Chapter 577 I Was Always This

Here is something I have never told anyone.

Not Kassie. Not Lira. Not Tristan. Nobody in this world, and nobody in the last one.

I was not a good boy.

I know you’ve probably worked that out by now.

My father was a man the whole city loved. He was an attorney, the kind who wins, and he wanted to be mayor, and everybody who met him said he’d make a fine one. He had a handshake people talked about afterwards.

At home, he was something else.

He ran our house like a courtroom where he was the judge, the jury and the law, and the rest of us were always guilty of something. My brother learned to keep his head down. Everyone else learned to go quiet the moment his key turned in the front door.

I never learned.

When he shouted, I shouted back. When he hit me, I didn’t cry. I went away and thought about it, and then I made it cost him. A slashed tyre on the morning of a hearing. A window. A client’s file that went missing the night before court. He could never prove it was me.

He always knew it was me.

So he hit harder. And I made it cost more.

My mother was sick for most of my childhood, and she stood between us more times than I can count. Small and pale and so tired, with one hand flat on my chest and the other raised toward him, saying his name softly, over and over, until he stopped.

One night, he didn’t stop.

I don’t even remember what the beating was for. What I remember is afterwards, going into his study and opening his laptop, the one with his whole campaign on it. Months of it. Every speech, every plan, every name. I poured his whiskey into the keyboard. Then I carried it out to the stone step by the back door and smashed it against the edge, again and again, until the pieces were small enough to fit between my fingers.

He found me doing it.

I had never seen his face like that before. It had gone completely still, and the skin around his mouth was white. He took the whiskey bottle out of my hand and broke it against the step. Then he came at me with what was left of it.

There was a gun in the top drawer of his desk. I knew it was there, because I knew everything about that house.

I ran. I got to the study before him, and I got the drawer open.

When he came through the door with the broken bottle in his hand, I was pointing the gun at him.

And my mother came through the other door.

She had been in bed for weeks. I don’t know how she even got down the stairs. She didn’t say anything. She just walked between us the way she always did, with her hand up.

And I had already pulled the trigger.

That’s the sentence.

That’s the whole of it. I spent ten years not saying it, and it takes about as long to say as it did to happen.

When Tristan died on the ice, I told myself that at least this time I hadn’t shot my own mother. That’s what I meant.

I know. I saw.

Wren’s voice was very quiet.

I saw it the first week, Cade. I’m sorry.

’...It’s fine. You would have found it eventually.’

After that night, everything happened the way things always happen for men like my father.

The police came, and then the lawyers came, and by morning there was a story. An accident. A tragedy. A grieving husband. He lost that election, and he won the next one. Nobody ever asked why a man had been standing in his own study with a broken bottle in his hand.

My brother told me it was my fault. My father told me it was my fault. They were right, and they were the only two people in the world allowed to say it, so they said it every day.

A year later, my father married again.

She had a nice laugh. She lasted four months.

I am not going to tell you how. I’ll only tell you that I did it the way I did everything to him. Quietly, so that he would know, and so that he could never prove it.

He covered it. Of course he did. The truth would have ended his career, and his career was the only thing he ever loved. He used his money and his friends and everything he knew about the law, and the story became another tragedy.

He married again. And I did it again. And he covered it again.

The third one was at the beach house.

He came in and found me standing there with a bloody knife in my hand. His face went white, and he looked at me as though I were a demon.

After that, he stopped marrying.

The police never left him alone. He bribed them, and he outlawyered them, and he knew his way around every door they tried to close. He and I lived in the same house for years afterwards and hardly spoke. Two strangers sharing a kitchen.

That was who I was, as a child.

And then one day, I simply stopped. I don’t know when. I woke up one morning and the boy who did those things was asleep, and I let him sleep. I learned to make jokes instead. I learned to be nobody.

I got very good at being nobody.

Her death killed him in the end. The boy, I mean, the one she died stepping in front of. That’s the only way I can say it.

I thought he was dead.

In the hollow at the end of that crack, on one knee, with my skin coming off and the glow filling the tunnel, I found out he wasn’t.

He had only been waiting for the one thing that could wake him up again.

Losing everything.

Losing the last thing.

Because the thought that went through me then wasn’t about dying. I had been ready to die for most of this Precipice. It was about her. The woman in the crimson armour, who had held my hand through an endless fall. Who told me, in the dark of a Demonic Spirit, that I was a monster, and then told me to stop running from it.

"So what if you are a vile demon? Face it Cade, or you’ll never become worthy of being my summoner."

I had laughed that off, too.

I was going to die in a hole, and I was never going to hear her call me a maggot again. Never going to see her smirk when I got something right. Never going to watch her pretend she wasn’t worried about me.

’...Oh.’

It arrived very quietly, the way the worst things do.

’I love her.’

Not the way I loved the others. I loved them too, all of them, and I meant it. This was something else. It was the one thought I had never let myself finish.

And I was going to lose it before I ever said it out loud.

’No.’

Something at the bottom of my soul had been waiting for me for a very long time. The same thing that nudged me on the ice when Tristan died. The same thing I touched on the cliff and flinched away from.

This time, I didn’t flinch.

I reached down past the well, past the new cold weight behind my ribs, down into the dark water underneath it all. And I grabbed it with both hands.

It came up through me like a flood through a dry riverbed.

[Warning: Dark Essence detected in host soul]

[The host is attempting to channel corrupted essence]

[This is not advised]

’Noted.’

[Dark Essence is being used as a catalyst]

[Your Spirit Essence is increasing...]

[Your Spirit Essence is rapidly increasing...]

[Dark Essence and Spirit Essence are flowing simultaneously]

[This should not be possible]

’Tell me something I don’t know.’

[Infinity Overdrive]

The well didn’t fill. It stopped having a bottom.

Four hundred became four thousand before I could blink, and after that the numbers stopped meaning anything at all. The Spirit River came rushing through the broken door inside me.

Alongside it, twisting around it, came something black and heavy and cold that held the whole flood together like a closed fist.

My burned skin began to knit. Not white, the way it had healed before. It came back with thin dark lines running through it, like cracks filled with ink.

I stood up.

The glow at the end of the crack had reached the hollow. The dragon’s head pushed in through the melting rock, its eyes found me, and it opened its mouth to breathe.

I lifted my hand.

Fire came out of it. Not white, this time. White and black together, twisting around each other like two snakes, and when the dragon’s breath hit that fire, the heat went nowhere.

For the first time since it came up the cliff, the dragon stopped.

It pulled its head back an inch.

’Yeah.’

I took one step toward it.

’That’s right. Back up.’