Merlin's Children (The Children and the Blood) (9 page)

“I thought you were too.”

He tensed, and after a moment, his father looked away, dropping the implicit question.

“I’m sorry,” Victor said awkwardly. “I should not have…” He grimaced, and then seemed to regroup. “The wizards. Were they… good to you?”

Cole couldn’t figure out how to answer.

“They didn’t hurt you?” his father pressed.

“No.”

Victor nodded, seeming relieved. Silence returned.

“Did they say anything else about me?” Victor asked after a moment.

Cole’s gaze hit the table hard. He could feel his dad growing tense as the seconds passed.

He closed his eyes. This was what he’d wanted. This was what he’d come here for. The chance to ask his father why. To find out the reason behind all the death and destruction from the one man who could tell it to him.

And all he wanted in the whole world was to change the subject, to pretend he hadn’t heard or just say nothing, because in this moment, when his dad still hadn’t confirmed or denied or done any of the things Cole was afraid he’d do… he didn’t know. Not for sure.

Suddenly, that ignorance felt more precious than gold.

“Cole?”

He swallowed, his gaze still on the table. “They said…” An ache moved through him. “They said you started the war.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Victor become still. A moment slid by and then the man drew a breath, folding his hands carefully.

“I did.”

Cole looked up.

“I killed the Merlin king,” Victor said, his voice becoming meticulously matter-of-fact. “I broke the spell. When the guards came to his defense, an explosion I caused killed much of the Merlin royal family. And started the war.”

He stared at his father as suddenly, the air began to share qualities with the concrete walls. Nothing of regret showed on the man’s face. No shred of remorse either. Just the acceptance of a job that had to be done.

“Why?”

“You have spent the past few months among the Merlin,” Victor stated, partly asking.

Feeling choked, Cole searched for an answer. “A bit,” he allowed.

“And the Taliesin,” his father continued in the same tone. “They told you I was a madman, or some permutation thereof.”

Cole couldn’t respond. His dad nodded anyway.

“They have their point of view. And without fail, it works in their favor. But you are going to have to decide for yourself what to believe. I cannot – and will not – try to make up your mind for you. All I ask is that you hear me out, see what I can show you of our side, and then go from there.”

Cole nodded, not knowing what else to do.

“Thank you,” Victor said.

Silence fell between them.

“I won’t lie to you,” his dad said finally. “That night the Merlin king died… I knew what I was doing. I knew it was murder, and I knew it would mean war. Mason and I, we intended to remove the Taliesin council the moment our magic was returned, though at the time, arresting them was all we had in mind.

“Things didn’t go the way I planned.”

Victor gave him a hint of a rueful smile, but his gaze fell away before Cole could respond.

“At least,” he continued. “Not overall. But in terms of killing the Merlin king…” His mouth tightened. “Yes. That went mostly according to plan.”

A moment passed. “I don’t know what the Taliesin or Merlin told you about Nicholas’ death. I don’t know what they said about my motives either. Mason and I pretended to be deliverymen and I shot the king when he answered the door. I hadn’t ever killed anyone in my life and when I saw the look on his face…” He shook his head. “It was terrible. The worst thing I had seen till that night. And yet, I had no choice.”

Cole looked down, his imagination struggling to compete with the memories of the past few days. Seconds crawled by, each one more uncomfortable than the last, till finally he dragged his gaze back to his dad.

“Why?” he asked again.

Victor paused. “Your time with the Merlin. It was spent with the remnants of the royal family, was it not?”

Cole froze. “Some.”

“The younger one.”

He gave a small shrug.

“And the elder?”

He hesitated. “Not as much.”

“What did you think of them?”

Barely breathing, Cole searched for an answer. His gaze wanted to flick to the mirror, knowing someone was probably back there.

His father seemed to read the impulse.

“It’s okay,” Victor said.

Cole swallowed. The truth still seemed like a risk, for all that he didn’t want to lie to his dad. But the idea had never been to give the Blood information on either of the girls. Not until he knew what the hell was really going on.

“They’re just kids, right?” Victor said as though he’d answered. “A little girl and her sister, lost in the war?”

Cole said nothing.

“You didn’t know their family. And you shouldn’t believe everything you see.”

The faint hiss of the air conditioner became the only sound in the room.

“I didn’t start out intending to kill their king,” Victor continued, picking up the previous topic as though the last exchange hadn’t happened. “Until the week before Nicholas died, it’d never crossed my mind. To tell the truth, I’d even worked at reconciliation between our sides, if you’d believe that. It’s how your mother and I met and, for a time, what I even thought was possible. But the one thing the Merlin’s Children absolutely would not give, the one thing we needed above all else, was our magic. And while at first, it was simply a matter of equality with them, in the days before the war, it became a necessity for dealing with a larger problem I’d only just begun to understand.”

He glanced to Cole. “We’re royalty, you and I. The descendants of a leader who, while revered by his followers as a king, still lost his children any shred of real authority. That we were symbols of that legacy, I’d always known. That we couldn’t live a life of our own, a life outside the council’s control…” His mouth twisted. “That I didn’t appreciate. Not until your grandfather died.

“I never got along with Thelonious. He was…” Victor sighed, clearly revising whatever he’d been about to say. “He was what they wanted me to become. A stamp on their authority. A broken man, cowed by the council and dreaming of what might have been. Not that I saw it that way. Thelonious had, in his own manner, sheltered me throughout his life. I almost wish he hadn’t. I would have been better prepared, at least. Or maybe I would have taken you and Clara far from this a long time ago. After all, the council had never spoken to me. They acted like they scarcely knew I was alive. And I believed…” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I believed. That the whole ‘Taliesin king’ issue wouldn’t matter. That it was enough that I’d distanced myself from my father and everything else the moment I was old enough to walk out the door.

“And then Thelonious died.

“The council summoned me before his body was even cold. And they explained the way things were going to be. I would leave your mother immediately. Taliesin
kings
didn’t marry Merlin. As a cripple, you’d be kept permanently out of sight at a location they’d designate, and if I couldn’t produce an heir with magical powers to take your place, then they’d be forced to see what could be done with you. Or really just your children. The magic in our line had to be preserved, you see. For what it meant to the people.”

Old anger played through Victor’s eyes and then he drew a breath, burying it. “I was sent to a safe house with bodyguards under the pretense of protecting the new king. My job disappeared, my phone was monitored, and everyone I knew stopped answering my calls. I was kept from home with ‘council business’ day and night, giving me no chance to tell your mother what was happening. And meanwhile, the council was preparing to take you both away from me.”

He grimaced. “So I reached out to the only person I could. As a child, Mason Brogan had been a neighbor and close friend. When he grew up, he went into business with his father. ‘Creative marketing and finance’, I believe he once called it. But regardless, he wasn’t on the council’s payroll and, through his work, he had resources. Contacts. Money. So when he came to pay his respects after Thelonious’ passing, I begged the guards for a moment to speak with a fellow Taliesin, and they made the terrible mistake of agreeing.

Victor paused. “The council ruled as long as there was no one with the power to oppose them. I had to change that. If I wanted to protect my family, I had to return magic to our people, and my ability to bind the same. No matter the cost.

“Mason assembled a team of people he trusted, people who were loyal to the crown and not the council, to serve as backup if things went wrong. He located transport while I slipped the attention of the guards, and then we were on our way to the Merlin king’s home.”

His brow furrowed, memories playing out behind his eyes. “Nicholas knew we were Taliesin when he opened the door. Perhaps not that I was their king, though regardless, I doubt he’d have cared. Five hundred years of binding had left us beneath their notice. He simply turned to call his bodyguards to help with the packages, and that was the end. The silenced gun went off. I started a war.”

He fell silent, studying the ground without seeming to see it. Cole swallowed hard. He couldn’t find his voice, though he didn’t know what he would have said anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Victor told him quietly. “Saying it all so bluntly… it would be nicer to let the past die. But I need you to know the story, so that whatever they’ve said, whatever else you’ve been told… you can judge for yourself. You don’t have to believe me. I just want you to have all the facts I can provide, no matter how unpleasant, so you can make your own decisions.”

Cole managed a nod.

“And as a part of that…” Victor said. He shrugged off his suit jacket. Cole’s brow furrowed in confusion, but his father didn’t look up. Carefully, he unbuttoned the wrist of his dress shirt and then rolled back the sleeve.

Cole’s eyes widened.

It looked like a tattoo gone horribly wrong. Jagged black lines radiated out from the inside of his elbow like an explosion beneath his skin.

“Shooting the king wasn’t enough,” Victor said. “We hoped if I did it, it would be. But when nothing changed and the guards were coming… I did the only thing I could think of. The only thing greater than ‘simply’ killing the king. I grabbed my pocket knife, soaked it in his blood and–” he gestured to his arm, “– took it as my own.”

“Is that why…?” Cole asked, trailing off as he pulled his gaze from the charred veins.

“The Blood,” Victor acknowledged with a hint of a wry smile. “It changed everything. And so did we.”

He rolled the sleeve back down, leaving it unbuttoned. “The effect of the spell breaking was like nothing I could have imagined. Painful. Agonizingly so. I felt it rip through me, into the people near me, and outward like a tidal wave. And when, through the pain, I saw the guards… I just wanted to stop them. And then the house was gone.

“I didn’t mean to kill them, Cole. Not the whole family. No one, in fact, but the king. I know it doesn’t make it better. But… it still needs to be said.”

Victor fell silent, his brow furrowing as though he was still trying to work through the memories.

Cole watched him. His own thoughts felt muzzy from lack of food and sleep, and in the midst of all he’d just heard, he didn’t even know where to begin. He wanted to be furious. Indignant. To insist that whether or not you meant to kill God-knew-how-many people, it didn’t change the fact you had.

But the regret on his father’s face made the protests die.

“What happened then?” he asked.

Victor looked over and, at whatever his dad saw in his eyes, the man gave him a faintly relieved smile.

“We went back to the council. We knew something had changed about us, that we didn’t have the look of Taliesin anymore, though we didn’t realize we were the only ones. We just rushed back, intent on disarming the council before they had a chance to collect themselves, but we were too late. We’d been too late before we even reached the Merlin king.

“They had your pillow, covered in bloodstains. And just before I could kill them, they explained that you weren’t dead. They’d simply enacted the next stage of their plan when the guards reported I’d gone. But now, if I didn’t play nice and submit to the council’s authority completely,” his mouth tightened, “the next time I saw you, you would be.”

Victor paused. “I… wondered… as the years went by, if I should have just killed them then. Perhaps their guards would have tried to keep you as leverage. Perhaps the ones holding you wouldn’t have learned the council was dead before you’d already been found.”

Cole swallowed, remembering Stephen and Vivian bringing him with them for exactly that purpose, right after his dad killed the Taliesin council. “They, um… they did.”

Victor glanced to him.

“The guards. They kept me with them. A few days ago, when you…”

“You saw that.”

It wasn’t a statement and it wasn’t a question, and when he looked up, he couldn’t read the expression in his father’s eyes.

“There was a room next to the council…” he said, the words not wanting to come.

Victor dropped his gaze to the ground. “I lived for eight years knowing that on any given day, you could be taken from me. Permanently. That if they grew angry with you, or if their policies on our family changed, or even if something simply went wrong… you might die. And there was nothing I could do about it.”

He looked back up at Cole. “I don’t know if you can understand that, especially in light of how it must have looked to you. But please know that everything I’ve done has only ever been to keep our family safe. There is no other reason.”

Cole watched his dad, and for the life of him, he couldn’t think what to say. The memory of his father standing over the dying councilor came back to him. He’d been cold. So very cold. As though the death of the man in front of him was nothing more than the natural conclusion of events, long delayed.

And yet, if he’d gone through all that his father had, maybe he would have felt that way too.

“I should have stopped them though,” Victor added quietly.