Page 44 of The Brotherhood

“What I’m going to tell you will sound terribly hard to believe. But… here it goes. I think I need to start with my husband who received a bite from one of his Twelve.”

“Twelve?” Volkan, asked.

“Twelve men or friends who… serve with him to protect the swamps where we live.”

“And this friend bit him?” Oblivion wondered.

“On purpose, yes. Because my husband asked him to. Because he’d been bitten by many bats during a fight with his… wife. His wife, uh… trained bats and crows and ravens all her life. There was trouble in our swamps and Nitro, the one who was bitten was the leader of the hatch she lived in.”

“Hatch?”

“The term they use for small communities in the swamp,” she explained, officially having all their undivided attention. “And Nitro was attempting to move Felix, the bird lady, to another location because her residence was in a location they deemed unsafe. She didn’t want to leave her birds and… during his effort, a romance formed between them. At this time, the Twelve had agreed to all find wives—they were celibate beforethis—” she cut in, further convoluting the story. “It was decided—possibly with my persuasive help—that it was better for them to be married. This was before I even had a clue about my gift—” she quickly added. “And they all agreed to marry. So, it was decided we’d throw a kind of ball and invite all the females in the swamp for the Twelve to pick from, then we decided to just let them each pick a handful from the whole lot and only invite those to the ball for them to pick from.” She paused. “Mercy, where was I?”

“The bite,” Oblivion helped smoothly.

“Oh yes,” she hurried, glancing at Sinrik and whispering, “I’m… hot!”

The panic in her face brought him before her, blocking the view of the Pillars as he began unbuttoning her outer coat, suddenly not sure he wanted them knowing she was pregnant.

“I can do it,” she fussed, swatting his hands off.

He stood behind her and helped remove it, snatching her hat off too as watching eyes all lowered to her mid-section, bringing a detectable freeze to each of them.

“I tend to run a little hotter in my condition,” she said, directly answering the wonder from their assessing gazes. “Where was I,” she mumbled, keeping the gloves on. “The bite,” she remembered, pacing a little as she organized her thoughts. “I’m trying to formulate a gist here.”

“We don’t mind all the details,” Noctis hurried while Sinrik took in her beauty even while being bundled in the black insulated overalls with a thick matching sweater.

“So, a romance formed between Nitro and Felix and there was a little fight between them, a misunderstanding, and she agreed to move all her birds if he agreed to a bat-tie with her.” She paused, facing them. “A bat-tie is what they call a fight, or a means to settle civil disputes. But the law forbids men to fight women, so she challenged him to fight her bats because shewanted to show him that they were capable of protecting her better than he could. She intended to use them as a shield and if he managed to penetrate that shield and reach her, she’d agree to move. If not, she got to stay. Well,” she said, full-on pacing now as they all listened intently to the bizarre story unfolding. “He did manage to breech the wall of bats, and it nearly cost him his life. She screamed and they attacked him.”

“How many bats?”

“Thousands,” she gasped.

“She housed thousands of bats?”

“No, she housed and trained what she referred to as her generals. The bats were everywhere in the swamp but it’s the generals that controlled them and she controls the generals. And in only seconds, every inch of his body was riddled with bat bites, all of them bleeding and it was suddenly a rush to save his life. My husband ended up giving him blood and… his life was saved,” she gasped then cleared her throat. “Well, fast forward a day or two and Lesion, the Swamp’s doctor of… sorts, developed a serum from his blood. He’d wanted to use the bat saliva in his system in a way that would… I guess help him. Only Felix gave him five times the dose she was supposed to— accidentally,” she quickly added, protecting her reputation and proving his growingangeltheory that had crept in recently. “And it turned him into…” she gasped, shaking her head. “Into something we first thought was terrifying because he bit her but then we realized he actually hadn't hurt her.”

“What was this serum?” Volkan marveled, astonished with the rest of them.

“I have no idea,” she admitted. “But it changed him. And not just temporarily.”

“And he bit your husband intentionally,” Noctis said.

She nodded and proceeded with her story, introducing them to thirteen Creole Kings with cognitive gifts. “What sort of gifts?” Oblivion asked, his eagerness entirely unhidden.

“All sorts,” she said, sounding just as amazed. “But what you need to understand is what they do with them in their dreamscape.”

“Dreamscape?” Nexus cut in. “What is this?”

“It’s a virtual reality they created that allows them to link all of their abilities to find other gifted humans all across the world. In fact, we were on our way to getting one such woman when we encountered Mr. Sinrik’s soldiers.”

“When you had the dream,” Noctis said, remembering.

“Yes! And when I woke, I had this…very bad feeling. And then when we passed a place along the road, I suddenly knew we were supposed to stop.”

“I don’t understand,” Oblivion said. “This is not a gift of persuasion, but a gift of vision.”

She stared at him, then glanced back at Sinrik, her look troubled before returning it to the Pillars.

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