52. Hazel
Hazel
Malachi smiles at me from the other end of the great hall, while Alasdair’s highest-ranking warriors fuss over his presence. They laugh and bow, offering him gifts of gold and flesh.
Of course, my brother does not care for any of it. Not anymore.
Not with the flood of magic flowing through his veins.
He searches.
He sees.
He wakes.
I clasp my fingers. Slithers of shadow coil inward, curling into my palm and settling at my fingertips.
Malachi’s eyes hold mine, and the darkness scratches at the inside of my ribs. So cold it stings. I bite my tongue and swallow them down, reeling them in. Arms of something other are desperate to reach out with every pulse of the orb around Malachi’s neck.
His eyes flicker, but the warriors do not notice that he is but an illusion. They do not see that his cape does not drape properly over the arms of his throne as he feeds them exactly what he wants them to see.
He takes.
He finds.
He needs.
I pinch my eyes closed, taking a breath. In the darkness, there is no thread of silence anymore. They are all so awake—nearly screaming. There are frays of a web that was once calm and peaceful.
Spinning, the obsidian click of my heels is a warning as I move through Alasdair’s manor. Outside, the shore is stained in blood. The trees are dusted in ash. Beyond the gates are the cries of grief.
Guards keep their eyes off me as I pass, worried that if they spare me a glance, my shadows will wring their necks, or worse, eat their souls. Before Malachi started playing with his orb, I might have let one slink out to remind them never to stop feeding that fear.
Now, there’s no point because the darkness lingers all around us.
Shadows pool at my feet, adding another layer to the deep-purple silk that swishes with every step. An obsidian circlet holds the dress at my neck, tempering what wants to get out.
My shadows are so hungry lately. Ravenous and angry.
I spin the obsidian ring around my finger again, containing what little I can when the orb pulls out the angry lash of darkness inside me.
“Soon,” I assure them.
It will all be quiet soon.
Marble pillars wrapped in silver ivy frame the door to Malachi’s chambers. He’s not there either. Even where his physical presence remains, he is not of his body at all anymore. He is something else.
Turning down a separate hallway, I pass a guard. His back stiffens when he meets my gaze, and that’s all it takes for a shadow to dart at him before I can contain it. It strikes with the bite of a snake. Quick and merciless, as its teeth sink into the guard’s neck, and he drops to his knees.
They’re so temperamental lately. Impossible to control.
I spin the obsidian ring again, but it does little to silence the whispers the closer I draw to my brother.
When I finally reach the door that leads below the manor, there are no guards because they’re no longer necessary. A shell of light caresses my nerves as I step through. Day is replaced with night. Polish turns to rot.
I descend the stairs, and my brother, who was once always surrounded by opulence and beauty, is at the heart of decaying darkness.
“Hazel,” his voice croons from the bottom of the staircase.
He feels me coming. Or maybe it’s the orb sensing my shadows shriveling at my approach. At first, they stretched toward that strange magic around his neck, curious and thirsty for a sip. Now, they know better.
With each pulse, they warn me.
Salty sea air is pungent down here, wafting through the barred windows at the staircase. It’s replaced by a dewy, moldy stench the deeper I travel. Until there are no windows or natural light.
Malachi rests on a stone ledge, twisting a ribbon of sunshine at his fingertips.
His eyes are closed. His shoulder-length blond hair wet and matted from sweat. A thick black scar crawls from where the orb rests against his chest, climbing his neck. His cheek. Until it reaches one eye, which is no longer blue, but liquid gold.
“You don’t look well,” I say plainly, stopping before him.
At least he’s alone and not testing my stomach today with a scattering of limbs and bone and blood as he has been lately.
He grins, sickly and weak as he blinks his eyes open to face me. “When you look at me like that, you remind me of our mother.”
My stomach churns at his comment. Malachi never speaks of our mother. Father taught us both not to, erasing every part of her from the palace—the realm. She is but a whisper. A secret.
An example.
One I don’t remember, but Malachi does. He was three hundred by the time I was born, and while I was too young when she died, he remembers.
Malachi twists the orb between his thumb and finger. It thumps at the pace of a beating heart.
“We are not supposed to speak of Mother,” I warn him, holding my chin high.
Malachi chuckles, and though he does not move, the air around me thickens. “What will Father do if I speak of her now? Return from the After to strip me of my crown? And to think he feared her. What little the Fae understand about what is out there.”
He holds his fingers up, weaving a ball of light, then watching as it melts like candle wax, dripping onto the ground.
“You speak as if you are no longer Fae yourself.”
“We are something greater, sister.” He lifts off the ledge, walking toward me.
My neck cranes farther back. He hasn’t grown taller, but it’s as if his presence is expanding. The limits of his being are no longer contained in his flesh. His magic reaches beyond it.
“You do not hear the whispers I do, but they see you. They hear you.” Malachi reaches, his hand shy of brushing my cheek when he pauses out of fear of what my shadows will do to him even now.
It is the reason my skin does not truly know touch. That my bones constantly ache for a connection. Anyone who dares come close is claimed by my magic, whether I wish it or not.
“Who do you hear?” I ask, my throat tightening at how distant Malachi’s eyes have become.
One blue, one gold, neither truly looking at me, even as they both don’t blink away.
Malachi shakes his head, not answering my question but pacing around the room with the orb in his grasp. “I feared what Mother was before I understood her.”
“There is no understanding her or what she did.” I shake my head. “It’s not natural.”
“And you are?” he snaps with such cruelty that my shadows swim around my forearms. “She was grieving. Could you blame her?”
My eyebrows pinch as I try to figure out why that matters. Why my brother would suddenly have any sympathy for what might be done in the name of grief. But then I recall the females who have walked from his chambers recently—reflections of Selia.
He’s grieving her, possibly regretting that he’s the one who killed her. And somehow, he’s using that to relate to our mother when he’s spoken poorly of her my entire life because of the magic she wielded.
When our father first met our mother, it was thought she didn’t have any magic at all. It wasn’t until my twin and I were born that the court learned the truth. I was born first, Hemlin second. And like in many cases of Fae twin births, Hemlin did not survive it.
Mother could not handle the grief, and in that moment she held his lifeless body, her magic woke in a brutal surge upon his corpse, revealing the nature of her power.
She rested her hands on my dead twin’s chest, and his eyes snapped open.
Father and his guards saw what she really was: a necromancer.
Only, necromancy is not a blessing. It’s a curse. What she raised was not her child; it was a creature with black eyes that opened its mouth and screamed until the piercing pitch made ears bleed and eyes water with blood.
Father killed Hemlin a moment later, and Mother coiled into her grief.
But the damage was done. The Guard dragged her away, knowing that what had been opened inside her could not be put back. To wake a necromancer’s magic is to allow something unnatural to take place, and to perform that magic once will result in far worse if done again.
Mother was killed the morning after I was born. I never knew her or my twin. But Malachi was there; he watched. He saw our father send her to Sarrow.
I wondered how Father could do such a thing to his own mate, even if it was his orders, not his hands, that killed her. Watching Malachi now, I understand it was mercy. That he knew they would reconnect in the After.
It’s believed one cannot harm one’s own mate, but that is not necessarily true. Harm can be interpreted in many different ways. If one truly believes they are keeping the other safe, is it harm at all?
Father did not believe he harmed our mother. He destroyed the necromancy that would consume her.
He saved her.
And then he erased her name, her memory, her being from this realm so he would not have to stare at that pain. Unlike Malachi, who casts light to create visions of Selia and surrounds himself with her, our father cast our mother out.
Malachi closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. “We are going to make this different, Hazel. We will create something else soon.”
“And what if Wilder and Elorie have found a way to stop you?” I challenge. “You could be playing into exactly what they have planned.”
“They cannot stop what has already begun, not when they have brought exactly what I need to finish this. Elorie will give me what the orb wants.”
“The orb tells you that?”
“It tells me many things.” Malachi smiles. “It aches for her magic. It aches for her. Wilder can bring his entire army, and it will not matter, not with what the orb will unleash. I will have what I need before the next moon, and we will finish what we’ve promised.”
“And then you will set me free?”
Malachi meets my gaze, not denying or confirming. He slips back into the shadows, perching on the stone wall. Casting illusions of himself around the realm so no one knows exactly where he is or what state he’s in.
His eyes close as he settles into his breath. The dull, matted blond strands that stick to his face are nothing like those of my brother.
He calls.
He hears.
He answers.
My shadows throw warnings in my ear of the male seated in front of me. But I cannot turn my back on him now, not when he is my brother. Not after what I’ve done.
There was a time when Malachi was not this magic-hungry creature. He had kindness in his heart. He saw the light in our realm beyond shadows, and he would remind me there was good worth fighting for.
As children, we would play in the valley below the Mantle, joking about what the gods might be whispering to Nym and Nyxia as we ran past. He swore they were telling each other all our secrets to entertain themselves. That we were but a story in a book to them.
But one day, the sky turned, and we were not paying attention. Malachi did not sense the ravagers before they descended upon us. One of them closed in fast. Its teeth tried to rip him away, even as he fought and protected me from the herd.
I knew what would happen if I reached out to save my brother. He was so full of light, and my shadows were desperate to drink his magic. They told me as much. It’s one of the many reasons Father changed the floors in the palace to obsidian, so I could not accidentally harm those around me.
But I could not let the ravagers take Malachi away. The boy made of light who saw the girl beyond the darkness. The boy who smiled at me across the room while all others looked at me with fear in their eyes.
The brother who protected me when the rest of the court would have sooner seen me strung up on the gallows for the nightmares that stretched out of my fingers, killing their loved ones while I was sleeping.
I wished they had killed me before I stole Malachi’s light. Before my fingers gripped his hand to save him from those ravagers and the shadows refused to release him.
I screamed and begged, and only then did they let him go.
Malachi did not die that day, but I felt it—the piece of his soul that Cleaved with the bite of my magic. The part of him I drank.
His good.
His spirit.
And now he is this angry, hungry creature.
A creature I helped make.