“Mong Kung,” he said. “The hills west of the city. There is another temple to our father there.”
Niran flipped the Grigori over and drew a blade from a sheath on his thigh. He stabbed the Grigori cleanly and stood as the soldier dissolved beneath him, then wiped the blood from his blade on the coat of the man he’d killed.
“Mong Kung,” he muttered. “We need to find Sura. He’ll know if it sounds true.”
Leo and Niran left the temple, jogging down the stairs and toward the women’s quarters where Sura and Alyah had gone. Leo saw a young soldier fleeing into the forest. He glanced at Niran.
“Let him go,” Niran said. “He’s no threat to us.”
“We get the women and we go.”
Niran nodded.
Leo was worried about Kyra at the side of the road. The Grigori who fled was running in that direction. Who knew if he was the only one.
“On second thought,” Leo said. “You head to Alyah and Sura. I’ll go back to the van.”
“Very well,” Niran said. “Though she’s not as helpless as you think.”
“It’s not that she’s helpless,” Leo said. “It’s that I’d be useless without her.”
Kyra watched the forest from behind shaded lenses and waited. Every now and then, she’d hear something stir, but she thought it was only birds or small animals. She tried to look like a bored tourist, all the time keeping her senses open and aware of the humans and others around her. She didn’t want to listen too closely and threaten her own consciousness. She knew if she reached too far with her hearing, she was deaf to anything else, and the last thing she wanted was to be vulnerable.
She heard an unknown Grigori coming and her hand went to her knife… but the voice veered away before it reached the road, heading back into the hills above her. There were humans up the road, but they were going about their daily life and didn’t appear to be moving either toward or away from her.
Twenty minutes after they’d left, she heard Leo coming through the trees. He sounded easy and happy, and she knew nothing was wrong. She turned toward him before he broke through the bushes.
“There you are,” he said with a smile.
“Everything went fine.”
He nodded and embraced her. “We had to kill four soldiers who came at us with weapons, but the rest fled or we were able to knock them out. Have you heard anything from Sura?”
She shook her head.
Leo said, “Niran was going to look for them.”
“Convincing the women might be difficult.”
“It probably will be, but you never know. Most of it depends on how many women they’ve seen die. Do you remember Prague?”
Kyra nodded. How could she forget Prague?
The Fallen they’d killed outside Prague the year before had abused his human lovers horribly. He’d killed so many that the survivors were plotting to find a way out with their children even before Leo and his previous watcher, Damien, had led a team to extricate them and kill the Fallen. Most of the children they’d rescued were still in Damien’s castle, learning how to control their sometimes fearsome power.
“We’ll give them ten more minutes,” he said. “Then we’ll go in.”
They emerged in eight. Niran carried a little girl, no more than three years of age, while Alyah carried a baby and three women walked behind them, Sura following. One of the women was visibly pregnant, though Kyra suspected another might be from the softness around her face. The other woman looked nearly dead. She followed Alyah closely, and Kyra suspected the baby the Irina singer was carrying was a Grigori son who had nearly drained his mother of life.
We’re all murderers. We kill our own mothers when they give us life.
Her brother’s bitter words never left her. Kyra’s own mother was dead, of course. All the human mothers were. Looking at Niran and Sura, Kyra wondered if they carried the same guilt that Kostas carried like a yoke around his neck.
“Can I help?” she asked Alyah.
Alyah nodded to the nearly dead woman. “Do you speak any French?”
“I do.” Kyra approached the woman, who began to cry and reach for her baby.
“Please,” she said in broken French. “Please, my son.”
“What is your name?” Kyra asked, bringing a blanket and a bottle of water to the woman. “Look, my friend is being so gentle with him. I promise—”
“He’s my son,” the woman said.
“She’s from a hill tribe,” Alyah said. “I tried to explain to the others, but I don’t think she understood me.”
Kyra put the blanket around the woman’s thin shoulders and helped her into the back of the van while Leo and the others helped the other women into the middle seats.
“Sit next to us with the baby,” she told Alyah. “She’s not going to listen unless you bring him close enough for her to see him.”
Through rudimentary French, Kyra tried to explain to the human woman why her own child could be making her ill, but Kyra didn’t know how much the woman understood. Eventually, as the van bumped back to the country inn, the human woman fell asleep, her bronze skin sallow and her cheeks hollow with sickness.
“I’m hoping Ginny brought Kenneth,” Alyah said.
“Kenneth?”
Alyah smiled. “In another life, he’s a linguistics professor at the university. Kenneth is originally from Hong Kong. He speaks and writes almost every language in Southeast Asia fluently. Preserving local languages is his passion. I think this girl might be from the Wa people. Part of her tribe lives in Yunnan Province, and Kenneth has probably studied them.”
“How likely is Ginny to have brought him?” Kyra reached for the baby wrapped in a colorful pink cloth. “She’s clearly attached, but she can’t continue to care for him as she has been or she’ll die. I don’t think she really understood what I was trying to tell her.”
Alyah happily handed the baby over to Kyra. “I’m hopeful,” she said. “Kenneth is incurably curious. If Ginny told him she was going into Burma to get some women out, he might have volunteered.”
Kyra wrapped the swaddling more tightly around the sleeping baby. Despite his mother’s sickness, he was round-cheeked and blooming with health, sleeping peacefully with two fingers stuck in his mouth.
Perfect. All the babies were so perfect.
Her heart twisted.
What would it be like to have a child of her own? Was it possible if she and Leo mated? Her mind supplied the dream of a round-cheeked, blond baby with vivid blue eyes and milk-pale skin. She glanced up to see Leo watching her with an expression she couldn’t read.
Longing. It might have been longing. Or that might have been her own.
She kissed the silky black hair of the boy in her arms and held him as they bumped over the country roads.
For now, the little boy was the son of a Fallen angel.
For now, his fate was balanced on the edge of a knife.
Prija IV
She could hear the traffic in Mandalay and knew that, were it not for her damaged mind, she would have gone insane. Perhaps the city was a punishment for killing their Irin friend. The Grigori who took her had not been pleased.
They knew what had happened as soon as they opened the door. Prija expected them to search her, but they didn’t. In fact, not a single one touched her from then on. They did drive through more populated areas though. They must have thought of it as a punishment.
So Prija killed the scribe, kept his knife, and nothing happened to her. She was not unpleased with that outcome.
She was unpleased with the conditions in Mandalay.
The human women there were kept in filthy quarters and near starving. Prija was thrown in a large room with a dozen of them. She did not have her saw sam sai. She didn’t have any privacy. She was given a tin bowl, and twice a day, a large basket of rice was brought to the room. The women fell on it, starving. There was a shower in the corner and a pit toilet, but that was all. Most of them were thin and wan from the Grigori who were slowly draining their lives, but when the guards opened the gate and called their names, the women went to the door smiling. They came back unconscious or nearly so. The other women laid the girls on their pallets and went back to gossiping or sewing or braiding each other’s hair.
It disgusted Prija even though she understood the women were drunk on Grigori power. They couldn’t help themselves.
It still disgusted her. The black shadow had become thicker and stronger. A fog hung around her mind.
The second night, one of the Grigori called her name. She sat in the corner, staring at the wall, and pretended not to hear.
“Prija.”
Fools.
She stood and walked to the door. The smirking guard led her down a hallway and took her to another shower. This one had a door and was equipped with warm water. It was nearly luxurious. A clean set of clothes was laid on the bench by the shower, and fresh-scented soaps were by the sink.
Prija washed. She closed her eyes and let the warm water fall over her, filling her mouth and covering her face. She soaked her hair and wiggled her toes. Whatever else the night brought, at least she would be clean. It had been days since she’d had a proper bath, and she could hardly bear her own scent. She washed away the grime but was relieved when she turned off the water to find that the black fog that had wrapped around her was still there. It settled against her skin as she pulled on the cotton shirt and wrapped the skirt around her.