The Scribe (19 page)

“And Malachi?”

“He was born near here, actually.” Rhys smiled. “Though I believe his parents moved when he was still a child and were living in Germany when the Rending happened.”

“The Rending.”

“Yes… the Rending.” Rhys nudged her farther down the hall as his inner voice took on a low, desperate tone. “One summer, there was a sudden rash of Grigori attacks in the cities. We learned later that it all happened within just a few weeks, but at the time, we had no idea. I was in London, about one hundred years old. I’d finished my training and was doing guardian work, as we all do. The Grigori, who had been relatively quiet for years, started attacking many human women. It was unexpected, and we couldn’t keep up. We’d let our guard down.” He let out a shaky breath. “My watcher followed protocol. When we needed help, we called for the mated men to come help us. They left the retreats to aid us in the city, because that was where the threat lay… we thought.”

They took another step down the hall, and Ava saw the edge of chaos.

She whispered, “But they left the Irina in the retreats alone.”

“Irina…” Rhys’s fingers came up to trace the image of a woman, arms stretched out as dark figures ran toward her. “…have frightening magic of their own. Powerful. Deadly. But they were outnumbered, and they had to protect the children.” Ava felt the tears wet her cheeks as she watched him trail his hands over the scenes of carnage the artist had rendered in frightening detail.

Bodies broken on the ground.

Homes burning.

Children’s toys, bloody and abandoned.

Rhys stopped in front of the depiction of another woman, this one with a fearful gash on her throat. Rhys’s finger traced down the woman’s face, lingering near her neck as if to cover the wound. “Grigori will go for the throat first. If an Irina cannot speak, most of her magic is rendered mute as well. Their voices are…” Ava saw him blink away tears. “The Grigori soldiers overran retreats all over the world. The Irina protected as many children as they could, but most didn’t survive. The girls, especially, were hunted.”

A rushing began to fill her mind. Ava could almost hear it. Hear the voices of the women, silenced forever. Their children, cries cut short by murder. A terrible pain began to throb in her chest.

“How many?” she whispered.

Rhys shook his head. “No one knows for certain. Thousands. It was a coordinated effort on the part of the Grigori to render us weak. They know we are most powerful when we are mated. And they have always feared the voices of the Irina. They fear magic they don’t understand. So, they killed them. As many as they could, along with most of the children and the men who had stayed behind.”

Ava felt the trembling start in her legs.

“The council estimates eighty percent of our women and children were wiped out within a matter of weeks in the summer of 1810. Our race was cut in half. That’s why we call it the Rending.”

The shaking grew. The horror was too much. The loss—barely comprehensible.

They halted at the end of the hall where a tapestry hung, woven with the same circle of Irin and Irina depicted in the book Malachi had shown her. But instead of a couple embracing, the tapestry was torn down the middle, forming a kind of curtain that Rhys pulled back.

Behind it, there were more words, written in the ancient script.

“These are names of the Irina and children from the retreat nearby,” Rhys whispered. He pointed to one near the top. “This was Evren’s wife.”

Ava stifled a cry. Hundreds of names followed that first one. Column after column of names. Some worn smooth by fingers rubbing over them. Others sharp and jagged, as if the stone still held the anger of two hundred years.

She felt rage bubble up along with a primal grief she could barely comprehend. Words caught in her throat, and her hands clenched, her fingernails digging into her palms till she could feel the skin break and the blood run. She felt powerless. Strangled by her own pain. By Rhys’s pain. By the pain lurking beneath every face she’d seen. She shook with it, knowing she was crying, but the tears weren’t enough.

“Ava?” Rhys’s voice seemed to come from a distance. “Ava, are you all right?”

Don’t speak. Can’t speak. Never speak again.

Shaking her head, Ava pulled her hair and closed her eyes. She dug her fingers into her temple, relieved by the bite of pain. Her tear-filled eyes rose to the wall of names, but there was only silence.

And Ava knew.

These
were
her people. And they were gone.

“No,” she whispered.

The shivering took over, starting in her chest and spreading to her limbs. Her mind flew in a thousand directions as she closed her eyes again and rocked.

“Ava?”

She felt Rhys’s hand on her shoulder. He tried to put an arm around her, but she shoved him back.

“
No!
”

“Ava, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

Rhys broke off at the unexpected cry of grief that came from her throat. It was a groan. A shout. It was everything her soul didn’t have the words to express. Ava leaned against the far wall, staring at the mosaic, feeling her legs start to give out. She felt locked in a pain she couldn’t escape.

And then she felt him. Felt him running toward her. Heard his footsteps coming down the hall.

Closer.

“What did you do?” he shouted.

“She asked! Was I not supposed to tell her the truth?”

A shove. A punch. Ava reached out, her eyes still closed, grasping for something she couldn’t name yet.

Hands met hers. Arms encircled her. And the calm followed. The rage fled, and in its wake was a fierce grief for a thousand faces she would never know. A thousand voices she would never hear. Ava held on to Malachi and wept for a loss her mind could barely comprehend. He lifted her and took her away from the hall. Away from the flickering candles and the bloody stones. Ava closed her eyes and let him take her away.

“So many dead.” She closed her eyes and whispered into his skin.

“I know.”

“Women like me. They hated them. They killed them. Because they were afraid.”

They were sitting in a quiet corner of the scribe house, in a room she hadn’t seen before. Low lights flickered from sconces on the wall, and the room was lined with comfortable chairs and sofas. There was another mural on the wall, but this one was a picture of the sky, vividly blue against the light stone walls. Malachi was holding her on his lap, stroking her hair as she burrowed her face into his neck.

“Was your mother killed, too?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. “Yes. And my father. He had remained behind at the retreat when the men in our village went to Hamburg to help the guardians. He was killed, too. Almost our entire village was wiped out. I was stationed in another city.”

She fell silent again, focusing on the quiet comfort of his skin against hers. How could a people survive such a loss?

“You lost your wives. Your mothers. Your children.”

“Most of us haven’t even seen an Irina since the Rending.” His voice held suppressed rage. “We are half a people.”

“That’s why you called me a miracle,” she said.

She felt his arms tighten. “Nothing about your family says you can be Irina, but you
are
. We lost so many, but… I am willing to hold out hope that somehow, if you exist, then others might, too. That our race will survive. We are dying, Ava. We may live forever, but we are dying from the inside. Once there were so many of us. Families. Generations. Now there are almost no children. The Irina who still live hide away, angry with the rest of us for leaving them vulnerable. Enraged at the loss of their sisters and children. And who can blame them?”

“And the Grigori know who I am.”

His arms squeezed a little tighter. “They will not get you. I will not allow it. None of us will.”

She pressed her face into the skin of his neck and breathed deeply, allowing herself the comfort. Allowing herself to dream for a moment that there could be a future for her that didn’t mean loneliness and isolation.

“Ava.” She heard the reservation in Malachi’s voice and felt him begin to draw away. She held his shoulders tightly.

“Just give me a few more minutes.”

His shoulders tensed, then relaxed, and she felt his arms go around her even more tightly, pressing her into his chest as he took a deep breath. His voice was only a soft murmur in her mind, and no other intruded. Malachi began stroking her hair again, tentatively brushing his fingers along her neck and behind her ear.

He finally said, “A few more minutes.”

And just like the moment in the hall, when grief and recognition slammed together, Ava knew. However it had happened, whatever strange twist of fate had caught her… these
were
her people.

And however he tried to deny it, Malachi was hers, too.

Chapter Eleven

It was getting harder and harder to avoid her. Malachi sat in the corner of the library, watching Rhys and Evren interview Ava about her family again. He’d trusted his brother to look after her, even if Rhys’s behavior had irked him, but Ava’s collapse in the hallway had been unnecessary. Rhys should have known. Irin scribes still struggled to talk about the massacre that had taken most of their families. How did he think Ava would react?

So Malachi was back to guarding her, this time from his own people. He didn’t know why he was so attuned to the woman, but perhaps days of reading her expressions had given him some insight the others didn’t have. She was handling her new reality well, but he knew she was still stressed at times. Like when they asked her about her family…

“Listen… Yes, I have a lot of cousins on my mom’s side.” Her voice was clipped, her hands clenched tight. “But no, as far as I know, none of them hear voices. My mom doesn’t hear voices. Her mom didn’t either. I don’t know why you don’t understand this. There is no history of mental illness—”

“Not mental illness,” he muttered from the chair at the far end of the table, glancing up at her. “Stop calling it that. You’re not mentally ill, Ava.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Whatever. Angel blood. Irin blood. Call it what you will. I’m the only one, okay? Lots and lots of girls all over my mom’s side, and none of them hear voices. Or souls. Or whatever this is.”

The rest of the world might have disappeared. Malachi and Ava glared only at each other.

“Are you always this sarcastic?” he asked.

“Are you always this taciturn?”

He picked up a book again and pretended to read.

Ava said, “I’ll take that as a yes.” She turned back to Evren. “Okay, next question.”

Evren cleared his throat. “It seems improbable, but let’s explore all genetic possibilities and look at your father’s side.”

“Now that could be difficult.”

“Because?”

“I barely know my biological father.”

Her father was a famous musician, Jasper Reed. He and Lena Matheson had never married. It was a brief relationship that only lasted until Lena became pregnant. From Malachi’s research, he knew the father had stayed in the mother’s life in a peripheral way, remaining friendly, but not an active part of his child’s life. Malachi found little to admire about Reed, despite the human’s legendary musical talent.

Children were rare to the Irin. A mated couple would probably only ever have one, possibly two, children in hundreds of years. No one knew why. Perhaps it was simply a divine trade for the unnaturally long life their race had been granted. For that reason, children were unreasonably cherished. Malachi might even say pampered, except for the rigorous magical training that started when Irin children reached the age of thirteen.

The thought of fathering a child and abandoning her was unheard of.

Evren asked questions carefully, but Malachi could tell Ava was becoming more upset. She twisted her ring in a nervous gesture, and the air around her became charged. He had the almost unbearable impulse to shove Rhys from his seat next to her so he could take her hand, just to calm her down. He quashed it. Damien’s warning still rang in his ears. Ava wasn’t a normal Irina who had been nurtured by a loving family. She had been subjected to the battery of human emotions her whole life. In that situation, any Irin male would be able to offer her comfort. It didn’t mean she had a special bond with
him
, even if he felt drawn to her.

But…

Maybe it was more than just a normal attraction. She wouldn’t let Rhys approach her when she broke down in the hallway. She’d reached for
him
. Even with her eyes closed, she’d sensed him. Almost as a mate would.

Reshon
. The word had become a persistent whisper in his mind.

There has been an overwhelming feeling of comfort as he held her. Malachi knew he was soothing her, but the act of giving comfort fed his soul, as well. Not to mention the intoxicating feel of her skin against his. Then the memories of their kiss on the island—

“Shut up!”

He blinked and looked to her. Ava was glaring at him, and Malachi frowned.

“I wasn’t saying anything!”