“No, though when we do find out that an actress, model, or rock star is Progeny, it makes a lot of sense.”

“Rock stars . . . Do the ones who are Progeny know what they are?”

“Often not until it’s too late. Those that do may go into hiding to avoid dying in a plane or car crash, of a drug overdose, so-called suicide, a gunshot . . .”

“Can a hunter take a normal person’s memory?”

“No.”

“Can a Progeny persuade another Progeny?”

“No. But they can sense them, when they’re near enough.”

“How?”

“You’ll know it when it happens.”

After a while I said, “What are you called?”

He hesitated then. “You can call us Watchers.”

I was strangely disappointed at that, thinking they really needed some better branding in the name department. As though following my line of thought, he quietly recited, “ ‘I saw in the visions of my head . . . and behold, a Watcher, a Holy One, came down from heaven.’ The Book of Daniel.”

“Like an angel.”

“Perhaps.”

“Your accent . . .”

“Romanian.”

It was a while before I finally worked up the courage to say: “Tell me about my birth mother.”

“Her name was Amerie Szabo. Though she lived under the name Barbara Bocz.”

Amerie. I said her name to myself again and again. It seemed exotic and beautiful. And though I never knew her, I thought it fit. I tried to imagine what she looked like. Did she have my eyes, was her hair the same color as mine? The pout of my lower lip—was that hers, or my nameless father’s? Did she know who had adopted me, where I had been living all these years? Had she ever come looking for me?

“She was killed three years ago,” Rolan said. “Which is probably how the Historian first knew to search for you, if not how to find you. Your mother would not have allowed herself to learn that, knowing her memory was at risk of harvest.”

Harvest. Such a clinical word for the rape of a memory. And though I understood, it hurt. How many years had I been allowed to believe I was simply unwanted?

After a stretch of silence, I finally asked: “How was she killed?”

He raised a brow at that. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“Yes,” I said quietly, not sure at all. And then: “I want to know.”

“Her body was found in the Danube near Csepel Island, south of Budapest. It was ruled an accidental drowning.”

“It wasn’t accidental.”

His sidelong look was his only answer.

I watched mile markers glide by through a blur of unshed tears. Sometime later, I said, “My father?”

Rolan hesitated as though choosing his words carefully. “Your mother . . . was rumored to have several lovers.”

“You don’t know who he is.” I wondered if she did.

“No. But it’s possible you have siblings. And that you even found one of them.”