AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We settled into the two armchairs. Amon conjured me a glass of wine, and himself a few fingers of whiskey, before beginning.
“It was roughly ninety years ago, when my father died. I freed Dossidian and Kasha first, before going to work freeing each and every single one of my people. Now that you have had the pleasure of meeting Ash Nevra, you can imagine how many trips, trade deals and pretty words it took for me to convince her not to go to war with me over these demands.” He paused to take a sip of his whiskey. He looked so tired. So tired of fighting.
“It was at this time that Prophet Margaret released the prophecy about your birth to the public. This piqued my interest. I had wanted to find a way to overthrow Ash Nevra, and the daughter of The Origin seemed like the best way to accomplish that goal. This is what drove me to find a way to get Ash Nevra to allow me to free Prophet Margaret in the first place.
“Once I had her safely back here, she showed me all of her other prophecies. The ones she hadn’t released. The ones sitting there, on that desk,” he gestured toward the seemingly innocent stack of papers.
“It took me… some time to come to terms with the fact that The Origin’s daughter was my mate. Daemon’s live for such a long time, it is not uncommon for one’s mate to be born much later or earlier than the other. In these instances, usually the mate who has reached maturity, waits the relatively short period of time necessary to introduce the topic to the other. Eighteen to twenty-five years is a blink in comparison to the hundreds of years many of us have already lived.” He smiled at me ruefully, “You’ll soon see for yourself. Assuming we survive the war that’s looming. You’ll blink and suddenly you’ll be two hundred years old.”
I felt a thrill at the thought. I still hadn’t fully wrapped my mind around the fact that I would live for such a long time.
Amon continued. “All that being said, it wasn’t the fact that you hadn’t yet been born. It was more the fact that you were Aleites’ daughter. The daughter of the most powerful being to have ever existed. This and the fact that you were currently frozen in stone, in your mortal mother’s womb. I wasn’t sure what to do with this information. Or how I would get you out of that fucking palace, if and when your birth was triggered as prophesied.
“The frustrating thing about prophecies, is they are specific enough to paint a vivid picture, but vague enough that you never know when things will be coming to fruition. I had no idea if I was waiting a year or several hundred years for you to be born. It was a stroke of dumb luck that I was in the throne room, the day Clair emancipated herself, eighteen years ago.” My jaw hit the ground. It had been him?
“You… you took me across The Veil? To the human world? It was you?” I asked, dumbstruck. He nodded and took another sip of his drink.
“Yes. It was me. I had been at the Court of Lust, allowing Ash Nevra to damn near rob me blind on a trade deal so that I could free another fifty or so daemons. She had been in a particularly… violent mood after our negotiations. I just didn’t have the stomach to stick around and watch as she… played.” He visibly winced at the memory. I decided I didn’t need to know the details, not after having personally visited her nightmare of a court myself.
“I was standing in the throne room looking up at Aleites, wishing that he were there to wipe her off the face of the earth, when I felt the rush of power vibrate through The Veil. At first, I didn’t know what it was. Then I heard it. I heard you. A tiny cry, from inside Elvira’s statue. It felt like I had been possessed, the second my aura met yours. I cut through the stone as carefully as I could, and there you were, tiny, and pink, and angry.” He chuckled at the memory and reached out to thumb my ring of ravens.
“You were already wearing this.” He said, thoughtfully.
“How did you get me out?” I whispered, unable to tear my eyes away from him. He smiled again.
“You didn’t make it easy. You wouldn’t stop crying. I had no idea how to make an infant stop crying. So, I muffled you with magick and shrouded you in a shadow to smuggle you out. Happily, everyone was still in the Great Hall, trying to figure out what had caused the burst of power. I was then able to make it past the widowmakers and shadow walk across The Veil without being stopped.
“The first thing I did was find a reputable adoption agency. Something was calling me to Toronto, Canada, and I didn’t stop to question it.” He smiled ruefully. “Again, I had no idea how to take care of a baby. I wanted to get you into a loving home and family as far away from the Dominion as soon as possible. I monitored you from afar, for several months, before I realized that you were never going to be adopted. You were too powerful, even as an infant, the humans naturally wanted to avoid you.
“I found myself worrying that even the adoption agency was neglecting you and not giving you proper care. Finally, I decided to track down the Nightshade who had emancipated themselves, to see if they could help. I didn’t trust the magick folk, but I figured, if someone hated the Nightshades enough to emancipate themselves from the line, they couldn’t be that bad.” Once again, I felt like my eyes were going to pop right out of my skull.
“You… found Clair?” I remembered the day they had rescued me from Kieran on the docks. Clair and Amon’s strange interaction suddenly made sense. Clairafine, he had called her. They had known each other all along. Amon nodded.
“I did,” he said, before taking a sip of his drink. “I didn’t know what to expect when I found her. I was pleasantly surprised to find someone who was kind, selfless and just an overall lovely person. She had already been married to Jeremy, and they were having difficulty conceiving. When I told her about all that was going on beyond The Veil, and the role that you would play in bringing balance to the world, she suggested that she adopt you. I shielded her and Jeremy from your aura the day they went to visit you for the first time, and they both fell in love with you immediately.”
“So Jeremy… did he know, too?” I asked. Amon shook his head.
“No. Clair didn’t want him to know about her past. When she left the Nightshades, she wanted to start fresh with him, and made me promise to shield his aura in secret. He still doesn’t know about any of this.”
That was why neither Jeremy or Clair had seemed to be affected by my aura the same way the other humans had been. That was why they had been able to be around me and were able to love me. I thought of all the times Clair had told me that it wasn’t my fault, when I had lashed out at the kids at school who bullied and tormented me. She had known, all along, what I was.
“I largely tried to stay away, as you grew. Ash Nevra had launched a full-scale manhunt, trying to find you when she realized you had been taken from Elvira’s womb. I didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to you. Until that day, when your power began manifesting, and you released that energy blast.”
He took a sip of his drink, looking like he was somewhere far away, deep in thought. I remembered that day. I had accidentally killed a flock of birds, and I suspected, my elderly neighbor as well. Mrs. Serafini. My heart twinged with guilt as it often did when I revisited that memory.
That had been the day I had rushed to the library to meet Conrad, but instead had found Amon in the stacks.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he had said to me, when I had discovered him. My skin prickled. He really had been waiting for me.
For over one hundred years.
“That day was the first day I had seen you in nearly eighteen years. I could barely keep myself from pulling you into me and telling you how happy I was that you were healthy, that you were safe. That you had grown into the most beautiful daemon I had ever seen in my fucking life. But when you looked at me, you were nearly as angry as the day you were born,” he chuckled. “I figured that wouldn’t have gone over well.” A smile twitched at the corner of my mouth. No, it certainly would not have gone well.
“I noticed that you were holding an entire book of Prophet Margaret’s work. A book that I knew, had at least one prophecy about us in it. I wanted to tell you, right then and there, everything that I’m telling you now. I wanted to tell you, that you were my mate, and that I had spent your whole life trying to keep you safe. That I would spend the rest of my life continuing to do so. But then…”
I flinched. I knew what had happened then. Conrad had arrived and taken me away. He had told me everything but through the perspective of the magick folk, who were unaware of the state of things beyond The Veil.
“After that, I knew you were never going to trust me. I had to get you here to complete the Quickening some other way. When you were fighting the widowmaker, I felt your distress through the trace I had placed on you in the library. I figured if you weren’t going to come with me voluntarily, I could enforce a life debt.”
