CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 37

SLADE

Age 15

I’m startled awake in my bed, and I sit up, pointed ears cocked. I’m not sure if it was something I dreamt or if it was a real sound that woke me, until I hear someone shouting and footsteps running down the hall.

I fling the covers off and get out of bed, quickly tugging my shirt back on from where I left it in a heap on the floor. I shove my feet into the boots beside the door and hurry out, tightening the drawstring in my pants as I go down the hall and head for the stairs.

Shouts rise up, and when I hear something shatter, I start to run. My boots skid to a halt against the carpet when I see a group of our servants gathered at the bottom of the stairs, crowding the entry hall just ahead. They’re all standing there frozen, not moving or talking, and the backs of my arms start to prickle.

I push my way forward, though I’m not even noticing the faces I’m passing, because I’m focused ahead. There are more people that I have to get through to get into the entry hall, everyone dressed in either their nightclothes or rumpled ones from yesterday, as if everyone hastily dressed to see what the commotion is.

As soon as I push my way to the front, I freeze in place.

A gray, morbid light streaks in through the entry hall.

Since this room is in the center of the estate, there are several open doorways that lead to different parts of the house, and every single one is full of more servants. As if my father called them all here, like he does when he hosts public punishments.

The windows at the left are casting predawn streaks across the marble floor, making the red wallpaper look deeper, the same color as a bead of blood left on the tip of your finger.

Right there in front of those dreary streaks of light stands my father. He shouldn’t even be home yet, not for a couple more days at least, because he was called to the king for business, but here he is. Red shirt crisp, black boots laced straight, and fury in his eyes, even at this early hour.

He’s gripping my mother by the wrist, holding her arm up at an awkward angle. A group of servants stands just behind her. It’s like the entire room is balancing on shards of glass and no one dares move, or else we’ll get sliced open.

Because the look on my father’s face...

It’s not only anger spattered over his brow and darkening his eyes. It’s not only a slight downturn of his mouth. This is something more. His whole face has gone red, blotches of it bursting against his neck that I can see from across the room in this poor light. The muscles in his arm are strained where he’s holding my mother, his grip so tight that his fingers are leached of blood. And his eyes...they aren’t just angry or irritated or disappointed.

No, they’re enraged.

Like everyone else, my mother is in her nightdress, her hair hanging loosely down her back. I know something is wrong just by the state of her undress. She would never leave her room without at least her robe and slippers on.

“I want to know who knew of this!” my father shouts, his glare skimming around the entire entry.

The servants are all watching wide-eyed, faces tight, fear making some of them tremble. But not one of them speaks up.

“I want to know!” he roars.

When my mother winces, I finally snap into action and stride over, loose boots slapping against the tile floor. “What are you doing?”

My father jerks his head in my direction, and something cruel enters his eyes. My mother looks as pale as a ghost. “What am I doing?” my father repeats, the last word ending with a whip of laughter that has nothing to do with happiness. “Oh no, this is all about what your mother has done.”

I flick my eyes to her just as a tear races down her collapsing cheek.

“Tell him.”

She flinches at my father’s order, but her lips stay shut, gaze staying on me.

“Tell him!” he screams, shaking her arm so hard that her whole body shakes with it.

I’m immediately transported back to being eight years old, when my body froze up and the scream only stayed in my head. Yet this time, the word tears from my throat. “Stop! You’re hurting her.”

He lets go, but I’m under no false pretenses that he’s actually doing it to appease me. He shoves her at the servants behind her, but Jak catches her before she can stumble.

My father looks at me. “Since she won’t tell you, I will,” he spits, like venom streaming from a snake’s fangs. In response, my own canines seem to throb in my gums. “What did your mother do when she thought I wasn’t going to be home for the night? She invited another into her bed. Spread her legs like an Orean whore.”

Shock makes my spine prickle and stiffen. It just takes a split second. Just the tiniest shift of my eyes as I look at her, and I already know. I can’t believe I didn’t put it together before. All the times he brought in fresh flowers for her or made sure to serve her first. The small smiles exchanged between them.

Jak’s still holding her arms, keeping her locked against his chest as if he, a magicless Orean servant, can stand to protect her against my father. He’s so opposite from my father in every way. Jak is quiet. Kind. A head full of hair and lines on his face from smiling rather than scowling.

My mother looks at me like she’s afraid of my reaction.

“There, you see?” Father says, pointing at my face. “Slade didn’t know. The truth is right there in the disgust on his face.”

I hate the way Mother takes in a shuddering breath.

“You’re right, I didn’t know,” I reply, taking a step forward. “But if there’s disgust on my expression, it’s not for her. It’s for you.”

My father goes still. “What did you say?”

“Why wouldn’t she seek affection from someone else?” I spit out. “You treat her like garbage.”

The surprise that enters his eyes is nothing compared to the surprise at myself that I managed to say that to his face. Every word is true, and if he thinks I would ever take his side over hers, then he doesn’t know me at all.

He whips around, eyes flaring on the gathered crowd. “I want to know which of you knew about this affair and failed to report it to me! I want to know how long it’s been going on!”

None of them say a word.

He pounds a fist against his chest in a shaky rage, making some of his power slip out, a break appearing in the middle of the floor. The crack of the marble reverberates throughout the room, shaking up through my feet.

“Control, Father,” I mock, throwing his constant command back in his face.

He snaps his finger so fast I don’t even see it, I just feel my pointer finger break in half, right where he did it the last time. A grunt skids past my lips, the pain exploding down my entire hand.

“Stop it, Stanton!” my mother cries. “Slade has nothing to do with it.”

My father doesn’t turn away from me, doesn’t acknowledge her right away. He just watches with sadistic retribution while I try not to vomit. After several long seconds, he snaps his fingers again, and my bones jolt back together with a sickening click.

I have to grit my teeth so hard that my jaw cracks, but I keep everything contained, keep it controlled. After all, that’s what he taught me all these years. To be in control. To master my power.

“You’re right, Elore,” I hear him say while I blink away the rest of the pain. “This has to do with you...and him.”

In my next breath, my father has shoved Mother away and gripped Jak by the throat. Jak tries to fight back, but it’s no use. He’s not a retired, wealthy warrior. He’s an Orean servant, skin tanned from all his time outside, body lean instead of the bulk of muscle my father has from all his years in the army. Jak might be a strong Orean, but he’s no match against the force of my father.

My father’s voice drops dangerously low. “I brought you into my home, allowed you to live in Annwyn and sustain long life. Yet you deign to seek what does not belong to you?”

Jak’s weathered hands scrabble, though he can’t even get a single finger off his throat. His face starts to go unnaturally red, his lips gasping for air he can’t take in.

“Stanton, stop it!” My mother tries to yank at my father’s arm, but he shoves her away. She would’ve gone sprawling, but I catch her before she can fall.

“I want to know how long this has been going on,” he says, releasing Jak’s throat just enough for him to suck in a breath of air and squeeze out hoarse words. “Was this the first time?”

Jak’s eyes flick to my mother, but that only enrages my father more. He shakes Jak like a rag doll. “Was this the first time?”

The entire room feels swollen. Like the air right before a torrent, inflated with a downpour ready to burst and flood us all.

The crack of thunder is Jak’s hoarse answer. “No.”

My father throws him so hard and so far, tossing Jak across the room, making him smash into one of the windows. The glass shatters, the first of the torrent raining down.

He falls into a heap, and my mother screams and tries to run to him, but my father holds her back. “How long, Elore?”

She tries and fails to rip from his grasp. His expression might be enraged, but hers is one I’ve never seen before either. Hers is pure, open hate. And that hate is like the wind that blows this storm around us, whipping it into a frenzy.

Her chin tips up, green eyes unfaltering. “For eleven years.”

“Eleven years?” Utter shock consumes my father. A surprised gasp even falls out of me. How did she keep that secret for so long?

But then I realize not a single servant gasped, none of them looked shocked, and that’s my answer.

They helped them.

My father’s black eyes glitter with something ruthless. “You will regret that, Elore,” he grounds out, like the rumble of an angry cloud.

I don’t know whether I want to thank them for helping give my mother a sliver of happiness or tell them off for not making her be more careful.

Right now, my mother seems to be well past the point of caring about being careful.

“I have loved him for much longer. The only thing I regret is not allowing myself to have that love far sooner.”

My father’s temper explodes.

In the next instant, he’s across the room, boots crunching over the broken glass. Jak has gotten to his feet, but before he can do anything, my father snaps his fingers, just as he snaps Jak’s leg.

The crack makes me jolt, and then an agonizing scream tears from Jak’s throat. My mother goes running over, but with another snap, my father breaks the entire room.

Everyone on either side stumbles from the shake, my own knees slamming down onto the marble tile as the house shifts.

The noise is deafening.

The whole estate breaks right down the middle. Everyone is screaming, falling, debris crashing down on our heads. When the walls split, the ceiling clefts, dirt spraying from the fissure in the floor. I have to scramble back when the crack spreads so wide I nearly fall into it.

When the shaking stops, I manage to stand up again and pull my mother up with me. The servants all get to their feet again too, everyone giving the broken floor a wide berth. Mother looks down at the massive crevice now between her and Jak, the gap too far to jump.

The two of them look across at each other, and the expression on their faces makes my whole chest hurt.

“Jak...” my mother says, voice cracking, eyes wet.

He swallows hard from his spot on the floor, face now covered in sweat and visible pain. “It’s alright, Elore.”

“Don’t say her name!” my father screams, and then his power breaks Jak’s arm next, snapping it so hard that the bone pierces through his skin.

“No!” My mother’s scream rends the air, and she tries to jump across, but I grab her at the last second. “You won’t make it! You’ll fall,” I tell her over and over again as she tries to get away.

“This is what you get for choosing Orean trash,” my father seethes. “I want you to remember this, Elore. Remember that this is what you get for betraying me.”

She goes stiff in my arms. The whole room seems to suck in a breath of air. And then, my father lifts his hand and snaps.

And Jak’s neck breaks.

There’s no time for my mother to scream. No time for me to blink. Jak’s neck cracks in an unnatural angle, and his wide, agonized eyes extinguish their light right before us.

When his upper body hits the floor, my mother’s body does too.

I’ve read the word keening before. I’ve heard of it plenty of times. But I have never actually heard someone let out a keening cry like my mother does.

It wrenches from her body with so much force that it sends chills down my spine. It’s so loud that I can’t even hear my pounding heartbeat.

The sound she makes is terrifying. Unrecognizable.

I’m in so much shock that I’m just standing there uselessly, wondering how the hell all of this happened so fast.

My father moves his power effortlessly, unbreaking a single portion of the floor’s fissure so he can walk across until he stands right in front of me. “This is why females cannot be trusted, Slade.”

My hands curl into fists, and I feel the spikes above my brows pierce through my skin. A single drop of blood slips past my eye. He looks at me coolly, unimpressed. “Lack of control. Now we know where you get it from,” he says with distaste.

Anger pours like a flood from my chest, and I feel the spikes in my back straining, ready to—

“Mother?”

I whip my head to the left and see the servants parting, and then my brother is standing there. He looks pale and scared, so young in his pajamas with a blanket clutched in one hand.

“Ryatt...” my mother cries.

He hesitates, eyes bouncing from the break down the middle of the house to my mother’s crumpled face. But then, his eyes land on Jak’s unmoving body.

“Father!” The word yanks out of his little voice, and he rushes forward, pushing past the servants that try to protect him. My heart leaps into my throat, but he skids to a stop in front of the crack when my mother manages to snag his shirt, stopping him before he can try to leap. He collapses into a fit of sobs against her shoulder.

And my father… I see his thoughts churn. See them clot and thicken.

“It cannot be.”

If my mother was angry before, she looks terrified now. Especially when my father takes a threatening step forward. “No,” she heaves out. “You will not touch him,” she says, gripping onto Ryatt even harder.

And I stand there in shock, looking from Jak to my little brother, disbelief grappling me.

And yet…fae have a hard time conceiving. It’s common knowledge. It’s why our long life is so important for our species. But my father was able to have not only one heir but two, and fairly close in age. He always put it down to the fact that my mother is Orean, but that’s not it.

Eleven years, my mother said. She’s been having this affair for eleven years. My brother is ten.

Ryatt isn’t my father’s heir.

My mother looks wild. Her black hair is disheveled, scraps of ceiling caught in its dusty strands, an angry scratch dragged down her cheek. When he broke Jak’s neck, he broke my mother’s heart, but she’s not going to let him hurt Ryatt too. I can see it in her red-rimmed eyes.

My father staggers, the back of his heel hitting the broken crack behind him as he realizes that Ryatt isn’t his.

My heartbeat feels like it wants to rupture through my veins and explode out my ears. Ryatt is still crying, clutching our mother’s nightdress, while she tries to drag him behind her.

“You dared to sire that bastard’s whelp?” The dark tone in my father’s voice seems to suck away the dawning light in the room.

My mother’s bottom lip trembles as she tries to block Ryatt. The other servants look like they want to intervene, but they’re too afraid to face my father, and they’re right to have that fear.

“I should’ve known I couldn’t trust an Orean.”

With another snap of his finger, the ground shakes again and there’s a violent snap, and I realize that my father has trapped us all in this room, a circle of cracks surrounding us, keeping us all in this entry.

By the time I steady my feet beneath me again, my father has walked up behind me, and I flinch when his hand slams down onto the back of my neck, squeezing slightly. “You gave me a powerful heir,” he says to my mother, that voice of his still booming, still edged with impossible rage. “So I have no further need of you or the false spare.”

Cold terror solidifies in my gut.

I know my father. I have been training with him for seven years. I have seen exactly how ruthless he can be. I have seen him break houses and streets. Mountains and trees. Tendons and bones.

But I will not let him break my mother and brother.

He may be as loud as thunder, but I’m as quick as lightning.

Faster than a blink, my spikes have burst from my skin and rot explodes from my veins.

I whirl on my feet and shove him back with all my strength. He cracks into the wall where some of the servants scramble, another group of them surrounding my mother and brother, trying to pull them away.

Good.

Because now that I’ve openly attacked my father, I’ve drawn a line in the sand. I either have to kill him...or watch everyone I love be killed.

I’ve let him lord over us for fifteen years. Let his cruelty dictate our lives. I have watched my mother sink further inside of herself, watched Ryatt’s wary eyes lose their glint every time my father treated him just as badly as he treated me.

But I haven’t put up with his training and his cruelty for nothing. I did it because I think I knew that one day, we would be here. On two sides of the line. I knew it was going to be him or us.

And I choose us.

So when my rot explodes out of me, it’s seven years’ worth of pent-up retribution.

The tile floor cracks, the earth between us crumbling with decay. Lines of poison leach from my skin and spread through the floor, slithering toward him like serpents ready to attack.

My father is straightening up, cruel eyes locked on me, acting as if that hit into the wall didn’t faze him in the least. “You think you can fight me?” he hollers. “I made you!”

He shoves his hands forward and sends out a burst of power toward me. I feel it, like the moving air of a thrown punch. On pure instinct, I throw my own magic at it, and the very air seems to detonate in on itself.

My father and I both go flying back from the force, my head cracking against the broken tile as rot continues to seep from my pores. I hear crashes and screams, but that’s all secondary. My sole focus is on him. I don’t know how I was able to block his magic like that, or how exactly I wielded my own in that way, but now that I know I can, hopeful determination bolsters my bones.

“You are done breaking,” I tell him, my chest heaving, lines writhing up and down my skin. From the corner of my eye, I can see some of the servants cowering, not just from my father, but from me. And I know what I must look like—this fae packed with spikes and rot, and I feel like I am every inch a wicked fae, from scaled cheeks to flashing canines.

But I don’t care. I will be a monster if it means I can destroy one.

He snaps his finger, but instead of trying to break me, my father breaks the floor right from under me. I hear my mother scream my name as I start to fall, but I jump up as the ground crumbles, barely managing to catch myself and roll. I don’t even get fully on my feet before I send rot streaming toward him, rotting the ground in putrid corruption as it coils around his legs. I see him grit his teeth, and I know I’m molding his muscles, breaking down his blood, decaying his bones.

And I realize with startling clarity that I can kill him. Right here, right now, I can rot him on his feet. But for some stupid reason, one I hate myself for, I hesitate.

That hesitation is all he needs, making my rot falter and pull back. With ruthless speed, he snaps his fingers, and even though I ready myself to block, his magic doesn’t come for me.

Behind me, I hear my mother scream.

I whirl around, seeing her nearly fainting backwards, arm broken in the same exact spot Jak’s arm was. Ryatt is crying, the sound of the two of them pounding my ears.

I feel a prickle in the back of my neck, only barely managing to spin around before a fist is suddenly thrown into my face. I go sprawling, the skin of my palms slicing open when I land on the broken tile. I roll over, finding my father looming over me. All over my arms, my spikes pulse erratically. I push myself to my feet, refusing to show fear, refusing to back down, no matter how much my mother calls my name.

“You are such a disappointment, Slade,” he tsks.

“Believe me,” I pant. “The feeling’s mutual.”

Something flashes in his eyes, and I know. I know that this is it.

This is it.

I call up everything in me. Every scrap of magic I possess. I recall every moment where he pushed me, degraded me, hurt me. I think of every single time my mother’s back went stiff, when her eyes filled, when Ryatt cowered. I let all that anger flood my mind and let it fuel me.

Power boils through my veins.

My father lifts his hand.

Time drops its speed.

The storm of the room roars. Or maybe that’s the sound in my own throat—the sound in his throat too.

In an instant, my father sends magic hurtling at me with a force that makes my skin prickle. But I’m ready.

If I thought the air exploded before, it’s nothing compared to this.

Our power collides.

And that raw, brutal, killing magic rips right through the air between us.

Magic isn’t supposed to react this way. I’ve never heard of it happening before, but maybe because I carry my father’s blood in my veins, it’s allowing our power to react to each other.

The estate cracks, a fissure appearing between us. But this one isn’t a physical break or palpable rot. This is something else.

A metaphysical rip in the air appears. It’s broken with jagged darkness and rotten lines. It crackles like a lightning storm, thunders with a barrage of deafening blasts. Wind whips from it like a cyclone, tearing off pieces of wallpaper and spinning it around, sucking it through the gash like blood, making it disappear.

My father’s eyes are wide, face leached of color, and the fact that he’s showing any hint of panic should worry me, but I’m too focused. Too caught up.

I pour more and more of my power into it. I let it collide with his, ripping this break in the air even further, filling the whipping wind with the stench of decay and hate. My hands shake, my father sweats. We grit our teeth.

Pain lances down my bones, and for a second, I think maybe he’s broken something, but no. My magic is draining me too fast, too strong. My spikes are going up and down in volatile bursts, and my heart feels like it’s going to explode.

“Slade!” Distantly, I feel my mother’s hand on me, trying to pull me away, feel Ryatt on my leg. But I don’t stop.

I can’t.

And right then, that’s when my father sees it in my face. Sees that I’m not going to give up. The booming outcry that comes from his sneering lips makes a fierce scream come from my own.

Because I would rather die than let him win.

The wind tears at my clothes, tosses dirt into my eyes, the smell of rot clogs my throat, his power pushing, pushing, pushing against mine so hard that my entire body shakes.

Control, Slade.

All those lessons. All the punishments and lectures and hours of exhaustion and pain. I put up with it because I knew I had to learn, had to push so that I could have just as much power and control as he does.

I learned control so that I could take his away.

I shove everything I have. Everything I am. I shove so much it feels like two parts of me rip right down the middle. And that’s when that preternatural tear in the air finally erupts.

I feel it the second the magic explodes—feel it because it explodes through me.

The power finally comes to a head, breaking my father and me apart with an ear-piercing explosion.

For a second, I’m weightless. Numb. Caught in the air right alongside my mother and brother.

But then that slow, slackened time snaps back into place. The rip in the air is suddenly like a massive maw of a bodiless beast, and its dark, storming mouth opens wide. It suspends in the air, facing my half of the room, ready to devour us all.

I don’t even have time to land back on the ground before those lightning teeth snap shut around our entire cracked half of the room. Then it devours us all in a storm of blackness, and all I know is agony and falling and echoing screams of dozens of people.

That ripped mouth swallows us down, down, down into the darkness of nothing, through time and magic and hallowed air.

And then we land in the belly of the beast, and my ripped apart body and poisoned power succumbs to unconsciousness.

I wouldn’t know that I’d ripped a tear in the world until I woke up four days later. I wouldn’t know that I’d ripped myself in half in the process or that I’d ripped the other people into Orea with me, who would now depend on me forever. I wouldn’t know that everything was about to change.

Unconsciousness was my only reprieve, but I wouldn’t know.