The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Too Little Too Late, pt. 3

SADIE CLIMBED INTO MY BED AND STARED OUT THE WINDOW. I TOOK HER COPY of Theogony and flipped to the page where the lines had been outlined like they had been in Beowulf. Sadie was convinced that there were more answers in these pages. For months, she'd stared at them for hours, dripping Fateor over the pages and watching the pages highlight and the ancient spines splay themselves open. Tonight she'd referenced it in the tub.

But for all her power, her magic, and her brilliance, she sometimes missed the most obvious things. In her seventeenth-century copy of Theogony, where I flipped to the Fateor-highlighted lines. Because the just-this-side-of middle English translation was a bit much for me, I reread them in her modern version.

"Now of the many children that were born to Sky and Earth,
These were the fiercest ones, and from the very outset they
Were hated by their father and he hid them all away,
As soon as they were born, deep in the earth; he took delight
In doing this wicked deed and did not let them reach the light.
But Gaia, thronging inwardly, prodigious, gave a groan,
And she devised a crafty piece of cunning of her own.
She made a kind of metal that was gray and very hard,
Fashioned a scythe and showed her children what she had prepared;
And though she grieved in her own heart, to make them bold she said:

'O children, born to me and of a father who is bad,
We'll take an evil vengeance on him, if you should agree:
If anyone was first to do things shameful, it was he.'"

Sadie originally believed that this was about Raven, that it was a warning from Lizzie to kill Raven because he was bad. And he was bad. He would hurt all of us in the end. But Lizzie went to her grave thinking Alexander Raven was a good man, so if she had been the one to mark these passages, then she meant no such warning.

But in light of today's events, I saw the ominous words in a different light. I knew three people on this earth born from men evil enough to kill their own children as infants. Or try to. Sadie, Kutoyis, and Sky. Sadie and Kutoyis had the same symbols on their wrists, as if they shared the same parentage (and it was likely that Sky had the same symbols on hers, but where was she for us to prove this?), and I was starting to wonder. These three children of Lizzie's, all different from the supernatural creatures from whom they came, each had an account of something having happened to them in infancy. Something done to them. Something that changed them forever.

It was, of course, clear then. Sadie had been the sick infant brought to the Bloods and healed some years before Kutoyis and Sky were born. Lizzie, the fair-haired Sorcerer. And whatever she'd done to Sadie, she'd probably done again to Kutoyis and Sky. Sadie had gone to live with the Survivors, while Kutoyis and Sky were left to live with the Bloods.

It was still just a guess, but I began to believe it: That they were merged creatures, part Blood child, part Survivor. I didn't know what had happened. I couldn't explain a why. But I was fairly certain that this passage in Theogony was not Lizzie's warning against Raven, but her warning against the children's father.

It was her instruction to kill John, lest he kill them first.

As soon as I had thought it, I believed it to be true. Maybe it was because Lizzie's Survival pumped through my veins, or maybe it was because I was starting to make sense of the pieces, but suddenly I had a purpose. I owed it to Sadie and Kutoyis to do something their mother wanted to do to protect them that she could never quite do herself.

I looked to Sadie, who was fast asleep. I would kill him. I would do what Lizzie had never been able to. I would protect the ones I loved.

I would kill John.

I re-read the last lines, and their truth radiated in my core. We'll take an evil vengeance on him, if you should agree: If anyone was first to do things shameful, it was he.