Sovereign Hope (5 page)

I turned. No
one there. Just the smiling, oblivious faces of the other
fairgoers. I spun around, blurring the flashing lights into one
continuous stream of red and gold and green and blue. The colors
traced together, flooded my head, blinding me. The music distorted
so that the lyrics stretched out low, like a tape being chewed up
and pulled out of an old school cassette player.

“
Don’t panic.”

I did another
three-sixty. A group of guys loitering by an air rifle game stopped
to watch me, giving me bemused looks. One of them muttered
something and the others burst into fits of harsh laughter.
Fantastic. I was going mad.

And yet…I
couldn’t be, because the voice came again. “Come with me, Farley.”
A hand slipped into mine. The next thing I knew, a small woman with
a chestnut braid was dragging me through the crowd. She wore a
long-sleeved dark grey shirt and black jeans tucked into her boots,
brown leather caked with red dirt. As the woman walked, her long
braid swung from side to side like a heavy pendulum. Her heart
shaped face was very pretty, dashed with a handful of freckles that
gave her a girlish appearance, although she was probably close to
thirty. 

“
You’re Agatha?” I croaked, trying to pull my hand
back.

The tiny woman
gave a curt nod. “And you’re Farley.” There was a lilt to her
voice, the echo of an accent. Maybe Scottish.

“
We’re going in the wrong direction. My mom was here. She went
the other way.”

Agatha tugged
me into a darkened walkway between two tents—a fortune teller and a
miniature red-and-white striped big top, inside which the smallest
man on record could apparently be found. She pulled her lips into a
tight line. “No. She didn’t. Your mom’s not here.”

“
I 
saw
 her. I have to—”

“
You saw what you were supposed to see. There are other people
here that want to talk to you, too. You met them briefly the other
day with Daniel.”

“
It
was
her.
I know what my own mother looks like.” I yanked my hand free from
Agatha’s. I made to step back out into the melee, but the other
woman caught hold of me.

“
She’s not out there, okay? I promise you it wasn’t
her.”

“
You can’t promise me that.”

“
I can. She’s not walking around anywhere, kiddo.
She’s 
dead
.”

The words sank
like a knife into my back. I whipped around. Agatha stared up at me
with a firm look on her face, yet her soft brown eyes held a note
of sadness. “I’m sorry. I realize there are better ways to break
that news. You came here to talk. Can we talk?”

“
What do you mean, 
she’s
dead
?” The world had slipped into a
strange slant. I peeled my sandpaper tongue from the roof of my
mouth, tasting something cloying and overly sweet.

“
It’s true. I’m sorry, really, I am.” Agatha cast a swift,
appraising look around us and bit down on her lower lip. “Come
inside.” She motioned to the fortune teller’s tent. “There are
things you should know.”

I stepped
back. “No.” Suddenly getting answers didn’t seem all that
important. Not if they were these kinds of answers.

Agatha almost
managed to conceal her frustration, but her anxiety was all too
evident in the way her body tensed with every passing second we
stood out in the open.

“
Have you heard from Moira since she disappeared? Have you had
a phone call? An email? Have the police found any evidence to
suggest where she might have gone? Have you any other reason to
believe that she’s alive somewhere?”

The answer
must have shown on my face, even if I refused to voice it. No,
there was no real reason to believe that she was alive. But that
didn’t mean I was just going to give up and accept that my mom was
gone.

“
I shouldn't have come.”

“
Yes, you should. You’re in danger. If you walk away now, I
can’t promise we’ll be able to protect you.”

The sounds of
the fair throbbed like a beating, demented drum, refusing to let me
think properly. The smells were all too much,
too saccharine sweet, too sour, too overwhelming. I
sucked in a deep lungful of air, trying to move past the panic.
“This is ridiculous. Who exactly do you think I need protecting
from? I’m an eighteen-year-old girl, for crying out loud. Who would
possibly want to harm me?”

Agatha scanned
the area with worried eyes; she grabbed hold of my hand again and
pulled me further into the walkway. The shadows enveloped us,
concealing us in a cloak of shadow.

“
The same person who killed Moira. The same person who
will
kill me and Daniel
and everyone else we know, given the chance.” Agatha stopped
searching the crowds for a moment and fixed me in her gaze, her
expression earnest and pleading. She took a deep breath.

“
Your father, Farley. Your dad.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Reaver

The air inside
the tent smelled different from outside—stale, like the heavy
material had gotten damp and dried out a hundred times over. It was
musty, but thankfully empty. Anybody overhearing our conversation
would have thought we were both crazy.

“
I know this is hard to hear. But it’s true.
I…
we
think it
would be a good idea if you came and lived with us for a little
while,” Agatha said breathlessly. Her shoulders tensed, poised for
my reaction.

I just
blinked. My silence seemed to fill Agatha with panic. She began
talking at a hundred miles an hour, her words running into one
another.

“
There’s a city below this city. It’s been there far longer
than Los Angeles has. Below your feet are
cavernous
 
halls and tunnels
 
that stretch on for miles and
miles. There are the four quarters: north, south, east and west.
I’m from the north. They call us the Thinkers. Intellects. To the
east are the muses, the Creatives. The south are the athletes, the
Warriors. The western quarter is where the Architects come from.
They design, build and create everything within our world. At the
centre of it all is the Tower. That’s where your father lives.” She
finally took a second to pull in a shaky breath.

Elliott Davenport. Alive. The concept wouldn’t sit right in
my mind. I’d spent my whole life living with the knowledge that he
was dead. And my life hadn’t been like some emo Hollywood movie
where I’d mourned not having a father figure. Where I’d dreamed
that he wasn’t really dead, but lost somehow and trying to get back
to me. He was just dead and that had been okay, because my mom had
been everything I needed. And now this small woman was telling me
the father I’d
never
needed had resurrected himself from the dead and smashed my
world into tiny, insignificant pieces.

“
Your grandfather lives there, too,” Agatha continued. She
rubbed her neck self-consciously and lowered her eyes to the
compacted earth at our feet. It was mercifully still dry and
un-boglike. “He’s been there the longest out of the three of them.
The three… Reavers.”

A
feather-light shiver raced up my spine and settled with a final
judder across my shoulders. “Reavers?”

“
Yes. They don’t really have a name for themselves. We call
them Reavers. They…take things. Things that don’t belong to
them.”

“
Like what?”

Agatha shifted uncomfortably, tugging her thumbs on the belt
loops of her jeans. “I’ll get to that. First you have to
understand, the patriarchal line of your father’s family are the
rulers of our society. They have special gifts that set them apart
from everyone else. They can…
do
things. Things
 
that you and I can’t. From the
moment they’re born, it’s drilled into them that their biggest
responsibility in life is to produce an heir. It’s all very
old-fashioned, but it’s all they live for—the continuation of their
precious bloodline. Being immortal isn’t enough for them. They’re
paranoid. They believe that if they die, they must have a successor
to take their place. They aren’t even allowed to receive their
gifts until they sire a male heir. That’s when they go through
their rites and become a part of the sovereignty.”

Something
bizarre was happening inside my head; it felt like a swarm of angry
wasps was trapped there, and they were determined to sting their
way out. My eyes were burning like crazy. “That doesn’t make any
sense."

“
Of course it doesn’t. Why would it? You've never heard
anything about this before.” Agatha gave me a tight
smile.

“
So, according to your story, I’m next in line to some royal
supernatural bloodline?”

The smile faded from Agatha’s lips. “Not quite. It’s like I
said—they have to produce a 
male
 heir. Your father already
had a son. You…you were unexpected. He never knew about
you.”

“
Wow. This just gets better. So I was an accident,
too.”

“
No. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not explaining this very
well. It’s a lot of ground to cover in a short space of time. What
I meant to say was that the patriarchs of the bloodline have male
heirs, because that’s all they’ve ever had. None of them have ever
had a female child before.”

I counted to
five. I counted slowly just to make sure, but when I reached five,
Agatha’s words still didn’t make sense. “Uh…biology’s never been my
forté, but isn’t that impossible? Isn’t having a kid a genetic roll
of the dice? A fifty/fifty kind of thing?”

Agatha cracked
her knuckles. A pinched crease manifested itself between her
eyebrows. “Forget about biology. Biology doesn’t apply here. Not
the kind they’ve been teaching you, anyway. Once they undergo their
rites, these men are immortal. They’re nothing like regular human
beings. Genetically, they’re something entirely different. They’ve
always had male children. That’s just the way it’s always
been.”

“
Uh-huh…” Disbelief laced my tone. “Next you’ll be telling me
they’re all vampires or something.”

“
Ha! Don’t be ridiculous.”

“
How is that any more ridiculous than what you just told me?”
I snapped.

“
It’s all tied in with what I said before. They’re Reavers.
They steal from others. They grow powerful from taking other
people’s life force. Tell me, if you wanted to steal someone’s life
force, would you take their toenail clippings?”

I just stared
at her. This conversation was getting weirder by the second.

“
Blood is just another part of the body. Your
soul
is your life force.
The soul is key.
That’s
what they take.”

And suddenly we’d moved beyond the realms of unbelievable
into the downright crazy. The fact that I’d let this woman carry on
with such a ridiculous tale made me feel slightly cruel, but there
was a perfectly good reason for it. If Agatha believed in all this
crap, then she clearly 
was 
mad, and everything she had
been saying was complete nonsense. Including the part about my mom
being dead. Especially that part.

“
Look, thanks for meeting with me. I appreciate you trying to
help me out, but I really have to go now. I have friends waiting,”
I lied.

Agatha gave me
a sad, almost disappointed look. “No, you don’t. The only people
waiting for you out there are the Immundus—your father’s men.
They’re human, but they have a direct line to the Reavers. They’re
stronger than they should be, and they do have some power. Who do
you think put that image of your mother into your head?”

Something
about the hint of pity in the tiny woman’s eyes was incredibly
annoying. I bristled and pulled myself up straight. “I’m sorry I
don’t believe in your fairytale. I choose to believe that I did
actually see my mother out there. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

“
I’m afraid what I told you is no fairytale. This idea that
your mother is still alive is the only fantasy here.”

The words
themselves were harsh, and yet Agatha managed to deliver them
softly. They stung all the same.

“
We’re done here. Goodbye, Agatha.”

As I marched
out of the tent, the canvas flap snapped on the icy breeze that had
materialized out of nowhere, blowing it straight into my face. I
pushed it aside and charged across the fairground, wanting to put
as much distance between me and Agatha as possible. A sensation at
my back told me I was being followed, though. I didn’t need to look
back to know the pixie-like woman wasn’t very far behind.

Not for long.
Shaking her off shouldn’t be that hard. I was almost at the exit,
the illuminated archway throbbing like a gaudy beacon just fifty
feet away, when I saw my mother again. This time she didn’t melt
into the background. She stood watching me, intermittently visible
above the dipping and spinning of a whirling bumper car ride, with
a cold, distant look on her face. The breeze caught her hair and
tousled it about her face. She didn’t move to brush the hair back
out of her eyes; she just stared at me. Her expression was empty,
flat and lifeless.

“
Mom!”