Someone shouted from behind, “Arrest her!”
“Lord Tristan!”
“Kill it!”
The screams from the crowd were overwhelming, growing louder as they fought for dominance.
Yet all I could hear were those words. Not the ones uttered by the vorakh before me.
But the other one. Thefirstone. The one that had haunted me my whole life.
And just like that, I was back there, back in my memories, in my nightmares. My body went cold.
There was blood. So much blood. More than I’d ever seen. I didn’t know. Didn’t understand. Because I’d never seen blood before. There’d been no hurt in my world. No injuries. No pain.
Only love. Comfort. Safety.
“Just a baby?” screamed the vorakh.
“Please,” my mother begged. “Please!”
She was crouched on the floor in front of me. A wall between us. She’d pushed me into the small cabinet beneath the table before the vorakh saw.
My father had fought her.
But now … he was broken. He’d used his stave, casting spell after spell. But it hadn’t been enough. The vorakh was too strong. Too powerful.
My father lay face down. His arms … the arms which he’d hugged me with, the arms which had been so strong and had held me as he carried me … they were no longer part of his body.
“Tristan,” my mother hissed, she was crying now. Scared. “Close your eyes. Stay quiet.”
But I couldn’t close them. I couldn’t stop staring through the crack, couldn’t stop trying to understand. Couldn’t stop trying to rearrange the images I was seeing—to put my father’s arms back on his body. To wash away the blood. To make him stand up, to hold his stave, to make him speak, and fight.
To make him breathe.
“Close your eyes,” my mother cried again, her voice so low I barely heard. “Don’t say a word. You’ll be safe.”
“Ma?” My voice shook.
“Shhhh,” she said.
The vorakh stalked forward, the ground shaking with every step she took.
“Tris—” My mother was cut off by a scream. Fingernails scraped against the floor as the vorakh dragged her away from me.
I clutched my knees to my chest, staring through the small slit in the door.
She’d looked like any other mage when I first saw her. Not particularly tall. Not even appearing strong. No red eyes. No claws. I’d even thought of her as pretty. She had a prominent beauty mark above the right corner of her lip that caught my attention.
But this wasn’t the akadim I’d been taught to fear. Not the ones in the scary stories.
This was vorakh.
And this was so much worse. Her long black hair fell to her waist, her skin pale. And in that moment, her beauty faded. Everything about her screamed death in my eyes.
“Please,” my mother begged again. “No!”
“You’ve birthed evil. You’ll regret it when he grows. When you see inside his soul like I have. When you learn what he is!”
