Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
“I just realized I hate magic.”
And it hates us. Tristan stops again suddenly at a large, four-way intersection in the tunnels. He spots a shadow, then turns to Raya. Actually, you should go ahead back to the House. I have … one last tiny thing to attend to … alone. You remember the way, yes?
“I need a fucking bath after enduring this unspeakable night with you.” She takes four more steps, stops. “Markadian wasn’t the only one you abandoned all that time ago, you know.”
Tristan gazes at her, taken aback. Raya, dear …
“I will wait for that list in your tower, though I’m not sure I share your confidence that George will cooperate. Also …” She shoots him a look over her shoulder. “I still think you’re in love with Kyle. Despite all you do and say, you’ll always be his. He is the only one on this entire planet for whom you would risk consuming dark magic to protect.”
Tristan stares back, silent, expressionless.
Then Raya is off, footsteps clacking in the distance until, like all other signs of life in these tunnels, she’s gone.
Only when the tunnels fall silent once again does Tristan speak. You can come out now.
From a shadow cast by an overhanging pipe, the odd shape of Wendy slides into existence. “Is it true? That your heart still belongs with the Kyle boy?”
Do you really care for the answer? Tristan returns.
Wendy gives it a second’s thought. “No,” she realizes, then draws closer. “Leave the box with Markadian, allow the choice to be his. To open … or not. It both satisfies your obligation to deliver the gift as well as render you blameless if it is harmful.”
Tristan turns to her. You shouldn’t have come, my darling.
In a flash, she is right in front of Tristan. “And you should be more wary around a witch.”
Most of us are, and with good reason. They know how to end us.
“And we know how to end them.”
Yet we do not.
“Due to the Protected Blood Truce. An eternal impasse.”
Not so eternal. This delicately fragile impasse of ours ends once the wrong witch learns we have killed Brock. Tristan hugs the box to his chest with a sigh, leans against the wall, gazes up at the pipes running along the ceiling. One of them drips on the floor nearby, creating a murky puddle. Thus, we must un-kill him. Sort of. Marky will forgive my blatant insubordination.
“He would sooner forgive you calling him Marky.”
Is that an attempt at humor? My, Wendy, how you surprise me.
“You should not trust the witch.”
I don’t.
“He is manipulating you to his will. He wishes to end you.”
Or is it me who is manipulating him? Everything is a game, my dear Wendy, and we are, all of us, players … even those of us who pretend to watch from the sidelines.
“I do not enjoy games.”
The game of manipulation is quite easy to master once you learn one thing: what a person truly wants.
“And what do you truly want?”
Tristan lifts the dark bracelet to his eyes, runs a finger over the beads, smiles. To be loved, of course.
4.
The Dream.
—∙—
Kaleb stirs from his sleep with a gasp.
The gasp scatters through his small stone cell like whispers of ghosts. He catches his breath as the last image of his dream slowly fades—a pale face in a fire, peering down upon him, eyes like winter with the haze of snowfall passing over—that face as it slowly fades into the bricks of his cell, Kaleb slowly returning to reality once again, the dream letting go.
Six feet wide, twelve deep, featureless walls, a skinny table with a leather-bound book upon it across from his bed. Lantern with a faint glow still left, his only light other than what spills in from the hallway through the small glass window of his door.
This room is Kaleb’s home.
He often wonders about that word—home. It makes him think of another dream he sometimes has, a more distant one, where he imagines he was the proud, well-studied son of a man and woman he called Dad and Mom. They loved him, even if he felt at times drowned in his workload, in his endless studies, in his violin lessons, in his math clubs. He wanted a break, but they loved him too much to let him rest, he had to be the top of all his classes, had to be number one. In this other life, he often wondered what it was like to have friends, to attend birthday parties, to stay up too late, to not know questions on school exams. Makes him laugh, the absurdity of such a life.
That wasn’t ever his life, was it?
It’s just a second dream behind the first one with the pale face in the fire, the pale face with eyes like winter.
He didn’t really have parents either, right? This dream he used to call a memory, he has had it so many times, he wonders if it betrays him now. Details changing. Shifting like water in a sink. There was never a fire that burned his house down, right? No studies. No awards framed on the wall. No alarm clocks.