James Frey - Descendant

“The High Council has made its decision,” Pop said. “We journeyed to Stonehenge and asked our question. The stones gave us their answer, and the answer is Aisling.”

A gaggle of old men measuring angles of light and lengths of shadow, their protractors consigning Declan’s daughter to a useless life of blood. He wanted to scream, to overturn the table, to seize the Falcata from its place of honor on the council wall and slash off their heads—but none of that would help Aisling. So instead he pretended to accept it, and came home to do what needed to be done.

“If they want her to Play, she’ll Play,” Declan tells Lorelei. “Whatever we want, whatever she wants, they won’t care. They’ll turn her into a killer. They’ll make her help the gods with their genocide. And if she dies, they’ll shrug and pretend to care, and then they’ll throw another poor child to the wolves.”

What he doesn’t tell Lorelei, has never told Lorelei, is what being the Player really means: how much blood has been spilled, even without Endgame. So much death, all of it justified as “necessary to protect the line,” necessary to prepare for Endgame. Declan has killed 23 people, and he remembers every single one of their faces. Just as vividly, he remembers the face of the current Player when Declan helped her make her first kill—the face of a 13-year-old who has learned what she’s capable of, who’s drawn blood and murdered her childhood and is equal parts terrified and proud. These are the faces he sees in his dreams every night; this is the fate—guilt, sorrow, regret, obsession—he wants to spare his daughter. Terrible to imagine that she too will someday be tortured by the faces of those she’s killed.

Even worse to imagine that she won’t be.

“Declan, that’s your family you’re talking about,” Lorelei says. She loves his family, always has; she has none of her own. “Surely, if we just tell them how we feel, they’ll understand—”

He shakes his head.

He met Lorelei when they were both 22 years old. She was freshly out of college; he was adjusting to post-Player life, trying to decide what to do with himself for the next 50 years. He told her stories of his life before they met, but he spared her most of the gory details. He didn’t want her to see that side of him, the soldier who would do whatever was necessary to survive. He regrets that now.

“Fine, Declan,” she says. “If you say that this is a problem, then I trust you—but why is it a problem we need to solve now ? Aisling is still a baby—that gives us more than twelve years to figure this out.”

“No. No!” As soon as the stones choose their Player, the training begins. Everything begins. They’ll mold Aisling into what they want her to be—and they will always be watching.

“We can’t risk waiting,” he says. “We’ve got a small window of opportunity here, maybe . They won’t expect us to make a move this quickly. That’s our only chance.”

“So what are we supposed to do, Declan?” She’s starting to sound irritated. “You want me to quit my job, abandon our family, take off with you for god-knows-where? Where will we go? How will we support ourselves? How long do we have to stay away? Have you thought any of this through?”

“We’ll figure it out as we go,” he says. Another thing Lorelei doesn’t know: he has plenty of money, enough to support them for the rest of their lives. When he disavowed Endgame, he also disavowed the money he’d been gifted for serving his line all those years as the Player. Blood money, he thought. He and Lorelei have been raising their daughter in near poverty, but that was by choice, not necessity. Declan’s choice, one of many he made without telling his wife. He regrets that now. He regrets so much. “We always figure it out.”

She shakes her head. “Pop was right,” she says. “I’ve let this all go too far. I’ve let you get carried away.”

“You talked to Pop about me? About this?”

“He’s worried about you, Declan. He thought maybe you needed some time away, a rest—”

“I know what he thinks,” Declan snaps. His father wants to send him back to the old country, for what he calls rehabilitation. But Declan has heard stories of the isolated camp in the Alps where faithless members of the line are sent. None of them ever come back. “He thinks I’ve lost my mind.”

“You’re not exactly sounding like a beacon of sanity right now, honey.”

“Endgame is a lie, Lorelei. You know that.”

“I know you believe that.”

With those words, he knows he’s lost her.

“Can we take a little time?” she asks. “Sleep on it, maybe talk more in the morning?”

Declan gazes at her, this woman to whom he’s sworn his lifelong love. The woman he fell in love with the first time he saw her, hunched over a book in an uptown branch of the New York Public Library, strands of hair curling over her face. “Of course we can,” he tells her. “We can talk about it as much as you want. You’re right, we shouldn’t make a rash decision. We won’t do anything until we both agree it’s the right thing to do.”

“You promise?”

He kisses her, takes her in his arms, and holds on like she’s a buoy in rough seas, the only thing that can keep him from drowning. “I promise,” he tells her.

Then he waits for her to fall back asleep, and kidnaps their daughter.

He tells himself it can’t be kidnapping, because Aisling belongs to him as much as she belongs to her mother.

But he knows better.

Declan drives all night with Aisling sleeping in the backseat. They can’t leave the country yet, not until he puts together a fake passport for the baby. But he can at least put as much distance as possible between himself and his family. He hears the Amber Alert on the radio, but by that time he’s ditched the car for a hot-wired Pontiac and is halfway to North Carolina. When he’s too exhausted to keep his eyes open, he checks them into a motel, paying in cash. He’s taken $5,000 from the safe at the back of the closet, which should get them through the first few hurdles of the journey. Declan has accounts in banks all over the world, accounts that Lorelei doesn’t know about, and he supposes he should feel proud of himself that he’s so prepared. But he’s not proud, only profoundly sad that he’s so good at keeping secrets from the woman he loves. This is exactly the life he doesn’t want for Aisling.

He never wants her to learn not to trust.

He plays with Aisling on the dingy motel carpet while the press conference plays on TV in the background. Lorelei has wasted no time calling the cops on him. He can’t blame her.

He’s glad of it, actually, because he knows the High Council would prefer to conduct their search in secret. Having police bumbling around and getting in their way will only help Declan.

Still, he can’t stand to hear the pain in Lorelei’s voice.

“Please, Declan, bring her home,” she says, before a crowd of eager reporters. Aisling looks up at the sound of her mother’s voice, reaching eagerly for the TV screen. “We can figure this out together, if you just bring her home.”

He wonders what she’s told the police. Probably that her husband’s gone off his rocker.

He hasn’t given up on her yet. Now that she knows he’s serious, maybe she can still be convinced.

Declan gathers Aisling to his chest, trying to soothe her to sleep. He lets his eyes close, and he dreams of Lorelei’s tears.

His training taught him to get by on only a few hours of sleep, so it’s not long before they’re on the road again. Declan has a contact in West Virginia who’s more than happy to make the baby a new passport, for the right price. While he’s waiting for it to be ready, he and Aisling duck into a drugstore. He buys a pink stuffed bunny nearly as big as her head for her and a cheap burner phone for himself.