Page 79 of Hexbound
Boot heels echoed on the tiles. Sebastian spun around, trying to work out where he was.
"Over here."
He turned and there stood a man, his hands clasped behind his back and his face turned away as he examined the horizon.
"Who are you? Where am I? What have you done to me?"
"I have pulled you into a dream. I wish I could do more." The man turned around, the moonlight gilding his dark features—the same features Sebastian saw in the mirror every morning. "I wish that you would let me."
Sebastian backed away, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. "What do you want?" he demanded as the Prime drank in the sight of him.Stop looking at me like that....
"To free you," his father replied.
Sebastian breathed out a laugh.Don't believe him. He's lying. He wants something....
But what?
Perhaps if he played this game, he would manage to discover what it was. "Why?"
The Prime stared at him. "What do you mean, why? I thought you dead until your wife appeared at my doorstep—"
"Cleo's with you?" Sebastian took a half step toward the man, then forced himself to still. Of course she would be. The foolish bloody woman! "I want her kept out of this."
"If you cannot manage it, how do you presume that I can? It is her link to you that allows me to do this—she's lying right here, beside me, in a meditative trance." Reaching out, Drake pressed his thumb to Sebastian's forehead and an image of his wife sprang to mind, peaceful as she lay on the floor beside his father's body in a gleaming circle of silver light.
Sebastian hovered over the pair of them. There was another woman in the room, sitting outside the circle as if on guard. Ianthe Martin, if he wasn't mistaken. He'd helped kidnap her daughter a month ago, and forced her to steal the Blade of Altarrh, at his mother's request.
"She looks... better than I'd have expected considering her loss," he said quietly, returning his gaze to Cleo. It seemed strange to see her without her ever-present blindfold. The flutter of dark lashes against her pale cheeks was new to him. And so too the way she dressed in a vibrant gown of green that dipped shockingly low—to his mind, at least—in front. All this time he'd only ever seen her gowned in virginal white lace, but that had been her father's influence, clearly. "They took her visions from her.”
"Did they? Or is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? She believes that the moment she loses her blindfold is the moment she loses her Foresight, and so she perhaps places a block in her own mind. We will see. It is rare to lose a talent like that." A hazy image of Drake formed beside him, surrounded by a pale nimbus of light. "There's so much more to the Divination Arts than Foresight, and she has the ability to learn so perhaps it is not such a loss, after all? Tremayne was remiss in teaching her how to control her sorcery. He wanted to use her Visions, but he never explained to her that she could do so much more."
Sebastian’s mother shared Tremayne's prejudices. "He feared her power.”
"Yes."
"Do you?" Sebastian demanded, and this time they were not speaking of Cleo.
"I fear... a great many things. But not another’s power. Every man and woman should have the opportunity to stretch themselves to the extent of their abilities. Especially you."
He wasn’t sure if he believed the words. "What is this?" Sebastian asked, staring at his transparent hands.
"It's a form of astral projection."
He knew so little. "I'm not the one doing it, am I?"
"No, you needed my guidance."
In another world he might have asked this man to teach him. He looked again at his wife. One would have thought her pure and pristine, but he'd seen the fire within her, the passion. Cleo demanded to be loved and she wanted a place in this world that was safe and welcoming. He could give her that, at least. "What will it cost me," he asked, "to see her kept safe from my mother?"
His father frowned. "There is no cost—"
Sebastian laughed under his breath. "There's got to be something you want."
"Ah, my son," the man breathed, looking sad. "I hoped.... But it seems your mother has dealt you a poor hand. She hasn't been kind, has she?"
"If she had been I would not have trusted it," Sebastian replied. "Don't pretend to know me."
"The problem is that your mother never understood what power is. She craved it—a by-product of her own tortured adolescence—but she never truly knew what it meant to be powerful."
