Page 245 of Eldritch
At first, Zevander might’ve thought she was a seer, but he turned to see the young Alastor quietly sliding a dagger from a holster on the table. The boy tiptoed toward them, his footsteps hardly making a sound against the dirt, as he approached the man from behind.
“By whom?” The drunk belched in her face and laughed when she grimaced. “You and your little spindling brother? Murdered by a monster and her weak, powerless?—”
The boy jabbed the blade into the back of his neck and backed away as the drunk reached for his throat, gasping.
The girl scrambled out from beneath him only seconds before he collapsed face-down in the dirt. Blood pooled around him, his body twitching as the last remnants of life escaped him.
“Alastor!” the little girl whispered. “What have you done?”
Eyes wide and panicked, the boy glanced up at her and back to the dead man. “He…He was going…to hurt you.”
Her face twisted to worry, jaw trembling. “They’ll throw you into a vein for this. He was a highblood.”
The dread in the boy’s eyes hardened and he crawled toward the man on hands and knees, and rifled through his pockets, until he pulled out a small rock of vivicantem, dangling from a chain. Alastor glared at the man as he held it up to the light. “Nothing more than jewelry for them.”
Words Zevander had said himself a time or two.
The boy unclasped the chain and pulled it through the hole in the white stone, leaving it free in the palm of his hand. “I could take it all at once. They would blame me, not you.”
“No. You’ll become Carnifican.”
“Better than burning in the flame.”
Zevander’s stomach clenched as he watched the boy pop the stone into his mouth and swallow it.
“No going back now,” he said, tears wavering in his eyes as he held the young girl’s hand in his. “I love you, Melisara. No matter what happens.”
“What are you doing here?” a voice growled from behind, and Zevander turned to see Cadavros standing behind him.
“You lied about who you were,” Zevander said. “You were nothing more than a spindling child.”
“Yes. I was born a spindling. Not even the king is privy to my past.”
It made sense now, why a mage as powerful as Cadavros would criticize the king and highbloods. Why igniting the vein may have once been important to him for innocent reasons.
Good reasons.
“Do you know what happens to a spindling when he’s given an excessive amount of vivicantem at once?” Cadavros pressed his lips to a hard line, as if he were holding back a surge of emotions. It was strange to see him that way when Zevander had always known him to be cold and detached. “His bloodline magic is restored. But we wouldn’t know because we continue to starve our spindlings. More mouths in search of vivicantem. More competition for power. Spindlings aren’t worthless, after all. I became Magelord. An impossible feat, as I’d been told the entirety of my life.” Cadavros crept toward the children who sat curled into one another on the floor. “I acquired my mother’s ability to steal identities rather easily after that. Face eater, she’d once been called.Sanguidin. A vampiric blood magic my sister inherited naturally. The ability to summon fangs at her will.” He nodded toward the drunk lying on the floor. “Eventually, I assumed his son’s place as an apprentice in the magehood by stealing his identity as well. It wasn’t as easy as drinking blood, like Melisara. I had no fangs to call upon for the task, therefore, I had to consume them whole.” His lips curled in repulsion.“A disgusting dilemma. To conceal who we were, I went by Cadavros. She went by Melantha.”
Zevander froze and swung his gaze back to Cadavros. “Your sister is Melantha. Apprentice to the Magelord?”
A memory sprang to mind, of sitting in a tavern across from an old woman who bore an awful disfigurement. The one who’d gotten Zevander’s father arrested. The one who’d insisted on keeping young Zevander for reasons he couldn’t understand at the time. “You hoped to cure her. That was your intent.”
“We all begin with good intentions, don’t we? Even the darkest of souls.”
More revelations came to light as Zevander pieced together snippets of thought. “It was her. Killing the sexsells in The Hovel.”
Cadavros chuckled. “She always harbored a bitter resentment toward our mother, though it was our mother’s vampiric magic which offered her a way to stay youthful and beautiful, drinking the blood of attractive women.”
“Why flammapul? She used that to kill them.”
The old mage sighed. “She loathed conflict. It was easier for her to seduce her victims in brothels. No rituals or ceremony, nor violence or ancient chants. Just hunger and the desire to walk amongst other mancers without judgement. Flammapul simply kept them from fighting. As a child, Melisara was gentle as a butterfly.” A darkness shadowed his eyes. “The world made her a monster.”
“Zevander?” The sound of Maevyth’s voice had Zevander twisting around, searching for her.
The small hovel blurred and shifted.
Zevander stood before a colossal tree, the width of the trunk about the size of the home he’d just stood in moments before. The dark hollow had him staring, recalling a time when he’d seen it once before. Weeks ago, in the woods.
