These are questions you should ask yourself before reading further because when you hear the details of my life, my upbringing, you may find my people to be almost as alien to your western culture as the Yanomamo tribe of the Amazon rainforest.
To start at the very beginning, I’d have to go back about two thousand years. My story begins in 1975, when I was born. That, however, is of no real interest, not even to me. Let’s begin fifteen years later, 1990, the decade the Soviet Union fell so hard it bounced.
Fifteen is a cool age. Hormones rush through your veins with more potency than black tar heroin and time is your dearest friend because even a month seems like an age. Fifteen is a good place to start. Fifteen was the year I learned how to use Words.
“All right class,” Professor Von Andor had said, holding several sheets of smooth white paper in one veiny, liver-spotted hand. His speech was precise, clipped, and delivered with a faint German accent, giving it an air of authority. “These are the Words. They are what you’ve been waiting for.” Pale blue eyes under bushy white brows took us in. At over seventy, the Professor still stood as ramrod straight as he had as a young man in the Waffen SS. Steel-gray hair clipped to a savage crew cut bristled over his shiny scalp and a sharp nose hooked over near invisible lips. Wrinkles formed by both displeasure and spite bracketed both his eyes and mouth.
Switzerland in summer and the five of us were stuck in class, despite the perfect day-seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit (or about twenty-two degrees Celsius, which is how I measured temperature at the time) with small fluffy white clouds scudding across the sky and Lac Leman beckoning only a hundred yards away. Julian, my father, had a large estate near the lake, a summer home to retreat to from the office. Not that he ever used it for that purpose. Instead of retreating from the world, he had it converted to a school for members of the family who exhibited certain … talents.
On that occasion, the five of us who stood in the large, rather Spartan basement were learning our first Words and we couldn’t be more excited. That five consisted of my half-brothers Henri, Julian II, Philip and myself, along with cousin Burke, who at that time displayed all the classic signs of teenaged angst and rebellion.
As the youngest to display an aptitude for magic, I was considered to be quite the prodigy, having already learned the Language of Air and Fire as well as coming along nicely with Water. Also, I had completed all the requisite courses in Botanical Magic far ahead of schedule. I learned so quickly, in fact, that Julian decided to lump me in with the other boys to see if I would sink or swim. And by sink, I mean die. Painfully.
In the Family there are many rules, but Rule #1 was: Survival of the Fittest. Julian Deschamps, billionaire businessman, enforced that rule with all the fanaticism of a tin-pot dictator in a third-world country. That is to say, brutally, savagely and without pity.
Training for Family began at the age of three. We went to school every day, given an education by the most talented, the most qualified private tutors money could buy, and a few who were lured by less savory means. By the age of ten you were either a cast-off (don’t ask, not pleasant) or a graduate, receiving the equivalent of an American high school diploma. By the age of twelve you were expected to have finished the equivalent of a four-year University degree. It was at that point (generally puberty) that, if you were male, you either showed a talent for magic or you went directly into the business side of the Family. Either way, training in wet-work came next.
Male or female, at the age of twelve you were fair game, a target for your contemporaries, a sort of free-for-all training in assassination and survival. The one amendment to Rule #1 was: It must look natural or like an accident. No weapons, no obvious foul play. It was a lesson in subtlety and discretion, care and vigilance. By the time I’d reached my thirteenth birthday, I’d survived three attempts at poisoning and a balcony railing that had mysteriously corroded overnight. The only true safety from siblings came when they reached their majority, the time when they must cease all assassination attempts.
Does this sound terrible? To us kids, it was business as usual, the price of living in the lap of near-obscene luxury. Grow up fast or grow dead faster. And despite how brutal it seemed, being born female was worse, far worse. Mike sometimes calls me a misogynistic prick, and I guess I am, but he’s never met the Family, and God willing, he never will.
But I digress, so let’s toddle off back to earlier in the narrative, magic training. Elemental magic takes years to master, but thanks to my facility, I blazed through at three times the normal speed. At age fifteen I was the youngest in my class.
The Professor handed us our assignments, twelve sheets of paper each, face down. “Here are the twelve Words,” he intoned with somber intensity. “Healing, Force, Forgetting, Vigor, Avoidance, Strength, Truth, Vision, Clarity, Aspect, Pain, and The Walls. Arranged from easiest to most difficult, the Words will reveal themselves as they will, each according to your natures and aptitudes. Do not force understanding; it will do you no good.”
Henri, a big brown-haired burly boy of seventeen, impatiently riffled through the papers before the Professor even finished. A scowl was fixed on his wide, brutish face. Of my three half-brothers, he was the one I hated most because of his boorishness and love of casual cruelty.
Julian II and Philip, the redheaded twins, turned their papers over in unison, thin faces pinched in thought and trepidation. Not only did they look the same, but their dispositions were identical as well, making them seem the same person split into two bodies.
Burke, well … Burke is … Burke. Brave, hard, fearsome, and a natural predator, a shark in human skin. He scared the ever-loving shit out of me. As a cousin on the distaff side, he was forbidden to seek my life, but that sure didn’t stop him from torturing me at every opportunity, which was often. At sixteen and a few inches taller than myself, he showed an aptitude for magic not seen in his branch of the family since Vlad Tepes began his terrible rule of Wallachia in 1456. Julian had high hopes for Burke, who demonstrated the kind of ruthlessness most prized in my Family.
“I see the Words of Strength and Vigor,” said Henri, a wide smile on his coarse features.
Well, shit … my insides tried to make a beeline for the soles of my feet. Giving Henri more strength would be like pouring gasoline on a bonfire. It would only fuel the flames of his loutish, ham-handed ways.
As for the twins, their faces lit up with glee. “We have Aspect, Clarity and Vision!” they cried. Three Words, ones both could use with great subtlety, enough that they could possibly succeed in taking my life.
Burke, however, merely riffled through the pages, mouth twisted in what might be called both a smile and a snarl, and kept his peace.
“Speak up, Burke,” the Professor said calmly. When he snapped his fingers under my cousin’s nose to get his attention, Burke looked up, anger flaring in his dark eyes.
“Healing, Forgetting, Vigor, Avoidance, Clarity and Pain.” That stopped everyone cold, shock rippling through all of us. Six Words! There hadn’t been a holder of six Words since Rodrigo Borgia, who used his Words to help him become Pope Alexander the VI, the most corrupt and scandalous Christian religious figure of all time.
At that moment my fear of the twins disappeared in a flash because, even though Julian forbade Burke’s hand in any assassination attempts, my cousin hated me enough that he could not stop himself from trying.