HEART OF THE CHOSEN (CASTE BOOK 1)

Chapter 39

The next day, I got up at dawn and went in the shower before putting on skinny jeans and a grey flared top. I pulled my hair up in a neat ponytail and applied makeup with a black kohl pencil and a touch of mascara. The ash effect under my eyes gave me almost a dark side, and a little light lipstick ended up harmonizing the rest. I left satisfied in the direction of the south wing. It’s not so much that I wanted to seduce, far from it, but if I ran into Naomi, I wanted to be on top to make her green with envy. Childish reaction, it goes without saying, but it was now the treatment I was going to inflict on myself every day. Having a neat appearance was important considering my wish to occupy a certain place among the castes of the Order, because who was going to respect a young girl in her twenties in jogging pants and who let herself down heavily?! I still remembered Prisca’s elegant appearance and the esteem everyone had for her. So I woke up this morning with a strong desire to make myself useful. I wasn’t going to laze in the garden yard all the days of my life, so I needed a goal, and with Blake’s imminent arrival, I hoped to succeed.

As I crossed the yard, I passed Thomas, his eyes haggard. The dark circles under his eyes made me think that his night hadn’t been easy and knowing a little about the incendiary blond that was this harpy, I would never have wished to be in his place.

“Eve, I was just coming to pick you up!”

“Thomas, you look terrible, didn’t it go well yesterday?” I ventured to ask, clenching my jaw.

“You could say that!” he spat, sullenly. “She went on half the evening.”

“She’s wrong to blame you, all the same!”

“That’s clear, and I didn’t hesitate to tell her! Only, with Guillaume, I’m careful. I would so much like him to have as normal a life as possible, and that will include the presence of his mother so I was careful with what I said.”

“I understand,” I said, as concerned for the little one as for Thomas. “And you? How do you see the future now?”

“If you want to know, I don’t see anything at all. Naomi will occupy the guest room for a while, while Guil gets to know her. But not long because I still think I’d make you c***k one day and in the end, you’d come back to me!”

“Oh! Uh…”

“Don’t give up,” he said smiling. “I understand, Eve, but time will tell, as they say!”

“Uh… yes but… maybe Naomi and you…”

“Naomi and me?! Are you dreaming or what! She tricked me and got out of here as soon as she had the chance, and above all… I was never in love with her!”

I looked down without saying a word. A few seconds passed during which I thought I liquefied on the spot.

“Let’s eat,” he said smiling.

Relieved that I hadn’t taken this very slippery conversation any further, I followed him to the south wing.

“Do you know about the others?” I inquired a stone’s throw from the common room.

“Yes, they are coming back today, Salomon came to tell me yesterday. By the way, did you tell Carmichael about your vision?”

“No,” I replied when honestly I had completely forgotten this detail.

“And when are you going to do it?”

“Soon, I’m waiting for another one to know if it’s confirmed and, I promise, I’ll talk to him about it!”

He didn’t have time to lecture me because I opened the door. As I entered, I froze in surprise at the sight before my eyes. A sweet warmth emanating from the room grabbed my guts and a wide smile appeared on my face when I discovered this perfect scene. Selene, Estelle’s mother, was standing serving coffee to the Van Durens and Salomon, who laughed in unison, followed closely by Blake, Ethan and two other castes, a woman and a man who were unknown. The beauty of these two people filled the atmosphere of the room as the laughter merged. Seated in the back, Ethan had one hand under his chin and was listening to the others, impassive. The fact of being able to read in him as soon as he experienced an extreme feeling and our common telepathy meant that he had almost no secrets for me. I saw him move almost imperceptibly before suddenly turning his head. His eyes finally met mine and he stood up, a thin grin on the edge of his lips, a sign that he too was delighted to see me again.

“You took a long time!”

“What should I say then! I came back to Mortain weeks ago!”

“We had a lot to do, we discovered unclear things.”

“Where’s Magnus?” I asked curtly, a way of making him understand that apart from those concerning the ex-Master Hand, his revelations didn’t interest me much.

“Everliegh!” exclaimed Blake, who came to take me in his arms.

“Blake!” I said, a little unsettled for once. “How happy I am that you’re here!”

“And me, we missed you so much, my beautiful, didn’t we, Ethan?”

Ethan came to kiss me on the cheek and went to shake hands with Thomas, who was still on guard with him.

“I present to you Monica and Mas Andrès, they both come from Spain and helped us with the attack on the tower. I owe them my life, so they’ll join us for now.”

I nodded in their direction, they imitated me. Despite their apparent courtesy, I couldn’t help but feel the strange gaze the young woman left hanging over me. She was splendid. Neither too tall nor too short, her brown hair cascaded down her shoulders. Her complexion was slightly tanned and dark almond eyes completed this perfect archetype of the Andalusian woman. She had a thin white blouse tucked into light blue jeans with thin black ballet flats, which gave class to her figure. Her neighbour was not left out, her brother, if I had understood correctly. His mid-length hair and his three-day beard made him ultra sexy. His linen shirt with long flared sleeves and his tight black pants underlined the originality of his look. He was staring at me, and it didn’t take long for me to get closer to Ethan to lower my pheromone level. Meeting an unknown male caste could always prove to be a dangerous exercise. Fortunately, my powers repelled the less reckless, but Mas was far from being unpleasant and rather to my taste… I shook my head and stuck to my brother. This damn power of attraction was going to drive me crazy one day, I still had hot flashes when everyone was finally sitting down at the table. Nervous, I poured myself a cup of hot coffee before questioning Blake.

“So, how was it in London?”

“I’m not unhappy that we left,” said Blake, sincere, “I must admit that coming back to this gloomy tower didn’t make me any happier than that.”

“Perhaps you preferred it as a prisoner,” I quipped, remembering the inhuman treatment that Blake had suffered for almost three centuries.

“No, you mustn’t exaggerate,” he replied, laughing.

“Where’s Magnus?” I asked, much more serious then.

Blake took a deep breath and poured himself a coffee. While he was still considering how to present things to me, it was Naomi’s turn to return to the common room. My mood suddenly darkened. She went to sit next to Thomas after warning him that little Guil would be looked after by Estelle all morning. As if she had only that to do, my poor Estelle!

“I would like us to see each other tonight in the Pomona room,” Blake continued, “what do you say?”

“Why? Won’t you tell me where he is?” I replied while lazily sniffing the aroma of the coffee.

“No indeed, or not at the moment.”

“Why?” I repeated, this time impatiently.

“For the same reasons that I didn’t want you to come to London.”

This time, I got up, hurt. Sidelining me about Magnus Burton Race wasn’t the best thing to do in the morning, especially considering the rather delicate situation surrounding me with that naughty Naomi staring at me.

“We had an agreement, Blake!”

“I know. But we’ll discuss that again tonight.”

“No way, where is Magnus?!”

“He’s safe and secure, which won’t be for long if you go now.”

“I’ll stay calm.”

“Are you kidding me!” Blake exclaimed, visibly annoyed this time, “I don’t want him to suffer the same fate as Egeria.”

“That was an accident,” I retorted, looking up at Naomi, to whom I would have reserved the same treatment.

“That’s not what Prisca told me!”

“She wasn’t there! Ask Thomas!”

“That isn’t the question, because I know from a reliable source that you were waiting for this confrontation and that you were determined to kill her.”

“Maybe! So what!”

As a cold wind swept through the room, Blake breathed and calmed down as my nerves remained unrelentingly tense. I tried to contain myself but this sudden mood swing pissed me off as much as the conversation itself.

“We’ll talk about it tonight.”

“Understood!” I conceded, angry and aware that it was time to end this altercation.

I spun around and stormed out of the common room without a last look at the others. Ethan was following me. I knew that at least he would tell me everything I wanted to know.

“So?” I asked a few steps from the library. “How many castes are guarding Magnus?”

I used telekinesis to open the imposing door that separated us from the library. Ethan smiled. I didn’t catch anything he was thinking at the moment, but I knew he was satisfied with himself by the way he sat down on one of the armchairs facing the fireplace. The library was kind of our place, it was here that I met him for the first time. I sat down and stared at him with the irrepressible urge to slap him, his smug look annoyed me. He had that attitude with everyone, but I couldn’t stand it when he displayed it with me.

“How much longer are you going to make me wait before telling me where Magnus is?”

“Stop your dramatics, Everliegh,” he spat in a monotonous tone, “you know very well where he is and you know very well that he’s being kept under close surveillance.”

“He’s in one of the chambers of the Pomona room, that I suspect. But which? If it’s well guarded, I don’t want to risk being spotted before I get my hands on him.”

“He’s in one of the western chambers. An old cell, two doors from Egeria’s old room, the one at the back of the room.”

“How many castes guard it?”

“Eight. Four powerful, three telekinetic and one telepath. Men in the pay of Prisca who have come to reinforce the castle. You shouldn’t take long to figure it out. These guards aren’t designed to repel castes like you. What guard could do that, anyway?”

“Okay…,” I said deep in thought, “and how did you manage to capture him?”

“It wasn’t very hard, in the end…,” Ethan replied before starting the story of the capture of the tower.

I thought I didn’t care about the circumstances that led to Magnus’ capture, but I ended up being captivated by Ethan’s account.

Blake, he, and a whole troop of caste soldiers had arrived in London undetected. They had all stayed about fifty kilometres from the city while waiting for Ethan to give them the green light to start hostilities. My brother had therefore been the first to return to the cursed tower. He had gone sheepishly to Magnus who, although suspicious, had opened his doors to him without suspecting for a moment that Ethan’s treachery could have gone so far as to make him fall from his throne as Master Hand. Ethan had explained his past actions and his exile by exposing his weakness of character when it came to me. Magnus had been sceptical at first and then spent his days trying once again to discredit me in my brother’s eyes. Ethan convinced him that his efforts were paying off, and he and Magnus began hatching a plan to kill me and all the occupants of Castle Mortain, the emblematic site of the caste rebellion. Magnus was aware that he was extremely fragile, and he assumed that if I died, he would regain power over everyone. Ethan found him crazier every day. His obsession with me drove him so insane that even his closest advisers tried to reason with him into making other arrangements for regaining power. Magnus didn’t care. For him, his authority over the castes would only be regained thanks to my death and nothing else. Ethan then understood, once and for all, that his adoptive father had to leave office and waited for the right moment to carry out Blake’s plan. This happened three weeks after his arrival. Some of his advisers were to leave the Master Hand to go to the few great caste leaders around the world who still supported the Magnus regime. Ethan notified Blake, who in turn notified Prisca, who went to Amsterdam. The next day, my brother found the Master Hand strangely pensive. He was standing, hands behind his back, facing his huge bay window overlooking the City of London. A thick mist covered the Thames, flickering lights came to life everywhere as dusk dawned in the sky.

“I’m so tired,” Magnus blurted without turning around.

Ethan, surprised, had never heard him speak this way. His words showed such weariness and weakness that my brother immediately understood that it was time to put his plan into action. He was finally alone with his master and walked slowly behind him.

“You’ve been through so many unfair things,” Ethan said, “and I know I’m as guilty as my sister.”

“You disobeyed, my son,” said Magnus, still thoughtful, “but that doesn’t take away the horrible feeling that all the elements are against me. I feel cornered and, in my long life, I have never felt so much hatred and contempt for my fellow caste. They all deserve death.”

“And I’ll be with you whatever your plan, my master,” commented my brother, impassive, while a shiver ran through him.

In front of his reflection in the glass, Magnus stretched a thin satisfied grin. It was the last. Ethan stabbed him in the back with a huge needle and the Master Hand, mighty as he was, collapsed within seconds. Ethan took his cell phone and sent an SMS to Blake, who headed for London, accompanied by his battalion of castes. The group numbered no less than forty strong including twenty telepaths and ten telekinetics. Despite this high number, the long-awaited confrontation took place in all discretion, because to our great fortune, it was the hour when the tower was the least well guarded. Each floor was taken one by one, and the fight quickly swung to our advantage thanks to Blake, whose knowledge of the place was no longer to be proven. He led his army through the building with the grip of a commander-in-chief, and they arrived at the final level in less time than he had originally planned. When Blake reached the top of the tower, we had lost fourteen of ours and had shot down thirty of theirs, the element of surprise had worked perfectly. Ethan remained convinced, however, that Magnus’ madness had greatly contributed to our success. The security of the tower was no longer one of his main concerns and his advisers were so bad that they hadn’t been able to persuade him to reinforce the guard, and Gregory was no longer there to oversee security.

When I heard that name my brother had been trying to keep quiet since the beginning of his story, my blood froze.

Magnus lay next to Ethan. Blake watched, satisfied, and patted my brother on the back, expressing his immense pride. Magnus received a new dose of tranquillizer and was chained and locked in a car roof box.

And so the Master Hand was removed from office and I couldn’t help but smile as I imagined this hateful man ending up in a crummy roof box. What a delight!

“Do you have any remorse?”

“None,” said my brother, very sure of himself, “we discovered so many elements of his infamy in London that it was easier for me than I thought.”

“For instance?”

“We found a well-hidden secret laboratory in the basement of the tower, not far from the jail where you were locked up. Access was on the underground platforms of the Canary Wharf, well concealed. No one would have found out if I hadn’t managed to get one of the tower guards to talk. Strangely, he had a deep-rooted fear of this place. We forced him into it and he died, it was full of traps. Anyway, we didn’t expect to find out what Magnus was up to without anyone knowing. He had gathered an astronomical quantity of caste DNA strains and was carrying out more than dubious experiments on our fellow castes, as well as on humans.”

“How did you know?” I said, unsurprised by the despicable acts of which Magnus Burton Race was capable.

“There was a register that listed all his experiments,” Ethan resumed. “It went back to the time of the Second World War. No less than several thousand humans died or remained seriously handicapped. As for the castes, about forty succumbed after the first injection, others remained alive, sometimes with serious long-term effects.”

“But what was Magnus’ goal?”

“Combine the DNA of a caste with immense power with his own, I imagine. Or he wanted to build an indestructible army, what do I know?”

“Were there survivors on whom the experiment worked?”

“Yes, more or less. We discovered that Gilles was one…”

Gilles, the plump little man who had participated in my hell in London and whom we had pulverized at the same time as Sophie Devesniel. I remembered now that he had a terrible time controlling his telekinesis, I understood better why now.

“… and others scattered around the world. But Blake preferred to keep the register secret so that the information it contains remains confidential. But according to the notes I could see, the results weren’t a complete success, so Magnus continued his tests on humans, like Olivia…”

Shocked, I remained silent and tried to think despite the growing anger that caused frantic tremors in all my limbs. It was all becoming clear now, Olivia had changed so much when I found her next to Magnus. Her blank stare, her lack of emotion and her incredible strength when he ordered her to hit me. Burton Race’s chemical experiments had reduced my friend to nothingness and certain death. I swallowed my saliva hard and forced myself to hold my breath to contain this new urge to pulverize everything around me.

“What did you do with what you found in the lab?”

“Blake brought everything back here, in the tower, under guard,” answered Ethan with a detachment that I sometimes envied in him. “He thinks that Mortain is safer because he doesn’t want his discoveries to end up in the wrong hands.”

“Why not destroy everything?”

“Because if we get our hands on one of the castes or one of the infected humans, he hopes that we can save them through the work and the notes taken by Magnus and his researchers. Moreover, it’s an incredible discovery. It was suspected until then that the experiments on the castes stopped after the Second World War. Little information had leaked since, except that a small number of people had disappeared and that all had been victims of Magnus’s research.”

“And that’s not the worst,” said Blake gravely, who had just burst into the library. “It was Magnus himself who inspired and helped the Nazis in their research. This to be able to have an incalculable number of human guinea pigs and to the Nazi’s work for his account once the war was over.”

Blake had dropped that last sentence with a flow and a coldness that gave me goosebumps. Far from being surprised to hear how far a man like Magnus Burton Race could go, I still had trouble realizing that we were, directly or indirectly, linked to the most fatal episode in the history of the modern world.

“What are we going to do now?” I inquired as Blake settled into a chair near us.

“We’ll make sure to keep this information secret. A caste with great powers could use it for the same purposes as Magnus and could succeed, this time. It will be up to Carmichael to decide whether or not to destroy Magnus’ work, but one thing is certain, my brother wasn’t a great chemist and didn’t always surround himself with the most competent people. Someone other than him could, in the long term, lead more easily to the success of his research, which confirms the danger of this information.”

“So why are we keeping it here?”

“Besides the fact that we could probably save infected castes, there’s an even greater danger that drives us to keep these samples.”

“Which?”

“Did someone else go before us in Magnus’ laboratory?”

“But, you have found everything, the register of experiments, the strains…”

“Several test tubes were missing with the DNA belonging to the same caste,” answered Blake gravely with a look that made me anxious all of a sudden.

“Which?”

“Yours.”

I was puzzled at first, then turned livid. Me again! Will I never be at peace, I tell myself, tired of always being at the heart of the slightest discovery.

“But why only mine?”

“Because you must be the most powerful caste existing to date, and you have the rarity of the gift of attraction.”

“And above all,” adds Ethan in a macabre tone, “who could annihilate you if it’s not a caste endowed with the same powers as you…?”

This last sentence threw a chill in the room. Ethan might have been right. But now that Magnus was neutralized, who could blame me enough to consider destroying me? Weary, suddenly, I politely retired to help Estelle organize the reception planned to celebrate their arrival. Another question crossed my mind.

“Blake?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do with the mummified bodies we found next to Carmichael’s cell.”

“They weren’t there when we got there.”

“Oh, yes!” I wondered. “Who could want dead people reeking of mould?”

“I have absolutely no idea, but according to your description, I don’t think we have much to fear from preserved skeletons. I imagine they were just the perverse fruit of Magnus and Egeria’s experiments. I see no other explanation.”

At the end of this horrible discussion, I excused myself. On the way to the south wing, I wondered about the latest events and revelations from Ethan and Blake. I realized that the frightening conversations horrified me less by the tenor of the events than by the calm with which I could absorb them. Sometimes I frightened myself as I found myself impervious to some of the most extreme situations. I had become a true caste.