No Rest For The Wicked - A Prologue

“Everything is set, father. The transfer will be complete in the next few weeks.”

Roger lingered in the threshold of the library, wary of the dense, sickly hush. He recognized the posture of the old man at once: Frederick, upright and composed, his stripped-silver hair disciplined to a soldier’s sweep, hands folded with precision atop the blanket draped over his wheelchair’s arms. Even in such decrepitude, his father exuded a predatory alertness, pupils glinting over the rim of his bourbon, backlit by the fire that channeled flickering amber over the velvet curtains and Persian rug. The illusion of decline was only that. Frederick’s mind was a blade, honed and patient.

A shiver traced along Roger’s shoulder blades. These moments never failed to unsettle him…how the house itself seemed to idle, listening. This was always the feeling that hung around the family when it was time for one Davenport male to pass through and into another. This was not the first such evening, nor would it be the last. Yet anticipation…seasoned now with something like dread…climbed Roger’s spine as he advanced into the room, careful not to allow the leather soles of his shoes to squeak.

He took the armchair beside his father.

Frederick nodded in slow, satisfied increments, never looking away from the fire. “And the subject?”

Roger laced his fingers, forced nonchalance. “Secured. After tomorrow, he’ll be in our possession.”

“Is he alone? Family?”

“A mother. No one else. She’ll be manageable.”

A pause. Frederick took a careful sip, the glass trembling minutely against his lips. “What if she proves unmanageable?”

“I have a contingency. Eidolon will assist, if necessary.”

Frederick’s lips twitched in a facsimile of a smile, the type that seemed permanently carved into his face by long habit. “You trust them too much, son. Organizations like Eidolon possess the loyalty of a tide pool. Their usefulness ends the moment they sense weakness.”

Roger let himself bristle, jaw tightening. It was always this: the soft undermining, the paternal barrage of doubt. “They require us, father. Our expertise is the reason they indulge our demands, not the other way around.”

“Have you not learned yet?” Frederick adjusted the tartan blanket over his knees, the motion disproportionate to the quiet rage in his eyes. “Empires are never built on an even exchange. They are sustained by the readiness to dispose of an asset the moment it becomes inconvenient.”

It was a line he had heard since his first childhood, repeated so often it felt coded into his marrow. “They believe they’re using us, but they have no idea…”

A spasm wracked Frederick’s face; for an instant, something ancient and sorrowful leaked through the mask. “I suppose it’s always like this, with sons. You hunger to surpass the father, but all you see is the obstacles I’ve left in your path. You imagine I don’t know how you operate.” The old man blinked, returned to focus. “You’re wrong.”

“You’re not making this easy,” Roger spat, tired of the ritual humiliation. “I’ve got everything under control. The boy. The mother. Eidolon. The ritual parameters are tighter than ever. You have no cause to worry.”

“Tell me about the subject again.”

“Male, age nine.” Roger recited the facts as if reading from a dossier. “Discrete, healthy, anonymous. No extended family…father’s dead, mother is one of our maids, an immigrant.”

“Good, good, always smart to grab from a group that is overlooked.”

Roger recoiled at the remark. This game they had all played for so long had begun to wear on him. “I didn’t choose this, you know. I would’ve been perfectly content to let the line die. But you made sure I had no alternative.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Frederick sneered. “You love the power as much as I do. You only hate the price.”

A silence gathered. In the faint clatter of ice shifting in the decanter, Roger felt sudden nostalgia for his childhood…the real one before they had found the relic. The rare, golden afternoons when Frederick would take him out on the water, or teach him to play Seega, a game similar to chess, his hands gentle rather than grasping. He wondered if maybe the old man felt it, too, this pang of kinship that was never expressed except as hostility. He doubted it.

“Do you ever regret it?” Roger asked. The question surprised even himself.

Frederick hesitated, the rarest of silences. He tapped the rim of his glass. “To regret is to admit weakness. That is not our heritage.”

Roger scoffed, but he saw how his father’s knuckles whitened. “What about Erin?”

That name fell like a stone. For a moment, it seemed Frederick would ignore it. But after a slow exhale, he said, “She made her choice. The house cannot abide a traitor, not even a beloved one.”

“You killed her. You killed both of them.” Roger’s words came quiet, but they rang out in the hush.

“She killed herself and her beloved, the moment she betrayed us.” Frederick coughed, wet and rattling.

Roger stood, tension rippling through his frame. “If there’s nothing else—”

“Your wife. She’s progressing well?”

A faint sneer. “Yes, father. The child comes in the next week or so.”

“Good. Your first wife was cunning, but she had the bad fortune to bear a girl. This one may lack wit, but she’s producing the future.”

Roger stared at the bookshelf, his mind tracing faces from his past. “What if the girl—”

Frederick cut him off. “Daughters have their uses. But sons are the river. The current.”

“Of course.”

He poured himself a bourbon, letting the silence drag, then threw it back in a single swallow. The burn felt appropriate, punishment and reward. “Anything else, father?”

Frederick’s eyes softened, just a flicker. “Don’t disappoint me, Roger.”

Roger nearly laughed. Of all the curses in the Davenport lexicon, that one stung most. “I won’t.”

Roger took the empty glass and set it down hard, a punctuation mark. “I’ll see to the arrangements.”

“Do,” his father replied.

Roger turned, the antique wooden floors creaking under his feet, and left the room in darkness save for the fire’s pale echo.

He paused in the corridor, listening to the hush. Frederick would not call him back; the old man had said his piece. Roger exhaled, a shuddering relief suffused with dread. The burden on his shoulders felt immense, but familiar. He walked the hallway, hands tight in his pockets, and for a moment thought he heard a whisper, Erin’s name breathed through the walls.

In the library, Frederick remained, eyes heavy-lidded. He closed them, remembering a younger self, the tang of sea spray and the quicksilver mind of his favorite child. Then he put the memory away, like a photograph locked inside a desk, and waited for the ritual to begin.