Link here to a general overview of the novel
Prologue, Chpt 1, Chpt 2, Chpt 3, Chpt 4, Chpt 5, Chpt 6, Chpt 7, Chpt 8, Chpt 9, Chpt 10, Chpt 11, Chpt 12, Chpt 13, Chpt 14, Chpt 15, Chpt 16, Chpt 17, Chpt 18, Chpt 19, Chpt 20, Chpt 21, Chpt 22, Chpt 23, Chpt 24, Chpt 25, Chpt 26, Chpt 27, Chpt 28
Chapter Twenty-nine
Sebastian
We’re in the lab and angry at one another as we almost always are nowadays. It’s been a year now, and the asshole still refuses to run away with me after the Conclave bombing. Ever since we lost Trina, Daav’s doubled down on his obsession with growing his Verse. And lucky me gets to sit there and watch him suffer, the stab to his heart of Trina’s death ignored as he lets himself bleed and bleed. I’m sick of it, and my snark is sharp and full of my frustration. He accuses me of refusing to help in the projects Victor lays on us.
Today he snaps after the latest of Victor assignments which I casually suggest I’m going to skip out on and sneak out to a soccer match instead.
“You’re doing this to get back at me, trying to sabotage what matters to me most. You say you care about me, but that’s bullshit, Sebastian.”
His words hit their mark and I flinch. He rarely swears and he’s never questioned my feelings for him before. All I want to do is take care of him. But he doesn’t want that, or doesn’t want it from me, preferring to die the slow death of never ending self-sacrifice.
Victor’s told us to try merging our Verse this morning and to let them rest together for as much of a quarter bell as we can manage. Which is a tall order since no one ever manages more than a fraction of that without a shut down of their Verse. But if someone ever did it, the ability to double the power with two sets of tangles working in conjunction is the dream the Conclave salivates over, at the same time they caution mages away from trying.
Or so Victor reminds us as we dutifully trot into the lab later (because of course I go since Victor will only take it out on Daav as much as me) and tells us to make the touch last but dissolve it if we have to to avoid any nasty consequences.
Victor must be in a mood himself, as most of the time he warns us to avoid doing Verse work close to one another and scoffs at the Conclave’s Holy Grail. Probably just being the perverse motherfucker he is today.
We stand closer than we ever do when we’re in the lab, not touching but almost, with a beaker on the table in front of us in case we’re lucky enough to use tangles together to boil the shit out of water. We have our Verse open, resting beside each others, and I’m coaxing the tangles to the boundary of mine, to come closer to his, but they’re not listening. I can’t see into his Verse, that never happens between mages, but when we do this, we can sense the other landscape, kind of like pressure you feel leaning into a strong wind. You know the wind’s there but it’s invisible.
Daav’s complaining while we do what we’ve been told, able to speak out loud while managing his Verse work which is hard to do. “Keep going, Sebastian. Are you even trying?” He’s angry, too, and today he’s letting it out.
I grit words out in response, a shitload more difficult for me than him. “I’m trying, asshole. This whole thing is a waste. You’re just going to do what you want anyway.”
After I spit out my answer, I hear him growl.
And then I feel his push, a heaving shove coming from behind Daav’s Verse and toward mine.
Explosion and pain, I’m flying, and then…black.
Later, I’m waking in the manse’s medical room and my arm is agony, so bad I want to tear the thing off my body to make it stop. I can’t help the tears streaming down my face.
Daav works next to Victor who gives clipped orders to him to get me in position for an x-ray. Victor won’t give me painkillers, because it’s Victor so of course he won’t.
Daav is stone silent, his face a blank, especially after Victor announces the break in my arm is simple enough to let them proceed with resetting it, and tells Daav he needs to force it back into place.
With more expressionless silence Daav yanks the arm with Victor holding me. I scream. Black again. Then back to consciousness, Victor casting my arm while Daav now refuses to even meet my eyes. Same when he carries me to our room.
It’s only later that night that he tries to talk to me, to apologize. But I can’t find anything to say to him. He’s blind to everything, and I guess to me as well.
Then early the next morning Victor comes to make his threats, and I know staying is pointless.
I jerk awake in the chair again, uncomfortable bent metal slats digging into my back. Must have blacked out from the last bit of tender mercy the man offered. Blood pools in my mouth, and while I’m a big fan of pain, I know that this is too much for even me. Woozy, the room spins and the sluggish feeling in my head keeps focus just out of reach.
“You will really throw your life away, your brother’s life away when all you need to do is phone your lover?” the asshole, not going to call him father, asks me for maybe the hundredth time.
He looks a bit fuzzy, although he’s standing right in front of my seat, bending over me where I’m tied to the chair. They’re so damn cliché, this man who claims to be my father and his dozen nearest and dearest buddies. Maybe he’s blurring in and out of my vision because of the drugs they forced into me, or maybe because my eyes are plumped half shut from the fists he started throwing when I showed up alone.
The open space, the skeleton of an unfinished building lobby, is covered with junk and debris. Exposed framing, rusting studs, tattered insulation with missing chunks, and frayed wiring hanging in desolate strips is a perfect parallel to how I feel–stripped, abandoned, crumbling to pieces.
Everything is throbbing pain. I try to sway to its music, dip into it like a lover, but it won’t give me its embrace. Bones are broken. My abdomen spikes with jagged spurts of agony. My hands lost feeling a while ago.
The asshole in front of me has anger issues, and he’s in desperate need of therapy. Fuck him for threatening Daav and a little boy. Fuck him. If I didn’t need to convince him to consider trading me to save Tuck, I’d spit on the man. He’d look good wearing my blood.
The dark wicked in my soul is winning. I’m just broken, nothing redeemable in sight.
“My offer stands,” I croak, hoping my words come out not too slurred, and without all the burn of hatred in my gut. “Daav’s not going to agree to come. We’re not that close. But if Harkness believes we are, like the media hype made you believe, then I’m a valuable trade. Harkness’ll think he’s getting his son’s lover to use as payback, and a mage to boot. That’s way better than his son’s lover’s ordinary non-magical brother. The poor man’ll get a headache just trying to figure out who the fuck that is.”
“Shut up!” Lorenz yells.
The sperm donor doesn’t appreciate my humor. Screw him. Lorenz is the name his associates call him as they rotate in and out the abandoned development property with their guns and unattractive bad guy leers.
The place stinks of rot and mold, clearly exposed to the elements for years. My nostrils flare, but the stink I breathe in isn’t just the place, but the guy in my face.
I’d laugh now if I didn’t think I’d choke on the blood and mucus, and my ribs didn’t hurt like a motherfucker, probably cracked. How can I have been so stupid? Not about coming here, there was no other choice to make. But for the belief I’ve foolishly harbored for years that somewhere out there I had a family who cared.
I’d followed instructions. When I called on the throw away phone from the Depot and they told me where to go, I laughed. This location’s the same place that Victor used to bring Daav and me to expound on Orreance’s fall into disgrace. The abandonment of its glory represented by the skeleton of a decades old unfinished luxury housing property left to decay. Our country could barely afford upkeep on its basic infrastructure yet alone anything new.
I can hear Victor now in my head. “You see this, boys,” Victor would say, his hands gesturing widely to the rusting pipes running across the unfinished foundation. “Grow your power or you are equally responsible for the squalor, the children dying of malnutrition, the early death rates to disease of our people. It’s up to you to save them. You were born with gifts, and if you don’t maximize them, you’re guilty of something worse than Staltz. Guilty of abandoning your own. It’s one thing to harm an enemy, it’s another to harm your own family. Orreance is your family. It gave you this opportunity, a life of privilege when so many suffer. So do your jobs.”
He’d use small remnants of framing lumber strewn around the construction project to smack the point into us during those visits. We were twelve, I think, the year he liked to bring us here. Then after the beatings he’d review engineering principles with us between the times we practiced falling into our Verse to examine molecules of wood and try to light fires around the property.
Funny how life brings you full circle.
Back to basic pain, to a country still falling apart around us, to the threat to innocent children. Yet another innocent child. My brother.
Little brothers. The parallels between myself and Daav border on absurd. Enough to make you trust in fate if fate wasn’t such an asshole.
Brings you full circle to realizing that sometimes walking out is the only thing to do.
Fuck, but if the drugs clouding my mind can just ease up and let me focus. I try again to sink into my Verse, but it’s not working. Figures.
Lorenz and Marshia, my not-mother, planned thoroughly to work around my power. Life hasn’t treated them well if the lines on their faces, not the lovely laugh lines variety, are any indication. Bodies too thin, hair stringy, skin sagging. Falling apart as they walk around with their avarice and greed stinking from their pores. Marshia’s been hovering around the edges of the large room, sometimes ignoring us, sometimes glancing over with dead eyes. Fuck, but that woman’s no mother of mine.
If they rot, I’ll dance on their decayed carcasses. They will not get their hands on Daav. And if they send me to Harkness, maybe I’ll have a chance to get at him myself, kill him. Or maybe Daav won’t have to worry about his magic going rogue since I’ll be far away in Staltz and he can stay put. But Harkness will probably use me as bait, and knowing Daav, he’ll come running.
There’s no winning. So fuck it, if Daav wants to sacrifice himself so much then at least I get to join him in death. No matter, I’m not making it easy for anyone–my parents or Daav. I’ll fight. They may kill us, kill our brothers, but I’ll take down as many as I can along the way. Humanity isn’t worth saving. I’m such an idiot thinking they’re worth it, that I’m worth it. Have been an idiot for far too long.
Daav. Prince. Fuck, but those sea eyes of yours.You got what you wanted afterall.
Lorenz keeps yelling, spittle running down from the corner of his mouth. I soak in the absolute twistedness of this moment as my body hurts, my heart hurts, my dreams burn to ash. It’s as much as I deserve, imagining some bucolic happily-ever-after reunification with my birth parents. You’d think I of all people would know better. The seashore of my childhood memory is now strewn with garbage and dead fish washed up on oily sand. I hate these people, just sperm and egg donors. I hate them. Gathering this dark pain around me, I picture my razored tumbleweeds, try to call them.
For a moment, my Verse flickers open, the tangles scrape toward me. Yes. Come here little precious ones. They moan, cackle, jitter with agitation. Searching around themselves. Searching, but there’s nothing. Then they send out one long, inconsolable wail.
Which dies off as the Verse dims and slips away. Shit!
Even it’s abandoned me.
“I’ve sent the message,” Lorenz adds with a sneer. “Harkness is getting Tuck’s location right now, and then he’s getting you. You’re pathetic. How does it feel to have killed your brother?”
But he doesn’t leave me time to answer. As a fist flies toward my face.