SWNOVELS Queens and Monsters: Chapter 34
My grandmother was freaking gorgeous! Saoirse appeared to me to be about fifty. At most. (Thanks to samhain slow aging.) She had fiery red hair a shade different from my mother’s, strong brows, bright eyes, and wore the most beautiful green coat over her clothes. I really hoped I had her genes when it came to my skin because it had a youthful glow that no makeup could fake.
“The resemblance is remarkable.” She glanced from me to Bethany. “You are right. The hair is all Tiynan and everything else is Marhysa.” She blinked a few times. “It will take some getting used to seeing you so grown already. I feel like my mind is playing tricks on me. That maybe Marhysa dyed her hair and came back to me.”
“Does she speak to you?” I had so many questions. So. Many. Questions.
Her eyes widened. “Never. Did she speak to you?”
Well this was awkward. “Not exactly…”
Her voice took on an icy edge that made me stand up a little straighter. “Then what exactly do you mean?”
Saoirse had a remarkable ability to make me feel like a five-year-old kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar, even though I’d known her all of five seconds. “When I shifted to her I was pretty much only conscious on the Plane. She came to me there. We had a conversation.”
“What kind of conversation? Are you sure this really happened and wasn’t a hallucination from your poisoning?”
It felt so real it hadn’t really occurred to me that it might be a hallucination. “I don’t believe it was a hallucination. She forced me to focus. I was…I was gone. I think she might have saved me, actually.” If I had kept drifting, would the Doctor have been able to save me? “She told me I was stubborn and more powerful than anyone predicted. I asked her why she cursed me and she said it was all the House of Axl’s fault. That she had to play her part. And when I asked her to uncurse me she said it was for my protection. Then she got really upset and pulled into herself and told me she didn’t just curse me, she cursed the entire House of Axl. Then Dray arrived and she told me I needed to go with him.” I blurted it all out with no finesse whatsoever.
My grandmother’s eyes widened more with each sentence. Her hand came to her mouth. “Oh my goodness.” Then she stumbled back into a chair and began sobbing.
I glanced at Bethany who looked just as shocked as I did. My Uncle Jaymes, who’d been in the next room with his daughter, Dray, and Kris, came running in. “What the hell is going on?” He dropped to his knees and shook Saoirse’s shoulders gently. “Mother?”
“It’s Marhysa! She’s alive,” her voice croaked. “Rhysa spoke to Marhysa. She really is in there somewhere. We have to help her.”
He turned his gaze on me. “You…spoke…to her?” he said slowly.
My grandmother grabbed his shirt and tugged his attention back to her. “It must have split her mind from her body. She’s hiding herself on the Plane for protection. Maybe she can’t come back.”
“Mother, I don’t understand.”
“She cursed the whole Damned house, Jaymes. She cursed him and his entire line.”
I began to feel very uncomfortable standing there seeing their pain and feeling their helplessness. It wasn’t my intention to hurt them, to drop a bomb of information to shock them, yet that’s exactly what I did.
Jaymes came to stand right in front of me. He was a good foot taller than me so I had to crane my neck way back. From the corner of my eye I saw Dray’s fists clench, but he didn’t move. And that was fine because I was in no way intimidated by my uncle. His emotions were running high. It was understandable. “How do you know what we don’t? What kind of curse?”
“The kind that broke her!” Saoirse wailed behind him. “I never should have indulged her affair.”
Neither of us moved. “I only know what she told me.” I explained the Plane conversation again. “She cursed me. She cursed them. She was a woman who was heartbroken and angry and she did what she thought was best.”
“What kind of curse?” His brows pulled lower and lower as it all sank in.
“I don’t know…but I have a theory.” I chewed on my lower lip while I gathered my thoughts into something that resembled a complete sentence. “When I was at the House of Axl I learned that the main bloodline can’t have children anymore.”
“What?” Bethany and Saoirse both gasped while Jaymes drug his hand down his face in shock, finally pacing away from me.
It was nice to have some breathing room again, but the air in the house grew thicker with emotion by the moment, so the relief was temporary.
“There are no kids in that house except Lou’s son.” I didn’t divulge her personal details but if anyone thought long and hard enough on the subject they’d probably have questions, same as me. “The only kids I saw the whole time I was there were the ones I told you about, Dray.”
Everyone’s eyes swung to him. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to keep that information secret or not, so I left it up to him to decide.
“Tell them,” he said with a nod.
They all turned back to me. “While I was exploring the property I found a large subdivision of houses, all with samhain inside. There were children there. Lou said that the infertility was exclusive to the main bloodline and that the rest of the family could still have children.”
“But,” Gigi joined the group, “that means without you, Antyne had no hope of the bloodline continuing.”
I shrugged. “Unless I am also cursed.” I had no way of knowing whether my bloodline made it so I was doubly cursed or whether my mother excluded me from this particular revenge.
“But with you, he at least had some hope,” she said.
“Why hasn’t Lou told us about this?” Jaymes asked Dray.
Dray shrugged, looking to me for answers.
“Because,” I said, “she couldn’t risk it. That is a closely held family secret, if she told any of you, and Antyne realized you knew his weakness, he’d blame her first.”
Jaymes scoffed at that. “Weakness from the House of Axl? The creator of the Dreg army?”
“Sure he has an army, but the bloodline is everything to him.” I shot back. “Maybe amassing the army is a way of protecting the House until he can find a solution. I don’t think they have any idea why they can’t have children.” When humans were scared they did all kinds of things to compensate, I had no doubt samhain were the same.
“Then we have no reason to fight them,” Bethany interjected. “They will die out on their own.”
“No,” Dray shook his head. “Power will simply shift to a different bloodline in the House. To this suburbia of new Axls.”
“And maybe they’ll be more reasonable,” she continued. “There is no reason to push the issue now.”
I watched all this playout since I really had nothing to say other than to provide information. I had no knowledge of history or how the power dynamics of the Houses played out.
That’s when the Doctor spoke up. “The numbers are with them but the power is with us. If we strike now we can end this and gather ourselves before the real problems come.”
Saoirse’s eyes narrowed. “You feel it coming too? The Darkness?”
He turned to me. “She sees it. I’ve seen it through healing her.”
I froze as all eyes turned to me once again, even though the subject was different this time. The Doctor watched me with a steady, piercing gaze meaning that he felt it was vitally important to push the issue now.
“You see it?” my grandmother asked.
More and more Wren’s began entering the room, keeping to the edges but listening intently.
I took a steadying breath and dove in. “Yes. When I’m in the Plane there’s always a shimmering black blanket off in the distance. It’s massive and getting closer each time I enter the Plane.”
She nodded slowly. “You see the Plane where we feel it. I feel this same Darkness looming over us like a cloud.”
Dray, in true Dray form, growled. “What the hell is going on?”
Saoirse smiled but didn’t look away from me as she spoke, examining me with renewed interest. “You hear, Draygus Wren, but you do not listen. We warned you. We’ve all been warning you.”
“Warning me about what?” he barked.
“Oh, I seem to recall first mentioning my unease about twenty years ago. Every meeting of the Houses, every ball, I take a moment and remind you of the Darkness we all sense coming. You always insist it’s the House of Axl and your war. I always tell you this is much bigger. You brush me off.”
“We all who?” His face kept contorting as he fought back the urge to explode in frustration.
She waved her hand at my uncle and cousin.” The House of Nala. When we Form from the Plane we can all feel the changes, especially the older members who can remember how it felt to have no Darkness on the Plane.”
“I see it too.” Gigi waved.
Aethel stepped up beside her. “Same. You always tell us it’s the war, Dray. It’s not the war.”
He sighed in defeat. “Then what the hell is it?”
Saoirse shrugged. “It’s touching our timeline but not part of it. But as it draws closer it feels almost as if it is getting pulled into our timeline.”
Gigi nodded, coming even closer. “Yes, exactly. To me it looks like a piece of fabric getting caught in a bike wheel. Now that it’s caught it’s getting wound into our timeline.”
I nodded along, not entirely sure how to describe any of it since all of it was new to me. I still didn’t have a handle on the timeline stuff.
“So you have Sight like Georgiahana?” My grandmother asked.
Now it was my turn to shrug. “I guess?”
“Interesting,” she murmured, then moved her hands around in some waving motions, creating what looked like a ball of plasma between her palms. “Let’s take a look at things.”
It reminded me of a crystal ball, but more electric and liquidy. Images seemed to be flashing inside and it drew Gigi and Aethel in closer and closer like a magnet. As I peered down I saw a lot but understood nothing. But Saoirse, Gigi, and Aethel did.
They all glanced at each other, then at me.
Aethel spoke first. “What is coming is bigger and darker than anything we’ve seen before. In order to fight it, Destiny brought the two of you together to be the tip of our spear.”
I felt an echo to a conversation I had down in the secret basement with Dray. One of the first times I allowed myself to interact with the Plane.
Gigi’s eyes remained on the ball as she spoke. “Between the two of you, you contain the blood of every House. Together, you are the Samhain, united as one.”
“As powerful as all of us combined,” Saoirse said with a flick of her wrist that made the plasma disappear from sight. “You need to learn to harness your Magic now. Before the Darkness arrives.”