Evolution (Demon's Grail Book 2) Read online

  ***

  It takes a while, but I finally locate Jonathan in one of the old, crumbling bedrooms in the upstairs section of the western wing. What's left of it, anyway, since the walls are crumbling and some sections of the house are missing entirely. Whether by accident or design, however, my brother turns out to be sitting quietly in the very same room where I woke up all those years ago on my first visit to this place.

  “Donna,” I say finally, after watching him for a few minutes.

  He turns to me.

  “Toby, our uncle. Shelley. Benjamin, the head of the -”

  “What are you talking about?” he asks, interrupting me.

  “You said I didn't remember the names of the people I'd killed,” I reply. “You were wrong. I remember all of them. It doesn't really help much, but I do remember.”

  “I've never killed anyone or anything,” he tells me.

  “You will.”

  He shakes his head.

  “You can't avoid it,” I continue, “not in a place like this.”

  “I'm not like you.”

  I can't help but smile. “Say that as much as you want, but it's not true.”

  He turns to look at the window, as if he's hoping he can ignore me.

  “I was in this room with our half-sister once,” I tell him, after watching him from the door for a few more seconds. “Her name was Gwendoline. She was... Well, she was a complete mess. Dangerous and insane, but also friendly and polite, it was as if she could never quite decide. Pretty good on the piano, too. Finally, our father killed her.”

  After a moment, Jonathan turns to me. “That sounds about right,” he mutters. “From everything you've told me, Patrick was a murderous psychopath.”

  I make my way across the room. “It's easier to understand someone when you've actually looked into their eyes. Easier to forgive them, too.” When I reach him, I take the bone-carved box from my pocket and hold it out to him. “I figured maybe you could use this. Not with me, but instead of me.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Jonathan -”

  “I knew you'd do this,” he replies, interrupting me. “I knew you'd think the answer to all my problems would be to use that thing to meet our father. You're very predictable, Abby.”

  “Actually, I thought you could use it to talk to Ash.”

  He frowns. “Why would I want to talk to her?”

  “I could tell you liked her,” I continue. “I also know you blame yourself for -”

  “I blame you!” he says firmly. “You're the one who told me to keep hold of her! You're the one who wouldn't let her run away!”

  I feel a shiver pass through my body. “I guess that's fair.”

  “It's more than fair. It's true.”

  I look down for a moment at the box in my hand. “Still -”

  “Do you always look for answers in the past?” he asks. “Seriously? I meant what I said earlier, Abby, I honestly don't think you and I have had one conversation since we met that hasn't involved you going on about our father, or occasionally our mother, or very occasionally your own past. We're like opposites. You carry all that baggage around with you, you define yourself that way, whereas I have none of it.” He pauses. “I've read a few fragments in the Book of Gothos. That's all.”

  “Did you finish it?”

  He shakes his head.

  I open my mouth to tell him he should, before realizing that I'd just be playing up to his expectations.

  “I'll leave this here,” I tell him finally, reaching over to set the box down, “so you can -”

  “No!” he replies, pushing my hand away.

  I pause, before slipping it back into my pocket. Maybe I should open the box right now and make some grand demonstration of wasting the petal, but I can't quite bring myself to do something like that. Deep down, I know that one day I'll need to speak to my parents, or to my uncle, or maybe to Shelley. Maybe even to someone who hasn't died yet.

  “I wish I'd never found out about any of this,” Jonathan continues. “I was happy in New York, working in the library and muddling on with my life. Sure, I had nightmares about strange things, about this place, but I could live with a few nightmares. Why the hell did I have to get dragged out of my life and pulled into all this insanity?”

  “You -”

  “I just met a little girl who's going to die!” he shouts.

  I open my mouth to reply, but the anger in his voice is shocking.

  “Her name is Lilith,” he continues, “and she, along with all the other children in this place, is going to be slaughtered if the spiders come here.”

  “We'll protect them,” I stammer. “You're acting as if this whole war is already lost!”

  “How many of them are coming?” he asks.

  “Spiders? I have no idea, but -”

  “How many is too many?” He stares at me for a moment, waiting for an answer. “If ten spiders attack Gothos, can we fight them off?”

  “We'd have a good chance.”

  “What about twenty?”

  “We -” Taking a deep breath, I already know deep down that twenty spiders would almost certainly be able to overwhelm us.

  “Thirty?” he asks. “Forty? What about -”

  “You've made your point,” I say firmly.

  “So the children really might be doomed,” he replies. “Now do you understand why I'd have been better off never knowing about this place? Now do you see why I might have been happier with my old life?”

  “You can't deny the truth about your own identity,” I tell him. “Trust me, I tried once.”

  “I was doing pretty well, actually,” he replies. “I was living my own life, defined by me, not by a bunch of prophecies and dusty old books. I mean, look at me, do I really seem like someone who belongs at the heart of a war? Maybe you fit in with all of this chaos, but I'm just tagging along.”

  “You can learn to fight.”

  “I don't want to learn to fight!” he hisses.

  I take a step back. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, he reminded me so much of -

  “Don't say it,” he continues.

  “Say what?”

  “I can see it in your eyes.” He gets to his feet. “I remind you of him, don't I?”

  “A little. Also of her.”

  “Great. Both our parents... A monster and a victim.”

  “It wasn't like that.”

  “Wasn't it?” He stares at me for a moment. “Was it all okay because she loved him? Did that make it fine for him to gut her after she'd served her purpose?”

  “This is why I think you should use the petal,” I tell him. “If you actually meet them both, you could -”

  “Or maybe you sympathize with him,” he continues, pushing past and heading to the door. “Maybe you're so much like the great Patrick, you can actually twist your mind until you understand why he killed our mother.”

  “She forgave him,” I point out. “At the end, after they were both dead -”

  “Then she was an idiot!” Stopping in the doorway, he looks back at me. “People want me to be more like my father, but the more I hear about him, the more I want to pretend he never existed. I've been thinking about this, Abby, and I've decided I don't belong here. I tried to fit in, I tried to reclaim my identity and all that garbage, but it's a waste of time. I'm going to ask Absalom to help me find a way to go home.”

  “This is your home!”

  “It's your home! It's not mine!” He pauses. “I'm going back to New York, and I'm going to work at the library again, and I'm going to pretend that I never heard about any of this, that I never met Absalom or Emilia or a bunch of vampires or Ash...” Another pause. “Or you.”

  “You can't mean that.”

  “And I want to take the children with me.”

  “You -” I stare at him, shocked by the idea. “You want to what?”

  “Maybe I'm naive,” he continues, “but I don't believe the spiders would move heaven and earth ju
st to kill six children. If I take them away from here, back to New York, I can hide them. I can get help if necessary, but the important thing is that they won't be here at Gothos. If the spiders overrun this house, you'll all die but the children will survive. And if by some miracle you repel the spiders, you can all come and get them when it's safe.”

  “You want to leave?” I ask. “Jonathan, you're one of us.”

  “This isn't my fight.”

  “The spiders won't stop at Gothos,” I reply, “not this time. It'll be Sangreth next, or the Great Library, or the human world, but slowly they'll spread their empire across all the eight worlds, and then maybe into the void itself. No-one is safe.” I wait for him to say something, but I can tell I'm not getting through. “Jonathan,” I continue, with a hint of desperation in my voice, “even if you hate me, our family -”

  “Means nothing to me,” he says firmly, interrupting me. “Patrick is just a legend, and Sophie's less than that. I'm not a soldier, I can't fight in this war. It's not that I'm scared, Abby, it's that I recognize reality. If I stay and try to help out, I'll die, my life will be wasted because of some twisted, misguided sense of nobility. If I take the children with me and try to save them, maybe that's something I can do that'll actually contribute. I'd rather save six lives than throw my own away and let the children die anyway.”

  “They'll never agree,” I tell him. “The parents, the council... There's no way they'll let you do something like this. It's crazy.”

  “The parents will go for it,” he replies. “Abby -”

  “You can't run,” I say firmly. “You're like me, you're a fighter!”

  “I'm nothing like you. And I'm nothing like our father, either.” He steps toward me. “If I can save even one of those children, that would make my life worth more.”

  Staring at him, I realize that he's serious. “Jonathan,” I say finally, “if you -”

  Before I can finish, a scream rings out from elsewhere in the house, and we both turn to the door as we hear the sound of shouting voices. People are running, and when I make my way out into the corridor I see several figures racing toward the hallway.

  “What is it?” I shout. “What's wrong? Are the spiders attacking?”

  “It's the nursery!” one of them calls back to me, as the distant screams continue. “Something's happening in the nursery!”

  Absalom

  Ten thousand years ago

  “They could come from any direction,” Edgar mutters darkly, as we wait on the plains. “Still, at least we should have some warning. It's not as if an army of huge spiders can get too close without being seen.”

  “The scouts reported no hint of them as far as the Navarian ridge,” I point out, my eyes fixed on the distant mountains, waiting for any hint of movement. “They might not even be here yet.”

  “They're here,” Edgar replies. “I can feel it in the air. They're coming for us.”

  “My head hurts,” Makho complains for the hundredth time since we took our positions. “Why did you let me drink so much beer last night?”

  “Did Cerulesis come up with a strategy?” Edgar asks, turning to me.

  “She was working on it.”

  “If she's failed this time,” he continues, “I don't know that we have much of a chance.”

  “She won't fail,” I tell him.

  “But if -”

  “She won't fail! Trust me, she never fails! She knows what she's doing.”

  Sighing, I stare at the empty plains ahead. I've been involved in enough battles by now to know how this small-talk goes. Everyone's scared, so we end up bickering and squabbling with one another, trying to pretend that there's some semblance of normality about the situation. Anything is better than the silence of waiting to die.

  “Right now,” Edgar says finally, “I feel like we've been left out here in the open so we can get picked off easily. Why didn't she position more units at the base of the third ridge? That would have made a lot more sense. This strategy she's deploying right now is insane.”

  “She's insane,” Makho mutters.

  “Shut your mouth!” I hiss, turning to him. “You don't know what you're talking about!”

  “And you're blinded by love,” he replies. “Cerulesis lost her mind a long time ago, she should have been pulled out of the strategy room and replaced by someone who actually knows what they're doing.”

  “The woman might be mad,” Edgar interjects, “but her strategies are not. She's never led us down the wrong path before.” He pauses. “We have to keep our faith in her,” he adds finally, as if he's trying to persuade himself. “She needs to work her magic one final time.”

  “She's given up everything so she can continue her work,” I tell them. “Trust me, I know some of the sacrifices she made.”

  He glances at me.

  He knows exactly what I mean.

  Turning, I look back across the plain toward Gothos, and it's hard not to think of Cerulesis still at the stone table, furiously scribbling notes on the maps. At a time like this, I doubt she's capable of remembering her own name; all that matters to her is that we're able to defeat the spiders, and as long as she's on our side, I actually think we have a chance. The others haven't seen the way she works, not up close; they don't understand the strengths of her mind, and the twists her thoughts can take as she searches for a solution to every problem she encounters. She's the only true genius I've ever met.

  Still, I can't ignore the faint hope that maybe when the war is over, she might recover. No matter what happens, there has to be a chance that one day there'll be no more fighting, and we can all -

  Suddenly I hear a shrieking cry, and I turn just in time to see a huge spider bursting up onto the nearest ridge, silhouetted high above us against the night sky. With no time to think, I raise my sword and join the others in rushing toward the creature. Even before I get there, I feel the blood of my fellow vampires being sprayed across my face as a spider leg flashes through the air, slicing the bodies of five men in half. At the same time, I see more legs rising up for another attack and I realize that this isn't just one spider, it's a whole horde. Loud cries fill the air, along with a spider's wretched squeal as I close my eyes and lunge forward, driving my sword toward the beast's heart.

  Please, one way or another, let this be the last war I ever have to fight. Let the madness end here.

  Abby Hart

  Today

  “Out of the way!” I shout, pushing past the crowd that has gathered near the door to the nursery. “Let me through!”

  “Give her space!” Absalom tells the soldiers, forcing them to move aside as I get to the front. He turns to me. “Abby -”

  “What's wrong?” I ask, looking toward the doorway as I realize that the scream has become more of a whimper now, as if someone is sobbing. After a moment, even that sound is cut off suddenly, replaced by the choking sound of death and then, finally, silence. “Absalom, what's happening in there?”

  “I'm not sure yet,” he replies, “but...”

  “But what?” I wait for him to reply, but there's a hint of tears in his eyes. “Absalom, will you please tell me what's going on?”

  When he doesn't reply, I slip past him and head to the doorway, only to stop when I see a bloodied, torn corpse on the floor, with six children sitting nearby. I look around, tensed for some sign of an attacker, but there's nothing else in the room. For a moment the scene makes no sense at all, until finally I realize that the children seem so calm and tranquil, as if not only does the corpse not bother them, but it actually gives them some kind of comfort. The body is still twitching slightly, but it's clear that she's dead.

  “They killed their carer,” Absalom says, his voice trembling with shock. “The children attacked Clarissa and tore out her heart. It was very sudden, she died within minutes.”

  All I can do is stare in shock, convinced that this has to be a mistake. Clarissa's bloodied corpse is on the stones with a thick hole in her chest, and a few fe
et closer to the children there's a ravaged heart that has clearly been torn apart by small hands. Some of the children have blood on their fingers, as if they ripped the heart out from Clarissa's chest themselves.

  “No,” I whisper. “They wouldn't do this, why would they -”

  When I look more closely at the children, however, I realize that there's something wrong with their bloodied faces, as if all six of them are locked in some kind of intense concentration with their eyes tight shut. I take a step forward but Absalom puts a hand on my shoulder, holding me back.

  “Careful,” he hisses. “Something's wrong here, and we don't know what. No-one has been into the room yet.”

  “Has anyone asked them what happened?” I reply.

  “The children? They're not responding to anything. It's as if their minds are somehow shut off.”

  Slipping free from his touch, I take a step into the room, while being careful not to get too close to the children. Hearing a noise nearby, I turn and see that Jonathan has reached the front of the crowd and is staring in horror at Clarissa's body.

  “Stay back,” I tell him firmly.

  He turns to me.

  “Let me handle this,” I add. “Trust me.”

  Turning back to look at the children, I realize that they've barely responded to my arrival at all, as if their minds are elsewhere. Their eyes are closed, too, but I can tell they're not sleeping: they're breathing calmly and slowly, almost as if they're meditating. The nearest child is a little girl with the most beautiful golden hair I've ever seen, so I take another step toward her and then crouch down, making sure to keep a little distance between us in case she tries to attack me. Still, I can't believe that she and the other children are responsible for Clarissa's death.

  Something like that could never happen here, not in the heart of Gothos itself.

  “Hey,” I say cautiously, “My name is Abby. Can you tell me what happened here?”

  I wait for a reply, but her eyes remain closed and her head stays bowed.

  “Lilith,” Jonathan says from the doorway. “Her name is Lilith.”