Sovereign Hope (14 page)

Aldan sat down
in the high-backed wooden chair at the head of the table and
sighed, pulling out another to his left so that I could join him.
Being so afraid of him felt rather foolish now, as we listened to
the cicadas buzz outside in the grass. After a while the old man
gave me a slow, wry smile.

“
Well. You’re here for a reason. I guess I’d better start on
this story. It’s a long one, after all.”

“
Sure.” If intestines could knot themselves, mine would have
been triple-tied. I was finally going to get some
answers.

Aldan cleared
his throat and leaned forwards, contemplating a small groove in the
table. “You ought to tell me if there’s something you don’t
understand, or if I’m going too fast, okay? I’m not very good at
these things.”

“
No problem.”

“
Where would you like me to start?”

“
The beginning?” He could probably do a better job of
untangling the events of the past six months than I
could.

He blew out
his cheeks. “From the beginning would be a very long story. Maybe
I’ll summarize?”

That seemed
appropriate. I nodded, waiting for him to begin.

“
I am the tenth of the Immortals. There are twenty-eight after
me. Seems pretty funny when I think of it like that. There’s my
good-for-nothing son and his after him, and so on and so forth, all
the way down to Elliot. So you see we are very, very distantly
related. Just don’t call me granddad—makes me feel old.” His
laughter was like steel on stone, but I couldn’t help but laugh
along. It seemed like the polite thing to do, anyway.

“
Okay,” he continued, “I’ll save the middle bit for another
time. I suppose it was 1860
when I found
Daniel.”

The look on my
face must have been telling because Aldan paused. One hundred and
fifty three years. That horrible, sinking feeling returned, making
me feel unreasonably miserable.

“
Sorry, carry on,” I said, attempting a poker face.

“
Yeah, that’s right. 1860. Anyway, I found Daniel laid out for
dead in a particularly nasty backstreet in London. The Seven Dials;
a pit of vice and poverty. He was covered in all kinds of dirt and
filthy rags, which wasn’t that unusual in those days, but anyway.
He’d been there for a few days at least, that much was obvious. He
was bruised all over and smelled like he might already be dead. He
couldn’t have opened his eyes even if he’d tried. He’d had the
living daylights knocked out of him, and I could see as plain as
day that he wasn’t going to live. So I took him.

“
I was different back in those days. I was full of Immortal
crap, high on my own self-worth. Anyway, I thought to take him and
bring him back to life, you see? Perhaps keep him as a sort of pet.
He was so tiny. He couldn’t have been more than eight years
old.

“
I was due to set sail to America in less than a week, and I
decided I had enough time to repair him and pass him off as my son
or nephew. I went straight back to my hotel and had him brought in
through the service entrance. They bathed him and tidied him up. He
was the most pathetic thing I’d ever seen. I put my palms on him
and passed some of myself into him. I had never seen something buck
and fight against life so hard before. It’s almost like he didn’t
want it. But there you go…that’s him.”

I was lost.
“You passed some of yourself into him?”

“
Well, yes. I’m not proud of it, but back in those days I had
plenty of extra life force floating around. All an Immortal needs
to do is touch a living thing and they can take life or give it, as
simple as that. When an Immortal deigns something worthy enough to
give it life, all he’s doing is depleting his store a little. And
back in those days, I had a huge storehouse, if you know what I
mean.

“
You can take a little here and there from people and they
barely notice the difference. But what truly makes you powerful is
when you take it all. When you sap every last spark of vitality out
of a thing, that’s what gives you the rush—the indomitable strength
to take whatever you want.”

I
shuddered.

“
Oh, you’re right, sweetheart. It’s a horrible thing. I killed
a lot of people before I changed my ways. But that’s a different
story. One I don’t plan on getting too lost in right now.” I
nodded, not sure I wanted to get too lost in that story, either. He
rubbed his fingertips on the tabletop and rocked gently back on his
chair. “So Daniel got better either way. He didn’t speak for days
and wouldn’t do what he was told. I caught him trying to escape
more times than I care to remember. He would sit there in silence
with his knees drawn up to his chest, backed into a corner,
glowering at me like he knew what kind of bad I was. There was
something in that look of his that made me feel like I was being
judged and coming up rather short.

“
I came back to the room one night and found him sitting there
waiting for me. He gave me this look of complete disgust. I tell
you now, if it had been anyone else, I would have found an
interesting and exquisitely painful way of sending them to their
maker. Instead, I just sank down into a chair and started sobbing
like a baby. I’d been alive for over eleven hundred years by that
point. It didn’t matter what people thought about me. People didn’t
register as anything more than a means to an end in my book. But
something in this child’s face brought all that crashing down
around me. I despised him for it.” The quietness in Aldan’s voice
portrayed the heaviness of the memories for him as he continued to
rock back and forth. He sucked on his teeth sharply, looking me
squarely in the eye.

“
Do you know what he did then?” His intelligent eyes searched
my face as if I might already know the answer to his question. I
had no idea. “I was sitting there crying and wailing, and I
couldn’t understand why, and then all of sudden I felt something
touch my shoulder. I looked up, so stunned I couldn’t believe my
eyes, and he was standing there with his hand on me. Those wild
eyes of his were fixed straight on mine as if to say, ‘it’s all
going to be just fine.’ Right there and then I saw a grown man in
that little boy. That very moment I vowed I’d never take something
that didn’t belong to me again. I promised him. I didn’t want to
let him down, you see. And I haven’t since.”

He got up and
went to the fridge, pouring out two glasses of orange juice. I was
busy thinking. So Aldan had saved Daniel’s life, and in return
Daniel had given him back his conscience.

“
It was a day or two later when he finally spoke to me. He
asked me if I knew where his little brother was. He was so
desperate. It felt cruel not to help him. I went out and asked
around. It took me all of an hour to learn what had happened. It
turned out his mother had come home in a drunken craze a few nights
before and drowned the little boy in a bathtub. The mob had caught
up with her, and she’d been hanged that morning. Apparently, a
pretty big crowd had gathered to send her off. She was a nasty
drunk. All the women in the back streets knew about her. They told
me how she was constantly beating her children. No one knew where
her oldest boy was.” He took a sip of his juice.

His mother killed his little brother?
It was too horrible to think about. “What did you tell
Daniel?”

Aldan laughed.
“Not the truth, I can tell you. I just didn’t have it in me. I told
him a horrible lie that I still regret to this day. I told him his
mother had taken Jamie and sailed off to America to start a new
life. It was pretty plain that he would want find him, so he was
raring to go when I suggested he come with me a few days later.

“
It took me a long time to work up to telling him what I knew,
and years longer still for him to forgive me. But by that point he
was angry with me for other reasons. We’d joined the Reavers in the
Tower, and they didn’t take kindly to Daniel. They didn’t like how
I treated him or why I refused to kill people anymore. Whenever I
had my back turned, this particularly nasty piece of work would
snatch him up and lock him in this tiny wooden chest. They would
weight it and then throw it in the ocean. See, Daniel wouldn’t die
because of what I had given to him, but the experience of drowning
is just as terrifying all the same. Not being able to breathe or
scream out… When I found out what was happening, I lost my
mind.

“
By this stage I hadn’t killed anybody in nearly a hundred
years. I was ready to make an exception for that evil monster, but
Danny wouldn’t let me. I broke every bone in the bastard’s body
instead. No one bothered Daniel again after that.”

“
Wouldn’t Daniel would have been grown by then, though? Agatha
said that the people of the Four Quarters aged much slower than
regular people. I know he’s not like them, but even so, surely it
wouldn’t have taken
that
long for him to grow into an adult?”

A flicker
passed over Aldan’s face. He looked at me blankly, as though I had
misunderstood some vital part of his story. “There’s no point
comparing the two. Just because I gave him the gift of life doesn’t
make him anything like people from the Quarters. He’ll never be
like them. Or me. He’s like you.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Prophesied

“
Like me?”
I clutched hold of my
glass so tight the liquid inside began to tremble.

Aldan’s focus
drifted, and his eyes flickered behind me. I followed his gaze to
look back out of the door and was startled to see Daniel sitting on
the porch step. He was looking out over the clearing, listening to
the story as Aldan recounted it. Being busted reading his diary
would have been less embarrassing. A deep blush of shame burnt
hotly at my cheeks.

“
Daniel’s just like you,” Aldan continued. “A small part of me
corrupted him, but for all intents and purposes, he’s
like you.
Human.”

Daniel stirred
on the porch, making my pulse quicken. A desperate urge overwhelmed
me—I had to tell Aldan to stop—but he carried on before I could say
anything.

“
When I saved Daniel, he was on the brink of death. So much so
that I only just caught him before the last of the life ran out of
him. From then on he was stuck. His body would never grow, but he
grew mentally. After a while he really
was
a man trapped in a boy’s body.
That was the hardest thing he had to deal with, I think. It was
that way for a long time.

“
The others never accepted him. We left the fastness, the
Tower, but before long they caught up with us. In our society you
don’t really leave the nest. It’s similar to the Mafia in a lot of
ways. You never get out until you get
out.
” He threw back the remainder of
his juice like it was a shot of whiskey. “They came in the night
and tried to take my head off.” His eyes glinted as he drew his
thumb across the thick, warped skin of his scar, and I bit back the
urge to gasp. My reaction earned me a bitter laugh. “Don’t worry,
love. They didn’t send the right man for the job.”

His words
echoed inside my head. It was easy to see how Aldan could have been
a dangerous person to know back when he was mobile.

“
Daniel found me in a bloody heap on the floor and, without
realizing, got too close. I was almost unconscious and I ended up
drawing on him, trying to gather energy to heal myself. I came to
just in time to realize what was happening. The poor kid was lying
on the floor half dead, eyes rolled back in his head, veins
popping, the works. I panicked. I pushed so much energy back into
him that I knocked myself into this coma. It took Daniel a few
weeks to figure out that he could come in here with me. I couldn’t
protect myself or look out for him; I relied on him to keep me
hidden. As the months rolled by, I noticed that he was growing.
After that, well…the rest is history. He just kept on ageing at a
normal rate until he hit what we guess to be eighteen, and then
that was it. He’s been like that ever since.”

He fell into
silence while I mulled over his story, still unsure whether the
whole thing was just a really terrible joke. The porch’s wooden
steps creaked again. Questions flew around my head, demanding
answers. Demanding I go out and ask Daniel everything that was on
my mind. He wouldn’t appreciate the interrogation, though. Just
because I knew some of his most personal secrets didn’t mean we
were friends. Aldan’s low voice broke the quiet, interrupting my
thoughts.

“
It didn’t take the Reavers long to realize what had happened
to me and Daniel. Especially when Daniel went charging into the
Tower and killed four Immundus. It seems that when I passed all
that energy into him, Daniel got my abilities too, except I could
never use them like he can. He has some special aptitude that I
never possessed for wielding that much power.”

“
What…abilities?” I asked quietly. Daniel knowing how curious
I was about him was not a comforting concept.

“
He can channel huge surges of power made up of the most basic
components, primarily light. I could never do that. Then there’s
the fact that the elemental gifts that other Immortals control,
like water and fire, have no effect on him. The power he controls
isn’t like anything they’ve seen, and I think it’s entirely unique
to Daniel. You understand?”

I nodded. I
was back on Figueroa, where Daniel had played with blue flames that
spread like liquid light over his hands. So that was what had
happened: their power didn’t affect him.