on the ground.
Lorelei, bleeding.
Lorelei, eyes open to the sky, unseeing.
Lorelei, gone.
Molly drops to her side, screaming. “I didn’t mean to,” she says, over and over again. “It wasn’t supposed to go like that.”
Declan lets the blanket drop from his arms. The bunny rolls in the grass, lands a few feet away from the pool of blood.
Pop looks back and forth between his son and his daughter-in-law, between the living and the dead, frozen in between. “Son,” he says. “I’m—”
But Declan will never know what he is: Sorry. Not sorry. Tired of blood. Thirsty for more.
Declan no longer cares.
Declan cares for nothing now but his daughter.
He turns his back on his father. His Player. His lovely, raven-haired miracle bleeding into the grass.
He runs.
Declan doesn’t know how to tell Aisling what happened to her mother. Not now, when she’s too young to understand—and not later, when she will have questions that he can’t answer. Questions about the choices he’s made, and the mistakes.
He doesn’t know who to blame.
He can’t help blaming himself.
He spirits Aisling away from the Ozarks and drives her into the heart of the Mississippi delta. Deep in the swampland, miles from civilization, an old woman lives in a shack, like a fairytale crone. She speaks with the thick accent of the old world, and wraps him and Aisling in gnarled arms when she finds him on the doorstep.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she says. Her name is Agatha, and she claims to have the Sight. Declan doesn’t believe in such things, but there’s a fire roaring in the hearth and stew boiling on the stove, and the couch is made up as a bed. He stumbles in gratefully, allowing Agatha to take the child from his arms.
He feels empty without her weight.
“It’s happened, then?” Agatha says, her voice a rough croak. “They’ve designated her as a Player, and you took her away?”
“The Sight?” Declan says, skeptically.
“The evening news,” Agatha says. “I extrapolated.”
Agatha is La Tène, like him, which is why he is allowed to know her name, see her face. And like him, Agatha is an apostate, a traitor, a nonbeliever. He grew up hearing tales of her, a bogeyman invented to scare the children: ask too many questions, the wrong kind of questions, and you’ll be sent into the wilderness, where Agatha the witch will find you and gobble you up. Agatha has been with Le Fond for longer than Declan has been alive.
She’s lived in hiding for decades, because the La Tène have never stopped hunting for her and the ancient scriptures that she stole from the archive.
Agatha blazed the beginning of the trail that Declan has been following.
She discovered the first clues that Endgame wasn’t what it seemed, in the words of their very own forebears—and as a reward she will live out the rest of her days in lonely exile.
She can be trusted.
“She’s gone,” Declan says. It hurts to speak the words aloud. “Lorelei. They killed her.”
Agatha says nothing for a long moment. Her expression never changes. Then, though he hasn’t asked yet: “Yes, you can leave the child here with me for as long as you need. Until it’s safe. Do what you need to do.”
What he needs to do.
Go north.
North as far as Canada, where he can slip across the New York border unseen, then south again as far as the city, his city, where he found the happiness he will never have again.
Dye his hair, turn telltale red into mousy brown.
Disguise his face with false nose and beard.
Return to Queens.
Watch his people from the crowds and the shadows. Watch his father. Watch his Player.
Simmer with rage.
Burn.
Burn.
He could kill them, all of them, easily. They’re not expecting him to return. They’re not on guard. He could slip through Pop’s window in the dark of night, slit his throat while the old man snores in his Barcalounger, Honeymooners reruns droning on the ancient TV. He could break into the deli across the street from Molly’s apartment, aim his sniper rifle at her window, send a bullet into her head while she sips her morning tea. Or he could nestle an explosive in the brakes of Molly’s mother’s car, turn her into a ball of fire on the Queensboro Bridge. He could assassinate the High Council one by one. But first take out everyone they love, make them watch. Spatter them with blood.
An eye for an eye.
A loss for a loss.
Declan’s blood is ice; his heart is a stone. He could do it. He could do anything.
But he holds himself back.
Not for the La Tène line or for the dying embers of family loyalty, not for the sake of his humanity.
They robbed him of that, his father, his trainers. They made him a killer, and it’s only justice that they reap the benefits.
He holds back for Aisling.
Someday she will be old enough to know him.
He will be a man she deserves to love. He’s come back here partly to prove to himself that he can be. That in the face of the greatest temptation, he can show restraint. That he’s not simply a soldier and a killer.
Still, he burns.
And now they will burn.
They’ve posted guards in front of his old apartment; he knocks one out with an efficient choke hold and the other with a blow to the head, then lets himself in to retrieve what he needs: a bottle of Lorelei’s perfume, so he can breathe her in when he needs to remember. His journal, a record of every step of his journey from ignorance to acceptance, which he’d left behind in hopes that Pop and Lorelei might come to understand. A photo of Lorelei, so that Aisling will never forget her mother’s face. Then he sets the incendiary device and watches his past bloom into flame.
Next stop: the High Council chamber. Hidden in the basement of what looks, from the outside, to be a dilapidated veterans’ hall.
Declan disables the security system with a few simple clips of the wire cutters, picks the complicated locks on the chamber door, and lets himself in.
It’s easy.
They gave
