The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Too Little Too Late, pt 2

HOURS LATER, AFTER SADIE TOOK NOAH INTO THE WOODS TO BE ALONE WITH him, I found her in my bathtub.

"Sadie?" I called. "Babe?"

She laughed sadly. "Not Princess?"

She was sitting in water up to shoulders, her knees huddled against her chest.

"No, not princess," I said.

"Good. Never call me that again," she said. I nodded, taking a seat on the floor next to the tub.

"How did Noah take it?" I asked.

"Not well." She let the words hang there. Then she said, "I didn't tell him everything, Everett."

"What did you leave out?"

"That John's our father," she said solemnly.

"Did Sarah tell you that?" I asked, playing dumb.

She rolled her eyes at me. "I know you were listening."

"Okay, so then I can say there's no way you know that. Just because he bound her to not telling you the truth doesn't mean . . ."

"Yes, it does, Everett. It supports the facts. Today, with the Fateor, Noah reasoned out that he's either in Andrew's line or he's in John's. So either we're Lizzie and John's, or we're Lizzie and Andrew's kids. And you know what's funny? I only know the parentage of one Survivor, and that's enough to figure it out: Cassie was Andrew and Lizzie's only child. Andrew told me. And so that means that John was our father."

I had no idea what to say to her. I kept having no idea what to say to her. How did we keep ending up here, in places of pain and sorrow, in situations I couldn't fix, with problems I couldn't kiss away?

"What if you're just one of John's descendants?" I suggested.

She laughed ironically. "You know, I thought that too. Especially because John and Rebecca have been married since the seventeenth century, though I don't know why him being an adulterer on top of everything else should surprise me. But one night when I was in New York I spoke to Hannah on the phone, and I got her to admit something interesting to me."

"Which was?"

"Only the direct descendants of elders have been able to carry the witch magic."

"How'd you get her to admit that? How do they even know that?" I asked.

She shrugged. "They've been testing who has witch magic for years. So far, only Survivors born from two elders have any chance of using the magic," she said. "And another thing. All the Survivors were born in some kind of sequence, like you'd expect. Generations coming one after the other, not mixed in. She told me that, if you can believe it. With a few exceptions, apparently. Ben has the magic. So does Noah. So do I. We were born out of order, the only children of elders born so late. I'm guessing why Lizzie gave us the books. I'm guessing that has something to do with why we can track in one way or another. The three of us are different, and I don't know why birth order matters, but somehow it must. I think there was something they wanted to tell us, Everett. Not that I have been able to figure out what that is," she said, nodding to her ancient copy of Theogony on the ground. "I guess that means Cassie is like us too. Too bad she's out there in the human world killing people left and right and can't be here to mourn with us."

Her voice was sad and sarcastic, and it made every inch of my body ache. It was sometimes so hard to love someone who was in so many pieces. After all, to love someone who is so constantly in pain is a pain all its own.

"Wait, that doesn't work," I said. "If Cassie is a vieczy and she's a child of Andrew and Lizzie, then one of them is technically a nosferatu or some other shifter. Only one of them is a witch."

She met my eyes sadly. "I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense. Look at Noah. It's Lizzie, then, who was different. A shifter or something like it. She's the common factor between Cassie and Noah." She pressed her palms to her forehead, squinting as if in pain. "Jesus, how does that fit into all of this? How did I miss that? What else haven't I thought of?"

The question was rhetorical, but I answered it anyway. "What about your power? Where does it come from? John can't read minds," I argued. I wanted it not to be true that John was her father as much as she did. I didn't know it before it hit me in that moment, but I'd had a diluted idea that we would figure out who her father was and that she would love him. And one day, somewhere on the way to my father's beach vision, I would marry her. She would put on a white dress and her father would walk her down the aisle and give her away.

But that wouldn't happen. Not if John was her father.

At this rate, maybe it wouldn't happen at all.

"You want to hear something funny?" she said, only I knew she meant it wasn't funny. "I think he can read minds. I think he has all my powers. I might be an exception in a lot of cases, but I don't think this is one of them. He could probably read minds the entire time, and of course he never told anyone he could. It was the ultimate power play. All those times I left the Survivors' City and Ginny could still mirror my powers. She could still read my mind, communicate with it even, thousands of miles away from me. She could even do it when I was in New York for weeks. I think she wasn't mirroring my power. She was mirroring his. I'm sure that's how he's always known too much, always been inside people's minds."

"Impossible," I said. "He would have gotten caught."

"Who would there be to expose him? It would only take someone with one of three powers to bring him down, to expose all his secrets: A mind reader better at reading minds than I am, a reader better at reading than I am, or a mirror. And think about the timeline: He started really trying to tear us apart when I came back and could read his mind, and when Ginny came and could mirror him. If he's figured out that I have the reading power, then it makes more sense that his tactics escalated. But a better mind reader would know he was reading others' minds. A better reader would be able to determine which powers he had. And a mirror would be able to tell the world which powers he had because she'd be able to use them. Between Ginny and me, we're all three of those things, not that he knows how useless I am at the reading. Convenient that we're not there now, isn't it?"

I stayed quiet.

"You look like you don't know what to say," she said, sinking her head back against the rim of the tub. "That's okay. That's how I feel. I wish it wasn't true, but I'm afraid it is. Lizzie is my mother, which is wonderful because she's the only person I've ever truly loved in there. Only she's dead now so it's terrible. And John is my father, and he's the only person I ever truly hated in there, and he's still alive, which is also terrible."

She studied her reflection in the still water, and even the reflection looked sad to know the truth.

"So how does all this play in? How does it inform our next move?" I asked. Wasn't that all we ever doing? Asking questions, seeking answers, plotting the next step?

"It doesn't," she said. "I just get to know the truth, and it becomes another thing to carry in my heart."

I didn't need her power to read emotions; hers were written all over her. I could feel the grief, the despair becoming a part of the air we inhaled, a part of the things we touched. A part of us.

"I'm sorry, Sadie. For everything," I said.

She ignored the apology. She lifted her left wrist out of the water, and showed me the symbols. "They won't come off. You were right to turn them down."

"We'll find a hiding spell or something," I said, and took her hand. She was warm from the bathwater, warmer than she was in real life. It felt strange.

"What's the point?" she asked. "They're just more scars. I might as well keep them. I worked hard for them, didn't I?" She lifted her other hand out of the water and traced the symbols. "It's funny, actually."

"What?"

"It's just funny how we chase things. How I chase things. After all: How many answers we seek are just a part of us, waiting to be found?"