Vaskel looked at her hand and saw his future spreading before him. A special power would make him valuable, powerful, and needed. Like Marina. He placed his hand in hers.
“Do you agree to the binding?” She traced one finger languidly up his arm. “Do you take these powers and this connection?”
“Yes,” he said before his brain could talk him out of it.
The moment the word left his lips, pain lanced through his arm like liquid fire. He bit back a scream, not wanting to show weakness, as something seemed to burrow beneath his skin, flames licking the path Marina had traced. The sensation lasted only seconds, but when Marina released him, he could have sworn he saw faint marks on his skin, whispers of black slipping away beneath the red. But when he looked again, there was nothing. Only his skin, unmarked and unblemished.
“Was that so hard, little brother?” Marina asked, her words a velvet caress. “You’ll start feeling it within a few days. A prickling sensation when danger approaches. The closer the threat, the stronger the warning. Use it wisely.”
She rose gracefully, leaving coins on the table for the ale. “Oh, and Vaskel? Best not to mention this to anyone. They might get jealous, and jealousy leads to such unpleasant complications in our line of work.”
He nodded before he noticed her taking her pack from the back of the chair. “You’re leaving?”
Her smile unfurled slow and sultry. “It’s time for me to fly solo for a while. Besides, two hellkins with the ability to sense danger in a crew would be overkill, don’t you think?”
She was gone before he could respond, slipping through the crowd and vanishing into the night. Vaskel sat alone in the tavern, staring at his unmarked arm, wondering what he’d just done.
“It’s nothing,” he told himself, as his mouth creaked into a yawn. “I’ll probably never see her again.”
Seven
Vaskel staredat his arm now, those marks suddenly not unfamiliar or inexplicable. He should have known the moment he saw them. He should have remembered his promise from so many decades ago. But, in his defense, he hadn’t seen her since that night.
He’d trekked all over The Known Lands, going from crew to crew and village to village, but he’d never spotted Marina again. He’d never even heard about a beautiful hellkin with special abilities. At first, he’d asked. The first few years after she’d left, he’d looked.
But Marina had proven herself to be as elusive as ever, leaving behind only whispers and tales that seemed too fantastical to be true. After a while, Vaskel convinced himself it had never even happened. Maybe he’d imagined her entirely, he’d thought. He almost laughed at how foolish that idea had been. Foolish and wishful.
Vaskel met Iris’s eyes. “I know who’s behind this.”
The words came out flat and emotionless, but inside Vaskel felt like he might shatter into a thousand pieces. How could he have been so stupid? How could he ever have been so young and reckless and desperate for approval?
Iris studied him. ”Someone from your past, I take it?"
Vaskel laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Someone I thought was gone. Someone I hoped was gone. We parted ways years ago, and I parted ways with her kind of work and her way of thinking not long after that.” His mind went to Lira and the honorable crew that had become his genuine family. “It was a lifetime ago, and a part of me thought that shedding that version of myself would mean shedding all of it.”
He trailed off, staring at the marks. They were more visible now, as if the revealing spell had somehow strengthened them. Or perhaps whoever was on the other end of the soul bind was drawing closer. “I was clearly wrong.”
“According to the spell book, soul binds can lie dormant for decades,” Iris said. “Sometimes they’re never activated.”
“I think I always knew this one would be,” Vaskel whispered.
The hellkin thought of all the years that had passed since that night in the tavern. He’d changed so much, he’d become someone he could be proud of, and he’d found friends worth keeping. He’d built a good, honest life in Wayside, but now his past was coming to claim its due.
“Twenty years,” he said, more to himself than to Iris. He kicked the leg of the table hard enough to make the cauldron jump, and the bookwyrms leapt from their perches and fluttered around the cage. “I was so young then. I didn’t understand what I wasagreeing to, and I didn’t have the first clue about debts and the people who collect them.”
“Then you were manipulated,” Iris said firmly. “Whoever did this took advantage of your youth and inexperience. That’s not foolishness, Vaskel. That’s being a victim of someone’s cruelty.”
But Vaskel barely heard her. He was too busy cursing his younger self, the desperate boy who’d wanted so badly to matter that he’d sold a piece of himself for powers. But if he was being completely truthful, he had little room for complaint. She hadn’t tricked him into a poor bargain, and until that moment, he hadn’t regretted making the deal. Since so long had passed without a single sign of Marina, it had felt like a bargain that had cost him nothing.
On top of that, the gift Marina had given him had worked. He could sense danger, and he had saved his crew countless times over the years with his warnings. It had made him sought after and valued, even after he’d matured into a fierce fighter in his own right. But now he knew all of that hadn’t been free, although he didn’t know what it would cost him or why she was collecting now.
Now that he was finally happy. Now that he’d finally found a place to call home. But maybe that was it. Maybe that was why she was calling in her debt. Maybe she knew. Maybe she’d always known precisely where he was. Maybe she’d been biding her time and waiting for the moment when collecting the debt would cost him most dearly.
“There’s no doubt in my mind who’s behind this,” he said, the name sitting like poison on his tongue, a curse he could barely bring himself to utter.
Eight
“Marina,”he said, the name hanging in the air between them. “She was a hellkin I once crewed with, and she’s the one...”
