As a child Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecific drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation to it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Why the drudgery of it, being despised for the purpose of some interminable crusade, when it would be so much easier to simply let things happen? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? The world didn’t even love a hero for long. Wanting anything—beauty, omnipotence, absolution—was a natural flaw in being human, but the elective tirelessness of villainy made it indigestibly worse.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum most honestly, the truest truths: fairytale peasant needs money for dying child, accepts whatever consequences follow. The rest of the story was always too lofty, about choosing good or the inevitable collapse of desperation and vice; recordings of human nature, prescriptions to rectify its ills. They were the lying truths, ideologically grand but implausible on the whole. In his view, human nature wasn’t an artful curation of morality, but merely cyclical patterns of behavior. Self-correcting; leaning one way only to balance it out with the other over time.
Callum had always tended towards the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by reaction rather than a cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole but at least it was rational, explainable by even biological terms. A person had to have a foothold somewhere; a role in the ecosystem, like any species. Callum admired that, the ability to choose a side and behave as it dictated. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. It was whether or not he could live with his own decision, because life was the only thing that truly mattered.
The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.
Libby was a hero. Parisa was a villain. Their goals were overarching, appositional.
Nico and Reina were so impartial and self-interested as to be wholly negligible.
Tristan was a soldier. He would follow wherever he was most persuasively led.
It was Callum who was an assassin. It was the same as a soldier, but when he worked, he worked alone.
“Do you worry about dying?” Tristan asked him after dinner one evening, the two of them left behind beside the dining room fire. Unnecessary warmth, given the spring breeze outside, but the Society was nothing if not committed to aesthetics. “That someone might choose you to die, I mean.”
“I will die someday,” Callum said. “I’ve come to terms with it. People are free to choose me if they wish.” He permitted half a smile as he raised his glass to his lips, glancing at Tristan. “I am equally free to disagree.”
“So it doesn’t bother you that the rest of the group might elect—”
Tristan stopped.
“Elect what? To kill me?” Callum prompted. “If I feared elimination I would not have come.”
“Why did you come?”
Reaction. Tristan would not understand that, of course, even if his reasons were precisely the same. He was a soldier who wanted a principled king, though he seemed unaware what his own principles were.
How pitiful, really.
“You keep asking me that,” commented Callum. “Why should it matter?”
“Doesn’t it? The point of the current subject is intention.”
“So you’re asking my intentions?”
Callum took another sip while he considered his answer, allowing his thoughts to steep.
His life at the Society was not uninteresting. It was methodical, habitual, but that was a consequence of life in any collective. Self-interest was more exciting—sleeping through the afternoon one day, climbing Olympus to threaten the gods the next—but it scared people, upset them. Tending to every whim made others unnecessarily combative, mistrustful. They preferred the reassurance of customs, little traditions, the more inconsequential the better. Breakfast in the morning, supper at the sound of the gong. It soothed them, normality. Everyone wanted most desperately to be unafraid and numb.
Humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition, survival. “My intentions are the same as anyone’s,” said Callum after a few moments. “Stand taller. Think smarter. Be better.”
“Better than what?”
Callum shrugged. “Anyone. Everyone. Does it matter?”
He glanced at Tristan over his glass and registered a vibration of malcontent.
“Ah,” Callum said. “You’d prefer me to lie to you.”
Tristan bristled. “I don’t want you to lie—”
“No, you want my truths to be different, which you know they won’t be. The more of my true intentions you know, the guiltier you feel. That’s good, you know,” Callum assured him. “You want so terribly to dissociate, but the truth is you feel more than anyone in this house.”
“More?” Tristan echoed doubtfully, recoiling from the prospect.
“More,” Callum confirmed. “At higher volumes. At broader spectrums.”
“I would have guessed you’d say Rhodes.”
“Rhodes hasn’t the faintest idea who she is,” said Callum. “She feels nothing.”
Tristan’s brow furrowed. “A bit harsh, isn’t it?”
“Not in the slightest.” Libby Rhodes was an anxious impending meltdown whose decisions were based entirely on what she allowed the world to shape her into. She was more powerful than all of them except for Nico, and of course she was. Because she would not misuse it. She was too small-minded, too un-hungry for that. Too trapped within the cage of her own fears, her desires to be liked. The day she woke up and realized she could make her own world would be a dangerous one, but it was so unlikely it hardly kept Callum up at night.
“It is for her own safety that she feels nothing,” Callum said. “It is something she does to survive.”
He had not told Tristan the truth, which was that Tristan was asking the wrong questions. For example, Tristan had never asked Callum what books the library gave him access to. It was a grave error, and perhaps even fatal.
“Tell me about your father,” Callum said, and Tristan blinked, taken aback.
“What? Why?”
“Indulge me,” Callum said. “Call it bonding.”
Tristan gave him a hawk-eyed glare. “I hate it when you do that.”
“What?”
“Act like everything is some sort of performance. Like you’re a machine replicating human behaviors. ‘Call it bonding,’ honestly.” Tristan glanced moodily at his glass. “Sometimes I wonder if you even understand what it means to care about someone else, or if you’re just imitating the motions of whatever it’s meant to look like.”
“You wonder that constantly,” Callum said.
“What?”
“You said you sometimes wonder. You don’t. It’s constant.”
“So?”
“So nothing. I’m just telling you, since you seem to like it when I do that.”
Tristan glared at him again, which was at least an improvement. “You do realize what I know, don’t you?”
“The betrayal, you mean?”
Tristan blinked.
Blinked again.
“You feel betrayed by me,” Callum clarified. “Because you think I have influenced you.”
“Manipulated me.” The words left Tristan’s mouth with a snarl.
It had certainly been a mistake. Callum couldn’t think how Tristan had suddenly conjured up a method to test him, but now that it had happened it couldn’t be undone. People hated to lose autonomy, free will. It revulsed them, the controls of another. Tristan would not trust him again, and it would only get worse. The difficulty of it was the festering, the ongoing sickness. Tristan would wonder forever whether his feelings were his own, no matter what Callum did to reassure him.
“Can you really blame me? I preferred the libation of my choice,” said Callum, suddenly finding the whole thing rather exhausting. “Anyone given a talent has a tendency to use it.”
“What else have you done to me?”
“Nothing worse than Parisa has done to you,” Callum said. “Or do you really think she cares about you more sincerely than I do?”
Tristan’s expression was anguished, curiosity warring with suspicion. That was the trouble with possessing too many feelings, Callum thought. So difficult to choose one.
“What does Parisa have to do with it?”
“Everything,” Callum said. “She controls you and you don’t even see it.”
“Do you even hear the irony of what you just said?”
“Oh, it is exceptionally ironic,” Callum assured him. “Petrifyingly so. Tell me about your father,” he added tangentially, and Tristan scowled.
“My father is not at issue.”
“Why not? You discuss him at length, you know, but you never actually say anything when you do it.”
“Ridiculous.” A scoff.
“Is it? Speaking of ironies,” Callum mused. “Upfront but never true.”
“Why would I be honest with you?” Tristan retorted. “Why would anyone, ever, be honest with you?”
The question fell like an axe over them both, clumsily surprising them.
A shift, then.
For a moment, Callum said nothing.
Then, “When Elizabeth Rhodes was a child, she discovered she could fly,” Callum said. “She didn’t know at the time that she was altering the molecular structure within the room while shifting the force of gravity. She already had a predilection for fire, always reaching for candle flames, but that was normal for a child her age, and her parents were devoted, attentive. They kept her from burning, so she has never actually discovered that she cannot, as a rule, burn. Her understanding is that she can only alter physical forces without disturbing natural elements,” Callum added, “but she is wrong. The amount of energy it would require for her to change molecular composition is simply more than she possesses on her own.”
Tristan said nothing, so Callum continued, “It startled her sister, or so Libby thought. In reality her sister was suffering the early symptoms of her degenerative illness: weight loss, loss of hearing, loss of vision, weakening bones. Her sister fainted, which was purely coincidence. Lacking an explanation, Libby blamed herself and did not use her powers for close to a decade, not until after her sister passed away. Now she thinks of it only as she would think of a recurring dream.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Tristan attempted brusquely, but Callum pressed on.
“Nicolás Ferrer de Varona is the only child of two deeply average medeians who made a considerable profit on good investments, despite what talent they lacked themselves. He is, of course, their most profitable investment, being more aware of his talents than Libby, but not by much.”
At Tristan’s arched brow, Callum shrugged. “He can transform his own shape as well as the things around him.” Few medeians who were not naturally shifters could do so, and shifters could not perform Nico’s magic in reverse: shifters could transform themselves, but nothing else.
Tristan, already familiar with the difficulty of the magic involved, furrowed his brow into the obvious question of why.
“I don’t know if he’s in love with his roommate and unaware of it, or simply careless with his life,” Callum commented with a roll of his eyes, “but unbeknownst to him, Nico de Varona died briefly in the process of transforming the first time. Now he can do it easily,” Callum assured Tristan, “having trained his body to recognize the muscle memory of being forced into its alternate shape, but if not for the magic in his veins restarting his heart, he would not still be breathing. Now he is quicker, more intuitive, his senses keener because they have to be, for survival. Because his body understands that by trying to keep up with him, it might die again.”
“What animal?” Tristan asked. An irrelevant question, but interesting enough.
“A falcon,” said Callum.
“Why?”
“Unclear,” Callum said, and moved on. “Reina Mori is an illegitimate daughter belonging to an influential mortal clan, the primary branch of which are members of the Japanese nobility. Her father is unknown and she was raised in secret, albeit in wealth and privilege, by her grandmother. The control she has over nature is nearly that of a necromancer. Why she resists it so much is incomprehensible—why she refuses to use it, even more so—but it has something to do with resentment. She resents it.”
“Because it makes her too powerful?”
“Because it weakens her,” Callum corrected. “She is a universal donor for some life source she cannot use herself, and there is nothing available to strengthen her in return. Her own magic is essentially non-existent. Everything she possesses can be used to whatever excess it wishes by anyone but her.”
“So she refuses to use it out of,” Tristan began, and frowned. “Self-interest?”
“Perhaps,” Callum said. When Tristan paused in thought, he added, “As for Parisa, you know her story. She is the most aware of her talents. All of her talents,” Callum qualified with half a smile, “but the magical ones in particular.”
When Tristan was quiet again, Callum glanced at him. “Ask.”
“Ask what?”
“What you always ask me. Why is she here?”
“Who, Parisa?”
“Yes. Ask me why Parisa is here.”
“Boredom, I assume,” Tristan muttered, which proved how little he knew.
“Perhaps a bit,” Callum acknowledged, “but in fact, Parisa is dangerous. She is angry,” he clarified. “She is furious, vindictive, spiteful, naturally misanthropic. If she had Libby’s power, or Nico’s, she would have destroyed what remains of society by now.”
Tristan looked doubtful. “So then why is she here, according to you?”
“To find a way to do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Destroy things. Or take control of them. Whatever suits her when she finds it.”
“That’s absurd,” said Tristan.
“Is it?” countered Callum. “She knows what people are. With very few exceptions, she hates them.”
“Are you saying you don’t?”
“I can’t afford hatred,” said Callum. “I’ve told you this, as you may recall.”
“So you are capable of feeling nothing when it’s convenient for you,” Tristan muttered.
Callum slid him a grim smile.
“Did it hurt?” he asked.
Tristan braced for something. Rightfully. “Did what hurt?”
“The things your father did, the things he said,” Callum said. “Was it painful, or just humiliating?”
Tristan looked away. “How do you know all of this about us? Surely not just by sensing our emotions.”
“No, not just that,” Callum confirmed, adding, “Why wouldn’t you leave?”
“What?”
“Well, that’s the story, isn’t it? If it was so bad, why didn’t they leave. Why didn’t Cinderella leave the home of her wicked stepmother, why didn’t Snow White flee the evil queen’s kingdom. Why didn’t Rapunzel leave her tower?”
Tristan curled a fist. “I’m not a—”
“Not what? A victim? You are,” Callum interrupted, “but of course you can’t allow the world to call you that.”
“Is that judgment? An accusation?”
“Not at all. Your father is a violent man,” Callum said. “Ruthless and cruel. Demanding, exacting. But the worst of it is that you love him.”
“I hate my father. You know this.”
“It’s not hate,” Callum said. “It’s corrupted love, twisted love. Love with a sickness, a parasite. You need him in order to survive.”
“I am a medeian,” Tristan snapped. “He’s a witch.”
“You are only anything because you came from him,” Callum said. “Had you been raised in a loving home, you would not have been forced to see a different reality. Your magic might have accumulated in some other way, taking some other form. But you needed to see through things, because seeing them as they were was far too painful. Because seeing your father for the whole of what he was—a violent, cruel man whose approval you still need more than anything on earth,” Callum clarified, and Tristan flinched. “That would have killed you.”
“You’re lying. You’re—” Tristan turned away. “You’re doing something to me.”
“Yes, I am,” Callum said, setting aside his glass as he rose to his feet, coming closer. “This is what you would feel if I were manipulating you. I’m doing it now. Do you feel this?” he asked, closing a hand around the back of Tristan’s neck and turning the dials up on Tristan’s sorrow, his emptiness. “Nothing hurts like shame,” Callum murmured, finding the ridges of Tristan’s love, riddled with holes and brittle with corrosion. His many pockets of envy, desire; his madness equating to want.
“You want his approval, Tristan, but he will never give it to you. And you can’t let him die—not the real him, not even the idea of him—because without him, you still have nothing. You are seeing everything as it truly is and still, do you know what you see?”
Tristan’s eyes shut.
“Nothing,” Callum said, as a sound left Tristan’s mouth, bitterly wounded. “You see nothing. Your ability to understand your power requires accepting the world as it is, but you refuse to do it. You gravitate to Parisa because she cannot love you, because her contempt for you and everyone feels familiar, feels like home. You gravitate to me because I remind you of your father, and truthfully, Tristan, you want me to be cruel. You like my cruelty, because you don’t understand what it is, but it entices you, it soothes you to be close to it, just like Rhodes and her proclivity for flame.”
Tristan’s cheeks were moist, probably with torment. Callum did not enjoy this, the destruction of a human psyche. It was ashy, like rubble. Wreckage was so empty and unalluring, even when suffering was overripe. A sense of cusp; not salty, not sweet, but not neither. It was the peril of tilting one way or another, falling too heavily—irreversibly and irreparably—to one unsurvivable side.
“I am the father you didn’t get to have,” Callum observed aloud. “I love you. That’s why you can’t turn your back on me, even if you want to. You know my flaws but crave them; you lust for them. The worse I am, the more desperately you are willing to forgive me.”
“No.” It was no small amount of admirable that Tristan could speak, given what he was going through. “No.”
“The truth is I don’t want to hurt you,” Callum told him softly. “This, what I’m doing to you, I would never have done it if not to save you. To save us. You no longer wish to trust me,” he acknowledged, “I understand that, but I cannot let you keep your distance. You need to know what my magic tastes like, how it feels, so that you will recognize the absence of it. You need to know pain from my hands, Tristan. You need me to hurt you so that you can finally learn the difference between torture and love.”
Whatever remained in Tristan’s chest brought him to his knees, and Callum followed, sinking with him to the floor. He rested his forehead against Tristan’s, holding him upright.
“I won’t break you,” Callum said. “The secret is people want to break. It’s a climax, the breaking point, and everything after that is easier. But when it becomes too easy, people crave it more, they chase it. I won’t do that to you. You would never come back.”
He eased his touch, taking his magic along with him. Tristan shuddered, but it wouldn’t be immediate relief. He would have no release, and the fade was like a muscle cramp. Like a limb gone numb and then waking, pins and needles. Nerves twitching to life again, resurrecting. Pressure finding a place to fill.
“How,” Tristan began, and Callum shrugged.
“Someone in the Society has books on us,” he said. “Predictions.”
Tristan couldn’t lift his head.
“Not like an oracle,” Callum clarified. “More like… probabilities. Likelihood of one behavior or another. Charts and graphs of data, plus volumes of personal history, what drives us. What follows is a narrative arc of our lives, a projection. Most likely outcome.”
Tristan sank against his chest, and Callum pulled him closer, letting him rest his head there, feverishly returning to the stasis of his own soul.
“Yours isn’t the most interesting,” Callum told him regretfully, “but it does have some relevant details. Obviously I paid more attention to it than the others.”
“Why,” Tristan attempted hoarsely.
“Why me? I don’t know. I requested it on a whim, to be honest. To see what the library would give me. I wrote down Parisa’s name first, for obvious reasons.” Callum chuckled. “I should have known she would recruit people to her cause against me, and Rhodes was such an obvious choice. So hideously moral, so tragically insecure. Surprisingly acrobatic, though,” he offered as an afterthought. “Or so I can only assume, given your… encounters.”
Tristan said nothing.
“Her book predicts she’ll never come into the full scope of her power. Odds of 1/1, actually. Frustrating thought, isn’t it? She nearly wasn’t chosen for the Society because they couldn’t agree on whether she would, but in the end Atlas Blakely convinced them.”
He felt Tristan shift.
“Blakely hates me, of course. Wants me dead. Wiped out like the plague. Loves you,” he added, shifting to look at Tristan. “If I were you, I’d start wondering why.”
“What did it say—” Tristan swallowed. He could speak normally by then, but probably didn’t want to. “What did it say about—”
“This? The elimination?”
No answer.
“I know we’ve only been left alone this long because they are waiting for you to do it,” Callum said. “I know you chose the dining room because, not long ago, you slid a knife into your pocket. I even know,” he added, glancing down to where Tristan’s hand had disappeared from sight, “that your fingers have wrapped themselves around the handle of that knife right now, and that the distance from there to my ribs is premeditated, carefully measured.”
Tristan stiffened. The hand around the knife was strained, though it had paused.
“I also know it’s insurmountable,” Callum said.
Silence.
“Put the knife down,” Callum told him. “You won’t kill me. It was a good idea,” he added. “Whoever decided it would have to be you—Rhodes, probably,” he answered himself on second thought, and when Tristan didn’t deny it, he shrugged. “It was a good idea,” he said again. “But so deeply unlikely.”
Tristan braced, and Callum waited.
“I could kill you,” Tristan said. “You might deserve to die.”
“Oh, surely,” Callum said. “But will I?”
Silence.
Elsewhere, a clock ticked.
Tristan swallowed.
Then he shoved Callum away and slid the knife from where he’d concealed it in his pocket, tossing it into the space between them.
“You can’t kill Rhodes,” said Tristan hoarsely.
“Fine,” Callum agreed.
“Or Parisa.”
“Fine.”
Tristan’s mouth tightened. “And you’re wrong.”
“About what?” It didn’t matter. He wasn’t wrong.
“Everything.”
Things fell silent between them again. Exhausted, emptied, and probably in need of more healing than he realized, Tristan summoned his glass from the table, draining it in one motion of his head. Callum watched the sheen of wine lingering on Tristan’s lips, slick when they parted.
“So who dies?” Tristan asked.
Finally. For once, he was asking the right questions. Callum reached over to pick up the knife with one hand, observing it in silence. The flicker of the dining room flames danced along its edge.
“As it turns out,” he said quietly, and glanced up, meeting Tristan’s eye. “I kill you.”
Within moments, the silence was punctured by a scream.
