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Chapter Eleven
Bryn
"The brothers have arrived, master.”
Nina has been gone for just over twenty-four hours, and my manservant has not been idle. Nor have I. I have put out feelers on almost all available channels, though nobody seems to have seen or heard from Ivy. No. Nina. Dammit. Her name is Nina. I cannot afford to keep making that mistake.
Crichton’s announcement comes too casually for such a momentous event. He is not referring to my biological family. He is speaking instead of twelve men far closer than that. The Brotherhood. The order. The Dark Knights. We go by many names, but we are a society of broken men tasked with doing the work that the Lord’s own would usually rather not. Because we are all deeply flawed, psychopathic, and occasionally psychotic, we don’t usually cluster together for long.
Suffice to say, I did not summon them.
“Is that so, Crichton. How did they know to come?”
“Your actions have rippled, sir.”
“Mmhmm. My actions have rippled and you have told tales. It is not like you to betray me, Crichton.”
“This is not a betrayal, master. There are evils greater than any assembled here growing in force. The blood calls them forth.”
I give Crichton a stern look, but there is no time for a tongue lashing or other remonstration. The Brotherhood is here, and that means I have to deal with them.
“Did you put them in the dining room?”
“Of course, sir.”
Of course he did. The dining room has been the gathering place for the Brotherhood of the Order of the Dark Knight for as long as anybody can remember.
When I enter that room, my table is no longer empty. There is a man in every seat, save one at the head of the table. My seat.
Nobody says anything as I walk in and sit down. There is a long, pregnant pause. They are waiting for me to make my excuses. I have none.
“You’re out of control, Bryn. Even for you, this is fucked up.” The most impulsive of us speaks up when the silence has drawn itself out past the point of tolerance.
As if Cosmos has anything to say about fucked up. He has blue hair and a misanthropic streak a mile wide. He’s killed twice as many people as he’s slain demons, and that’s a conservative estimate. The man can barely go out in public without somebody dying in a horrific and traumatic manner.
“You can’t kill your ex-girlfriend’s son and fuck her daughter,” he says, though he says it with a broad grin.
I allow myself a quiet smile. “I can, because I have.”
“Bryn,” Steven says. “The girl is gone. You’ve killed one and lost the other. They are some of the last sources of angel blood on the planet that we know of.”
Steven is the oldest among us at almost sixty, or is it seventy now, perhaps even eighty? I am not good with names and times. He is well gray with milky blue eyes that have seen through the gloom too many times to count. I’m surprised he has come. He likes it in the south of France, where the beaches are sunny and the girls can barely be bothered with bikinis.
“Then perhaps you should have taken better care of them,” I say. “They've been off everybody’s radar since Ivy left.”
“Ivy wanted to be left alone. We accepted and respected her wishes. You should have told us the minute Jonah and Nina arrived in your care. We could have taken them in.”
“Yes, and hoarded the power and the blood for yourselves.”
“What have you done with his blood?” The question comes from the other end of the table. I can’t see who asked and I don't care enough about the person to recognize them by voice.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
They are exasperated with me, but I do not owe them an explanation. I have done nothing wrong according to our code. The harvesting of the blood is part of our rituals going back centuries. Jonah was never anything more than a vessel. Nina is more important. Nina can bear more young. Girls to breed, boys to bleed. That has been the motto for longer than anybody can remember. It’s inscribed on the fucking fireplace mantel in flowery script so it doesn’t look quite as horrific as it is.
Feminae ad genus homines cruentare.
This is not a company of heroes descending to save Nina from me. This is a horde of monsters, having scented blood, arriving for their own chance at a taste of it. Okay, some of them are tolerable, and being in their presence again does feel somewhat comforting. It is easy to start to feel alone in the world, to have the mundane creep all the way around me and start to take over. When these madmen are all assembled, normality gives us a wide birth.
