And I needed him too. I could shoot a gun and maybe throw a few punches. I could hack any system on the planet, and I could fly an airplane. But I had no idea how to kill a Nephilim. I needed him and Castle Vianney, maybe just as much as they appeared to need me.
"I'll come back. I can't promise beyond that, but I'll come back."
"That's good enough for now," he said.
"How long until I can go?"
"A few days."
Jax came out of his room and stood beside me as I thanked the Chancellor. "What do I call you?" I asked.
He smiled. "You can call me Grandfather. I would like it very much if you did."
I didn't know how I felt about that, but it might be good to have another living family member. To not be the last of my blood.
The Chancellor turned to Jax. "Tomorrow, take her to the city, to the bank. She needs to see what her parents left her."
"Yes, sir," he said.
The Chancellor—I couldn't quite bring myself to think of him as Grandfather yet—stood to leave, but hesitated. "Scarlett, do you know what you're holding?"
I opened my hand to look at the black ring. "My father called it a Token of Strife."
"The Tokens are an ancient practice of the Orders. The Token of Strife symbolizes a conflict. When you give a Token of Strife to another, you are challenging them to combat. But only when you put the Token on, do you agree to the challenge."
"My father wore it… during the battle."
"Then your parents died fighting for their beliefs. For their belief in protecting others. For their belief in this place. They died as Templars."
I sucked in my breath and squeezed the ring harder.
The Chancellor put his hand over mine, his lined skin thin as paper and smooth against my own. "I know you can't trust me, but perhaps you can trust them."
Chapter 9
The Inquisition
Jax and I had slept in the same bed before, but last night it felt different. Everything felt different.
I hadn't wanted him to give up his room and sleep in the hall. "We've shared a bed before," I'd reminded him. "Just stay. Besides, I don't want to be alone."
I wasn't sure how true that was, but it worked. He stayed and I woke up this morning with his arm draped around me, the stubble of his cheek rubbing against my shoulder.
It was never sexual in the past and it certainly wasn't last night either. But it was comfort. Friendship. A semblance of safety in a world that suddenly seemed dangerous.
I dreamed of my parents that night, and for the briefest of moments, just as I was waking but before consciousness dealt its blow of truth, for those few moments I'd forgotten about the day before. Forgotten that my parents were dead and I was homeless in a world I didn't understand. I had them back, if just for a flicker of thought, and it felt so good. So happy.
Then the memories came crashing in and reality destroyed that briefest of peace.
Now I stood at the gates of the Castle, dressed in borrowed clothes and borrowed shoes, my hair braided to one side, my treasures tucked into my pocket, ready to face New York City with Jax.
He'd dressed in his Order's formal uniform, a cloak with the Teutonic symbol on it. His wolf pendant hung around his neck, as always, but now he also wore his Teutonic Knight Order ring.
"This is where you were when you said you were going to summer camp or visits to your grandparents, isn't it?"
"Yes."
I knew he hated lying, hated knowing that it would be a long time before I stopped piecing together the little, and big, discrepancies that now made up all my memories. That my life had become a puzzle, broken into too many pieces to count, that I had to put back together, only it wasn't making the right picture. It was making a new picture I didn't recognize.
We didn't take the car as I'd expected. Instead, we walked into Vianney, the town, and went down into the one subway station they had. "How can we get to Manhattan from the subway? We're on an island."
He smiled, a bit of boyish charm shining through the soldier. "You'll see. It's pretty incredible."
Incredible was an understatement.
We didn't have subways in Montana, but I remembered going on one before the war, when I was little and my parents took me to New York for a family vacation. This was in a class all its own.
We crammed into the train with several other students and some faculty and with a rumbling and jerk, headed underground.
But we soon found ourselves not just underground, but underwater.
Jax pointed to something and I followed his finger. "They built a tube from Manhattan to the island, all underwater, and created the world's most advanced underwater subway." The walls of the train turned transparent, allowing us to see the underwater world around us. Fish swam by, ignoring the giant sea monster of humanity, but what most surprised me were the larger-than-life sculptures that lined the bottom of the lake. It was an entire scene, humans and Zeniths and some Nephilim and Lycans, a re-creation of a battle during the Nephilim War, all made of stone.
"That's amazing!"
"A local artist created this to encourage coral reef growth once they got permission from U.F.I. It certainly makes the commute interesting."
We arrived in Manhattan faster than I would have thought, and I followed Jax out of the subway tunnel. I noticed lines of soldiers at the entrance and exit of the tunnels, checking the IDs of all who went in, and asked Jax about it.