Chapter 82: Chapter 82

Isabelle got up and approached the railing. Her story was so sad that words failed me. And what could I have said in such circumstances? She had killed her daughter trying to protect her. What words could help?

“I travelled around the world and met other castes. I had other children. I abandoned them, refusing to see them die. Until you…”

“What was different?”

“At that time, you were a child like the others. You had no powers, just an adorable little face and laughter that sent me straight to heaven. I was very much in love with your father, Nathanael, and experienced moments of tenderness with him that I had never known in almost eight hundred years of existence. His love was pure, natural, and he was breathtakingly attractive.”

A smile lit up her face at the mention of my father, but it was almost immediately erased when she told the rest.

“But we again crossed the path of Magnus Burton Race, and that was fatal to us.”

“Then why are you so inclined to forgive him?!”

She took a deep breath and sat back in the chair she had left a few minutes earlier. My brother, attentive, placed a hand on hers.

“I have to go back in time for you to understand me. During World War II, I was injured by shrapnel while living in northern France. I was picked up by people who soon handed me over to the Germans, when they discovered that I was able to heal abnormally quickly. Wounded, I had little chance of using my powers to get out of this mess, and the Germans gave me doses of morphine so strong that I could barely open my eyes most of the time. Doctors performed experiments on me. A caste named Morgan…”

“Morgan?!” I asked, thinking back to the man who had aided Blake after escaping from an Amsterdam jail.

“Did you know him?” asked my mother.

“He has since died,” revealed my brother.

“Good,” she said. “This man was looking for a way to turn humans into castes, and used war to foment his plan. For years, I was subjected to the worst experiments in order to achieve his ends. An incredible amount of blood was taken from me and injected into poor humans, even children. And they all died in excruciating pain. I was killed countless times. Morgan loved watching me freeze in icy water, and calculated how long it would take me to die. Morgan was careful not to burn my body, because he liked to see me come back to life. After a few deaths, the awakening was quicker. Upon my resurrection, I was injected with a new dose of morphine, and the infernal cycle was perpetuated.”

I had trouble swallowing as my mother’s appalling story filled me with disgust and dread. Even with all the imagination I was capable of, I was twelve thousand leagues from what she had endured. But a warmth crept into my heart as I felt Ethan’s empathy. An empathy that was foreign to him until now.

“By early 1944, the war was nearly over,” my mother continued, “and Morgan stepped up the speed of his experiments. He stopped torturing me to concentrate on my special properties. Three prisoners had survived after an injection of my blood, which doctors had combined with I don’t know what product. And he savoured his success. A man came to free me. This man was Magnus. But I didn’t know anything about his plans at the time. I wanted to be free, and that’s all that mattered to me. In despair, bruised, emaciated and drunk with revenge on my captors, I welcomed Magnus as the Messiah. He stuck a needle into my heart and injected atropine into it. This had an immediate effect. Observing Magnus, whom I immediately recognized, I decided to let him go without a fight. He had just saved me, the hour of revenge hadn’t arrived. He understood that I wasn’t going to do anything against him, and said to me: “If someone has to kill you, it will be me.” He then left. Before fleeing, I killed a dozen guards and put an end to the tortures of a number of prisoners. But Morgan was nowhere to be found. I later learned that Magnus had captured him. He had needed him to use my DNA strains, and enlisted the three prisoners who had escaped.”

“Lord!” I said. “This man is evil incarnate.”

“I think you have noticed that there are worse,” reminded my brother with good reason.

“Magnus is what he is,” continued Isabelle, “and I am as I am. When I met your father, Eleonore had been dead for almost eight hundred years. Magnus had saved me from the Germans and I didn’t care about the DNA strains he had stolen. I was in love and the mother of an adorable little girl. Your father persisted in expelling the hatred in me and replacing it with love. I was finally happy. I was just asking that we stay away from the castes and everything about them. Magnus was Master Hand, and knew where I was. I was at peace for a while, until I got pregnant with Ethan. An ultrasound revealed it was a boy, and Magnus caught wind of this information. Convinced again that the children of a Castellane would be the children of the prophecy, he visited me in the greatest secrecy. He wanted us to live in London, with him. Obviously, I refused his proposal out of hand, but I saw the underlying threat. Pregnant, the memory of Eleonore never left me. I had nightmares every night, I barely ate. Nathanael was very worried but I couldn’t tell him more without risking that he would do something stupid.”

A shiver ran down my spine as my brother squeezed my mother’s arm a little tighter. The story was accelerating and would soon end.

“Magnus returned a few weeks later, very angry. Again, I refused to leave my home, just as I refused to allow my daughter, Everliegh, and my husband to live in his sinister tower, and to have my life ruled around a prophecy that he alone believed. So he made me a proposal: when my son was born, I should entrust him. He assured me that he would leave my daughter and my husband in peace only on this condition. He wanted to have one of the children of the prophecy so he could better control the other when their awakening began. And if I didn’t respond positively to his conditions, I was doomed never to know any respite. In desperation, I hid Magnus’ ultimatum from Nathanael. When I gave birth, I asked a friend to come to the hospital. She was powerful and a telepath. She had no trouble manoeuvring the hospital staff. She manipulated the mind of the midwife who had ordered me to have a caesarean, so Nathanael couldn’t be present at the delivery. Then she coerced the rest of the hospital staff into believing that I was dead, along with my baby. Nathaniel was mad with grief, but this was the only solution to protect the three of you. I left Ethan with this friend, who lived in Corsica, at a little-known place where I thought you would be safe, my son.”

Speechless, I didn’t know how to interpret my mother’s words. I felt like my brain was no longer able to accept anymore revelations. Ethan took his hand off her arm and came to sit beside me. He gazed into my eyes, and what I saw in his own overwhelmed me. I hugged him tight. Suddenly, an element of her revelations materialised in my head. The blood escaped my cheeks, I loosened my grip then turned to my mother.

“What was your friend’s name? You said she lived in Corsica? What was her name?”

“Adriana.”

“Her last name?”

“Adriana Ferloni. Her married name was Panchak. Adriana Panchak.”

I remained speechless.

“Eric and Thomas’ mother,” Ethan said, stunned.

“She was my best friend at the time,” my mother continued, observing Ethan, “but some time later, I was overcome with remorse and wanted to take you back. She already had two young sons, and took care of mine very well. When I took you back, she was very angry with me, because she was attached to you. After that episode, she cut off all contact with me, and that’s the worst mistake I’ve made. I went to hide with my baby with a caste in New Delhi, a caste that I thought was my friend, a friend as sure as Adriana. But, to gain favour with the Master Hand, she betrayed me. I was captured and locked up in London, while Magnus raised my own son. Like you, Everliegh, I have known treatments that a woman should never have to tell. I suffered abuse, I experienced humiliation and malnutrition. I consoled myself by telling myself that the Germans were much worse. But one day, one of Magnus’ minions injected me with a substance that drove me mad. Your father, Nathanael, had heard that a prisoner resembling me was locked up in London. He called on our Corsican friends to find me. They found the strength to forgive me, especially since there was a rumour that Magnus was aware of the birth of their two sons, whom they had nevertheless taken care to conceal from him. Adriana and her husband accompanied Nathanael. He probably thought Magnus wouldn’t hurt him in front of a witness. Magnus knew there were always dissidents to challenge his authority at any time, so he rarely risked executing castes without real reasons, and he had nothing against your father, who was very appreciated in the community. That day, he denied having locked me in his tower, and invited Nathanael and the Panchaks to lunch. The Panchaks had never been to London before, so Magnus used that excuse to show them around the tower. He finished the visit by the roof, because, at the top of the Canary Wharf Tower, you can admire London in all its splendour. As they surveyed the city, a caste led me to them. The substance I had been injected with was sending me nightmarish hallucinations. I screamed, and in the distance I heard Nathanael’s voice calling my name, shouting my name, and just as I was about to stretch out my arms to him, Magnus injected me with atropine in the heart. The shock was so violent that my powers burst out. When I finally opened my eyes to reality, there was no one on the roof except Magnus. “You killed them all,” he told me, “and now you know what it’s like to lose the man of your life, just as I lost the woman of my life, when you killed her.” I was so devastated, and in shock, that I let him stick another syringe in my neck. I was then locked up in Amsterdam, tied up, with an infusion of drugs in each arm, until you, Everliegh, unknowingly freed me.”

Words failed me. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, yet I didn’t realise I was crying. The sadness of her story was beyond unbearable.

“But when you led your assault,” she continued, “you didn’t find my cell. I was unconscious, almost dead, and no one knew I was there except Egeria. It was finally Blake who found me. He brought the Six back to life, and me with it. And since they became powerful again, they have kept me with them.”

“And you have to live with Magnus! How can you bear it?”

“I would have ripped his guts out!” Ethan said.

It was the first time I had heard him speak ill of Magnus. Was it death that had changed him so much, or was it his reunion with our mother? He had never known our father, and while I was being raised by Sam, he was being raised by that lunatic. I had never dared to imagine the education he must have received with such a man. But hope was born on this island, because my brother now has what he never had: a family. A single sister hadn’t been enough to bring him back to the right path, but maybe a mother would? The question now was whether she had the will.

“But Magnus was right,” she continued. “I killed my daughter, Eleonore. I killed the man I loved, Nathanael, and I hurt all my children. I am cursed. My destiny is to end up here, safe from the world, in the company of the Five. I’m like Blake in his last days, waiting for one of them to give me the death I deserve.”

“We have just found you and you’re already dreaming of leaving us.”

“That’s not what I said,” she said with a mysterious smile. “Maybe you’ll understand in your first millennium of life.”

“You’re not there yet,” I retorted, “and I don’t want you to talk about your death as if it wouldn’t affect us, it’s selfish!”

“I’ve lived a painful life, Everliegh. When the day comes, I’ll leave in peace.”

Her intense gaze pierced me. Was that supposed to reassure me? She got up and walked inside the suite, leaving my brother and I on the balcony, as her last words imprinted themselves on our brains.

“She’s unhappy,” Ethan said.

“I see that, and in view of her history, we can understand it.”

“Since my rebirth,” continued my brother, “they have put us together in a suite, opposite yours, at the very back of the temple. So trust me, I’m doing everything to get her back to life.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late,” I said, suddenly distressed. “Don't get too hopeful, Ethan, please.”

“I’ll get there, you’ll see, sister.”

I watched him. He had changed. It was as if a glow had kindled in him since he met our mother. But, if anything happened to Isabelle, would he be able to overcome his pain?

“You hurt me a lot,” I said, feeling that the time for explanations had come.

“I know, and I regret it. I was so unhappy. I acted out of anger and grief. Could it be that you accepted this marriage for a reason other than the war?”

My gaze wandered to the horizon. I then realised the absurdity of my situation. None of my relatives considered that I had agreed to this marriage for Carmichael’s sake, and that was true in a sense, since it was a necessity for waging a war. But they were wrong about my feelings for him, because no one realised that I really cared about him. Nobody was there, in the Scottish Highlands, when he brought me back to life and when I really discovered him for the first time. I myself had to die to see it.

“It’s true that today I would still be single if it hadn’t been for that threat,” I confessed, “but Carmichael and I deserved better than a suicide attempt on our wedding night, don’t you think?”

“Yes, and I’m an idiot.”

“Oh yeah! But at least you realised who Magnus was. You’re improving!”

“And I would like you to forgive me so that we can move on, because it kills me, my sister.”

“But you can’t always move on, Ethan. If I have decided to spend my life with Carmichael, it is my choice, and you must respect it, and whatever I decide in the future, you must abide by it. Is that clear?”

“I will do that.”

“And maybe you will find a young woman who’ll make you happy. Who knows?”

“No.”

His response was unequivocal. Ethan was definitely not like the other castes. Our antagonism on this point seizes me at this moment. While I inspired my fellow men with attraction, he only inspired fear or, at least, that was the only feeling that I had observed in the others, in the enclosure of the castle. His ability to attenuate my magnetic power probably came from there. But his pithy answer had distressed me. My brother had never considered his happiness, it had always been foreign to him, and the thought saddened me so much that my eyes filled with tears. I grabbed his hands, my gaze locked with his. His hazel eyes narrowed in a smile. He already knew that, five seconds later, I was going to forgive him. His tousled brown hair now reached his ears, he was the same handsome young man I had met in the castle library. This memory warmed me.

“Okay, I forgive you. But you’ll have to apologise to Carmichael!”

“Yes, I promise you.”

An almost childish smile appeared on his face. I imitated him and went to curl up in his arms.

“I love you, my sister.”

“I love you too, my brother.”

My tears stained his linen shirt, but this brotherly embrace was interrupted by Isabelle, who was calling Ethan from inside the room. I wiped my eyes.

“We’ll see you tomorrow, child,” she said as she placed a kiss on my cheek.

“Okay, Mom.”

She began to smile. A frank smile which narrowed her clear eyes and revealed the brilliance of her teeth. I imitated her, an indescribable joy crossing my heart from side to side. However, it was awfully strange for me to say Mom to a woman who wasn’t yet in her twenties. But I had so dreamed of using that word one day that it slipped out of my mouth with disconcerting ease. She grabbed Ethan’s hand and, before walking through the door, gave us one last revelation that she hadn’t been able to express out loud before.

“One last thing, my children. If I ever have to leave this world one day, know that it will be in the company of Magnus Burton Race.”

Her wink, associated with this murderous phrase, said a lot. Ethan nodded, and I followed suit. One thing was certain, my mother knew how to deliver her revelations.