112. Seb
SEB
His first, stupid instinct was to rush in, but he quashed it, fighting against everything inside him.
Instead, he stood behind the mostly closed door, listening, waiting.
In sixteen years of Cantrèa he’d learned patience: how to wait for your opening, how to go for the jugular when the time was right.
His own blood simmered, rage pitching to a boil as he heard Lily cry out. He dug his nails into his palms.
From the other side of the door he heard Conrad, the agony in his voice palpable, unbearable.
“He broke up with me. I didn’t want to come out, but I didn’t want to break up! That was his decision, and he made it for both of us.”
Like most everything Conrad said, it was both true and not true.
Like most everything Conrad said, it found Seb’s most unprotected parts, letting shame and self-hatred clot up around the gash.
Every part of him wanted to throw himself into the room, scream, “That’s not how it happened! ” But he didn’t.
Instead, he threw himself into the room when he heard the sizzle of an AEtheric attack materializing.
Head down, he rushed Conrad, driving his shoulder squarely into his diaphragm and hurling both of them into the bookcase behind him.
Ascalon vanished with a disappointed hiss.
He wasn’t used to this kind of combat, and the impact dazed him, but he leapt up immediately.
Braithwhite came for him, and Seb spun out of the way, surer of himself now that he was on familiar ground. Both of them wore gaudy talismans pulsing with AEther, and Seb snatched it from Braithwhite’s neck, breaking the chain and casting it to the floor, crushing it.
Lily let out a strangled cry as it broke beneath his foot, and he saw her for the first time.
She was crumpled against the couch, pulling her hands out from behind her back.
Her face was a ruin, half of it coated in blood from a dripping head wound.
His heart stopped and surged. Part of him broke away.
He suddenly felt emptied out and hollow.
Conrad and Braithwhite circled him, Conrad hurling spells and Braithwhite attempting to stab him with a length of pipe.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lily staggered to her feet.
Silently, Seb willed her to stay down even though he knew she would never, not in a hundred years, do such a cowardly thing.
A beam of light streamed through Seb’s peripheral vision, and he followed it as Lily’s attack connected with Conrad’s shoulder, throwing him back into the bookshelf.
Braithwhite took the opportunity to hit Seb, catching him in the stomach with the pipe.
It took his breath away, and he crashed backward, into Lily, gasping.
Conrad fired a spell at them, and Seb brought his arms up, but it was Lily who shielded them, flinging up White Rain on Still Lake.
The attack fizzled and guttered out in the barrier of her mother’s magic.
Braithwhite hurled his pipe at Lily’s head, and she ducked.
It sailed across the room, smashing through a far window.
Seb reached behind him and gripped her hand.
It was slick with blood, and her breath was ragged in his ear.
His stomach flipped as he risked a glance at her.
He could see the white shine of bone beneath a flap of skin; she was fading fast. If he didn’t turn the tables—and now—she might actually die, and he would be crossed and cursed before he let that happen.
Shaking, he stood up, facing Conrad squarely.
“Conrad. Stop.”