“Yes.” He nodded. There was a long pause, but no more information was forthcoming. Apparently, he felt that everything had been said that needed to be said. People did what he told them to. He had told them to join the Checquy, and so they would. Odette diplomatically closed her eyes before she rolled them. Then she opened them again.
“There was quite a bit of shock when the announcement was made,” she said. “We were informed that one of the heads of the Broederschap had been killed.” She didn’t add that he had been killed by the Checquy, but everyone was thinking it. “Then we were told that Grootvader Ernst had made peace with the Gruwels — I’m sorry, with your organization. Then we were told that we would be merging with this organization. All of this information was communicated over the course of five minutes.”
“Oh, I said it nicer than that!” snapped Ernst.
“Not much nicer!” snapped back Odette. “We’ve lived in secret for centuries, Grootvader, petrified that the Checquy would track us down and finish the job they’d started in 1677. And then suddenly you expect us to move in with them! Of course people were going to react.”
“I expected a reaction, but not this madness.” The two of them stared at each other, and Felicity was caught by their resemblance. They might be separated by multiple generations, but there was no doubt that they were related.
“And who are these rebels, these Antagonists?” asked Chevalier Eckhart. “What resources do they have to command?”
“There are five of them,” said Marcel, who’d returned to his notes. “Only five now. But they are dangerous.”
“It was surprising, at least to me,” said Ernst. “I had anticipated trouble from the older members of the Broederschap, those most set in their ways. There are still a few who have been with us since the very beginning, who remember the Isle of Wight and the Checquy. If anyone could be expected to hold on to their hatred, I thought it would be them. But it was not that way at all. Rather, it was the younger people, the apprentices, who would not countenance peace.”
“I knew there were people missing from the files you gave us!” exclaimed Rook Thomas triumphantly. “There was a gap in the demographics, from age nineteen to twenty-six.”
“Wait, so the five are your friends?” Felicity burst out incredulously. “The ones from the photos? Your boyfriend?” Everyone stared at Felicity, but her eyes were on Odette, who looked back for a moment and then nodded slightly. “You told me they died!” Felicity said accusingly to Marcel. He glanced up from his notes and gave a little shrug.
“They were angry,” said Odette brokenly. “So angry.”
*
Paranoia formed a crucial component of every Grafter’s makeup. Like twenty-twenty vision or a tolerance for gluten, if you weren’t born with it, it was implanted in you at an early age. And the cause of this paranoia was the Checquy.
When the Broederschap troops marched onto the Isle of Wight in 1677, they had anticipated that there would be no real challenges. The closest they had ever come to an inexplicable phenomenon was a regenerative pig they’d stumbled across, and even that was dead after they had tried to see just how regenerative it was.
As a result, when the operatives of His Majesty’s Supernatural Secret Service exhibited abilities on the battlefield that made absolutely no sense at all, the Broederschap was shaken to its core. During the campaign, the Grafters captured prisoners and snatched corpses. They frantically dissected them, and what they found (or failed to find) defied even the Broederschap’s understanding of science and, indeed, of logic.
The small portion of the Grafters who escaped the purge never felt truly safe. Always in the backs of their minds (and at the beginning of the agenda for every meeting they ever held) was the knowledge that the Checquy was out there, lurking, on their strange gray island.
And so the Grafters kept very much to themselves. If they amassed too much power or wealth or gained any prominence at all, they might catch the eye of the Checquy or some equivalent body. Rather than placing all their eggs in one basket, the Broederschap established chapter houses throughout Europe: in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Marseille, Hamburg — large cities where they would be lost amidst the population. After a century or two, they also built chapter houses in Belgium and returned circumspectly to their homeland.
Security was always paramount. But despite their scattered distribution across Europe, the Grafters were not isolated from one another. Like many scientists and academics, they thrived on constant collaboration, and information and research results were shared as a matter of course. Younger members acted as couriers, traveling to visit relations and colleagues and carrying materials and heavily encrypted documents within their bodies.
With the advent of telephony and then, much later, the Internet, the Grafters developed ways to take advantage of these new technologies without putting themselves at risk. Certain trusted flunkies were packed full of complex communications equipment and acted as the ultimate secretaries. However, lacking flunkies, the younger members of the brotherhood were obliged to improvise, and one of Odette’s friends had come up with designs that allowed animals to fill the flunky roles.
And so Odette had been sitting in her studio in Roeselare, Belgium, listening to the voices of her closest friends come out of the mouths of five members of the lizard family and a tortoise.
“This is insane,” said Saskia’s voice. “Graaf Ernst has lost his mind if he is honestly thinking there could be peace between us and the Gruwels! He is betraying us, betraying the generations that have worked and died to give us what we have today!”
It was startling to hear such rage in Saskia’s normally gentle voice, and it didn’t help that it was coming from the passionless face of a tortoise. Saskia, who lived by the seaside in Marseille and could breathe underwater and created beautiful perfumed butterflies with wings like flowers. Saskia, who had taken Odette shopping in Paris for her first gown and taught her to dance.
“What he is proposing —” began an iguana with the voice of her uncle Dieter, but it was cut off by a bright green chameleon.
“He is not proposing anything,” declared Pim. Odette could picture him striding around in his studio down the street from hers, as he always did when he was caught up in something. Pim was passionate, innovative, a genius among the Grafters, and Odette loved him with all her heart and all her heat. He had sculpted her spurs for her, and he would kiss her closed eyes and tell her how much he adored her. “He simply told us: ‘We will be joining ourselves to the Checquy. Peacefully.’ Just like that!”
“As if there could ever be peace with those abominations!” spat Mariette from her home in Brussels. At twenty-one, the only member of the group younger than Odette, Mariette spent as much time studying history as she did the craft of the Broederschap. She had interviewed Graaf Ernst and Graaf Gerd on many occasions and had talked for long hours with the few Grafters who had been alive since the very beginning of the Broederschap. Odette had had a hand in crafting her eyes. “They tried to rob us of our future! The Checquy would have obliterated our people, our families, everything we were if they’d had their way!”
“Well, after our armies tried to invade their country,” pointed out Simon languidly. His lizard, a frill-necked variety, had something of Simon’s look about it. It might have been the amused expression or the fact that it kept flaring its ruff to get attention. Simon was Odette’s cousin, and he never hesitated to push the bounds of either biological science or other people’s sensibilities. He had been known to turn up at Broederschap events looking completely inhuman.