He gestured toward a small carved table in the corner. “This time, I brought lunch.”
I stretched thoroughly before following him to curl up into one of the well-padded Queen Anne chairs. He sat across from me, laying wrapped sandwiches over the table’s engraved dragon design. I glanced up at him, trying to remember which line the color of his eyes signified. I was pretty sure Amber was some proto-language form of ertho. Earth.
Logan seemed to notice my appraisal, so I distracted him with a question about the dragon’s line. “Are there any others left, aside from Aern and Morgan?”
He pulled the cover back from his sandwich. “Not anymore. Things got a little crazy after Morgan was born. There were so many of us waiting for the day, watching for signs of the prophecy …”
He trailed off, realizing that this was the prophecy, that I was a prophet.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You can’t even imagine how prepared my mother made me.” I knew prepared wasn’t the right word, exactly, but I didn’t need to explain what we’d gone through. It was certainly no surprise to find how central the prophecy was to all of their lives, because that had been practically all mine consisted of for eighteen years.
“It started small, I guess,” he said. “Once the initial shock of a male heir in the dragon’s line calmed, there wasn’t much else to do but wait. We all had our place, and we were trained for the day Morgan would lead. But waiting was hard for some of them, especially the elders.”
He sat his sandwich down, glancing at my own lying unopened before me, and seemed to understand.
“There were some skirmishes, a few flare ups here and there, but for the most part we had things handled,” Logan said. “It reached a fevered pitch when Morgan got older and they knew he would soon lead.” His eyes met mine. “Things took a turn when their mother got sick. Aern and I must have been about fifteen at the time, Morgan close to twenty. When she died, their father changed. He became strict, enforcing rules on Morgan that he’d never lived by before, challenging the elders, calling the entire prophecy into question. There was a man, Tarian, who became convinced their father was trying to keep Morgan from ascending.”
He hesitated, taking a measured breath, and a tingle ran up my arms.
“They fought, and Tarian was killed. What we didn’t know, was that he had amassed a following. The battle that resulted took their father’s life.”
The tragedies of my own family were not far from such, and when I spoke, my voice was barely above a whisper. “So, Morgan’s father was killed so that he could sooner take the seat of power.”
Logan’s answering tone was level. “By the very people who wished to see him there.” His fist tightened almost imperceptibly where it rested on his leg. “And it wasn’t just his father. Most of the elders among their leadership were taken as well. Everything shifted. The younger of us were thrust into the positions left vacant, forced to choose a side between a split family.”
“And you?” I asked.
“And I chose neither.”
His words lingered in the silence between us for a long while as I picked at the clear plastic covering my lunch. He’d spoken of living alone, of choosing neither, but he was standing guard over me in the Division household for the new leader of Council. “You were going to tell me,” I said eventually, “about the men.”
The hesitation was there again, and I got the feeling Logan wasn’t a sharer, but this wasn’t exactly a normal situation. And I was the prophet.
“My father was to protect the One.” His eyes fell for an instant to the archive ceiling, to one of the smoked glass domes that hid surveillance cameras. “He was killed with the others, and it fell to me, to those men, to take his place.”
His words came back to me. Had it been Aern …
He straightened. “We don’t work for Council’s best interest anymore. We work for the good of our kind.”
What he didn’t say rolled through me. He was watching me, his team posted outside my room and in those black SUVs because I was their last hope. Everyone’s last hope.
“Brianna,” he said after a long pause. I looked up, caught suddenly by the change in his expression. “Eat.”
It wasn’t an order, but I obeyed nonetheless. Absently, I considered the story he’d told, comparing it with the details my mother had given me, lining our histories out on parallel timelines. Trying to find the connection. Trying to understand our link.
I hadn’t seen anything of our people within the Council archives. My mother hadn’t explained our past, how our lines had lived in the old world, or if there were any others left, aside from Emily and me. The only reference to us at all was that of the prophecy, and it didn’t even imply we were not one of them.