The Sleepless Stars (15 page)

Still, I kept falling. My limbs flailed in every direction as I struggled to take control. Slowly, the fall became a leap as I imagined my arms and legs pumping, coordinated. Instead of hurtling through the air, I envisioned hurtling across a field. I re-created the feel of a footfall, pushing off spongy grass, launching my weight forward into a sprint. And I ran and ran. I didn’t stop, kept going until I felt Ryder’s pendant bouncing with each stride.

I clutched at it, fingers curving around its polished surface. It felt warm. Real. Instinctively, I realized it was my key to escape, a lifeline back to reality.

Finally, my body mine again, I opened my eyes.

I stood in an office. Across from me, sitting behind an impressive mahogany desk, was Daniel. He tipped his expensive-appearing chair back and stared at me, clearly unhappy.

“Tell me what I need to know,” I said, returning his stare without flinching.

There were no chairs on this side of the desk, despite the fact that the office spread out behind me with the expanse of a throne room. Exactly the effect he was going for. I reached into my mind for my favorite chair—an overstuffed, well-loved, plaid chair from Ryder’s living room that had become “my” chair to curl up in—and suddenly I was sitting in it.

I couldn’t see Daniel beyond the desk looming over me—but neither could he see me. The desk vanished, and he stood over me, a glower coloring his features. The windows behind him were suddenly slashed by rain and sleet.

“I need you to stay,” he said. I said nothing. “Stay, and I’ll tell you everything.”

Was that a hint of desperation in his voice?

“I can’t. You know that.” I stood, twisting my hand, and the chair spun away, erased from existence. “I’m sorry.” It was the truth. Because of my fugues and what I’d seen in the minds of the others, I understood what he faced better than anyone. Then I realized. “You saw. What’s coming—what the others went through before they died.”

“That’s not going to happen,” he thundered. “Not to me.” Lightning crashed against the window behind him, but it barely shook. As if Daniel’s power was spent. “I’m in control. It’s my life. I decide—” His voice faded.

I glanced behind me and realized what had stopped him. A void blacker than black, devouring all light and life.

“We don’t have much time. Tell me. I can’t save you, but I can save your granddaughter.”

I remembered the Latin phrase carved into his headboard—or rather, I didn’t remember it, he did.

Omnes nominis defendere.
“Above all, defend the family,” I translated.

“She’s not a Kingston,” he protested. “Now that Leo’s gone, I’m the only true Kingston left.”

“Devon is your son. Esme is your granddaughter. Someone targeted her. Are you really going to let them get away with that? An attack on your family, on your flesh and blood?”

That caught his attention. Finally, I’d found the right tactic. Not his prestige or power, but rather, his pride. And there was nothing Daniel Kingston was more proud of than his family’s honor—despite the way he and Leo had tarnished it.

“Help me save Esme.”

The darkness crept closer, waves of roiling, inky blackness, dark tendrils swirling out, tasting, testing...

Daniel nodded.

The setting changed. We were on a grassy meadow at the edge of the forest. The darkness oozed from between the trees and bushes but held its distance.

The sun was shining. A few yards in front of us, a man and woman walked their horses. The young Daniel Kingston and the woman he loved, Francesca Lazaretto. I started to ask a question, but Daniel waved me to silence. To my surprise, sadness clouded his expression—the first true emotion, other than anger, I’d seen from him.

“I just asked her to marry me,” he said as the young couple left the horses to graze and sat down in the grass. “She’s telling me no.”

“What’s that have to do with me?”

“This is where you were conceived,” he snapped.

I turned to him in horror.

“No, not that. You’re no blood of mine. Where the idea of you was conceived. Francesca was only nineteen but already a talented researcher. She was desperate to save her family, so she decided to use her eggs to create a new generation of Lazarettos.”

“Wait. Are you saying I’m the product of some lab experiment designed to eliminate the fatal insomnia genes?” The thought, as shocking as it was, made a kind of warped sense. Except for the fact that it had obviously failed terribly.

“You don’t understand. The Scourge—what the Lazarettos have called their fatal insomnia going back centuries—is their family’s greatest gift, the source of their power. But in the last generation, they had begun to see fewer affected children.”

I didn’t understand how a disease like fatal insomnia could ever be seen as a gift. “That’s a good thing, right? Natural selection is designed to eventually breed out harmful genes.”

He shook his head, obviously impatient with me. The black tendrils seeped through the grass, on a search-and-destroy mission. Behind us, the forest had vanished, replaced by ribbons of black tossed about by an unfelt wind.

“The Lazarettos have used the Scourge since the time of the Black Plague. Then, their mutant DNA protected them from certain diseases, like the plague, and allowed them to rise in Venetian society. But most of their power came from an unexpected gift from the disease. Usually, the Scourge didn’t show up until adulthood, often after the afflicted already had children and had already passed the gene on. But occasionally, a handful of each generation would show symptoms at a young age—before adolescence. In them the disease moved faster, but it also left them with the ability to capture someone’s memories under the right circumstances.”

“Like what I can do.”

“No.” He shook his head. “What you can do is...enhanced. These children could take one person’s memories, especially after the family learned to use various venoms to create a special form of coma—”

Venom would stimulate the same pain-response neurons as PXA. “Leo took their venom compound and used it to create PXA.”

“Yes, basically. The point is, they use these children—Vessels, the family calls them—to steal the secrets of the most powerful men in the world.”

“Children as spies? That’s—” I didn’t even have words for it.

“In the Lazaretto family, every member is treasured as long as they contribute. These children were revered, well taken care of before their deaths. Just as the adults suffering from the Scourge are—they’re all tested for prion disease at a young age, their education accelerated so they can make real contributions before symptoms set in. While the healthy members of the family run the long-term business side of things, the members with the Scourge are trained in functions suitable to their shortened life-spans. Some are educated in science—to study their disease, find ways to increase the number of Vessels, better ways to induce coma in their targets, ways to prolong the productive life-span of the ones with fatal insomnia who aren’t Vessels. If they aren’t scientifically inclined, then they’re set to work as assassins—well, in the old days, now I’m pretty sure they’re just corporate spies—or placed in positions where they can help the family get close to their targets. Priests sent to the Vatican, executive assistants sent to seduce CEOs and marry politicians.”

“I get the idea. This Lazaretto family has evolved like the Mafia—no scruples about what they do as long as it serves the family. You’re not saying I’m one of them? Or my father?”

“Yes. Your father was assigned to join the priesthood. They wanted him to infiltrate the Opus Dei—the family’s sworn enemy and most fierce competitor going back centuries. But first, Francesca used him as one of many donors to artificially inseminate her eggs. No member of the family with the Scourge is meant to ever have children, not the natural way. They only act as egg and sperm donors for their scientists to combine. Angelo learned of Francesca’s research, recombining the family’s mutant DNA in new ways in the hope of creating more powerful Vessels for the family to use.”

“But the Vessels die after the family uses them. So she was basically genetically modifying her own children so that they would grow up to die?”

“Yes, but the family would survive. That’s all that mattered. And if she knew the secret to creating future Vessels, Francesca could solidify her own position, maybe even lead the family. It almost worked. Except your father found you—I’m not sure how— rebelled against the family, and fled here with you when you were only an infant.”

The encroaching darkness made my hair stand on end as it slithered toward us. We didn’t have much time. “No. I don’t believe it. Besides, what does it matter? Why are the Lazarettos here now? Why did they infect those children with fatal insomnia? And how?”

“It matters because the family needs more Vessels. That’s why they infected the children. If they can create and control Vessels who aren’t of the family, then they can let their own disease die out. The family will be cured of the Scourge, even as they inflict it upon others.”

I wanted to slap the proud smirk from his face as he looked fondly across the field to where young Daniel and young Francesca spoke earnestly, their heads so close they almost touched. He nodded to the couple. “She’s explaining the science and her idea. No one in her family took her seriously—not until much later. A decade later. But I did. I believed in her. That’s why she trusted me to help.”

“You helped her infect those children?” I demanded. The darkness surrounded us, swallowing his memories of his younger self and Francesca in a whirling vortex. It was still silent—making it all the more terrifying, but I was so enraged, I almost didn’t care.

Daniel shook his head. “No. Not me. You did. You’re Patient Zero. Not because you were the first patient with symptoms, but because you’re the person who infected them. The fatal insomnia in the children came from you, Angela.”

MARCO’S MEN DELIVERED
Francesca across the waters back to the Lazaretto family island that had been a safe haven for those afflicted with the Scourge for centuries. It was the middle of the night, those dark hours when the only lights visible on the nearby islands of Murano and San Michele came from the lamps guarding their docks. Then they turned toward Francesca’s island. There, even still a mile out at sea, the horizon filled with glimmering golden willow wisps. Some would go out, but others would take their place, a constant dance of lights.

Legend had it that the island was haunted, and the lights were lamps carried by the dead who were forbidden entrance to heaven or hell, doomed to wander the earth. Yet another layer of protection for her people—no one set foot on their “cursed” land except her family. No one dared.

Tonight, the ancient monastery with its watchtower glittered with light, as did the modern glass and steel laboratory. Not for any holiday celebration. Every night was like this on the island where sleep never visited.

They pulled up to the dock, a concrete pier that broke the line of the centuries-old, fifteen-foot-high wall surrounding the island. The iron spikes jutting out from on top of the brick were invisible in the dark but no less deadly. Not that the island had needed any defense—it had been hundreds of years since anyone tried to attack the Lazarettos where they appeared to be vulnerable. The bodies of those who had tried had hung from the spikes near the massive iron gate, a warning heeded by all, even the most vicious and greedy of pirates.

Of course today, the spikes were only for show. A part of their history, like the monastery that ran the width of the island—the original hermitage where her people had come to die centuries ago, tended by monks who were also Lazarettos. There were no guards here today—there was no need. The Lazaretto name was protection enough from modern-day thieves.

Until tonight. Only, the thieves who brought Francesca home were worse. Sent by her own brother. Lazaretto turned against Lazaretto. Betraying the afflicted, the people who had built their family. Anger seared through her, although she kept her face a mask as she took the hand of one of Marco’s men and allowed him to help her out of the launch and onto the dock.

“The six of us will secure the dock,” he told her as his men leapt from the boat. They stood huddled on the suddenly crowded jetty before the wrought-iron gates. The men were armed with machine pistols similar to the ones the soldiers who patrolled the streets of Venice carried. “Tell your people to open the gates.”

As a defense, the gates weren’t much—but then, they hadn’t had to do any actual work other than serve as an ornamental barricade to the occasional lost tourist in a rented boat who wandered on shore thinking the island was open to the public. They were controlled by electronics housed in the monastery and manned by her people. Tonight, it was a teenage boy who left the security office to press his face against the wrought iron as if he didn’t believe what he’d seen on his monitor. “Francesca?”

“It’s all right, Enrico. You can open the gate.” No need to risk bloodshed. Not here, not tonight. She smiled at Enrico and, ignoring her armed escort, strode forward just as the gates swung open, welcoming her home. “These men will be taking over guard duty. I’ll find you a new assignment.”

The boy looked flustered—the afflicted took care of themselves, those with few symptoms caring for those at the end of their days. Laundry, cooking, cleaning, monitoring the sick, working in the lab, each was assigned a job according to their abilities. Francesca’s people. Her true family. Each would do her bidding until they died.

Each would kill for her if she asked.

Out of sight of Marco’s men, she allowed herself to finally smile. Poor Marco. His men were as good as dead already. They simply didn’t know it yet.

<<<>>>

RYDER REMAINED ON
the floor of their cage while Grey examined their prison more closely—well, at least as best he could in the dark.

“I was thinking you could climb out between the top of the wall and the ceiling, shimmy up onto the chains and out over the gate at the top of the shaft,” Ryder told the other man, not even sure if he was aiming his voice in the right direction, the darkness was that complete.