BROKEN BLADE (22 page)

No help for it. I needed a haircut. I needed to get on the road.

I needed to find a better line of work.

* * * *

“You smell of old magic. It’s not pleasant.” The look on Es’s face was one of complete distaste. And unless I’d really lost my touch, I thought I saw something in her eyes that looked like fear. Resigned fear, as though something she had dreaded for a long time was finally coming to pass.

It wasn’t reassuring.

But instead of saying anything about that, I just forced myself to smile at her. “Wow, Es. Yes, it has been a long time. Good to see you, though. Please...don’t hover. It drives me nuts.”

A low chuckle escaped her. “I’m sorry, Kit. That was rude of me.” She rose from her perch on the stoop and came to stand in front of me, her pale, colorless eyes resting on my face. “You look rather well.”

“And you’re a better liar than I thought,” I said sourly. “I look like a horrid, broken waste.”

“That is your grandmother talking.” Es gave me a disapproving look. “You look like a woman who is pulling herself out of hell. Again. You did it once.” She reached up to touch my cheek and I didn’t let myself flinch away. “I hate the fact that you have to do it again. But you will. You will be stronger, wiser, sadder for it. But never doubt you’ll do it.”

As she spoke, she watched me with an intensity that left me uncomfortable. It was like she was trying to tell me something but I didn’t know what.

Licking my lips, I decided to focus on the matter on hand. “I need to know about Pandora, Es. You know, the stinky, old magic smell. Just what does old magic smell like anyway?”

She smiled at me and it was a familiar one, full of humor, wisdom and patience. “That just depends on the magic, dear Kitasa. This smell...it’s old blood, malice and cruelty.”

That didn’t make me feel better. And I hadn’t exactly felt warm and cuddly to begin with. Out of habit, I flexed my hand. Es lowered her gaze and watched.

Something in the back of my mind burned. “Please stay out of my head, Es.”

“Even magical injuries can be healed...if you’ll allow it,” she said gently.

“It’s not an injury.” Nobody understood the bond with my blade. I knew how it felt and it was like somebody had cut an arm off. Once a person lost a limb, no amount of healing would regrow it.

She sighed. “So very stubborn.”

Like she was anybody to talk. But I didn’t point that out to her. Judging by the smile in her eyes, she knew exactly what I was thinking, though. Drove me nuts, the way witches could do that.

“Would you feel better if I told you that you are just as frustrating to me?” Es stroked a hand down my arm and squeezed. “Just as frustrating…just as endearing.”

I swallowed and looked away.

“Now I’ve made you uncomfortable. I’m sorry. I just…well, I wanted you to know. I’ve missed seeing you. Speaking with you.”

I looked back at her, forcing myself to speak past the discomfort. Affection always left me…out of place. I just didn’t know how to handle it. “I missed you, too,” I said, and it was like I had to drag each word out. But I said it. “I can’t say I’m sorry I didn’t visit. It’s hard enough even now.”

“I understand.”

Coming from her, I could accept that. It didn’t sound like a trite platitude. Es didn’t use those. If she said she understood, you simply
believed
that. Gazing into her pale eyes was too hard, though. If she understood how hard it was…I blinked, my eyes burning.

Clearing my throat, I focused on the job.

“Can you help me with this Pandora thing or not?”

“Can I help?” she murmured, echoing my words. She walked away, the white garments she wore fluttering around her. She took the mug of tea she’d left on the stoop and lifted it to her lips. “When it comes to that one, the wisest thing anybody could do is stay away. Very far away.”

Her pale eyes met mine. “But that’s not an option, is it?”

“Doesn’t seem to be.” Turning away, I stared off into the brilliant blue sky. Clouds dotted the horizon and the sun played hide-and-seek, turning the edges of one fat puff to silver. I stared at it until my eyes stared to burn. “My gut tells me that walking away from this only makes it worse.”

“Worse for whom?”

The question was soft, and under the gentle tone of Es’s voice, I heard a world of worry.

Turning, I studied her. To my light-dazzled eyes, she looked strange. Bright lights didn’t affect me the way they would had I been fully human. I didn’t have trouble focusing on her, but light seemed to cling to her. It was an…odd sight. Odd, and unnerving.

Finally, I shrugged. “I can’t answer that. I just don’t know. The only thing I do know is that it doesn’t feel right to have something called Pandora’s Box in somebody else’s hands. Especially
unknown
hands. It would be like...” I faltered for the words. “Hell, putting my sword in the hands of my enemy.”

“So it’s the lesser of two evils in your mind.” Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she sipped from her mug. “Were I in your shoes, I might agree.”

“I get the feeling you disagree. What do
you
think I should do with the damn thing?”

She smiled, a faint curve of her lips. “Find the deepest, dark hole in the ocean and cast it down into it. Is that viable?”

The idea had merit. Then I shrugged. “I’d have to find the damn thing first. And I need more info to do that. Do you know anything about it? She…” I swallowed the nasty, coppery taste of fear crowding my throat and forced myself to ask the question. “She told me…” I paused. My throat was dry. Even
thinking
this was almost impossible. “She told me something that’s almost impossible to believe. I have no way to confirm it.”

“Don’t you?”

“Es.” I spun around, ready to hit something. I didn’t have time for this enigmatic shit. “Look, can you help me or not? I need
more
than what she told me. I don’t even know enough to know what I should do with the damn thing when I find it. I’m operating blind and I hate it.”

“Yes. I imagine you do.” She turned away and crossed back to the stoop, settling there with her arms wrapped around her knees. “What I know may or may not be of any use. In the end, you need to trust your gut on this.”

“I can’t just go by what she says. And research is pointless. There’s next to
nothing
about Pandora in the mortal world.”

“Please.” Es closed her eyes. “Stop saying her name.” Then she sighed. “There was never much known outside of those legends…only a handful of scholars, only a select few ever knew more.”

I narrowed my eyes. “A select few?”

She rubbed a finger down the hem of her sleeve. It held silver and green embroidery. Very pretty...upon closer inspection, I realized it was the pattern used in the crest for Green Road, the house Es belonged to. There were four houses in the order of witches. Green Road was the largest, the oldest, the most powerful. “Do you know the written history of Green Road is almost as old as the written history of the
aneira
?”

“I don’t much care about
aneira
history,” I said. The
aneira
might have bred me, raised me, trained me, but they had also tortured me, beaten me, starved me. They hadn’t bothered to share their history with me. Why should they? I was a useless, mongrel half-breed, not fit to even breathe their air, according to my grandmother.

“You should care. It’s more important than you realize.” She stared at me and yet again, I had that odd, uneasy feeling that she was trying to tell me something. “Sometime soon there will be things about them that you
need
to know. And your resources are…limited.”

I bit back the taste of bile and fear. “My grandmother won’t give up. I know that. I’ll deal with it.” 
Somehow…

“Oh, she’s not what I was talking about. Not
all
things related to your people are bad, Kit. After all…” She reached up and touched my hair. “You’re not. But you’re right. She’ll continue to seek you. Prepare for it. However…it’s not the
history
I was referring to. It’s the age. We are old. Very old. All of us are—
aneira,
witch, were, vampire. The offshoot races…some of them came later…our scholars think they happened when our kind interbred with mortals and the genes mutated. Some of the offshoots might have happened as a weird sort of evolution when the population was unique…merfolks, for example, are often found in areas where the livelihood is dominated by water. Not just oceans, but rivers, and lakes. Witches interbreeding with humans, say in Ireland and Scotland. And that’s where we often see selkie and the
mer
. Our scholars think our DNA caused the mutation a millennia ago that gradually led to those changes—an adaption.”

She was getting scientific on me. Wonderful. I shoved a hand through my hair and gave it a hard jerk. “Es...where are you going with this?”

“You have absolutely no patience.” This time, the expression on her face was nothing but pure indulgence. It was the look a mother might have given a child. But it had been a long time since I had been a child, and my memories of my mother were very dim. Echoes of her singing...and I thought that maybe she had loved me.

“We are
old
, Kit. Very old.
Vampires like to talk like they are the oldest of us…even older than mortals.”

My gut knotted in fear and I already knew I wasn’t going to like how this conversation ended. “That’s stupid thinking,” I said. “They feed off others. If humans weren’t here to feed them, how did they come into existence? And how did they make the new ones?”

“Stupid thinking,” she agreed. “At our core, we were all human once.”

I twitched. “The
aneira
weren’t. Witches weren’t.”

“You think not?” Her head tipped back and she gazed up at the sky as the wind tangled in her hair. “We are the closest to human even now. Genetically, we are just a few short strands away. A manipulation here. A mutation there. Although we are born genetically different, we are more human than any of the others. We even possess more humanity than they do.”

I snorted. “Oh, you’re wrong there. My grandmother has the humanity of a cesspit.”

“Well, there are humans who lack any sort of humanity, aren’t there?” She lowered her head and her gaze met mine. “A vampire bites a human and initiates the blood exchange. Within days, the human either dies or becomes a vampire. Within a few years, the soul begins to die and with it, the humanity. When a human is bitten by a were, the chances of him dying run about seventy-five percent. The few who survive will change. And they are no longer remotely human. We who were never human have no concept of what it is to crave blood. To look at another and see only prey...to have to fight the very instincts within us.”

She was making me nervous. Not just with what she was talking about, but the way she was acting.

She sighed and brushed her hair away, fisting it in her hand to hold it back from her face. “Our history tells us that for centuries, we hid in plain sight. Wise women, wise men...people might have suspected what we were, but they trusted us, let us aid them, and that was what we did. Because that was why we were created.”

“Created?” I had to force the word out.

She fingered the embroidery on her sleeve. “Yes. Just as your kind was created...with a purpose. We would protect mankind, while your kind hunted the monsters she had loosed.”

The monsters…

“Pandora,” I whispered.

It was true
.

She slid me a look, mild disapproval in her gaze. I could hardly care at that point.

It was all true, then.

“All the legends about the box…death, sickness…?”

“She did loose death and sickness…vampires
are
known as the undead, even now. It’s an odd sort of death, and their hungers
bring
death. The were? How many die when they are infected?”

Death…sickness
…

Swiping my damp hands down my pants, I tried to think.

“Think about it,” Es continued. “True death, sickness. They’ve always existed. But she brought about a
new
kind of death. A new kind of sickness…and with them came destruction. Those were her evils. Not all that rubbish in the legend.”

Blood roared, pounded in my head so hard, I thought I might be sick. My hand itched, and I closed it into a fist. There was no comforting whisper, nothing I could do to ease the fear I felt. Except face it and deal with it. My voice was surprisingly steady as I made myself ask, “Is this for real? You all actually know this to be fact?”

“It’s as close to real as any of the old legends.” Es tipped her head back, a small smile on her face.

“She made us.”

“No.” There was a pause, so brief it was almost not even there. She lifted her lashes to stare at me. “She made
them
. We were made to hunt them down, heal the poison from the blood...preserve the human race. But nature has a way of deciding what will win out. And nature decided she liked having all of us around.”

The array of thoughts running around in my head was dizzying.

Pandora created them…weres, vampires
.

And we were created too. My mind screamed out in denial at the very idea.

I slammed my fist against my temple in attempt to slow that wave of thought, but it didn’t work.

“Es, I think you need to start at the beginning.”

“That...would be a very long story.”

Chapter Seventeen

“There are some...or were some, at least, who believed she was Lilith.”

I blinked.

Lilith. Bent over the mug of tea Es had pushed on me, I wondered just how many more surprises she had in store for today. Huddling over the table, I tried to pretend like I was drinking that tea I hated as I processed what she’d just told me.

Processing…and still not taking it in. I could only think
one
Lilith of real importance.

“Lilith. As in the first wife some people think Adam had before Eve?”