Page 2 of Prior Claim
The person on the other end spoke. “Tell me you’re alive.”
Sevastyan. Bal. It was all Bal in Sevastyan’s voice right then. Mixed with bits of Vast. Her beautiful, tangled boy. Man. A man who was sometimes still a boy.
Weren’t they all children beneath?
She had to answer. Her eyes passed over the broken bodies. The broken walls. The grass swaying in the wind. The bright blue sky. “This isn’t living.” She’d done her task too well. This was the body of the criminal underworld fighting for its life, red blood cells spattered on the landscape, programmed for self-sacrifice. She was the virus taking them out. But what did that make Europe, no. . . the world . . Was that the body?
Her metaphor was falling apart.
Sevastyan’s breath came tight and sharp through the phone. “They’re going to flatten the place. They’ve lost too many trying to take you. Get out.”
Her beautiful, loving boy, always risking more than he should. “Tell me they don’t know you called me.”
“They don’t even know we’ve met.”
Ellisandre stood and staggered out past the bodies. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” This would be over soon. But first, there was something she needed to do. “Bal.”
“Yes?”
“Remember what I told you in Berlin. No one has permission to kill you. No one but me.”
“I remember.”
“So if I’m dead, you’re not allowed to die.” Ellisandre laughed. It was simple. They might keep him from her, but as long as he followed that one rule, as long as her will was iron above him, he would survive.
There was a roar of a plane in the distance. She narrowed her eyes, tracking its progress over the forest at the end of the pasture. “It’s good you called.” The broken bulletproof vest on her chest was restricting her breathing. She rubbed at her sternum with the heel of her palm. “I’m glad you’re not here.”
He was doing that thing where he tried to not cry and utterly failed. If she could see him, his eyes would be red and his pale visage flushed. “I wish I was.”
“You have something to live for, Vast. Prior claim, remember?”
“And you have me. I thought you had me.”
“They have you, for now. I’m not letting them have me too.”
“What will you do? Why didn’t you call Europol? It didn’t have to be this way.”
Ellisandre laughed again. Sevastyan wasn’t standing at a point on the road of life from which he could see what had her by the throat. There was no part of him that could. She had to do this. She’d cut the heart out of more than one of the beasts. She’d played the game on their own territory, on their terms, and done better. Judge. Jury. Executioner. This was the price. She was beyond the bounds of the law. It hadn’t started there, but it had gone there. No regrets, only grief. It didn’t look like she could live with what she’d done, but she could die with it, at peace.
Blood pooled in her mouth. She choked, coughing and bending, staining the ground vermillion with tendrils of her life. “I’m going to die, Bal.”
“I called so you wouldn’t.”
Tears ran in tracks down Ellisandre’s cheeks. “Find me on the other side. Whether or not you survive. Any part of you. Find me. When the claims are gone. When I’m your only prior.”
Coughs racked her battered ribs once again.
“Elli.” Her name came out of his throat like he was the one about to perish. Perhaps that was the truth, the greatest truth. Perhaps you died with the ones you loved, time after time.
She smiled through the tears pouring down her cheeks. This was their funeral, then. No music. No bells. No mourners. Only the two of them together, grieving each other, grieving themselves. A love story that had existed in secret, strangled for air. “Myths are meant to be rewritten. Goodbye, beloved.”
The plane was almost there. It was time. The phone fell from her fingers.
Sevastyan
Present
Sevastyan and Ellisandre stood in silence before the lamassu. Sevastyan’s blood burned through his body. There were a dozen things he wanted to do, and none were appropriate for a clandestine meeting amidst ancient artifacts in a public space. He turned to the right, walking through more stone reliefs depicting ancient attendants of ancient kings. Ellisandre shadowed him. He stepped around a massive black pedestal that was once the base of a column from Tell Tayinat, a neo-Hittite city. Once there would have been a wooden column set upon its strong, wide surface, but the beauty and safety it had once supported had long since moldered. Nothing was safe. Everything ended, in time. Except stone. He should have been born a stone.
