Eve of Destruction (51 page)

She sighed and continued to inspect the empty warehouse. The building wasn’t particularly large, but it seemed wide enough to suit their purposes. Whatever had once been stored here had long since been abandoned and ransacked by scavengers, and she was mildly surprised the entire structure hadn’t collapsed. Strands of moonlight filtered in through the cracks in the walls, and enough vermin scurried about the darkness of the floors to fill their apartment floor to ceiling. On this street alone it seemed like there were dozens of abandoned buildings, and no one had taken the time to level them.

“You see a disease, I see a weapon,” Shaedra said eventually. “I feel like we’ve been over this before.”

“And look where it got us,” he muttered as he climbed down from a pile of empty crates. He wrinkled his nose as a pair of rats skittered out from underneath one of them. No doubt they had sensed his unnatural presence; even the screlling rats didn’t want to be around him. 

“Nowhere, just like all our conversations,” she growled. “It’s been three-hundred years, you know. I realize ghosts are supposed to be persistent, but this is a tad ridiculous, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t have killed me, then. Perhaps if you would just listen to me for once, I would leave you alone.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right.”

“Then at least tell me why you’re doing this,” he pressed. “Tell me why you’re so willing to protect this girl. You’ve killed enough people to fill an entire country—I doubt you suddenly found a conscience now.”

“Maybe you’ve been right all along. Maybe I’m just completely insane, and you should stop trying to fix me.”

When he didn’t reply, Shaedra turned back to face him. He was standing out in the open just staring at her, but for once his lip wasn’t twisted in revulsion. In fact, he looked almost…pensive. It was completely out-of-character and enough to give her pause.

“What?” she asked.

“I never thought you were insane,” Alex said softly. “Introverted, eccentric, obsessed…all of those, certainly. But never insane.”

She grunted. “Thanks, I guess?”

“You were smarter than I ever was,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “You were smarter than any Vakari had any business being, really. We were never a people known for our intellect. We came from a culture of warriors, not thinkers. My parents never understood why I chose a woman like you. They thought you only wanted my title and wealth.”

Shaedra’s stomach sank just a little. Alex was rarely introspective these days. There was something completely different about him, in fact, from the tone of his voice to the glint in his eye.

“I never cared about that,” she breathed.

“I know. For all your faults, avarice was never among them. I think you might have actually loved me.”

“Of course I loved you,” she snapped. “You were the only one who—”

She cut herself off and turned away. Arguing with her own personal ghost about the present was one thing, but she had no interest in talking about this. Drudging up the past only made her weak. And she had no use for that.

“The only one who understood,” he finished for her, his voice still soft. “The only one who was interested in what you were doing. Vakar had very few magi—probably less than any other Esharian nation. Young children grew up wanting to be soldiers, to fight in glorious battles against our many enemies. They didn’t want to think. They didn’t want to learn.”

Except you
, she thought to herself.
You wanted to learn everything, and I’m the one who taught you. I showed you magic. I showed you everything…

“I know it killed you when I joined the Enclave,” Alex continued. “You didn’t want them to get involved. Do you know why?”

“Because they meddle,” she rasped. She clutched onto a battered crate and had to resist the urge to hurl it across the room. “They manipulate.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s more than that. They
control
. Even back then, not so long after the Kirshal created them, they had already grown arrogant. They had seen what unshackled magic had done to the rest of Esharia, and they wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. If that meant personally overseeing the growth of every new mage, then so be it. If that meant controlling the flow of knowledge, then so be it.”

He stepped forward across the room, and another pair of rats fled from his spectral boots. “If that meant putting a leash on true savants, then so be it.”

Shaedra grit her teeth. “You think that’s why I want to help Eve, then?”

“I know it is,” Alex said. “You might not have been the Avenshal, but you were special, my love. You never had to train with anyone to unlock your power. Weaving was instinct to you, and no one in Vakar understood that. When the Lesseks invaded, our people refused to believe in you. They didn’t trust that you might be able to save them, and they offered no help. So instead…”

She looked down at her mangled arm. Instead, she had become a monster. The wound was healing, slowly, even despite the cellium. Any human would have lost the limb entirely, but not her. She wasn’t human, not for a very long time. She was darkness—a darkness she had inflicted upon herself.

“Maybe the girl can save her people,” Alex whispered. “Maybe you can give her the support she needs.”

“Or maybe I should just kill her before she destroys everything,” Shaedra said.

She stared down at her crippled arm, at the mottled skin that was slowly returning to its pale color, and then jabbed her palm hard enough to draw blood. She squeezed her fist together, and the glowing, viscous liquid dripped from between her fingers.

She didn’t know how long she stood there looking at it, appreciating what it meant, but eventually she pivoted back to face him…

He was gone. She couldn’t remember the last time he had left amicably. She couldn’t remember the last time they had done anything but yell at one another. Maybe he had finally come around to her way of thinking…or maybe she had finally come to terms with herself. Maybe she just needed to hear the words spoken from her lips—the real reason she was even here.

“Before she turns into me.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

From the first moment Eve had learned of her mother’s murder, she’d been hounded by a recurring nightmare of the Dusties coming after her. It was a simple, primal response made up of equal parts anger and vengeance. A part of her had enjoyed the delusions because they’d given her a chance to lash out, an excuse to flex her magical muscle. They made her feel like she could undo what had happened if she could only push herself that much harder.

Then she had boarded that train to Vaschberg and buried those feelings away. The delusions went right along with them. She’d assumed it was for the better; she’d wanted to be as cool and composed as possible when meeting Danev and whatever else they might encounter.

Instead, the feelings had only festered inside of her. It might have explained why she had reacted so strongly on the train—maybe dealing with her grief was a vital part of learning to temper her powers. Either way, at long last she finally had an excuse to release them, and it felt just as good as she had imagined.

Sadly, her skills as a mage simply weren’t up to the challenge.

Shaedra stood across from her in the empty warehouse. Eve had thrown everything she could muster at the other woman, but, as it turned out, that wasn’t very much. At this point she could weave a few of the most basic spells from Maltus’s book—more than any krata was supposed to have access to—but that was about it. They were no match for Shaedra’s own magical defenses, let alone her Vakari regenerative abilities.

Finally, after ten minutes of solid weaving, Eve dropped to a knee and tried desperately to catch her breath. She already ached more than she had after hiking through the plains for two straight days. The Flensing gnawed at every part of her body; she could barely even lift her arms. A sharp pain stabbed at her lungs each time she tried to breathe.

“You’re still thinking too much,” Shaedra admonished, folding her arms across her chest.

“I’m not sure what you expect,” Eve replied between labored breaths.

“I expect you to hurt me,” the Vakari replied flatly. “You’re flailing around like krata in a magister’s library.”

Eve grit her teeth. “I am a krata. I told you before I don’t know many spells. I’ve picked up a few really basic techniques from Maltus’s spellbook, and that’s it.”

She sighed and tried to regain her breath. Despite how seemingly little she’d accomplished, the musty warehouse air now reeked of ash, and her eyes still reeled from the brilliant flashes of magic she’d produced. If anyone was outside in the alleyway, they surely would have thought a war was raging in here. The building might not have had windows, but the numerous cracks riddling the decaying walls should have been plenty to show off the lightshow.

Fortunately, no one had screamed in terror or come barging in with a squad of policemen. Unfortunately, this all seemed to be a huge waste of time.

“The problem is that you’re still thinking like a mage,” Shaedra said after a moment. “Formulae, equations, predictable manipulations…you need to move past that.”

Eve glanced up and scowled. “That’s what magic is.”

“No,” Shaedra told her. “Not to you it isn’t. It’s a primal thing, an instinct more than a conscious thought. You felt it at the
Calio
, you felt it on the train, and then you felt it again in the forest. Let yourself feel it again now.”

 “It doesn’t work like that,” Eve murmured. “I can’t just flick my wrist and do something.”

“You have before. What’s stopping you now?”

Eve shook her head. It was, really, the operative question. Over the last few minutes she’d certainly woven harder than any normal krata, but there hadn’t been anything special about it—she’d been given access to the spells and studied them. She had picked it up faster than most of her university peers would have, but being a quick study was one thing—being the Avenshal was another. Magic was supposed to be instinct for her; it was supposed to be etched into her very soul by a long dead god.

Well, apparently he hadn’t etched very hard.

“I don’t know,” she breathed, throwing up her hands. “I just can’t do it.”

Shaedra raised an eyebrow. “Because you don’t want to hurt me.”

“You already assured me that I can’t hurt you, even if I did manage to slip past your defenses.”

“But you thought you could, just like you did in the forest,” Shaedra reminded her. “You’re worried about it, and it’s making you hold back.”

“I think you overestimate my opinion of you,” Eve replied dryly. “I’m not that concerned about hurting a monster.”

“Yes, you are, because you no longer see me that way. You should, but you don’t. And it’s holding you back.”

 Eve braced her hand on the cold floor and dragged herself back to her feet. Her lungs had stopped aching, at least, but her arms and legs continued to throb mercilessly. She doubted her ability to heat up a tub of water at this point, let alone weave enough power to wound a Vakari.

“Believe whatever you want, but this isn’t working,” Eve said. “And I need to rest.”

“There’s no time for that,” Shaedra said.

“Unless you want me to Flense myself to death, there has to be.”

The Vakari raised her chin slightly and started to walk forward. It wasn’t a casual stride, either—it was a purposeful one.

“What are you doing?” Eve asked.

“I want you to stop me,” Shaedra told her. “If you don’t, I’m going to hurt you.”

Eve sighed and rolled her eyes. “You can’t trick me into this. I know you won’t actually do anything.”