The Sphere gleamed in Yagrin’s eye, and he dropped his bag before taking a drink. The hike up Mount Eurajny had been long and arduous. The mountain peak was fortified in a magical force field that wouldn’t allow him to cloak himself and appear near it. And now, on top was a mile or more of desecrated wasteland littered with bones and remains as far as he could see. Broken barrels of kor elixir where others had tried—but failed—to use a concentrated amount of the liquid energy to break through the Sphere’s defenses, he guessed.
The sun beat down on him as he latched his water back at his side and shouldered his bag. He’d found it, finally. But now he had to do the job. A job that curled his insides with delight instead of dread for once in his life. A delight he’d steeped in anger mangled with sorrow the last few weeks. A delight saturated with Red’s blood.
They’d killed her.
He fiddled the edge of the picture in his pocket of her grave and headstone. Taped on the back was a tuft of her bloodied hair. They’d sent it to scare him. Still he couldn’t manage to toss it. Who killed her, exactly, he wasn’t sure. Any of his Dragun brethren could have run back and told on him. Or maybe it was that stone-hearted man who’d sired him. Or Headmistress. He wouldn’t put it past any of them. But they were all dead to him now. As dead as Red was.
A deep ache sank in him like a stone that was too heavy, too settled to ever be moved. His sorrow was a new sort of anchor. There was no freedom in this life without her. There was only vengeance. Yagrin reached for anger, but he was a dry well of emotion. The only thing he could seem to find was iron-willed resolve. He would shatter the Sphere today. In one stroke he would end the use of magic for half a century at least and put a knife at Beaulah’s throat. Of all of them, he hated her the most.
He lassoed his magic out to the glowing Sphere, which hovered ahead of him like a low-hanging moon. Black matter weltered violently inside it. Since he’d started his search, he’d found it twice but lost it.
He’d almost given up until he got the call on the emergency burner phone he’d given Red. Someone had found it. She was missing. It had been four days. Yagrin knew. Right then, he knew. Yagrin sent a truckload of flowers to her family farm. He couldn’t bear to go there again in person. But it didn’t bring Red back. Nothing could. She was just another casualty of the Order’s sociopathic narcissism.
The Sphere shook as his magic attached to it, and the ground trembled, unsteadying him.
He needed to be a bit closer to unleash his fury on its surface. He pulled himself toward the Sphere, careful to keep his hold on his magic, which held it in place. If he let up at all, it’d vanish, relocating to protect itself.
He grinned at the tiny crack already on its glass, though he couldn’t take credit for it. That was someone else’s handiwork. It arced upside down, and he imagined it was a frown on the Sphere’s facade. As if it was upset to be destroyed.
“You don’t want this,” he muttered. “Look how unhappy you are trapped in there.”
He was setting it free. And making those he hated most rue the day they took his life from him.
He skirted a landfill of skeletal remains before getting close enough to the Sphere to do anything. How many had died on a similar mission? He wasn’t sure, but it wouldn’t be him.
When he got up close to the Sphere, its glow reflected on his sooty skin. It was also quite bigger than he’d imagined, the sun eclipsed behind it. It was a sight to behold. The epitome of power. The representation of the balance of magic. Or imbalance, as its dark sloshing insides suggested. But the taint of its appearance didn’t rob it of majesty.
What would she look like when she cracked all over? When she started bleeding and the time clock on their magic ran dry? Would she gleam with power then? One day, someone would appreciate his brilliance and thank him.
“Don’t do this.” Yagrin didn’t have to turn to know his brother’s voice. Had he brought their father, too? His knees felt like they might falter under him for a second, and anger burned in him for letting himself feel it. But when he turned, his father wasn’t there.
“Brother,” Jordan begged. “Please, don’t do this.”
He should have known he’d come. The trace. He’d let his brother put it on him as a prank when they were kids. But because of it, his brother could always tell when he was feeling distressed.
He rested his hands a moment, giving Jordan a chance to catch up to him. Jordan, more than anyone, needed to see the Sphere crack and bleed. His younger brother’s usual swagger was full of dignity and prowess, but today, a deep fatigue hung his shoulders. As if he was in every possible way exhausted. Yagrin almost didn’t recognize him.
“How’d you find it so fast?” Jordan asked, shoring himself up beside Yagrin, keeping his hands loose as if this might come to blows. He wouldn’t put it past his brother to try to hurt him to protect the Sphere. He was determined to follow in Father’s destructive footsteps. To whom, duty to the Order was his altar of worship. Yagrin was done with that. Revenge would be as good as freedom.
“A fortuitous trade brought me a dagger and a Location Enhancer,” Yagrin said. “Traded the dagger for the last of the ingredients I needed for a reverse summoning elixir.”
“Please, turn away from here and go. I don’t want to stop you, but I will if I have to.”
“You didn’t bring Father. Why?”
Jordan’s gaze hit the ground. “You know why.”
“You’re just like him. You spare me nothing by not having him here.”
Jordan wrung him by the shirt. He could fight back. He knew his brother’s tendencies. His left flank was always open. He reacted emotionally without thinking when he got upset, which made his moves hasty, leaving him vulnerable. Yagrin was the older brother, but he’d spent his life watching Jordan, forever in his prodigious shadow, and he knew him better than anyone. Better than he knew himself.
He could pound his face bloody, give him a good brotherly ass-kicking, which he probably needed. But that would still pale in comparison to the hurt Jordan stood there with right now over the girl. It bled through the droop of his posture. It hung in his sullen glance, which he tried to shadow with anger. And it had been weeks. Jordan still sitting with that pain was more satisfying than anything Yagrin could ever do to him.
And not because he didn’t love his brother.
Because he did.
“I hoped that girl would change your cold heart,” Yagrin said.
“Don’t speak of her.”
“But you seem determined to make Father proud.”
Jordan let him go with a shove. “I came here to stop you from making a mistake.”
“You won’t stop me with your words.”
Jordan’s composure hardened, but Yagrin could see right through him. The fury that burned in Jordan was no more than an ember. He was more wounded than angry. More confused than determined. He was still too broken over that girl to do anything to Yagrin. He didn’t have the grit to stop him. That was a good thing, Yagrin supposed. Meant his brother had some semblance of a heart. It hadn’t yet all rotted.
He rolled up his sleeves to get on with his plan, picturing Beaulah’s face. The devastation that would stain it when she heard what happened to the Sphere. How she would fear for her life every day until it ended. A dark smile curled his lips. Yagrin wished he could be there to witness it. But he had other places to be. Other duties that called.
“Yags,” Jordan pleaded, with his boyhood nickname. But that tender wound had long since scabbed over. It wouldn’t work. He would empty the Sphere.
Yagrin’s magic stirred in him like a brewing storm. He raised his hands and unleashed it at the bobbing orb above them. His brother’s knees hit the hard ground and weeping sobs scratched at Yagrin’s ears, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the dark magic assaulting the Sphere’s glassy surface.
It cracked like an egg, and breath stuck in Yagrin’s lungs. Tight in his chest. He held it in, waiting for the first piece of it to fall to the ground and its innards to bleed out. But she glowed brighter. He flinched with frustration, and he drew the destructive magic to himself again, this time with more force. He unleashed. The Sphere cracked more, into a tapestry of spiderwebs, but still its form held. Irritation burned through him, and fatigue weighed down his shoulders. He pulled at the remnants of toushana, all he could muster, the last of his strength, and unleashed once more. But it held, still. Broken, fractured beyond repair, but not a single trickle of matter fell from it.
“Bleed, dammit!” He pounded his fist to the ground and found a glisten of hope in his brother’s green eyes. “Well, it’s a start.”
Jordan’s lips parted as if he were reaching for something to say, but it came out as sobs. Yagrin considered embracing him, but his brother was like their father—it would take more than momentarily wallowing to change his heart.
“I’d stay and chat, but I have someone to train.” Yagrin pulled at his Anatomer magic, and a ripple ran down his body as he slipped into his other skin, the one he’d grown comfortable in as of late. Ever since he’d found an impressionable heiress in a Tavern. The face the girl wasn’t scared of—Octos.
After meeting her close up, her getting away, he wasn’t convinced she deserved to die. So when they crossed paths on the stairs of the Tavern, he’d shifted into one of his personas to get to know her. Form his own opinion. When he offered her the potion to tempt her ambition and she turned it down, that’s when he knew she was different. When he saw his brother come to her aid, he wondered what drove him.
Yagrin had decided then he would think hard before bringing the girl to Beaulah as she’d requested. But it was when the girl emerged and chose to trust him, when she’d said she was sorry he wasn’t allowed to finish his training—him, a nobody—that he’d made his choice. She would live, and he would help her get away with it. When she wrote looking for her mother, who was being held captive by his Dragun brothers, he wrote back forging her hand, to urge her to stay under her grandmother’s protection. And when he’d finally mastered her mother’s face, he paid Quell another visit to drive the point home.
She wasn’t only different, but she would be powerful.
When he later realized his brother was falling in love with her, he knew she needed to survive and be protected more than ever for the sake of not only her life, but Jordan’s. He’d been pondering a way to do just that, stewing over a letter, when her friend Abilene found him. Her binding with her toushana was an unexpected delight.
Yagrin could be credited for many egregious, harrowing things in his life but not loving his brother wasn’t one of them. The girl was good for Jordan. She was good for them all. He glanced at the Sphere, his work unfinished. She would be able to do far more than he ever could. He rolled down his sleeves over Octos’s marked arms.
“Until we meet again, brother.” Yagrin departed to the melody of his brother’s sobs.
