The Progeny (34 page)

Inside my skull I can almost hear my eyes clicking from one window to the next.

Rolan asks the pastor some question, his voice more gentle than I ever imagined it could be.

“West to east,” I say, my words echoing slightly.

I’m running out of time so fast, the sun’s practically moving from west to east . . .

The pastor pauses.

“What?” Rolan says.

“The story. In the Bible, it starts in Eden.” I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure of that much. “The tree of life,” I say and point to the window at back. “The serpent in the garden,” I say, pointing to the next window, the first on the long adjacent side. “All the way through Jesus to baptism, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity . . . the salvation story goes that direction.”

“Yes,” the pastor says softly, kind enough not to scorn me as an infidel or the religious village idiot.

“That’s the south, isn’t it?” I say, pointing to the long, windowed wall.

“That is correct,” the pastor says.

“But the sun goes from east to west. It goes along that side . . . from east to west,” I say, looking at Rolan.

“The sun
tells the story backward
.”

It does not end in morbidity. It is not mired in death. The story, once told in the unnatural succession . . . naturally goes backward. From the Trinity just right of the altar to the tree squarely centered on the back wall.

It has to end in life.

I glance up toward the slant of sun through that fourth window throwing panels of light against the darkened wall. And for a minute I feel that the droplets in that pane are about to fall, to rain down on my upturned face.

43

T
he window is abbreviated by the organ pipes to a mere third of the size of its siblings. Near the top of that Gothic frame, the panes curve up like a bowl or a crescent—or the limbs of a tree. A circle floats above it, a single golden fruit. I blink, and the crescent branches are a pair of arms, lifted to the sun.

The vertical panes form tiny squares where they meet the line of the “ground” the tree grows from. They are inset with the same gold glass. I stare at them long enough to see them separate from the rest of the window.

Three. Like the teeth of the dragon. The Trinity, the holy number of the Progeny. Three, the Glagolitic symbol like two towers sharing the same line of flat ground. Like the three vows of poverty, chastity, obedience.

The images flash, rotate before my eyes. This time I juxtapose them with the curving lines of script arcing across the pages of my mother’s notes—so like those Gothic arches. I shuffle them in my mind, lay them out on an unseen canvas. Not the pages of contradictions, take those out. Not the front of the one with its uniform lines. Eight left. Two across, four high. Switch two. The back of this one instead of its front. This one turned upside down, the curving translation connecting to the end of the page beside it.

They form the Gothic arch, a tree like this, two limbs lifted as though to the sun.

A sun floating above the crescent, a golden island of light.

Rolan, beside me, is murmuring something.

“What is it?” I say.

“ ‘Be praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun,’ ” he says. “Francis of Assisi.”

The orb on the pages falls away, leaving only the curved arms, so like the Franciscan crest. The arms fall away, and the sun floats like a perfectly round island. The elements reassemble, forming the tree of life.

I glance toward the lattice at the top of the church, created, the pastor said, to draw the eye upward.

Thank you.

Outside the wind has picked up, bringing in a string of clouds.

Three days left.

44

W
e have driven nearly a full day straight. We have spoken little in the last few hours; even my frantic calls with Jester have subsided to only the occasional text. The three of them—Claudia, Piotrek, Jester—are safe for the moment.

Luka, however, is another story. The most recent proof of his life arrived less than an hour ago in the form of a video. He was so still I thought it proved nothing at all—until one of his captors kicked him into consciousness.

One of you has to live.

“Rolan?” I say, glancing at him. The cuff of his sleeve slides back from his wrist as he rubs his face, exposing a double-barred cross tattooed on the inside of his wrist. It’s similar to others I’ve seen except that the lower bar is shorter than the one above it.

“Yes?”

“You’re a monk. But you’re a hunter. For real. Aren’t you?”

His expression is grim. He carries with him burdens beyond my knowing, not the least of which was the body we left near Zagreb.

“Yes,” he says finally. And then: “We were monks. I am not much of one now, if I ever was. Not much of a believer, either, sometimes. I have become the darkness I have hated.”

“I’m sorry,” I say and think of the long side of the church, devoid of windows but invariably lit from the other side. Of Luka, the night he claimed forgiveness was enough or it wasn’t. And I hope that it is—enough. For him. For Rolan.

For me.

“I need you to do something for me, Rolan.”

He glances at me, and it is the first time I have seen anything resembling apprehension on his face.

“If something happens—”

“I’ll protect you. To my dying breath.”

“I know you will. But I’m trusting you to do something else,” I say. “No matter what we find, we both know they’re not going to let me trade it for Luka and leave with him, alive. And I won’t be their pawn.”

“What are you saying?” he says, voice rising in alarm.

“If something happens to me, Rolan . . . I want you to take my memory.”

45

E
ven from here I think I smell sage blowing down to the sea from the hills.

In the time since our ride from shore, the Adriatic has shifted from turquoise to lapis beneath the morning sun. Now, as we arrive at the almost perfectly round island of Košljun in the Bay of Punat on Krk, it is on a sea of jade.

There’s a monk waiting by the jetty. Rolan tenses, not wholly trusting what we may find even here, though Jester has assured him that she spoke with the monastery from a secure line. When the boat docks, however, he makes no move to follow me ashore.

“They would not welcome me here if they knew what or who I am,” he says. “I will wait here. Keep your phone on.”

I tell myself I should take it as reassurance that he is not with me only to kill me the moment I lay eyes on whatever I may find here. But as the monk meets me, I am full of nerves. The clock is ticking, each minute too brief. And we have a long road to take in the two days before us.

“I am Brother Daniel,” the monk says to me. “It is an honor. I have been expecting you, hoping you would arrive in my lifetime.”

But my attention has gone to the statue of Saint Francis in front of the monastery. He is taming a wolf. I instantly remember the picture I drew on the flight from Chicago—the German shepherd, which was not a dog at all but a wolf in the circle I recognize now as an island.

Somewhere, in the course of the letters written to myself,
before
, I had deciphered this location.

Why had I never come?

As we enter the monastery, I glance up at the crest over the door, note the crossed arms, the tao cross behind them. The banner over them both is Glagolitic.

“What does it say?” I ask Daniel as we pass beneath it.

“ ‘Peace and good,’ ” he says, as we enter the shade of the courtyard’s colonnade.

We pass down a locked corridor to the last of a series of storerooms. It is sealed with a biometric lock.

He actually trembles as he opens it, and I feel for him, this man with the responsibility of curating secrets like a collection of poisons.

“What I am about to show you has cost many lives,” Daniel says, bolting the door behind us as an industrial light flickers on overhead. “As of this week, I am the last living guardian of this information.”

My heart is drumming, and twice I think it may actually stop as he unlocks a series of drawers and begins to produce handwritten letters, testimonies, personal accounts, and news articles, some of them so old that they threaten to crumble, others printed as recently as months or weeks ago. Each of them goes on a long, broad table that can never accommodate the weight of so much corruption. A story of slow rise from peasant beginnings fueled by ambition and revenge.

I sit down to read.

It takes hours. Too many. And I actually shudder to think of Nikola at the monastery on Cres just days ago, so nearby.

And then I remember Rolan, waiting all this time.

“What about the heretic monks, who infiltrated the Scions?” I ask. Daniel looks at me in surprise.

“There was a rumor over a century ago that several brothers from the monastery in Romania had made a vow to achieve such a thing,” Daniel says, unlocking another drawer. “A secret, fanatical sect, condemned as heretics before they disappeared. But that is all I ever heard of it, many years ago.”

By noon there are enough names to fill in several more circles of the Scion map—destroyed, in part, by the Historian, still fully intact in my head. And the picture is far worse than I realized, the Scions’ influence extending into the upper echelons of the European Union, Interpol, the IMF, and governments as far east as Asia.

I sit silent, eyes hollow.

The last item Daniel lays on the table is a thick, bound book.

“This is the true diary,” he says, spreading his arms to encompass the entire collection around us. “We have committed to collecting and protecting its growing tale for centuries, moving it from monastery to monastery at great risk to ourselves . . . in the hope that one day the entire story may be brought to light. Your mother worked tirelessly to complete the most recent years of this account. It is the reason she never allowed her memory to be taken, lest the work be exposed, or destroyed. And here”—he touches the book—“are the names and stories and relations of all who have died, with as many details of their lives as we have been able to gather. It is a more complete genealogy of the Utod than that in the Historian’s possession.”

I hesitate, and then open its cover. Turn to the back. There is Ivan, with more pages of information on his early life than I would have thought possible. And Nino is there, the date of the newscast announcing his murder penned in recent ink.

My breath catches.

And there is Ana. Her birthdate and biological and adopted parents. Nothing of her love for Nino or her otherworldly eyes that provoked such fierce adoration from others or the steely loyalty sheathed in her waiflike frame.

Her death is dated four days ago.

Sometime later I recover enough to ask how many brothers have died protecting this archive.

“Seventy-nine,” Daniel says. “Nothing near the losses suffered by your bloodline through the centuries. But they were precious to us, and each life was given gladly.”

“What about the diary of Elizabeth Bathory?” I say. “Does it exist?”

“If it does, I have not seen or heard of it, except in legend. And if it does, it has no power to end the killing. Only the truth, now, can do that. As for Elizabeth Bathory . . . God judged her long ago.”

“The truth won’t stop anything,” I say, incredulous. “Nothing is going to stop this. They’re too big!”

“You can stop it,” Daniel says quietly.

Rolan said the same before I saw any of this, and I laughed in his face.

“With what army? Do you even know who the new Historian is? Her name? Anything?”

“No. Not yet.”

I look around me with growing despair. Even if I took all of this back with me now—what would that do? How do you prosecute, let alone police or convict, a cabal? What did my mother, anyone—I most of all—expect to do?

And then it hits me. No wonder I gave all this up. Chose to forget it. To have it removed from my life as effectively as I removed myself from this one.

To live.

Because this will never stop.

“There is one thing more you must see,” Daniel says. “I have sent to Dubrovnik, but it is not yet here. We will eat something first.”

But how am I supposed to eat when every hour I sit here is one hour Luka gets closer to death?

Daniel locks up the archive and the corridor behind us. Emerging into the courtyard, I’m stunned to realize it’s late afternoon.

One more day gone.

I pick at my food and then give up the charade of eating altogether. Making some excuse about a restroom, I stride out of the dining hall, needing air, unable to breathe. But unlike earlier, the courtyard is now occupied by a nun tending several young children.

I decide to visit the chapel instead, but just as I turn, I catch sight of the nun’s face.

And she has caught sight of me. She gazes across the courtyard, unmoving, and I know her hair is blond beneath that habit, the same way I know the angle of her brows.

And that her name is Clare.

She is balancing a baby only a few months old in her arms. My heart begins to hammer; I have seen that face before, in the pile of my things. She is the twin image of the child in my baby picture tucked within my journal, a last gift from my mother to me.

Forget the diary, and the archive. I am staring at the secret I died to protect.

She has Luka’s eyes.

*  *  *

My name is Audra Ellison and I am twenty-one years old. I am Utod, from the noble and long line of Bathory. I remember who I am . . . those I died for, those I love.

And I am ready for the fight of my life.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
’ve said before that every book is a journey of a thousand thankyous and amazing companions—one that leaves me humbled and changed, each time.

Thank you to my readers for your voracious imaginations, intrepid souls, and devoted companionship. The author is only half the storytelling equation, after all, which is a collaboration between two souls. It was one of you who first asked me to write something about Elizabeth Bathory a few years ago. (Keith Moulton, here you go.)