Page 76 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

He seems to know the pressure point better than Kade, even.

Riley doesn’t notice. His eyes are moving back and forth on the screen.

‘To keep the lines stable, they married the children to one another every other cycle, alternating branches each generation like a braid, thus preserving the line. Over time, they began sharing the method selectively. Not the whole process, but enough to widen their circle. They brought others to Sable Key, people who could help them sustain and expand their empire. Some lines survived, others failed.

‘The original three remained unbroken at the centre, but the ritual they now performed every thirty years or so was bastardised in the extreme. Like an inbred genetic line, the Knot was weakening once more. Now, even in the younger bodies, the siblings began ageing faster than before. The transfer wasn’t holding like it once did. It was degrading, rotting. So the younger brother innovated.’

‘How?’

‘He brought in physicians, scientists and engineers. The best minds of the New World. He didn’t treat the Death Knot as ritual magic. He thought of it as a process; mechanical, measurable and capable of optimisation. By the turn of the nineteenth century, they understood something crucial. A host who lived fully before the transfer endured far longer. The richer the life, the more resilient the vessel. Too young, and the bond would snap under strain. Too old, and resistance hardened into rebellion, risking a fracture in the line, like the daughter who got free. They identified a narrow window between pliability and permanence. A fixed age at which the mind was strong enough to hold but not strong enough to refuse.’

‘Twenty-one,’ Lachlan utters, threadbare and grim.

‘They cultivated their children with the best education money could buy, but they also gave them experience through adversity, trauma and love. Nothing deepens the neural architecture like love. A hollow life wouldn’t sustain the transfer. When the body was ripe and the mind was ready, they harvested them.’

Lachlan rises to stand, his back to both Kade and Riley.

He’s silent for a while, his hand over his mouth.

‘What happens to the consciousness of the child?’

‘The adults can cage the soul of the child, bury it even, but they can’t kill it. Sometimes the child would fight and ultimately be caged; other times, they’d flee into the newly vacant body of their parent, which would then be stored. Over the last fifty years or so, the younger brother speculated that the consciousnesses of the children were blending with their own.’

Lachlan looks back, a deep frown in place. ‘The fuck does that mean?’

‘That fragments of the children were melded with the adults.’ Riley finally looks away from the screen and at Lachlan. ‘Did you never see a little something strange in him? A flash of something bright and angry?’

‘He wanted Jules for his body,’ Lachlan states, his voice trembling. ‘He was planning to possess him. This… that’s why he took his blood.’

‘It helped prepare for the merge.’

‘Penhalyx was always saying shit like… like he wanted Jules to have a good life, a good childhood, experiences. All of it was to possess him. That’s why he didn’t care.’ Lachlan sways drastically to the side.

‘Hey, whoa.’ Kade leaps up and grabs him, steadying him before he can fall. Lachlan is solid and heavy, but Kade is strong. ‘Here, sit down.’

‘I n-never saw it.’

‘Take a breath.’

‘That’s why he wanted you and me to…’ Lachlan breaks off, his head dropping into his hands, utterly miserable. ‘He wanted you to experience it and then keep me on, not knowing that it wasn’t you.’

‘Just breathe. It’s OK.’

‘I never thought for a second it could be this.’

‘No one would ever think it,’ Riley tells him. ‘That’s why it remained a secret all these years.’

‘Christ. This is why it was in my contract not to scar you or change your body,’ Lachlan utters raggedly. ‘Because it was his in waiting. This is what happened to Savannah on Sable Key, isn’t it? The blue light. Ariadne took her. Sorrenko knew. He... That’s... that’s why he shot her. The death transfers. He was trying to switch them back, oh my God. I should have known. I should have seen it, but I...’ Lachlan croaks weakly. ‘I could never conceive of doing that to your own child.’

‘Because you’re not a fucking monster,’ Kade insists sternly.

‘Sorrenko was trying to reverse it. He was trying to save her. Breaking the cycle.’ Lachlan looks at Riley. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘Julian,’ Riley utters, bracing in advance for the pain, and Kade feels it as if behind glass again, knows Riley took the brunt of it, ‘found out about all this from the journals that were kept throughout the centuries. They got them back from the witch hunters a century later, but that’s a whole other thing. The journals were sent to Vasily Sorrenko from Mikhail’s home in Rozhenska. Vasily shared everything with Julian.’

‘Jules would have told me.’

‘No,’ Kade tells Lachlan, hand on his knee. ‘He hired Iron Star to stage a kidnapping and fake their deaths.’