Prologue #2
He came up way short, just barely managing to clip his sire’s aristocratic nose. The crack! suggested he’d managed to break something of it, though, and then the polished sterling slipped out of his grip, his father’s immediate gasp-and-cover drowned out by the clattering across the stone floor.
With thunder echoing his pounding feet, Rhysallhan raced after his weapon as his father jumped up, the piano bench flipping off its stick legs.
“Have you lost your mind!”
The ringing alarm came back. This was bad. This was so bad.
There was only one thing worse than patricide.
Failing at it.
Someone was yelling. Not him, and he wasn’t about to decipher the decibels. The second his hand reconnected with the candlestick, he had a fresh blast of nausea at the blood on the corner of the base, but also a renewed focus. He spun around.
Both his sire’s brows were up high into that forehead, and blood was seeping out from the hands he’d clasped around his nose. Those eyes, always so haughty and bored, were wide and more offended than angry or scared.
“—dare you! You ungrateful—”
“I-I know who you have been t-talking to,” Rhysallhan forced out as the lights failed once again and came back on with a strobing. “I kn-know what you have done.”
His father went perfectly still such that the only thing animated upon him was the blood that dripped onto his club tie, and his pressed, starched white shirt.
“You know nothing.”
“I’m not l-letting you do this to Carmen. You h-have h-hurt her enough… al-r-ready.”
“Who are you to question me!” His father dropped his hands and blood poured down the front of him. “I am the head of this family—”
A raging scream unlike anything that had ever come out of Rhysallhan’s mouth erupted into the conservatory, overpowering even the thunderstorm.
With a herky-jerk jump, he charged. He had no idea where the candlestick was, so it was shocking to see the thing arcing out to the side again: Both his palms were somehow back on the shaft, right at the top so that the heavier base swung forward for a second time.
His aim was just as bad as his first swing, the impact catching his father’s upper arm because the male jumped back out of range.
The piano bench became his accomplice. As lightning sent everything into a flash-photography sequence, his father took a twisting pivot for the open doorway, and got tangled in the toppled seat, his slick-soled velvet slippers going out from under him, his balance lurching backwards—
He hit the keyboard with the back of his head, making an ugly one-note that was loud enough to fill the whole house. Then he fell lifeless to the stone floor.
The discordant explosion from the Steinway faded in the aftermath.
There was blood on the ivories. And a puddle forming beneath his sire’s skull.
Rhysallhan panted in and out, the breath whistling through his front teeth. For a split second, all he could see was that red smudge on the white. Then he inspected the sterling in his hand. So much more there, seeping into the articulated detail around the base, dripping off to fall to the floor.
As the candlestick started to slip out of his hand, he knew he was going to pass out—
His sire flipped himself over onto his stomach with all the grace of a fall wasp on a windowsill.
The wound on the back of his head was gruesome, the white of the bone a shocking contrast to the red gash in the scalp.
As Rhysallhan started to dry-heave, the injured male at his feet fanned his hand on the slate and pulled himself forward with a groan. Then he threw out his other arm.
One of Chritophe’s slippers was lost as he inched his way to the escape, to the threshold Rhysallhan had crossed.
All he could do was stare down in horror.
There was so much blood on the slate floor now. A trail of it, smudging an ugly maroon stain over the gray stone. And then there was the copper scent, spearing into his sinuses.
His brain, the only asset he’d ever had to his own name, froze up on him. Gone was all the intelligence he navigated his family with, the cognition that had made all this possible. He waited for his mind to reboot, like a computer that had been sent into a restart.
Nothing happened. He was utterly blank.
With the storm continuing to rage, his head wrenched to the side, and he measured the distance to the archway that led into the house proper.
He needed to finish the job, but God, when he’d played this out in his mind, it had been a one-and-done.
Neat and tidy, and then he dragged the body out onto the lawn behind the study where the heavy velvet drapes were always pulled.
He was supposed to calmly return here with a bucket and that wet vac, clean what there was on the floor—and now the piano keys—and double-check nothing was out of order.
Then the doggen would return first, and he would tell them he needed a special Last Meal prepared.
His sister would come back next and she would be so excited with all she had purchased.
When the pair of them sat down at the dining room table together, he would lay out the lies about him and their father having to return to the Old Country.
He’d tell her that they had been urgently called away to recapture some legacy land before humans developed it, and that their sire had already departed on a private plane.
And then the happy news. Chritophe had had a change of heart and reconsidered her desired mating, and he’d left the appropriate permissions to proceed in place.
Carmen would be surprised, but thrilled, and she would be so swept up in excitement, she wouldn’t question anything.
Rhysallhan would depart the next night, after he covered up the burn mark on the lawn, after he was sure his sister was settled. He’d disappear from this cursed house forever and finish the second half of all this, alone in his grim knowledge of what had truly transpired.
All neat and tidy. Not like… this.
With a feeling of utter disassociation, he retightened both hands once again, and stepped in behind his sire.
Planting one foot on either side of the trim torso, he scrummed down into his thighs, and lifted the candlestick straight over his head.
He aimed for the wound.
And this time, he hit the bull’s-eye. He brought the heavy silver down right where he needed it to go.
At the cracking impact, his sire’s arms jerked up and seemed to hang at the apex of their wingspan.
When gravity grabbed the limbs back, the palms slapped against the stone.
And then there was no more forward motion, just twitches of the torso as the breathing became only a series of juicy, gasping inhales.
He waited for them to stop. They didn’t.
Arching forward to check the head, he recoiled. His father’s eyes were open and unblinking. The nose was completely out of place, the blood flowing out of it like a faucet, the mouth below open and gaping.
And yet the male refused to stop breathing.
As more lightning flashed, Rhysallhan drew back the candlestick one last time—
“Brother?” came the call from the foyer. “I’m home! It’s simply too ghastly to be out tonight.”
In horror, he looked down as their sire seemed to rouse at the sound of Carmen’s voice.
“Rhysallhan? Wherever are you?”