Free The Prophet by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Page B

Without them, the madness and death only increased, but logic held no sway when the panicked needed to lay blame.
    Next, the shm’Ahnmik fled. The falcon shapeshifters—those who had survived the war—formed an empire, well removed from the conflict and heat of their once-kin. The followers of Anhamirak, the serpiente, remained behind and raised their own kingdom. Both sides would forever remember Maeve’s disgrace and look on her descendants with fear and mistrust.
    Maeve named her clan Obsidian, after the black glass that can only be created when the earth itself belches forth fire and ash. Formed in destruction, the stone can be smooth as a teardrop or as sharp as an arrowhead. And just as no man or woman can control the volcano that forms the obsidian glass, so too does the guild named after it disavow any ruler, emperor, king, or master who tries to claim dominion over it.
    —
    Half white viper, half falcon. No wonder the boy was dumb. It was well known that falcons were prone to insanity.
    “Who were your parents?” Farrell asked the woman. She had obviously been broken as a slave, but maybe she still knew where she came from.
    “I’m sorry,” the woman answered. “I do not know.”
    You cannot save them,
he told himself. The woman was broken. The boy was mad, and would certainly die of that malady; falcons did not live long away from the rest of their kind, and half falcons rarely survived childhood.
    How had Jeshickah gotten them?
    “You seem to have been waylaid.”
    As if summoned by his thoughts, Jeshickah, the so-called Mistress of Midnight, appeared in the doorway. Farrell’s spine crawled at the sound of her voice, and every fiber of his being writhed when he saw the woman and the boy both go to their knees. Maeve’s kin were without masters! Yet here they were, bowing to this vampire, this dead body that did not know to lie down and begin its path to the next world.
    Farrell turned slowly, trying to rein in his fury. Jeshickah would see it, and guess that she could use the woman and boy against him. Worse, if he dared to lash out, she could claim him and all those who chose to follow him as her property. They would end up as destroyed as this poor white viper woman.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to force the proper respect into his voice. “I was distracted. I thought white vipers were extinct.”
    He tried to betray nothing beyond idle curiosity. He could not let her know how valuable this information was to him.
    “Are they?” she replied, sounding bored. Like the empire she ran, Mistress Jeshickah had a magnificent exterior that wrapped a frigid, calculating essence. Milk-pale skin and dark walnut tresses meant nothing. The void that was her soul was visible in her jet-black eyes, which flicked to the mother briefly. “That one was born in these cells, several years ago, to two other serpents. A fluke of breeding, I suppose.”
    Impossible. The children of a white viper were white vipers, always, just as the child of a cobra was always a cobra. White vipers were not born to other serpents, like some strange, frustrating trait that might spring up once every several generations when one tried to breed horses or dogs. If Jeshickah was lying, though, there was no way for him to force the truth from her.
    You cannot save them,
he told himself again.
There is nothing you can do
.
    He glanced back at the boy, who was still on his knees, with his head down and his shoulders hunched as if against a blow. Did he even know where he was, or why he was kneeling?
    ***
    Malachi fought to stay focused, but while Farrell had been full of potential, of destiny shouting commands at the future, Mistress Jeshickah screamed out thousands of years of history and memory and ambition sufficient to make Fate itself ache and cry in agony.
    He knelt because he had been taught to kneel in her presence, but doing so meant overlapping with every other soul who had done the same in the past four centuries.
    “I