Tentyrian Legacy (49 page)

points to the addresses and shrugs her
shoulders, indicating she doesn’t know what they are. But judging
how she refolds the paper and reaches down the front of my dress to
stick it in my bra, it’s something she wants me to have. She sees
the Swiss Army knife and gives me a nod. “Arianna, we can’t fight
this. Change is coming, and we can either

be a part of it or die.” Laura steps back
from me and continues, “I know we aren’t that great of friends, but
take my word for it. We are better off with them then without.”

Before I can reply, Stavros appears. But
rather than approaching me as I anticipate, he grabs Laura by the
neck and shoves her up against a wall with a loud crack as her head
connects with the paneled wall.

“You lying bitch. I trust you for a half
minute and you betray me. You’re just as perfidious as every other
woman. Serves me right for having a moment of weakness.” His grip
on her windpipe is so tight she can only choke out a few gasps for
air.

“Let her go!” I scream. “I’ll do whatever you
want.” Stavros pays me no heed.

“You thought you had me fooled with that
little game. But I’m not stupid, you little slut. I have video
cameras and I saw you give her a piece of paper. You say you love
me! What a joke.”

I lurch toward Stavros with my superhuman
speed, but before I can stop him, he moves out of reach and hurls
Laura across the room. Her body flies over the desk, slams into the
opposite wall, and crumples into an unconscious heap. Stavros looks
over at her with a pitying look and appears momentarily distracted
with some nostalgic thought. I only need that one moment. I whip
out my pocketknife I’ve been coveting and sprint full speed at him
with the intention to slit his throat. Stavros manages to deflect
me by turning just in time. Instead of cutting his throat, I manage
to leave a serious gash across his chest. The fine velvet of his
jacket splits, and blood shows through the sliced fabric.

“You’re a little bitch too. And now you’ll
die.” Stavros shifts behind me and puts me in a chokehold with one
arm. Will all my strength, I claw and kick. But his power is
unmatched. With his free hand, Stavros fishes out the paper and
also finds my necklace. He rips them both out of my dress.

“A familiar relic, I see. No doubt a gift
from the Brotherhood. Hathor and her daughters wore these too. But
didn’t anyone ever tell you? Talismans won’t save you from death—as
they found out all too well.” He throws the necklace and paper in
the fireplace and drags me over to a switch on the wall, which he
flicks. Between the red dots now clouding my vision from the lack
of oxygen, I see the flames ignite. I can feel the heat on my skin
as Stavros pulls me closer to the open flame. He is going to burn
me alive. Through my hazy vision that is becoming darker by the
millisecond, I see a figure out of the corner of my eye.

Shots of a gun fire, and Stavros reacts with
a flinch, dropping me. My head connects with the brick hearth of
the fireplace. Stars explode in my consciousness, and it feels like
my head is a raw egg cracking. I manage to roll over onto my back,
away from the blazing fire, as I hear what sounds like a series of
military commands from men who have swarmed the room. Please be the
Brotherhood. I open my eyes, expecting to see Stavros standing over
me, but he is gone. As I begin to blink and let the chaos come into
focus, I hear Maximos’ voice calling my name.

“Ari, Ari, are you all right!” Maximos rushes
over to me and scoops me into his arms as he kneels on the floor.
Despite the abominable pain in my temples, my heart is soaring.
Maximos is alive. “You scared me to death!” he says. “Praise Hathor
you are alive! Tell me, are you hurt?” His beautiful blue eyes are
scanning my body, looking for any sign of hurt. His face is etched
with concern.

“My head aches a little,” I manage to croak
out. So much emotion is welling up inside of me, it makes it
difficult to speak. “I thought you were dead,” I say. “I saw a
vision of you dead . . . on a floor. I wanted to go to you, but I
didn’t know where. How did you find me?” My voice is choked, and I
feel hot tears begin to slide down my cheeks.

“Shh, matia mou, don’t cry. I’m perfectly
fine. But you will be the death of me if you do something like that
again. Fortunately, I put a tracking device in that necklace of
yours.”

“I’m sorry, Maximos, but I had no choice—I
had to try and save Laura and Raad. But they are both dead . . .
Stavros said he killed Raad, and I watched him kill Laura.” I am
now sobbing, and Maximos is rocking me gently as he holds me close.
We probably are a strange sight to the Brothers in the room, who
I’m only vaguely aware of. Based on the activity around us, it
sounds like they are ripping the room apart.

“Max, I can save the woman,” I hear someone
say. A hand reaches for Maximos’ shoulder. It’s Aristos. Maximos
turns with me in his arms and stands to face him.

“You can save Laura?” I interrupt before
Maximos can react. “Maximos, put me down. I can stand,” I say as my
tears are temporarily forgotten. Maximos lets me down slowly but
keeps his hand on my arm to steady me.

“We only turn those who become Brothers,”
Maximos says quickly. He gives a look of disapproval to Aristos.
“Laura is an unfortunate casualty. But we cannot turn every human
who gets in the Dark Coven’s way. Ari, would you wish this life on
your friend?” Maximos asks me.

I’m torn with indecision. “She risked her
life for me and for the Brotherhood. She was killed because she
tried to give me information!” I say passionately, running a hand
over my tear-stained cheeks in an attempt to wipe away the
embarrassing moisture. I point to the fire- place. “She found a
list of addresses that she tried to give me. Stavros burned the
paper.” I pull myself from Maximos’ sure hold and flick off the
switch to the fireplace. I try to see if even a bit of the paper
survived, but it’s long gone. I manage to fish out my necklace that
is now blackened with soot.

The zodiac pendant is hot in my palm, and my
skin puckers and bubbles in response. But within seconds, I can
already feel my skin begin to heal. “Please, Maximos, we need to
save her,” I urge. “She is too young to die.”

Maximos looks conflicted. “Aristos, are you
offering to take responsibility for her?” he asks gruffly.

“Yes, I will,” Aristos promises.

“Then it is done,” Maximos pronounces.

“We don’t have time to take her back to
Ambrosine,” Aristos says as he lays Laura’s body on the center of
the carpet. I don’t see Laura’s chest rising and falling, but I can
hear a few sluggish beats of her heart. Cradling her body, Aristos
unleashes his fangs and sinks them into her neck, which I suspect
is already broken.

Several minutes go by as we stand and watch
him drain her. Laura’s pallor is as white as a sheet, and the
sluggish heartbeats are no more. I want to cry out and tell him to
stop, but surely he must know what he’s doing? After all, he helped
create the Brothers. That’s when Maximos commands something in
Greek. Aristos lifts his head and pauses in response. He looks
slightly disoriented as he wipes his bloodied mouth on his sleeve.
He then bites his wrist and pulls open Laura’s mouth, placing his
open wound above it.

At first, only a small amount of blood drips
into her mouth as he gently massages the column of her throat. He
then bunches his hand into a fist, increasing the blood flow. The
room is silent as we stand by, watching in anticipation. Then I see
the muscle of her throat swallow for the first time. Her mouth
weakly purses to the punctures in his wrist, and she begins to
suck. The whiteness of her skin begins to color. I breathe a sigh
of relief.

“Take her to the island,” Maximos commands,
still shaking his head in disapproval. Aristos nods, and within
seconds, they disappear into thin air.

“Thank you,” I whisper to Maximos.

“Don’t thank me yet. I hope your judgment was
sound, Ari,” he warns. “Laura will not be herself for quite some
time. She won’t be gifted with the control you have . . . She is
not Tentyrian. She has a difficult road ahead of her.”

“Then I’ll help her,” I promise.

“We’ll see. She is in good hands for now.
However, I need you to try to remember what was on that piece of
paper. As you can probably see, the Dark Coven got away.”

“But not before we pumped Stavros full of
cyanide bullets,” interrupts Ryan. “He’s going to be hurting for a
while.”

“He really is a monster. Do you have
something for me to write on?” I ask. Ryan reaches into a pocket of
his black cargo pants and pulls out an iPhone.

“Can you type it?” Ryan asks. “That way we
can relay it to the Control Room immediately.”

“I’ll try,” I say as I try to conjure up the
text I saw. I’ve always had a photographic memory, but I saw the
paper only for mere seconds. Maximos questions if Laura indicated
what the addresses were. I respond absently that she didn’t as I
begin to press the keypad to type in the words and numbers I pray
are accurate.

“What if they are the locations of where the
weapons will be unleashed?” suggests Ryan.

“I am hoping the same. But it will be a
miracle if they are,” Maximos says solemnly.

Meanwhile, I can feel his, Ryan’s, and the
other Brothers’ eyes trained on me, patiently waiting for
deliverance.

2010 AD, September Ambrosine Island, Ionian
Sea

The tracking device I had Aristos embed in
the zodiac pendant showed that Ari was in New York. I’m still
amazed she was able to shift—it wasn’t a skill I expected her to
develop for

years to come. However, as I suspected, she
had been moved to another location. After intense deliberation with
Evander and Aristos, we determined that Evander would lead the
public smear campaign against the Dark Coven while Aristos and I
went after Ari with the appropriate backup. It was a gamble. The
Dark Coven surely knew that all the facilities hadn’t detonated as
planned. We were coming after them. But they had no way of knowing
we knew where Ari really was...

When we arrived at the Dark Coven’s penthouse
office, we were prepared for an all-out battle. But Stavros shifted
away like the coward he is. The Brothers found a handful of
Subordinates on the premises, but Calix and Aglaia were nowhere to
be found. When I pulled the trigger on my gun, I could have
unleashed the entire magazine into Stavros as I saw him holding
Ari’s face to the fire. My rage burned just like the flames in the
hearth. But Stavros’ presence was short-lived. Miraculously, Ari
was all right. As I held her in my arms, it was a moment that
seemed to unfold in slow motion. The mayhem behind us fell away,
and for a few seconds it was just the two of us. I never wanted to
let her go. But unfortunately I had to—we needed to face the
reality around us.

I had serious qualms about turning Laura.
We’ve never turned a woman before. But Ari was right, Laura died
trying to help us. And it wasn’t that long ago I offered
immortality to Raad. However, I was shocked when Aristos almost
drained her completely. I’ve never seen him lose control like that.
I had to command him to stop, before it was too late. Fortunately,
the turning process was initiated successfully, and Aristos took
Laura back to Ambrosine to recover.

The Dark Coven was gone, and there wasn’t any
documentation or computers kept at their office. Our last hope was
in the address list. And Ari delivered it to us successfully. Her
photographic memory captured the ten locations perfectly. We then
deployed the Brothers to raid them, and within three hours they
found and disarmed every single dirty bomb, all of which were
rigged to detonate. We prevented disaster—barely. It was a close
call.

It’s been two months since we foiled the Dark
Coven’s attack. Our public campaign against them has been
successful. DTPA12 never reached the market, and Stavros, Calix,
and Aglaia are being hunted by the FBI and Interpol. We haven’t yet
been able to crack the hard drives that were retrieved from the
facilities. It is something that Aristos has been working on
diligently—when he is not taking care of Laura. As long as the Dark
Coven is still out there, the nightmare Hathor predicted is still
possible. Our efforts to subvert them and find the other Luminaries
will never stop.

When we returned to Ambrosine, we burned our
dead, and Ari had the chance to say good-bye to Raad. During the
funeral pyre ceremony, she watched stoically. I was surprised she
didn’t cry, and when I asked her why, she said that Raad wouldn’t
want her to mourn. He would want her celebrate—he had moved on to
another life, and Ari was moving forward with hers.

The weeks that followed were quiet compared
to what transpired when Ari first entered the picture. We spent
afternoons walking on the beach, meditating, and practicing with
her powers. Now Ari no longer needs the necklace, which I replaced
for her, to help channel her energy to shift. She can also read
minds now without physical contact. One thing she hasn’t yet
managed to control is her premonitions. Since the ones she
experienced of Laura’s death and of me dead, she has been unable to
tap into that energy again. I keep telling her to give it time, but
she is so eager to learn and be a perfectionist, she has little
patience.