I lay awake for a long time that night, plotting all the ways I’m going to kill him.
Chapter four
Carrson
It’s a dream.
A nightmare.
I always know it, the moment I look down and see the unmarked skin of my arm, no rose tattoo to remind me that the world is full of liars. As soon as I see the softness in my chest, the lack of definition, the near-boy body I no longer inhabit, I understand.
I’m having the dream again. The kind that drags me back into memories from when I was younger. This time, it’s the ceremony, the real one that happened when Iwas fifteen.
The me who’s asleep now, twenty-three and exhausted, knows exactly how this works. I won’t wake until I’ve relived it all. That long-ago night. Start to finish. In excruciating detail.
In the dream fear coils through young me like a serpent, slow, sinuous. It slithers along my spine, cold scales pressed tight to my warm flesh, but I don’t show my terror.
Never show weakness.
The first rule my father taught me.
His first lesson, administered with the lash of his belt across my back.
The walk is silent. No words. No instructions. Just the shuffle of shoes on stone, mine and my brothers. I don’t have to count to know there are twenty-one of us here.
We started with twenty-five.
But not everyone survives the tests.
Hands on my back guide me forward, firm and insistent.
This is an honor,I remind myself. I am one of the privileged few.
A son of The Order.
I don’t buy that shit for a second. Most of my brothers do. They’re blinded by their upbringing. They’re drunk on the power they’ll receive when they become men, but I am not like them.
Their fathers are demons.
Mine is the devil.
In the dream, they strip me to the waist at the door. Not roughly, but like it’s part of the rite. A reminder my body doesn’t belong to me. It never has. It, along with my mind and soul, belong to The Order.
Beneath my breath, I beg, plead, with myself to wake, but it’s no use.
Dream-me keeps walking, moving forward on numb feet.
We descend into the vault.
It’s cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature, but the kind of freezing that settles in your bones. That crawls beneath your skin and whispers,you don’t belong here.
Above us, my father’s house looms. Built hundreds of years ago, when we gave the land a name.
But this place?
This place is much, much older.
Ancient.
