Page 63 of Abducting Sarah

“Come with me.” I took her hand and led her outside into the night. The fresh air helped to clear my head for what was to come, but I was also very aware of how alone we were. “Where are the others?”

“On the ships, I think. Why?”

“Good. I want privacy for this.”

“For what?” She shifted anxiously. “You’re making me nervous, Deacon.”

I sighed. “I do not mean to. It is only that this is important.”

“Then tell me already,” she insisted.

I exhaled a deep breath. “If you believe that we could not have children together, then that tells me you do not know who you are.”

She frowned in the soft moonlight. “What are you talking about?”

I struggled to figure out a way into the conversation. “Your power as a conduit…where do you think you get that from?”

She thought for a moment, seemingly struggling with the answer to the question. “I—umm, I honestly don’t know.”

“What did your mother tell you about your father?” I prompted.

She huffed. “She would never talk about him. Our mother told us he was the love of her life, but it was too painful to speak about him.” Then, she frowned. “Why? Do you think that’s where I got the power to see ghosts?”

“I know it is,” I said with absolute certainty. “You have that power, because members of your father’s family have that power.”

“You know who my father is?” Her voice was small and wondrous.

Everything in me felt loose and unstable, as if I were the one getting bad news, instead of the one delivering it. “Your father is Volatile Bateen. Justice’s brother.”

She gasped in horror, and both her hands covered her mouth as she whispered, “What?”

This time, I knew she had heard me and understood what it meant, but she still asked what, as though she had not. It was a peculiar reflex of my consort. Instead of repeating myself this time or asking why she tended to doubt me, I merely nodded. I wanted to give her the space and time she needed to process the information.

“How…how is that even possible?” she asked in shock.

“I…”Does she really mean how?“You are well-versed in thehowof this, Sarah. Your talent for sex—”

“No, how did theymeet?” she interrupted me.

“It is unclear,” I admitted. “But Volatile often travelled to Earth for many years—he was a merchant before the war. After the war, he has lived alone on an island in the Diamond Sea of Orhon.”

“My father is alive? And he never came to see me or my sisters?” She sounded sad and angry. “Not even after our mother died?”

“I cannot speak for him, Sarah. I know not his reasons.”

She stepped forward, and I thought she might strike me in fury.It is fine, I can take it. Whatever she needs to do right now to deal with this new information.But she hurled her arms around me and buried her face against my abdomen, instead. She sobbed against me, so I gently held her. I cradled her to me and petted her soft hair. She seemed so exhausted by everything, and I knew I was, too.

After a while, she sniffled and looked up at me, her wet eyes so luminous in the moonlight. “That makes me half-Ladrian, doesn’t it?”

I nodded and brushed an errant strand of hair away from her face. “This is why you can use a transmogrifier belt. Pure humans cannot, though we have been working on that technology.”

“Why…why don’t my sisters see ghosts too?”

“I do not know,” I replied honestly. “Being a conduit is a rare gift, even among pure Ladrians. But Volatile’s sister Constance had it. She was beloved by all, much the way Silence is now. Until the day Constance was murdered, she was a wonderful—”

Sarah gasped. “She was murdered?”

I set out to explain the situation. “Her murder was perpetrated by Justice and blamed on a general. The general was executed, his body burned here on Halla, and his ghost was murdered by another right after it emerged from his body, so that he would be born to the ether, taking Justice’s secret with him.”

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