Chapter 39
Chapter thirty-nine
Dominick
Never in his life had he seen so many pyres. Mourners gathered around the platforms arranged throughout the Menage. The wooden bases, surrounded by silber logs and hay, were ready to burn the bodies within them. Even the air seemed dry today, as if the atmosphere itself were eager for a quick burn.
The Council of Elders had declared a mass ceremony with a spare pyre for the parts of bodies that had come back. Dominick shivered.
Part of him had been ashamed to refuse to view his brother’s body. Now the only thing he’d remember his brother by was what was in his memories, and the linen-wrapped lump among the branches.
“Shadow.” Chair Briar’s tumbling voice resounded throughout the arena.
The Council chair, in her purple robes and jowly face, had those winged warriors on either side of her.
Dominick peered around the upper levels where various coven members sat viewing the spectacle.
The aliato were standing at attention every twenty feet.
“We call to you on this day to ferry those we love into your realm. Watch over their souls, keep them at peace, and forever hold them in your graces.”
Dom’s father lowered the torch to the hay, and the flames devoured it hungrily. All around, his fellow coven members cried. Dom couldn’t. Not here, not when he still couldn’t understand what had happened.
A dangerous thought crept into his head, one he refused to dwell on, but still a nagging feeling that if Al had been with Colton… No. This wasn’t Sera’s fault. Dom swallowed hard as Colton’s pyre burned brighter, his mother on one side of him and Theo on the other.
With each second, the mourning moans from mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters intensified with the thickening smoke that rose to the blazing sun.
The coven glorified death, called it turning to dust. But that wasn’t truly how it worked. You only turned to dust if your magic burned you out. Roasted you from the inside, a natural sort of combustion.
But Colton hadn’t burned out. His mother had prepared her son’s body, and she’d said Colton had come back slashed. Death by someone else’s hand left a corpse.
And Colton’s had just caught flame.
A low hum left his mother. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and Dominick’s heart cracked.
Between her audible grief and the smell of burning hair and flesh, he was overwhelmed.
He reached for Theo’s hand and squeezed it tight.
Theo nodded and led him away from the smoldering remains, exiting the Menage and finding some solace outside.
“How are you holding up?” Theo asked.
“As well as expected. Fucking terrible.” His throat grew thick with the words, and he choked tears down again. Dominick kissed the back of Theo’s hand. “Thank you.” He attempted to keep his voice level. “For being with me today.”
Theo’s arms wrapped around him. Dominick took in the smell of his skin, burying his nose in Theo’s neck. The warlock only held him tighter.
He was a mess, but he wasn’t alone. The first tear slid down his cheek, then a second, and a third. Each one swung his heart in some sort of paradox pendulum. Growing and breaking sadness; then a sensation that for once in his life, he almost felt whole.
The distinct sound of his father clearing his throat prompted Dom to let Theo go.
Tristan Benero had been stern with Dom and Colton growing up.
Dom supposed he had to be, with two young boys in the home who created chaos wherever they went.
The day Dominick announced he wanted to try for an oracle position rather than the Legion ranks like Colton, he’d received a stern lecture about honoring their family.
His father had been assigned as a guardian despite hoping for a Legion position.
Tristan prided on protecting their way of life.
It would be his legacy—for him, but also for his sons.
But now, his father stood, eyes bloodshot, cheeks washed with tears, reaching for him. A solid wall of chest slammed into Dom’s. His father’s bear-size arms wrapped around him, pulling him to his bulky frame.
Dominick didn’t quite know what to do with his hands, but as his father’s forehead crushed into him, as the Benero household head’s shoulders quaked with silent weeping, Dom wrapped his arms around his father’s broad back and held him.
“My son,” his father said. “My son, my son.”
Dominick glanced at his mother approaching and then at Theo. They both had grief and worry painted on their faces. And something surged within him.
Honor, maybe? Revenge? Something bubbled within.
His father never wept. His mother should not have burned her favorite son.
And the more he looked around at the coven members filing from the Menage in a line of misery and anguish, he couldn’t help but glare at the aliato standing guard at the door.
They had something to do with it. He was sure of it.
“Come home. I’ll make some tea.” His mother, with her puffy eyes and voice hoarse from her mourning chants, rubbed her husband’s back.
“Yes, dear,” his father said, wiping away his tears and with them his vulnerability.
Still, Dominick glared at the winged warriors. Not one of them acknowledged him. They looked hollow. Their wings held high, the magic seeping from their scabbards.
His mother’s hand was warm and soft in his. She took Theo’s in the other. “Let’s go, loves.”
“Yes, Mother.” He let her lead him home.
Through the streets of Daedeth Quarter, Colton’s face kept flashing in Dominick’s mind.
His tightly cropped blond hair, the slight sunburn he always seemed to have across his nose and cheeks.
His laugh. Memories of his brother levitating frogs, crabs, and other critters around the house in a parade of ribbits and clicking pincers until their mother chased him with a wooden ladle.
Colton would giggle as he ran, his procession of varmints bouncing off furniture and walls behind him, while Dominick, squealing in delight, watched the madness.
At the base of the stone steps leading to the row house, his mother finally let go of his hand.
“Thank you for being here for him… for us.” Fresh tears raced to Dominick’s eyes as his mother kissed Theo on each cheek. She gave her son a knowing smile and climbed the steps after his father. “Theodore, you’ll stay for tea at least.”
“Oh, Mrs. Benero, I couldn’t impose.”
“Not an imposition, dear. See you inside.”
“Do you want me to stay?” Theo directed the question at Dom now. This was the first time he had brought a man home to meet his family. In the light of the tragedy they had endured, his mother and father had accepted Theo with open arms.
“I’d like that.” The words felt like blades against his throat.
Moons, he was tired of crying, tired of being…
sad. Dominick tilted Theo’s chin and kissed him.
His lips were soft and familiar now. They were outside, and he couldn’t seem to care.
What the neighbors thought, what his parents thought, any of them.
Theo broke their kiss. “I’m going inside. Take your time.”
Dominick sat on the steps and listened.
To the door squeaking closed behind Theo, to the murmurs inside the house, and to the scuffing of other Daedeth members’ shoes across the white stone blocks of the street.
That bit of rage sat heavy in his chest. War had been the coven’s way of life since the beginning of its existence. They took the most vulnerable of their people and placed them as fodder on the front lines, claiming that it was the demons who wanted to control them.
But as Dominick looked around at the stone homes, at the iron posts holding mage lights, at the esoti warlock who trimmed the bushes across the street, still adorned with his mourning ribbons, he wondered how this war could have raged for so long.
The witches and warlocks of the Solarni coven were powerful.
But were they more powerful than a demon army?
His mother interrupted his thoughts. “Dominick, come inside, please.”
He waved her off. Just a minute more.
Dominick scratched the stubble in that place below his ear, almost hearing Sera’s voice: Such a nervous lock you are.
He wondered if she was all right. If she knew—if Alistair knew about Colton.
Dominick didn’t think he could go through it all again, have the rush of grief overwhelm him as he watched Sera and Alistair crumble.
He let out a sigh and stood. There was a flash in the sky. “What in Eraphon’s name?”
A flaming projectile arched toward the center of the Citadel. He couldn’t look away from the ball of flame. When it hit the barrier the coven guardians kept around the city, it burst into sizzling sparks that poured over the warded dome.