Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 5: Last thoughts

Kaiser did not awaken on the third day.

The bloodline did not answer him, and it broke him. He drove his fists into the surface of the jade flagon, past the pain, again and again, trying to beat some dormant thing in his blood into waking — until the cracks spread across the jade and the skin peeled off his hands and the blood ran out of them and pooled on the floor. He lost too much of it. He fainted where he stood.

It was half an hour to midnight when he came to.

He checked himself first, the way a drowning man reaches for anything — hoping the change had come while he lay unconscious. It had not. His skin was the same grey. No claws would come, and none would retract. His canines had not grown. Kaiser had known it for false hope even as he let himself have it, a way to put off the certain thing a little longer — because in the deep of him he had always known the bloodline would never wake in him. His father had been a human.

" By the elders’ decision, I will be thrown into the Screaming Sea. "

What he had learned of that place, after his mother died, put a cold down his spine. Death he could accept. Not that. Not that way.

The thoughts turned in him, one over the next.

He thought of the whole of the life he had lived until now, inside the small warm bubble his mother had built around him — and of the moment the bubble burst and left him standing alone in the cold of the truth.

He thought of the faces of his mother’s clan, come to watch him fail. They had worn their smug grins into the chamber already knowing how it would end, here for nothing but the pleasure of his failure and the carrying-out of the sentence their elders had set on him before he was ever born.

He thought of his two uncles. Rodon and Anastas. The hope they had given him before the ritual — that if he shed his own blood, it might stir some sleeping thing in his line.

He had met them the day after his mother died. They had come looking for her, and found her gone, and been wrecked by it. They had helped him bury her, and they had sat with him in it, and they had asked him — gently — about his birth, and about how much Rasvet had told him.

He had opened up to them. He told them everything she had told him that last evening.

Everything but the letter.

He kept the letter to himself, even from the two who had been kind to him, because the letter meant his mother had taken her own life, and he would not let that name be laid on her, not by anyone. So he said nothing of it.

Now, in the failing dark, Kaiser drew the red pill from where he had hidden it inside his fingerless glove.

" My life was meaningless. " He said it to the empty room. " I was a curse on my mother. She loved me with the whole of her heart, and in the end I was the reason she is dead. If only I had held any power at all — "

The tears came.

" What would I not give. For power. For the power to change what is coming — to have made her happy — to climb up out of this hell — "

He swallowed the pill. freewebnσvel.cѳm

A chill spread from his mouth and his throat down into his chest and out through the whole of him, and Kaiser fell, and died, grief still open in his eyes, as midnight came down over the lands of the Black Earth.

And a plane away, or a life away, Kei watched the last of it play out.

It had come to him like a film run behind three-dimensional glass, Kaiser’s memory unspooling frame by frame until it reached its end. He let out a breath.

" This one had a hard time of it. "

He felt it — a thin thread of something like pity, for a life sentenced before it had even begun. And under the pity, a harder thing: he had no patience for the ending Kaiser had chosen for himself.

" He could have tried to live it out to the last. " Kei turned it over. " Then again — if he had, I would not have woken up in the body. "

He let that sit.

" And the mother’s death. " His mouth went wry. " Something about that sits wrong. But who can say. No one has ever understood women. "

He almost smiled at it, and then the smile went, because the other thing had been circling him the whole time and now it landed.

" It is all too neat. My death, to the minute. My waking, here, in his body, at exactly this moment. It reads like a thing arranged — like someone is working the strings on both our lives, with a reason he has not shown. "

His Yakuza instinct — the sense he had honed over years of sitting across tables from criminals and from the men who hunted them — pulled at him, low and certain.

" But that can wait. First I get out, and then — "

The thought stopped where it was.

Because he had not walked away clean. He had come back inside a dead body, yes — but to the world outside this room, Kaiser was still in the middle of his awakening, and the price of failing that awakening was a cruel and particular death.

His life still hung by a thread. freeωebnovēl.c૦m

The door of the room swung open.