Chapter 31 Nyte
Nyte
“What if the only way out is for one of us to kill the other?” Drystan pondered, breaking the eerie silence as we descended in darkness.
“Then it was nice knowing you. I can’t be killed,” I answered flatly.
“I might have Astraea’s blood with me.”
“You don’t.”
“You wouldn’t scent it in a tightly sealed bottle.”
“I would.”
Drystan made a disgruntled sound. “Is that all you’d have to say to me?”
“I’d rather not waste time on theoretical last words.”
“I suppose we’ve already been there.”
I didn’t need to be reminded of that horror.
I’d fallen into the curse not long after I heard about Drystan’s plan that he’d sworn Astraea to keep in secrecy.
When she’d plunged her stormstone dagger though his heart …
I’d believed it was true. That she’d killed him.
And the reminder surged my anger about the ruse, which I hadn’t gotten to unleash on either of them.
“Next time I won’t waste my breath,” I muttered.
“You have to admit, the plan to get Death to transform Astraea was genius.”
“It was idiotic with no guarantee. You deserve to be dead for good.”
That thought alone tore a phantom wound inside me, but I wouldn’t let it show.
“Probably, but hey, we had to have inherited some tricks from our father, right? I swear he’s the one true immortal on this godforsaken land.”
I grumbled my agreement, content to let the silence settle again. These stairs down were endless.
“Have you ever imagined how you would do it…?” Drystan asked, voice quieter now with a somber topic. “How you would kill him if he was right there?”
“No, actually. I always imagined the opportunity would come with little time to think about it, and I hope that’s true.”
A tragic tension grew between us.
“Sometimes I’ve wished that we would have time,” he confessed. “To ask him why, but then … I don’t even know what I mean by it. Why was he cruel? Why couldn’t he be satisfied with what he had? Why couldn’t he love us?”
I didn’t like to carry other people’s emotions, but with Drystan and Astraea I always captured an echo of their feelings good or bad.
“The truth is often more painful than the unknown.”
“Don’t you want closure?”
“We’ve been orphans for a very long time, Drystan. That’s all I need to know. There’s no why that would heal that truth, or even make it more tolerable to harbor. I’m just glad that you … that despite all he tried to do you didn’t end up like him.”
Drystan didn’t speak for a long moment.
“You said he has another son,” he broke the silence again. “I have another half-brother?”
“Had,” I corrected with a faint pinch in my chest. “When I was cursed, my subconscious projected back to where I came from. Nightwalking, in the most incredulous sense—that realm is where that ability is from. In that other realm, I saw our half-brother, but he didn’t know who I was.
He was everything I feared you or I could have become from the influence of our father, and the irony is that it was the absence of our father that drove our half-brother, Malin, to become a true villain to himself and his country.
I think the abandonment is what made him want to prove himself.
For us, we watched our father and knew it was everything we never wanted to be, so why would we want to please him? ”
Drystan pondered the story in silence for a while. “I suppose we could have turned out worse then.”
Finally, light broke at the end of the tunnel, and when it did, it took everything in me not to retreat right away. We walked right into a perfect replica of the drawing room in our former home. The Keep of Bethezal.
“Stay close to me,” I said, but the words became lead on my tongue.
My next step swayed my body from a wave of dizziness that came on sharply and suddenly. I blinked, catching myself on the back of a chair.
Stay close to me.
Stay close to me.
My words echoed through the room, mocking me.
When I straightened, I stared down at the hauntingly familiar pattern of a beige and crimson carpet. Then I heard the suppressed sniffling beside me, daring a sidelong glance to find Drystan, just a boy the height of my shoulder. His eyes brimmed red and his bottom lip quivered.
I remembered why he was so devastated right before I looked a little further up the carpet and found the dog with its neck broken.
“You should be training yourself, not some runt,” father spat, furious when he’d discovered his younger brother with the animal.
I gritted my teeth recalling his act of cold cruelty just moments ago.
Our father had ordered Drystan himself to kill it, but he never would have gone through with it.
Instead, he’d knelt by the beast, hugging it while its tail wagged happily, blissfully unaware of its death crawling closer.
I stood by and watched the thinning patience of our father, who would have struck out at Drystan, likely beaten him until he conceded.
Even then I knew he never would, not when his heart was so pure and innocent.
So I’d reached into the hound’s mind, commanding a sharp and painless break of its neck, when father’s yelling and Drystan’s cries of protest distracted them both for it to easily appear like Drystan had followed through.
If our father knew what I’d done, he said nothing. After all, I was his killer.
The look of absolute horror and betrayal Drystan had cast up to me when he held the beast limp in his child arms would go on to haunt me for years to come.
“Nothing is worth your tears. You shed a single one of them, I’ll show you what pain really feels like.” Those were father’s harsh parting words before he left us in his study, the slamming of the door leaving a rumbling echo of his violence.
To his credit, Drystan didn’t let a single tear fall after that despite his palpable misery. Drystan stayed put, and I couldn’t leave him. So we stood there and let the sorrow creep in slowly. For his fragile heart, there was a part of me that sympathized with him.
“Anything you love is worth your tears,” I said at last. “Father has never loved anything.”
“I hate you,” Drystan said, three words that formed a blade sharp enough to cut through my own emotionless web. With them he shot his heartbroken gaze, now lined with anger, at me,. Then his first tear fell.
“Hate … now that is something that only hurts you unless you find a way to craft it into a weapon.”
“You sound just like father,” he seethed, with a face far too young to experience such agony.
With that, Drystan stormed out of the room, slamming the door in his wake. I didn’t try to deny it. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t comfort him.
Father gave the order; I carried it out.
We were one and the same.
Always one and the same.
I’d so long been numb to that acknowledgement, yet right now it was like Drystan had punched his small, gentle hand through my chest and ripped out my black heart.
I didn’t care how father saw me. I didn’t care that I was a nightmare whispered among the people.
I did care about Drystan. How he saw me.
Right now, I was his monster.
I wanted to go after him, but I never did. I wanted to lock ourselves in his room and explain why I did it.
I didn’t do any of those things … Because I knew this wouldn’t be the last time father’s cruel ways came down on Drystan, and I thought it best to let his heart know a few breaks so he might learn to protect it before it could shatter.
I was wrong. He was just a kid.
My first step to go after him shifted the ground, and my limbs flailed, trying to catch myself before I could slam into the wall, when the whole room tilted on its axis.
“Drystan!” I called.
Gods, I’d let him down. I should have fought with him. Instead, I’d not only just stood by to watch the first piece of his innocence get taken, but I’d been the one to steal it.
“I’m sorry, Drystan,” I said in defeat, letting my body tumble whichever way the room went.
It stopped spinning and I slammed to my hands and knees, trembling with the aches lancing through my face and abdomen as if I’d taken a fresh beating.
“When I order an assassination, I expect it fulfilled,” father’s voice bellowed, and I knew then we were in the great hall. I recalled this memory.
Another powerful kick from a nearby guard nearly knocked my smaller body onto my back, but I gritted my teeth, tensed my muscles, and stayed firm.
I dragged my sight up to see Drystan, who barely looked older than twelve mortal years. He stood by father, looking at me with expressionless eyes, but his features occasionally winced at my pain. He’d told father of my failure to kill the enemy he’d given me as a target.
I’d set it up so perfectly when I arrived at the family’s home.
It was a vampire who’d deserted his place in father’s uprising, and in penance he’d ordered him and any family he’d had killed as an example for others.
But he had a wife and two innocent children.
He’d pleaded endlessly at my feet, and so I staged their deaths instead.
It was the first time I’d taken Drystan on a task with me because he’d begged to go. And perhaps it was because he was with me I’d found the mercy for the cowardly soldier. I wasn’t ready to claim another piece of Drystan’s innocence.
The irony that almost made me laugh was that I could kill every person in this room with little effort.
The guard who’d carried out my beating would die eventually; I’m sure father was even counting on it.
Yet I kneeled here and accepted my punishment like the pitiful child he saw me as right now, because if I didn’t, he’d warned me before my rebellions that he would inflict it on Drystan instead.
I didn’t know why my little brother had betrayed me. Perhaps in revenge for killing his pet. It didn’t matter, and in truth, I didn’t want to be spared from this beating.
“You two are dismissed; get out of my sight,” father hissed, turning away.