“It was idiotic with no guarantee. You deserve to be dead for good.”
That thought alone tore a phantom wound inside me, but I wouldn’t let it show.
“Probably, but hey, we had to have inherited some tricks from our father, right? I swear he’s the one true immortal on this godforsaken land.”
I grumbled my agreement, content to let the silence settle again. These stairs down were endless.
“Have you ever imagined how you would do it…?” Drystan asked, voice quieter now with a somber topic. “How you would kill him if he was right there?”
“No, actually. I always imagined the opportunity would come with little time to think about it, and I hope that’s true.”
A tragic tension grew between us.
“Sometimes I’ve wished that we would have time,” he confessed. “To ask himwhy, but then… I don’t even know what I mean by it. Why was he cruel? Why couldn’t he be satisfied with what he had? Why couldn’t he love us?”
I didn’t like to carry other people’s emotions, but with Drystan and Astraea I always captured an echo of their feelings good or bad.
“The truth is often more painful than the unknown.”
“Don’t you want closure?”
“We’ve been orphans for a very long time, Drystan. That’s all I need to know. There’s nowhythat would heal that truth, or even make it more tolerable to harbor. I’m just glad that you… that despite all he tried to do you didn’t end up like him.”
Drystan didn’t speak for a long moment.
“You said he has another son,” he broke the silence again. “I have another half-brother?”
“Had,” I corrected with a faint pinch in my chest. “When I was cursed, my subconscious projected back to where I came from. Nightwalking, in the most incredulous sense—that realm is where that ability is from. In that other realm, I saw our half-brother, but he didn’t know who I was. He was everything I feared you or I could have become from the influence of our father, and the irony is that it was the absence of our father that drove our half-brother, Malin, to become a true villain to himself and his country. I think the abandonment is what made him want to prove himself. For us, we watched our father and knew it was everything we never wanted to be, so why would we want to please him?”
Drystan pondered the story in silence for a while. “I suppose we could have turned out worse then.”
Finally, light broke at the end of the tunnel, and when it did, it took everything in me not to retreat right away. We walked right into a perfect replica of the drawing room in our former home. The Keep of Bethezal.
“Stay close to me,” I said, but the words became lead on my tongue.
My next step swayed my body from a wave of dizziness that came on sharply and suddenly. I blinked, catching myself on the back of a chair.
Stay close to me.
Stay close to me.
My words echoed through the room, mocking me.
When I straightened, I stared down at the hauntingly familiar pattern of a beige and crimson carpet. Then I heard the suppressed sniffling beside me, daring a sidelong glance to find Drystan, just a boy the height of my shoulder. His eyes brimmed red and his bottom lip quivered.
I remembered why he was so devastated right before I looked a little further up the carpet and found the dog with its neck broken.
“You should be training yourself, not some runt,” father spat, furious when he’d discovered his younger brother with the animal.
I gritted my teeth recalling his act of cold cruelty just moments ago. Our father had ordered Drystan himself to kill it, but he never would have gone through with it. Instead, he’d knelt by the beast, hugging it while its tail wagged happily, blissfully unaware of its death crawling closer. I stood by and watched the thinning patience of our father, who would have struck out at Drystan, likely beaten him until he conceded. Even then I knew he never would, not when his heart was so pure and innocent.
So I’d reached into the hound’s mind, commanding a sharp and painless break of its neck, when father’s yelling and Drystan’s cries of protest distracted them both for it to easily appear like Drystan had followed through.
If our father knew what I’d done, he said nothing. After all,Iwas his killer.
The look of absolute horror and betrayal Drystan had cast up to me when he held the beast limp in his child arms would go on to haunt me for years to come.
“Nothing is worth your tears. You shed a single one of them, I’ll show you what pain really feels like.” Those were father’s harsh parting words before he left us in his study, the slamming of the door leaving a rumbling echo of his violence.
