Chapter 13 #2
Then I remembered what Sinora had said. She played the game. Pledging herself to the Echelon to the School of Dark Magic and telling him her gift. I assumed she meant Jaxan. Ash had pledged herself to Jaxan.
Their words swirled around like a maelstrom, getting me more and more agitated about the position I was in. Bonded to a Blackburn or not, Jaxan had no right to be here, uninvited and unwelcome, palming through the newspaper while I’d been in the bath.
I squared my shoulders and locked my spine. I wasn’t going to cower from him. I wouldn’t just lie down. I would not allow him to make me feel that fear I felt in my nightmares.
He stepped on a small copper bead, making a loud crunch, and rather than continue walking closer, he paused, the toe of his shoe jamming the bead back into the crack I’d dug it out of earlier.
“Do you know,” he said in a manner meant to pique my interest, “I could control your every move with a single word. Tenacity will not outlast me, nor will you outwit me, Ember. I should tell you now my gift is command. That means I say something, you do it. It’s that simple. ”
With a callous flick of his wrist, a tornado of smoke-gray shadows rippled out of him and shot through the house. In the wind, my hair flew in my face, loose wrappers ruffled, and thousands of copper beads scattered and rolled.
I struggled to breathe as a dark gust of shadows shot up my nostrils and raced out through my mouth. He could do it again, too, all night long if he wanted. Dark Witches didn’t have spell counts like light witches did.
The Shadowcurrent streaming out of him made a powerful jerk for the door, the wind of it slamming the door closed, and the bones of the house shook.
When his shadows died down after, I almost wished for them to return.
For darkness to cloak his grim silhouette, now illuminated and leering at me in the dim, orange light of the table lanterns.
He smiled slowly, the twisted slant of it summoning the sensation of bugs skittering across my skin.
Unless that was a sign of something else — the onset of withdrawal. And my flask was missing.
He slid his misshapen fingernails inside the deep pockets of his dark, mid-length coat. Better there than shoved in my mouth, I thought, until I recalled a self-defense unit I’d taken in gym, and the lesson on what to do when an attacker’s hands are hidden. Assume they’re reaching for a gun. Run.
But there weren’t weapons in Everden.
Or there wasn’t supposed to be.
“Is there something I can help you with?” I asked, as reasonably as I could.
Slowly, Jaxan strolled to the tall bookcase behind me.
To keep myself calm, I looked for more similarities between Leland and his godfather. I looked in the places where Leland showed his conscience. His irises. Around the mouth. But all I saw was cruel, dark, irreversible heartlessness.
Jaxan’s eyes roved over a row of thick texts, ancient ones half crumbled to dust, their leather spines worn, their titles unintelligible. Plucking one from the shelf, he carelessly tossed it at the table. It landed with a thud so forceful, the coin jumped from the impact.
I swatted a hand through the air, coughing and struggling to diffuse the spreading cloud of thick dust. Bored of how long it was taking for the air to clear, Jaxan flicked his Shadowcurrent through the cloudy air, blowing the dust away in one, quick sweep.
“I see you’ve brushed up the mess,” he said, turning his nose down at where I’d angled the dustpan against the wall, next to the letterbox’s remains. “Henly, isn’t it?”
Begrudgingly, I lifted my chin in confirmation.
“Henly and Helen,” he laughed. “I’ve always found that humorous. Does it trouble you you can no longer write to him?”
I clenched my fists in the lengths of Leland’s extra-long sweatshirt sleeves.
Ash played the game. Ash survived. Ash made it to Alchemia when she could’ve ended up like Sabrina.
I wanted to pick up the text and throw it at him, but I knew what would happen if I did.
I needed to be like Ash. I needed to be smart.
“I live here now,” I said carefully. “I knew staying in touch with him would be hard.”
Jaxan batted a hanging bunch of lavender as he pushed his way into the kitchen. “It killed me, you know, seeing an artifact destroyed like that,” he said as he scoured a spice rack.
In my head, I swore at him. To see it destroyed? You’re the one who destroyed it!
“But I had my reasons.” He abandoned the spice rack and paced back to the kitchen table.
“I wanted to make a Dark Deal with you, but considering you don’t want to be here” — he plucked a reeded glass vase off a shelving unit, inspected it, then gingerly set it down on the empty space where the letterbox used to sit — “I had a hard time thinking of a bargain you might be interested in. Then I remembered Henly. Would you like me to deliver a last letter to him?”
Flames licked at my skin. There was nothing I wanted from Jaxan. No Dark Deal I would make with him. But I knew it was necessary to pretend, to keep asking questions, to find out what he wanted. It was what Ash would’ve done.
“So you would send a letter for me,” I confirmed, “and what would I have to do in return?”
“Work with me,” Jaxan said pleasantly. “Like Leland does. Like your sister did.” Hands behind his back, he peered into her bedroom. “I’ll even sweeten it. I’ll tell you why they stopped speaking to you. I assume you’ve wondered that?”
“I used to,” I replied in a measured tone.
He tipped his head to one side, considering me.
“The Echelons like to have a common enemy. Something troubling for the realm to unite around. I grow tired of it being Dark Witches.” He tipped his head to the other side.
“Allwitches, they’re too remote to pose any real threat.
For now. But you, a human girl who dares to claim as many schools of magic as the Goddess has.
You see how that’s a problem, don’t you? ”
“I didn’t claim anything,” I said. “I was blessed.” In all honesty, I cared more about the dirt on my shoes than I did about why Helen didn’t speak to me. But, trying to be smart about this, I conjured desperation, and asked the question he would’ve expected. “Why doesn’t Helen speak to me?”
“For that,” Jaxan said, studying the grime beneath his nails, “you will have to agree to the Dark Deal. And make a Death Bond on it. Standard practice. A Deal means nothing to me without a life secured. Not yours. No, that would be a violation. ‘No Unselected witch shall be used as collateral.’ ” He paced aimlessly while I remained with my back to the washroom door, watching for the next thing he might pick up and toss around.
“I’ll let you choose. I deliver the letter.
Tell you all you want to know. In exchange, you work for me.
If at any point you cease to do so, I will claim the life of the witch with the Death Bond on them.
” Reaching the table, he abruptly stopped pacing.
“Who do you prefer? Helen or Ash? Leland?”
“You want me to choose one of them?”
“I know no other witches you care about who haven’t already gone missing.”
I dug my nails into my palms to channel my rage where he wouldn’t notice it. “Can I think on it?” I asked, relatively calm, or as calm as I could fake in the midst of my blood driving me mad.
From his coat pocket, Jaxan removed a flask — my flask — and laid it flat on the table. Then he removed the Everblade.
“I was afraid it would come to this,” he said. “I warned you you wouldn’t outwit me. I wanted to work with you. But it’s clear you desire a harder path.”
Time slowed and overwhelmed me as he slashed through the air with the Everblade.
In one quick stab, he gutted my flask, breaking it apart into splinters.
Alcohol stung my nose as a flask’s worth of moonale spilled from it, puddling under the text on the table, rolling off the table’s rounded edge, leaking onto the floor.
My blood pounded as I watched the table bleed with the only thing keeping me from deteriorating. It took everything — everything — to suppress the overwhelming urge to jam my fingers in Jaxan’s eyes and roar.
But I listened to the drip drip drip as the last of it drained, pretending to be calm, refusing to let Jaxan know how badly I needed the moonale, how much I’d come to depend on it.
How everything — every sound and sight and smell that was new or sudden or unpredictable — made me want to axe-throw his knife into the window above his head, shattering it, roaring laughter as glass rained down.
Jaxan returned the Everblade to his coat pocket and paced the room again, stopping in front of the couch to pull a loose thread.
“More than a few Aspirants have drowned themselves in the Sundering Sea to relieve the burn of it. Withdrawal. Terrible symptom of being so blessed. It’s time you start getting used to it. ”
He whirled his shadows into a thick, black cloak, covering himself to the neck.
“I’ve left a book on the table for you, the subject matter being what I would’ve asked for your help with.
But you’ve chosen to be at odds, so I suppose I’ll fix it without your cooperation.
I wouldn’t count on me managing it without breaking you.
Have a nice night, Ember Blackburn. I hear Leland is — two-for-one night at the Silverstone brothel. Then again, it always is with him.”
My fingers curled with rage.
The thought of Leland at a brothel . . .
In the time it took me to resist the urge to shred my throat on a long, hard scream, Jaxan was gone.
Disembodied, I walked to the kitchen table and picked up the gold.
* * *
The edge of the dustpan banged the garbage bin as I discarded the last of the letterbox.
I didn’t want to. But it was necessary to keep moving to burn off the restlessness in my legs.
It had taken three taverns before I found a witch who would sell me a cask of moonale.
A gold coin for a hundred liters. Fifty liters, if I needed a Creator for pocket-to-porch delivery, which I did.
I stowed the dustpan, then went to the cask on the porch to fill a fifth mug.
I headed back inside, rinsed the dishes, threw out wrappers, and washed my clothes in the tub.
It was no longer withdrawal making my blood pound with rage but Jaxan. For the first time since arriving in Everden — for the first time since I was a child — I wished for spells, magic to make me powerful and satisfy my blood.
I was up late, peeling apart sodden pages of the text he’d thrown on the table.
The Witch’s Limit. I tired my eyes out trying to make out what meaning I could.
The letters were runny, and the intensity of the scent of alcohol — on the pages and in my mug — stung my nose and made my stomach turn.
But I was learning things. Learning what he wanted.
The last Curse on Everden was three hundred years ago, not long after the Sundering.
It was the last time a Dark Witch cast a Curse.
It was also the last time any witch could birth more than one child by the same witch father.
That’s what the Curse was — an attack on a male’s seed, so they could only impregnate one witch once.
A single, once-in-a-lifetime instance. The timing of it couldn’t be controlled; it could happen in their teen years or when they were elderly, entirely up to the Goddess.
But once a male witch got a witch pregnant, that was it. No more children. They were done.
Before coming to Everden, I’d known witches couldn’t have full siblings. It was why Helen went to the human realm to mate, to see if it was easier to conceive half witches. I didn’t know it was a Curse — that, at one time, things had been different.
Whoever had Cursed Everden hadn’t accounted for what would happen to the Goddess’s magic when the population shrank.
When Her followers dwindled, the magic in the Circle of Seven waned in response.
Magic that sustained witches, magic needed to survive the delivery of a healthy witch baby, was no longer enough to maintain the population, compounding the problem.
Witches were dying. In childbirth and as a species.
And Jaxan, I guessed, wanted me to be a model human, like my sister was.
Someone to advocate for the human realm because the only way to save Everden was to combine us.
If the realms could ever open their minds to it.
I blew out the lanterns with a sigh. My wet clothes drying on the porch for the night, I wandered to the couch and messaged Leland. I didn’t need him to Refresh my things in the morning — or want him to — so I told him not to come and then turned off my transmitter.
A child when he’d made his Dark Deal. Standard practice, Jaxan had said, to cast a Death Bond to secure it.
I remembered the desperation in Leland’s voice when he’d said, “I want you here,” and I wondered whose life Leland had pledged, whose life would end if he failed to keep me alive until Selection on August 1.