Page 62 of Empire of Dark
“Girl next door?”
She smiled. “Boy next room. We grew up in the same facility.”
“You grew up in a facility? What kind?”
“Well, not really a facility. It was more like a huge home with a large, weird family of sorts. It was in one of those grand old colonial homes set in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the States. We called it the Fortress.”
“Our species do gravitate toward mountains no matter the continent.”
She grinned. “We do. I don’t know what that says about us—whether we like to be above everyone else or whether we are drawn to the sky.”
I puffed out a chuckle. “Arrogance aside, I like them because they’re intimidating, even to the strongest of our kind. Whatever we are, the granite and stone was here long before us and will exist long beyond us.” My fingers ran up her spine. “Tell me of the Fortress.”
Her head tilted to the side slightly, her green eyes inquisitive on me for a second before she continued her story. “I went there when I was eight. Both Lyle’s parents and my mother were busy with their jobs with panthenite elders. We stayed in the Fortress, which housed the lot of us offspring that had no supervision. We called it the Fortress because of the two women that took care ofus, Bea and Fae, who ruled that place with iron fists. Two harder human beings you never would have met. They were tanks of women and made of fire and stone and could curdle your toes with one look. But they were the ones that raised us. I would see my mother occasionally, three or four times a year. I never knew my father, save for the name he left with me. Think of the Fortress more like a boarding school with thirty kids.”
“Does it still exist?”
She shook her head. “No. There was a fire there years after I left which killed both Bea and Fae, and the elders had a new Fortress built just like it in the Rockies. They moved it west as the East Coast had started to be too populated.”
“So you and Lyle grew up together.”
Sadness sank into the green of her eyes, shifting the depths of them to darkness. “We did. We were best friends. He was funny and smart and he constantly hummed but couldn’t carry a tune and he looked at the world so differently than everyone else around us. He was peaceful…” Her voice trailed off and I could feel the surge of energy in her body mutating—angry and moving upward toward her head.
“And peaceful doesn’t flourish in our world,” I said as I set my left palm flat on her lower back, sipping away just the crest of the furious surge of energy within her body—just enough so the pain wouldn’t overtake her, wouldn’t reach her head, but not enough that she would know exactly what I was doing. She would only feel the warm heat of my hand.
She shook her head. “No, it does not. Which made his death—” She paused, hiccupping a breath, and her hand went in front of her mouth. It took a moment before she spoke again. “Which made what happened to him in the end all the more heinous. He didn’t believe in torture. Didn’t believe in pain for any gain. And that is exactly how he went down.”
“When was it?”
“A hundred and seven years ago.”
A chill ran down my spine. Not my favorite time in history. “During the First World War, then?”
She nodded. “We were deep in enemy territory, in the heart of Germany when we were captured. The stupid part of it was that Lyle wanted nothing to do with the war. I agreed with him, and I thought I could walk the path of peace as well, until the torture and devastation of the war became clear and too much for me to ignore. I was ready to fight, to help where I could—and Lyle only came to the continent because of me. I engrained myself as a maid at the estate of a German general, and Lyle was a footman, so we could gather intelligence and feed it back to the elders.”
“I hardly think you could pass as a maid.” I truly didn’t. Ada would draw attention no matter what room she walked into.
A mischievous smile quirked her lips. “I shaved my head.”
“You what?”
“I shaved my head. People don’t look past something like that. Back then they either thought I was seriously ill or I had lice.”
I laughed, lifting to wrap my hand into her glorious hair. Smart but sacrilege. The world that forced her to shave her head deserved to pay with screams and blood. I’d taken up altar myself at the feel of the thick strands wrapped about my hand.
The smile on her face faded as darkness set back in. “That war was a Pandora’s box of atrocities that humans opened up—chief among them, the chemical warfare. The general’s house I was spying in was in charge of all the chemical production facilities. We managed to blow up seven of the sites before I was discovered. Before Lyle was discovered. They took us.”
My thumb moved to trace a soft line upward from between her eyebrows to her scalp, dissipating pain. The energy wasfurious now, starting to build in her skull. “This was the torture you spoke of done unto you?”
The dark clouds in her eyes only intensified. “I was an experiment. They’d never encountered anything like me before. Someone that couldn’t be injured, and they needed to know why. So I became nothing more than an animal strapped to a table to dissect.”
I winced, not able to stomach the thought of someone doing that to her.
All was fair between panthenites and malefics—it always had been. And my kind could be viciously cruel. I knew that firsthand.
But to imagine someone doing that to Ada—it felt like strips of my own flesh were being torn off me. Making me wish I could go back in time and cut into ribbons with the sharpest, tiniest scalpel the ones that had done this to her. Torture under my hand had always been an artform. And I would paint a fucking Renoir with the blood of whoever did this to her.
She exhaled, looking upward to the heavy oak beams that ran across the arched ceiling of the dining hall.