment, every night when I closed my eyes:
the knife sliding into Mother’s chest. Her blood soaking the stones of the
bridge.

Her still, white body in Persephone’s arms, as my sister
bore her away from me.

I rose and went to the door. “Thank you, Miss Parkhurst.” I
glanced at the clock. “It’s almost five—why don’t you go home for the
evening?”

“Are you certain you don’t need anything before I leave?”
she asked. “Coffee? Or perhaps some tea? Or—”

“We’re fine,” I assured her. I didn’t want anything to
prolong this interview.

She flushed lightly. “If you’re certain, Dr. Whyborne. Have
a lovely evening.”

“And you as well, Miss Parkhurst.” I gestured to my office.
“Come in, Father, please.”

He’d never visited me at the museum before. He stopped just
inside the office and looked around with a critical eye. “And you say this is
an improvement?”

“Quite.” I took my seat. It felt unspeakably odd for me to
be the one sitting behind the desk, and him the supplicant.

“A reward, I suppose,” he said, sinking into the chair
across from me. “For…things.”

All of Widdershins was rife with rumors about what had
happened on the Front Street bridge. Not to mention the strange behavior of the
ocean on Hallowe’en, the tide suddenly rushing out, ships spotting a great wave
coming in…and then nothing but the ocean returning to normal with a slow sigh.
Even so, the loss of the historic bridge was ascribed to damage from the freak
wave.

The incident in the museum, however, had been too public to
cover up, even with all the money and lawyers Father could summon. The official
story claimed Stanford had gone completely mad and attacked the gathering with
a gang of hired thugs dressed in Hallowe’en costumes. The gang had mysteriously
escaped, but Stanford been apprehended by…well…me, unfortunately. Griffin had
chased reporters off our walk several times after the story made the New York
papers, although fortunately, interest died away quickly.

“How is Stanford?” I asked.

Father looked old. Up until Guinevere’s death, his
sixty-five years had hung only lightly upon him. In the last few weeks,
however, every one of them seemed to have marked his face and body. His eyes
were sunken, his back bowed, his clothes loose on his frame.

“I escorted him to the asylum in New York this morning,”
Father said. He shook his head slowly. “He seems to hold the two of us
responsible for everything.”

I couldn’t say I was surprised. Stanford had never been one
to take responsibility for anything. Hadn’t he even blamed Guinevere for her
own death?

In truth, he should be grateful to have escaped the hangman.
He wasn’t even being shut away in Danvers as a lunatic, but within a private
hospital where he wouldn’t face the sort of abuse that had left such deep
wounds on Griffin.

But I doubted he would see it that way. And certainly it
offered little comfort to Father.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last, uncertain what else to say. Hard
enough to know my brother had killed our sister; how much worse must it be for
Father? To have his adored son turn on him as Stanford had? To discover his
wife and children were descended from eldritch abominations, and the daughter
he’d thought dead for years lived beneath the sea?

“Have you heard any news concerning your mother?” he asked,
and the uncertainty in his voice was almost painful to hear. He’d always been
so filled with vigor and conviction. The broken man in front of me seemed
almost a cruel parody.

“No.” I’d spoken with Persephone twice since Hallowe’en.
Mother had still clung to the vestiges of life when Persephone found her. The
ketoi had performed the transformation ritual just in time, but Mother had been
left terribly weak, and had gone to the ketoi city to heal. The matriarchs had
welcomed her, and confirmed Persephone’s right to rule as chieftess. The new
queen beneath the flood.

But I hadn’t heard anything in days. The knife, the blood,
played out again and again inside my skull, eroding hope. What if Mother had
died after all? What if…

What if she hadn’t, but she no longer wished to see me? I’d
been part of the cage which had held her on land, hadn’t I? What if, now that
she was free and had Persephone, she didn’t want me anymore?

“I walk the beach every night, though. I’m sure I’ll hear
more soon,” I said firmly. Not that it would matter in Father’s case. Whatever
had happened to Mother, whatever choices she made, she was beyond his reach
forever now.

He only nodded. Like me, he wore a black mourning band on
his sleeve. Technically, the Whyborne family had suffered a series of
tragedies: Guinevere dead from some unnamed illness, Stanford gone mad, and the
reclusive Mrs. Whyborne killed by the shock of her children’s fates. Black crape
hung on the bell at both Whyborne House and the one I shared with Griffin, and
we’d all suffered through a mock funeral in which an empty coffin had been
interred in Mother’s place. The more wild papers claimed our family to be under
a curse, the source of which varied from my involvement in Christine’s Egyptian
expedition, to one of the objects on display during the private Hallowe’en
tours.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

Father seemed to take a grip on himself. He sat up
straighter and met my eye. “I came to inform you the legal papers have been
drawn up and signed. You’re my sole heir now.”

“I…what?” All the breath seemed to leave my lungs.

“I’ve settled a yearly sum on Guinevere’s son,” he went on,
ignoring my shock. “Once he comes of age, of course. Earl Gravenwold will
continue to raise him, none the wiser as to his true parentage. I thought it
equitable to provide for the boy, since he’s of our blood. I hinted the
Endicott twins might have poisoned Guinevere, and warned the earl not to trust
any of that clan with the boy.”

We didn’t know if the twins had wired England with the news
about the American branch of the family before their deaths, but if they had,
Guinevere’s son would surely be in danger as a ketoi hybrid.

“Hopefully he will take the warning seriously,” Father went
on. “And of course, Stanford’s sons will receive the same yearly sum, although their
mother seems of the opinion they should never again have contact with any of
us.”

“You can’t be serious,” I finally found the breath to exclaim.
“Not about the boys—about me.”

“You’re all I have left.”

The words hung between us for a long time. “How sad for
you,” I said at last.

“Damn it, boy.” His eyes flashed, a bit of the old fire
showing. “I was wrong. Do you understand? I underestimated you. You stood
against Blackbyrne, and the Eyes of Nodens, and even if I don’t know what
happened on the bridge on Hallowe’en, I know we’re all still alive when we
wouldn’t have been otherwise. You’ve got as much courage as any soldier I
fought beside on the battlefield, despite your…tendencies.”

I’d dreamed of this moment, as a boy. Laid in bed, or hidden
in the garden, and dreamed of hearing Father praise me instead of Stanford.

But those dreams had died a long time ago. “Thank you,” I
said. “But the answer is no.”

His brows snapped together in a scowl. “You don’t know what
I mean to ask.”

“No, I won’t take my place at Whyborne Railroad and
Industries. No, I won’t move to New York to learn the business. No, I won’t
even move back to Whyborne House, as befits my status as your heir.” I folded
my hands in front of me. “I will live with Griffin, just as we are now, and
remain here at the museum. And if you cannot accept my decision, you may do
with your fortune as you see fit. I’m sorry for all you’ve lost—all our
family has lost. But I don’t owe you my life to fill the gap left by Stanford’s
absence.”

For a moment, he glared at me. Then his face crumpled, and
he looked away. “You meant what you said that day, didn’t you? You hate me.”

He sounded bewildered, as if he couldn’t understand how his
actions had led to this point. No wonder Stanford had such trouble accepting
responsibility; he mimicked Father in that as in so much else.

Father had lost, if not everything, almost everything. His
wife, his eldest daughter. His beloved son. Only I remained, the despised,
bookish son whom he’d never understood. And now I told him he couldn’t even
have me.

“No,” I said at last. “I pity you.”

“Save your pity.” He took a deep breath. “Still, I expect
you and Griffin for Thanksgiving.”

It caught me off guard. “I…if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” He rose to his feet. “It’s what your mother
would have wanted.”

~ * ~

A few hours later, Griffin and I walked hand-in-hand along a
deserted stretch of beach just outside of Widdershins. We carried a lantern,
although the light from the full moon gleamed from wave crests and shells, so
bright we hardly needed any other source of illumination.

I’d come here every night since Hallowe’en. Once the doctors
declared Griffin’s wound healed enough for exercise, he made a point to join
me. Persephone had met me twice, but it had been more than a week since she’d
last appeared. With so many nights of glimpsing nothing more than dolphins, I
was starting to lose hope.

The November cold turned the wind raw, and we strolled
bundled in our overcoats, hats pulled low and collars up in an attempt to
protect our faces from the chill. As we walked, I told Griffin of my
conversation with Father. When I finished, Griffin squeezed my hand. “So. I’m
sleeping with the heir to the Whyborne empire now.”

“I suppose. Not that it makes much difference,” I said. “No
doubt Father and I will get into a quarrel over the Thanksgiving turkey. By
Christmas, he’ll have me disinherited again. He’ll probably leave everything to
charity, or throw it all into the bay. Or have every cent entombed with him,
like some Egyptian pharaoh.”

Griffin chuckled. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Then his
expression grew more serious. “I received a letter today.”

“Oh?”

“One of my brothers has been located. He’s mining gold in
the Yukon.” Griffin offered me an uncertain look. “I know such news must be
painful for you, after everything. But I wanted you to know.”

“I’m glad for you,” I said, and meant it. “Of course, given
what happened with Christine’s sister and my own family, you realize your
brother will turn out to be some sort of insane cannibal sorcerer.”

“No doubt. But I’m willing to take the chance.” He glanced
out to sea, then gasped. “Look!”

Figures arose from amidst the waves, one after the other.
Their orca-like skin gleamed in the moonlight, and the jewelry forming their
only clothing glittered amidst the sea foam. Persephone, Stone Biter, and
others I didn’t know.

And one I did.

She walked into the shallows, the tendrils of her tentacle
hair lashing idly. The sea had resculpted her body, pared away any curves still
left behind by illness, and bleached her skin to white marked with swirls of
dark blue. But even if her fingers bore claws and razor teeth lined her mouth,
I knew her at once.

“Mother!” I cried, and ran to meet her. For the first time
since Hallowe’en, since the moment she’d stabbed herself with Fiona’s knife, I
felt I could breathe again.

“Percival.” The arms around me were strong, stronger than I
remembered her ever being in my life. “Oh, Percival.”

Tears burned my eyes, and her wet skin soaked my clothing,
but I didn’t care. “Persephone said…” My voice broke, and I had to catch myself
before trying again. “She said they’d reached you in time. That the
transformation would save you. Heal you of everything. But I-I was so
afraid…and when weeks passed and you didn’t come, I started to worry something
had gone wrong.”

“Shh.” She stroked my hair gently, then pulled back to look
up into my face. Her features were no longer entirely human, but her eyes
hadn’t changed at all. They were still my eyes, and Persephone’s. “I’m sorry.
It took longer than I wanted to regain my strength. But I did, and I’m here
now.”

I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. “I was
afraid you didn’t want anything to do with me any more.”

“Why would you think such a thing?” She gripped my arms,
claws digging into my coat. “You’re my son and I love you. Nothing could ever
change that.”