Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When Draven awoke, he was laying across a stout stone bench topped with a thin tufted cushion.
He groaned as he sat up, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. Was everything from last night just a dream? A terrible, horrendous nightmare?
But when he plopped his hands back into his lap and his vision came into focus, certainty rang through him like a damning bell. It was no dream—though this was his nightmare given form.
His father sat across from him in a dark maple chair, straight-backed with level shoulders, his ankle tucked neatly over his other knee. “Ah, good,” he mused, somehow still managing to make those words sound indifferent. “You’re awake.”
Fear choked him like a gripping fist.
Yet as flashes of last night pelted him—Rhea’s screams and Suzumi’s desperate pleas—his fear soon melted into ripened anger. “What did you do with them?” he snarled like an animal, his lip curled and teeth bared.
“Oh,” Tynan cooed, tilting his head with curiosity. “How very interesting. It appears your time away from home has made you either incredibly dim-witted or incredibly bold. Which is it?”
Draven’s lip peeled back further. “Fuck. You.”
“Hm,” he hummed, sounding amused. “It appears it may be a bit of both, then.”
Draven held his stony expression. Though internally, he could feel the wince growing inside him.
He had never said those words to his father before.
He previously would have never dared. But he now knew there was a life outside of Tylderon and Erandor politics.
There was a world filled with good people. A life outside the courts.
There was also a man who was and would be more of a father to Draven than his own blood would ever be.
“Where are they?” Draven nearly growled. He glanced down at his arms. Through the torn, ragged sleeves of his tunic, he could see patches of his skin. Patches of the ink bleeding into his veins. He could feel those distinct flickers of hunger as his magic began whispering to him.
Free us. Use us. Become us.
His father leaned in with rapt curiosity. “The magic speaks to you, doesn’t it?” He grunted a clipped laugh. “You, who is only half pure-blooded, have been chosen to receive the full weight of its prowess. How fascinating.”
Draven pressed his hands against his head. It was as if his magic was eavesdropping. It wanted him to know that what his father said was correct. Yes, yes, yes, it seemed to confirm in an aged, sibilant voice.
“Make it stop,” Draven pleaded, squeezing his eyes shut in spite of knowing his father would think him pathetic for it.
Yet his father did something odd—very odd. He reached out and stroked a gentle hand down his cheek. “It’ll be alright, my son. Embrace the voices. Let them in—let them merge with your veins to become one with you.”
Draven’s eyes shot open. He had never heard his father use such a tender voice. Did he…care? Something else struck him, then. The casual admittance that Draven’s blood was only half pure. But that would mean…
His father—always somehow knowing, as if he had the magic of deduction—read everything on his face.
“Come now, boy. You didn’t really think I was unaware of your mother telling you about your true maternal heritage, did you?
If nothing else, me catching you with that courtesan should have at least made my awareness fall into place for you.
” He sighed, as if disappointed. “No matter. I will be far more involved in both your training and your studies from now on. You can improve. You will become the formidable Dalmar Heir your mother’s visions showed you to be. ”
Draven’s face twisted. “I’m not staying here.”
“And yet you will not be leaving, either. Where does that leave you? In some pocket of some otherworldly plane?” He chuckled, shaking his head like he’s just told some silly little joke.
“There were signs indicating the magic had accepted you as its champion. When it took control of you in Rivara, for example. Still, you’ve always been so soft—so unlike the chosen Dalmar vessels in the past. Coupled with your impure blood, I just couldn’t quite believe it.
Yet… Here is the proof, staring me in the face.
And to think, you are born the son of a common light-wielder, no less.
” He stiffened as the words left his mouth, eyes sharpening as though he just stumbled upon some treasure trove of realization.
He felt the full weight of his father’s stare as it bored into his left eye.
His heterochromatic eye. The eye with the small fissure his father forced him to see scholar after scholar over.
Draven wouldn’t indulge him. “I’m going back,” he practically spat through his gritted teeth. “No matter what.”
His father shook himself from his momentary daze. “Go back to what, exactly? That bookshop has been reduced to nothing but rubble and ash.”
“We’ll make a home somewhere else,” Draven countered, a wail pounding in his chest at learning The Polished Bookery’s fate. “We’ll have each other, and that’ll be enough. We’re a family—something you know nothing about.”
His father pouted his lips, mocking sympathy.
“Do feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken, but mustn’t there be other people around to call something family?
” He made a show of sucking in a breath, kicking his eyebrows up.
“I don’t think you have anyone who fits under that umbrella. Not anymore, at least.”
The undertone of his words sent Draven lurching forward without thought, gripping at his father’s tunic with his fists. “Where are they?”
His father smiled. “Your eyes are black.”
“Tell me where they are,” Draven demanded, a rush of desperation cracking his voice. He shook his father, who surprisingly let him. “Tell me.”
“Simply look around you and you’ll have your answer.” He tsked at him. “Truly, you are more incompetent than I even realized. Forging you will be no easy task, that much is certain.”
Draven ignored him, instead wildly scanning the space they were in.
The surrounding room finally flooded his vision in not some blur, but a stark image—as if someone had dropped the curtain backstage, revealing what was hiding behind the ongoing show the entire time.
They were in the sprawling room his father used for his most exclusive meetings.
The same room he and his brothers would frequently sneak into, crawling across the upper balcony on their bellies to spy.
He recognized that decadent table and those ornate, scarlet-tufted chairs resting at the center with a sort of story-like detachment.
He had always peered into the happenings that took place at those very pieces of furniture, but they always felt like a work of fiction as he watched.
Yet now he was staring at them up close and personal, as if encased in his own story.
His own work of fiction. Because what he was seeing…
there was no feasible way it was anything but fiction.
But a story. He never recalled seeing a river of red splitting the normally spotless onyx table of anthracite before.
Had never seen a body tied atop of it, looking as though some cult wanted to set the stage for some sick sacrilegious ritual.
He had never seen a body impaled on the adjacent wall as casually as a newly hung tapestry, blood dripping down like streaks of new crimson paint.
It was Atlas on the wall. His head was limp, sandy hair falling forward like a shield meant to cover his face while his arms were splayed out, a stake pierced through each of his palms, pinning him in place His brass spectacles were shattered on the floor beneath him, where they must have slipped from his nose.
Blood was splattered on the metal frames, sprinkled like red raindrops on the lenses.
More blood pooled at the crotch of his pants, seeping through and staining the fabric.
Draven hunched over, clutching at his stomach.
He was going to either vomit or pass out.
Perhaps both. Blood thrummed in his ears louder than a clap of rattling thunder.
His vision flickered in and out, in and out, while his body swayed like a brittle leaf swept up in a too strong wind.
His breathing hitched, then remained wedged in his chest altogether.
It was like a fly trapped in a spiderweb, wriggling and writhing, unable to break free.
He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe.
Breathe.
He felt a hand on his back, and he flinched with cold terror in his bones. “Breathe, my son. Breathe. I can’t have anything happening to you now. You are far too precious to my plans.”
Jagged, stuttering gulps of air funneled into his chest, though he would hardly call what he was doing breathing. His head was cradled in his hands when he heard that painfully comforting voice.
“Dra…ven.” It was raspy and devoid of the usual melody he had loved so fiercely. Still, his head snapped up, and he scrambled to the table, where an outstretched body laid.
His mother was bound at both her hands and feet, her body stretched out as far as her limbs would allow.
Her hair had been cut and mangled, as if to humiliate her—to take something away from her.
Blood dribbled from her lips, and her entire upper half was exposed, save for her breasts, which were wrapped in a thin cloth bandage.
Just above those bandages, across her décolletage, was a branded word.
The letters were oozing and angry red, patches of pale pink weaving through the mark.
Whore.