Chapter 3

He is quiet for nearly a minute, thinking. Putting words together. Dredging up the past. "Your mother…" he begins, but trails off, shaking his head. "Eliza was the only child of the Sparrow line. Your family, Maeve—your mother"s family, rather—is one of the wealthiest, oldest, and most powerful fae families, and Eliza was last of the line. If Alistair explained how reproduction works, or rather doesn"t work, in immortals, then you are aware that biologically, an immortal only has one true physical parent. It"s not seen that way—the host or donor is seen as merely a…vessel. A necessary intermediary, you might say. Something akin to how a mortal couple might view a surrogate, which I suppose is pretty much the truth. In your case, your grandmother, Eliza"s mother, was never able to conceive, and she tried for centuries with any number of mortal males. Finally, because your grandparents were desperate for a child to secure their lineage, your father took mortal females and began to try for an heir that way. I doubt Alistair would have told you this since it"s not well known outside fae circles, but it is preferable, especially in aristocratic or royal fae lines, like yours, for the female to bear the heir, rather than for the male to sire one on a mortal female. It has long been seen as a blemish on that couple"s social standing if the male is forced to sire the heir. But by the time it became obvious that Philistia, your grandmother, was barren, immortal numbers were already dwindling very, very fast."

"Wait, wait. My grandmother"s name is Philistia?" I snort. "What the hell?"

He just shrugs. "Fae have always had unusual ideas for names."

"Next question, before you keep going. How old was Mom? When she…died." My throat catches on the last word, the syllable acidic and bitter at the base of my esophagus, like bile.

"Eliza was born on May 16, 1510."

I blink. "Wha…what?"

He smiles kindly. "She was fae, Maeve. We are immortal. To reach an age where we appear middle-aged to a mortal, we are at least four hundred years old."

"She was older than Alistair? But she looked younger!"

He laughs. "Vampires and fae age differently. Vampires do not age physically when they"re unblooded, but then when they are blooded, they age faster than fae. It balances out, mostly, but as a result, vampires tend to appear older to mortal eyes than a similarly aged fae would."

I rub my face with both hands. "But Mom was 513 years old?"

He grins. "Yes. And I happen to be older by nearly fifty years. I was born in 1463."

"Where was Mom from?"

"England. Your mother"s family is distantly related to the English royal family. Distant cousins, I believe. Your father"s line isn"t royal, but is English nobility who can trace their lineage nearly to Arthurian times."

"No shit?"

He snickers. "No shit. You hail from a very, very prestigious family twice over."

"You talk differently without the glamour mask," I say.

He shrugs. "The mask becomes second nature. You learn to suppress all fae characteristics and adopt the mannerisms of mortal culture. When we drop the mask, we tend to revert to type. For me, I tend to revert to a more formal and archaic pattern of speech without my mask in place, which is true of most fae."

"So," I say, prompting him to continue the story.

He sips and continues. "So. By the early fifteen hundreds, immortal numbers were already on the decline. There have been witch hunts at various points throughout history, where mortals became aware of our existence and hunted us down. Each time that happened, we lost significant numbers of our population. And then there were the wars, the constant mortal wars. We couldn"t very well stay out of them, embedded within mortal culture as we were, and are."

He sips again, thinking.

"In the seventeen hundreds, what your current mortal history texts call the Age of Reason, the Immortal Tribunal, the body responsible for governing immortal affairs, decided to create a scientific council dedicated to solving the problem of immortal reproduction. They worked night and day for more than two centuries with no results."

"How do you know this?" I ask. "About the reproduction council?"

His expression darkens. "You"ll find out shortly." He sighs. "This is where the telling becomes painful. By the time the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1918, immortal numbers were reaching critically low levels. Technology was advancing rapidly, and mortal society was changing just as rapidly. The IRRC—the Immortal Reproductive Research Council, as they named themselves—decided it was time to change things up. They began using more and more drastic measures, attempting ever more desperate experiments. Artificial insemination was pioneered by immortal scientists when the council was first established in the late seventeen hundreds and successfully attempted in mortal subjects by 1900. It was never successful in immortals, obviously.

"So, decades passed, and immortal populations around the globe continued to dwindle. The IRRC labored for over two hundred years with absolutely nothing to show for their work and the billions of dollars in funding. The Tribunal finally demanded results, or the entire council would be executed and replaced. So, in 1978, the IRRC came up with an experiment that had been suggested several times across the centuries but always rejected because it is, in immortal cultures, considered unthinkable. Can you guess?"

"Cross-species reproduction."

"Precisely Although ‘species' is not quite the correct word." He finishes his drink and sets it aside. "It has happened before, of course—interracial sexual relations. But always, as far as history is concerned, as a result of rape during war, and if the victim—the immortal female—was impregnated, an abortion was forced. Invariably so. Such a child could not be allowed to live. It goes against everything all three immortal cultures believe in, which is why it took more than two hundred years for them to become desperate enough to try it.

"Now, you must understand that since we are immortal, we take a long time to come to a decision, and even longer to plan and carry out any kind of action. So even though the decision was made in 1978 to attempt cross-race reproductive experiments, the council spent more than twenty years planning. The first experiments didn"t take place, according to my sources, until 1999. They were…a dismal, brutal failure. The female subjects, obviously, refused to participate willingly, and the males whose morals got in the way couldn"t be induced to carry out their part of the experiment."

I wince. "You mean, the women wouldn"t allow themselves to be raped, and the men wouldn"t rape them."

He nods. "Correct." A sigh. "So they had to go back to the drawing board. New techniques were required, as were new subjects. The problem was, with immortal populations at record lows, subjects were nearly impossible to find. Even more desperate measures were required."

I blow out a breath. "I think I know where this is going, and I don"t like it."

"Indeed. Here is where the story intersects with your history, Maeve. Your grandfather, Elias Sparrow, was, and is still, Chairman of the council. When the scientists announced their solution, Elias volunteered his daughter to be the first subject."

"Did…did Mom volunteer?" I ask, knowing the answer.

"No. She was not asked. Elias made the decision and she was given no choice in the matter."

"So my grandfather is a monster."

Andreas groans. "I wish I could unequivocally agree, truly I do, more than you can know. But no, Maeve, he is not purely a monster. He was up against the wall. If he didn"t produce results, Tribunal Enforcers would show up at his door and he would die. If he didn"t produce results, immortal statisticians predicted that our kind, all three races, would be extinct by 2100 at the very latest." A sigh, scrubbing his face with both hands. "The fate of all immortals was at stake, as well as his own life. So, to him, sacrificing his daughter was…necessary, as he saw it."

"Still, she should have been given that choice." I"m angry, and it shows in my voice.

"Yes, she should have. I don"t know what choice she would have made, but she deserved the option."

He rises from his chair, paces angrily across the room, and then back to the fireplace, bracing both hands on the mantle.

"We were in love." He heaves a long, harsh sigh. "I'm Greek. Burke isn"t my true last name, but I haven"t used my actual family name in, oh, a hundred years at least. It"s actually Bouras, just by way of information." He glances at me briefly, then back to the unlit fireplace. "We met in Athens, in 1827. I was fighting against the Ottomans for Greek independence, and your mother was a volunteer nurse, which was a fashionable thing for well-to-do young ladies at the time, especially among aristocratic fae families. I was injured—it"s a tale as old as time. She was my nurse, and we fell in love. We were together from the day we met in 1827 until the day she disappeared—August 19th, 2004."

"Holy shit," I breathe, doing quick mental math. "You and Mom were together for 174 years?"

He nods. "Yes. Nearly two centuries." He swallows hard, head bowed, shoulders hunched. "She is the only woman I"ll ever love."

I can"t help but go to him and rest a hand on his shoulder. "Andreas…you can live essentially forever. I think Mom would want you to move on, someday."

He nods heavily. "I know. I just…can"t. She was my mate." He shrugs as if that says it all.

And, knowing how I feel about Caspian…it pretty much does say it all. I can"t imagine spending that long with him only to lose him.

"What happened?" I ask.

He"s silent for several beats. "She vanished. We were living down in the Florida Keys. We owned a little beachside bar. A locals-only sort of place for fishermen, beachcombers, and the like. We didn"t make a ton of money, but we didn"t care. We had a little cottage less than half a mile from the bar, and we"d walk to work along the beach. I tended bar and she worked the kitchen." He looks at me and smiles—sad, glimmering with reminiscence. "She was a wizard with seafood, Eliza was. Well, anyway. It was late afternoon. We"d run out of something for the kitchen. Lemons, or capers, or something she needed for the special that day. I don"t remember exactly what it was, now. She rode her bike to the little market a few blocks away.

"At first, I wasn"t worried. She could take care of herself. She"d been through wars. But when an hour turned into two, and then three, I knew something was up. This was before cell phones, remember, so it wasn"t like I could just call her, text her, or track her on Find My. I closed the bar down and went looking."

He goes quiet again, this time for nearly a full minute.

"I found her bicycle. It was on its side on the sidewalk less than half a block from the grocery store. She was just gone. No cameras, no witnesses. But her purse was still in the basket on the front of her bike."

"Mom never left her purse anywhere."

"Yeah, exactly. I knew something bad had happened—she"d never vanish on me like that willingly." Andreas shakes his head. "I…I went a little mad, then, if I"m honest. I questioned everyone in that little town. Everyone. Every tourist, every shop clerk, every gas station attendant. Eventually, reports started to coalesce—a black SUV had come through town. When you live in a small town like that where you know all the locals by name and what they drive, any new or different car is immediately tagged as an outsider. It was the sort of place you didn"t just "pass through" because it wasn"t on the way to anywhere. You went there on purpose, or you lived there, or you were lost. So that black SUV stood out."

"How on earth were you supposed to track down a single black SUV?" I ask.

"When you"re immortal and you know you quite literally have all the time in the world, patience is merely a by-product. I went to the next town along in the direction people had seen it going, and I did the same thing in that town—I asked everyone who would respond to me if they"d seen a black SUV come through." He scrubs his face. "Town by town, I tracked that SUV north. Finally, in a little town outside Atlanta, I got lucky, and got a plate number off of an ATM camera."

I frown. "You weren"t a cop then, though."

He shrugs. "I was desperate, so I forged PI certs."

I blink at him. "You forged who-the-what-now?"

A small laugh. "Private Investigator certifications."

I laugh. "Wait. You forged papers to make you a PI?"

"Faking the necessary elements to pretend to be a real detective would have taken too long, and I needed access." He shrugs. "I suppose you"re shocked at my dishonesty, considering I'm a cop now, yes?"

I nod. "Yeah, basically."

He sighs and shrugs again. "Up to that point, I"d been a lot of things in my life. Soldier more than anything else, but by the twenty-first century, I was pretty sick of war, and there weren"t any good ones on then anyway."

"Good wars?"

He winces. "That"s a very archaic, old-world, career-soldier way of thinking. Your modern sensibilities probably find that rather revolting, I suppose. But when you"re a career soldier for nearly half a millennium, you tend to see war in a pretty unique way."

"How so?" I ask.

He sighs. "War is hell. But when you"ve fought all over the globe, for the right side and the wrong side, with swords and spears and muskets as well as carbines and pistols and artillery, it"s all the same. The cause doesn"t matter much when people are trying to put holes in you."

"But I guess my real question is what makes a good war?"

He tips his head to one side and then returns to his recliner. "That"s hard to answer in a way you"ll understand, Maeve. I do not mean to be condescending or sexist or anything, but you simply do not have the frame of reference. These modern wars are just…" he shakes his head. "Giving you a satisfying answer would take us off topic."

"Did you find her?"

He expels a harsh breath. "Sort of. I tracked the SUV to a compound in the mountains of Colorado. But the compound was guarded by too many warriors, so I…" He swallows, growls. "I couldn"t go in. I"d have been slaughtered. Those weren"t just Tribunal Enforcers—I"d never seen them before, but I now know them to be IRRC Elites. Basically, the very best of the very best immortal warriors from all three races. One, two, maybe even three or four I could have taken out. But there were at least a dozen." He shook his head. "At that point, I knew nothing. All I knew was that my mate had vanished. I knew of the reproductive council, as it"s the kind of thing that gets discussed in the underground immortal bars and havens. There had been rumors of a secret force of soldiers being poached away from clan forces, family security, and even from the ranks of the Enforcers, but when Eliza and I moved down to the Keys to get away from pretty much everything, I stopped keeping abreast of the latest gossip and such."

"Obviously, Mom got away, and somehow I came into the picture," I prompt.

"I got a job in the nearest town and set about finding out as much as I could. Which wasn"t much. It was owned by a shell corporation which was in turn a subsidiary of a subsidiary—standard secret land ownership tactics. I watched it—no one went in, no one went out, with five total exceptions. Each time, it was the same black SUV—same plate, same driver, and all within two weeks of Eliza"s arrival."

"What did you do?"

"What could I do? I kept watching. I've done enough reconnaisance to know that I wasn"t getting in—no one was, short of an organized military assault, and even that wasn"t guaranteed to succeed. It was built into the mountain, some underground bunker. There were outbuildings, but that SUV went into a tunnel into the side of the mountain, with foot-thick blast doors and high-tech security measures and cadres of armed Elites inside and out. It was obviously some kind of secret immortal base of some kind, but no amount of digging produced anything."

He growls a sigh, scrubs his hand through his hair. "I watched that base for six months. The first real break I got was when I saw Elias Sparrow exit the tunnel, make a phone call, and have a very angry conversation with someone. That was suspicious—Eliza disappears into that base, and here"s her father? Seemed unlikely to be a coincidence."

I wait through his silence, which extends into a minute, and then two.

"I watched through a scope, from a peak almost a mile away. I"d work nights at a warehouse loading trucks, and then I"d spend the day in my observation nest. I'd doze off for an hour or two here and there. Mostly, nothing happened but guard changes. I thought of and discarded a thousand plans to get into that base. I knew it was impossible on my own. So, I watched and waited. Because I knew one thing: Eliza was too smart and too powerful to stay a prisoner for long. Eventually, she"d escape. And she did."

His smile, remembering, is bright and amused.

"The whole mountain shook. It felt like an earthquake, but I could taste the magic in it, and I knew it was her. She was the only person I knew with enough power to shake an entire damned mountain."

"What did she do? Did she blow it up?"

He laughs. "Yes, kind of. Basically, she hoarded her vitality, let it build up, let it fester and simmer until it came to a boil, and then let it blow up. We fae, you see, are sort of like steam engines. The magic has to come out regularly. It must—and it will, one way or another. What your mother did was very dangerous for herself, but it was the only option she had. When she let her vitality explode, it vaporized at least fifty people in a radius around where she was being kept. Not just people—everything. Rock, metal, flesh, everything. Like a miniature nuclear explosion."

I stare at him. "What? for real?"

He nods, his expression grave. "She never forgave herself for it. Most of those people were innocent—just doing their jobs, which most of them were not given an option in any more than she was. That vent burst—what we call such a magical detonation—haunted her the rest of her life."

"She was being held against her will," I say.

"Worse than that," he says. "Far, far worse."

Andreas is silent for the longest time yet—nearly five minutes. His expression is pensive, fingers drumming on his thigh.

Finally, I can bear the silence no longer. "Andreas?"

He blows out a plosive breath. "Yes, yes. I…fuck. I don"t want to show you. But you deserve to hear this from her, and she made me promise."

"Andreas? Show me what?" I ask, heart in my throat.

He plants his hands on his knees and pushes to his feet heavily. "I"ll be right back. Stay here, please."

He vanishes upstairs and returns after a couple of minutes with a small video recorder—the hand-held kind with a fold-out monitor, popular in the early 2000s, before cell phone cameras. Andreas rummages in a drawer in the kitchen and produces a cord which he connects to the TV and the recorder.

He rests the recorder on the mantle, uses a remote to turn on the TV and change the input, and then Mom"s face appears on the TV.

I gasp, and then sob, "MOM!"

Andreas comes to sit beside me. "This will not be easy for you, Maeve." He pivots to face me, his knees pressing into mine. "A bit of background on how this particular video came to be is important, I think. After she escaped from the compound, I was there to pick her up and get her away. We were chased, obviously, and running out of options. I had a contact, a friend whom I"d fought with in various armies over the centuries, and this friend was, and is, somewhat of a malcontent, I suppose you could say. He was vehemently opposed to the Treaty, he hates the Tribunal, hates Enforcers. I shared his views, to an extent, but up until Eliza"s capture, I wasn"t ready to consider joining any kind of group seeking to change the status quo. This changed my mind, and Matorno, my friend, was someone I knew I could trust to help Eliza and me disappear from the Tribunal and Council radar. So, I called Mat, and he helped us disappear. But, it turned out he wasn"t alone—he was a quasi-leader of a group seeking to upend the status quo. They weren"t, and still are not, engaged in any kind of outright violent rebellion, but rather more of a…political and social resistance, you could say. From the inside out. Part of that was gathering intel on what the Tribunal is up to behind the scenes. So when Eliza and I showed up at their safe house with the story Eliza had to tell, they immediately wanted to debrief her—officially recording her statement. That"s what this video is." His gaze fixes on me, dark irises still partially glowing white, as if there"s a haze of fog skirling across his eyes.

He rises, his tread heavy and slow; preparing to press play on the recorder, he looks at me with a reluctant sigh. "Are you ready, Maeve?"

My eyes are already stinging with unshed tears. "No. How could I be?" I dab at my eyes with the cuff off my hoodie. "Play it, Andreas. But I…I might need you to hold my hand."

Andreas presses play and the image of my mother"s face takes on life as the video begins.