Lord of Unkindness Ch. 37

 Notes: HAVE A FINALE!!!!!

Title: Lord of Unkindness Ch. 37

***

Chapter Thirty-Seven

 

Photo by Jeremy Hynes

It’s pandemonium.

Fur flies. Blood spills. Little limbs are severed even as dogs are swarmed under, rats gnawing until they’re inside the larger creatures. It’s horrific—Ciro hates seeing animals in pain, but to see them actively destroying each other as his father and cousin fight for dominance is a level of violence he’s never experienced before. It’s even worse due to the fact that his father has locked down their magic—none of the familiars can be converted into spells, none of them can be handled more efficiently, more mercifully. It’s just a vicious battle of might versus might, and as more rats pour out of the ceiling, Ciro wonders for a moment what he’ll do if Nephele succeeds in killing Victor.

Then the door to Victor’s bedroom bursts open and another two dozen dogs charge into the office. The tide, red and quivering, begins to turn.

We need to get out of here. Ciro finally pulls himself together enough to stand. He tries to go to Angelo, but can’t—the barrier is more than magical, it’s physical somehow. Angelo is standing right in front of him, less than an inch apart, and yet it might as well be a mountain—worse, because he’s on the outskirts of the familiar battle.

“What’s he using?” Angelo says, a question both rhetorical and for Ciro as he looks around the room. “What artifact can keep us apart?”

“I don’t know.” Ciro shakes his head. “Something personal, probably—something that was made by a Hambly, since it’s so attuned to Victor.”

There’s a scream from the side of the room as one of Victor’s dogs breaks through Nephele’s sea of rats to go for her leg. She grabs the vase on the plinth nearby and smashes it down on the familiar’s head, but the crack in her defenses only widens. She has to turn her familiars from going after Victor to protecting her, and shoots a frantic look at Ciro a moment later. “Help me!” she shrieks.

Ciro doesn’t know what to do. Despite everything, he doesn’t want his cousin to die like this—eaten alive by her uncle’s familiars, the ultimate pawn in his game to get Ciro under his thumb. Nephele is an awful person, but she doesn’t deserve this. “Free me and I will!”

Nephele nods shakily and reaches toward the wall behind her, but one of the dogs lunges over her protectors and hits her right in the chest, knocking her onto the floor. She screams again, shrill and pained and afraid, so terribly afraid.

Ciro can’t help her. But Angelo can. He has no reason to—she assaulted Maria, she burned his home, she forced them apart. But Ciro has always known Angelo is a better person than him, and the fact that his lover turns and extends the magic that can’t touch Ciro on Nephele, pushing all the familiars that have converged on her back, is proof of that.

A protective golden light engulfs Nephele, and a second later her rats are drawn in as well. She’s down to…lord, there have to be fewer than fifty of them left. Ciro is intimately aware of what happens to a witch like them when their familiars are taken out, and even if Nephele hadn’t been savaged by his father’s dogs, she’d probably be in shock right now thanks to the fact that over ninety percent of her familiars have died in the last two minutes.

God. His heart, already in his throat, feels like it’s going to rip right out of him when he sees the dogs turn their attention to Angelo.

“No!” he screams at his father. The entire pack is swarming Angelo and Nephele, and it’s clear that the press is a challenge for Angelo to handle. Even with his powerful kinnara magic, he’s being pushed to the edge by the ferocity of Victor’s attack. Ciro can hardly even see Ciro through the animals leaping at him, synchronized like one canine leviathan. Circling Angelo’s head, Ciro’s raven flaps its wings frantically, barely out of grabbing range from the dogs. Ciro wouldn’t put it past his father to hurt Ciro’s familiars right now.

Victor is a bit shaky on his feet, but his expression is one of brutal triumph as he moves across the floor. Tiny bodies are crushed beneath his feet, the corpses of his own familiars ignored as he moves unerringly to Ciro.

“You see the consequences of defying me now,” he says gutturally. “You have nothing left to use against me. You’ve been separated from your mate, and if you don’t agree to submit to my will and allow me to collar you appropriately, I’ll make sure Angelo Fabroa doesn’t leave this room alive. His strength won’t hold out against me forever.”

“Father—”

“Do you understand?” Victor presses. “Give me your agreement, now, or the second his magic fails I’ll have my dogs rip his limbs off. I’ll make you watch it all, son. I don’t need you sane to make good use of you.”

It’s the end of everything. Every hope, every plan, every second chance that Ciro has ever fought for. This is how it ends—on his knees before his father, begging for a chance to be his slave if it means sparing Angelo. It’s worse than he could have imagined, because he dragged the man he loves into this, and…

Don’t give up!

It’s Angelo’s voice, but the connection is coming from Ciro’s raven. Not the one on his shoulder, but the one out in the center of the office flying for its life.

Connect to your magic! Use what you gave me to bring it through. You can still save us, Ciro. I know you can.

Bring his magic through…like he did with Annette, when he manifested his familiars. Only he pulled them through himself, his own body. If he does that here, they’ll just end up trapped behind this magic with him. Wouldn’t that make his father laugh? But he has one out there…one familiar connected to his magic, one that’s linked to him in the open.

And on the other side of the country, he has an entire flock waiting to come to his rescue.

There’s no more time to question himself. His father is right there, familiars as vicious and focused as he always is while Ciro’s flounder and squawk. It’s time for this to end.

And Ciro’s going to be the one to end it.

He closes his eyes, because if he has to look at the scene in front of him right now he’ll never be able to keep his cool. He turns his attention inward, into that connection with his magic that goes deeper than the familiars themselves. This is the essence of what it is to be a witch of his caliber—to hold a reservoir of power that’s always with him, always there. It’s been so long since Ciro has done more than dip his fingertips into it, but now he reaches his self-imposed dam and rips it apart. His magic surges into him, frothing, freezing, already more than his body can handle. So he doesn’t handle it. He turns it toward the familiar in the middle of the office and encourages it to grow, grow, grow…

Come back to me.

“What the hell…” he hears his father exclaim over the roar in his ears, but Ciro doesn’t care anymore. He’s a channel, a vessel for his own power as it beats through his body and into his familiar with all the pressure of a thousand flapping wings.

When he opens his eyes again, Ciro is expecting chaos. With so many flying familiars packed in such a tight space, they might end up easy prey for the dogs, but it’s the only magic available to him.

Turns out, he’s wrong about that. He didn’t channel a thousand birds into his father’s office.

He’s created one single, enormous raven instead.

Ciro’s eyes widen as he takes in the mythological proportions of the familiar he’s brought into being. It’s twice as tall as any of the humans in the room are, its head brushing the ceiling. It can’t spread its wings out all the way in here, they’re so broad, and its beak is as long as a motorcycle. When one of the dogs rushes at it, the raven simply opens its beak and—snaps it up.

It’s the beginning of the end for Victor. The raven hunkers down so its legs are protected, closes its inner lids, and starts snatching familiars up right and left. They just vanish into its maw, and Ciro watches as his father gets more and more desperate. Victor is throwing everything he has at Ciro’s magic, and none of it is working.

Finally, as he’s down to his last few dogs, he breaks and runs for the bookcase behind his desk. The second he grabs a small silver statue in the shape of a rat, Ciro feels the spell binding their magic to familiar form break. Victor spins around, sparks at his fingertips, but it’s already too late for him. Ciro urges his familiar forward, and in one fell swoop it grabs his father up. He’s got just enough time left for Ciro to see his mouth open in a scream of his own before he vanishes into Ciro’s magic.

He can’t describe the sensation that surges through him as his father’s magic flails and fights, then dwindles into nothing. It’s like Ciro has all the magic in the world, but it’s dirty, tainted. It’s too much for him to handle. He has to get rid of it. He has his familiar turn it up and out, a tower of power blasting through space—and the ceiling.

As alarms begin to blare and smoke billows out of the roof, Ciro wobbles and falls to his knees in a move he can’t even feel. He can’t feel anything at all; his body is as numb as his hands were. He can’t feel his lungs work. He can’t feel his heartbeat. How is he even alive? The darkness crawling up in his vision is welcome—any reprieve from this awful nothing of sensation.

But at the edge of his dwindling sight, just before he loses himself entirely, Ciro sees gold.

 

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Seventeen, Part One

 Notes: Ready for a rock and a hard place? 'Cause I got one for you!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Seventeen, Part One

***

Chapter Seventeen Part One

 

Photo by Cody Chan

Kieron’s entire world narrowed down to putting one foot in front of the other. It was all he needed to do, all he needed to think about. It wasn’t easy, but it was simple, and that was all he could handle right now. Step. Step. Step. He moved in time to the pulse that emanated from inside Blobby, tuned to a frequency that Catie would be able to pick up on if she was listening closely enough, but that other ships wouldn’t have any reason to be looking for.

He walked for a thousand steps. Two thousand steps. Five thousand steps, and every step took him farther from—

No.

Just walk.

Compartmentalization. His therapist had talked to him about that over and over—back before she’d been implicated in an enormous scandal thanks to her wife. Kieron wondered what Delilah Farraday was up to now, what her fate had been. Whether she too was using her hard-earned compartmentalization skills—skills that she’d learned here at Hadrian’s Colony too—to get through her life.

Is it hard? Does she miss her wife? Is she still with her? Kieron hoped she was. It hurt to be separated from the people you loved. Hell, it hurt to be separated from people you didn’t love, case in point—

No. Walk. Just walk.

He walked, and slid here and there, and at the apex of this stretch of the narrow ridge he was climbing upon, the wind kicked up badly enough that he wasn’t able to stay on his feet. Kieron dropped to his knees, and he couldn’t keep his grip on Blobby, who in cane-form began to roll down the steep surface.

“Change!” Kieron shouted. It was the first word he’d spoken since walking away from— “Change, Blobby!” Kieron watched with a sense of rising horror as the little bot tumbled over the precipice they’d found themselves on, vanishing, oh shit he was going to fall to the bottom of the canyon and those tunnelers would find him and—

And then he reappeared on six legs, clinging securely to the slippery stone as he climbed back up to Kieron. Kieron stared, his heart beating so rapidly he felt it in his throat, and waited for Blobby to get into grabbing distance. Once there, he grabbed him and pulled him in close with his good arm. “Holy shit.” Kieron closed his eyes and turned his face up toward the tumultuous sky, letting the tiny, stinging droplets of rain ground him. “Baby, you can’t do that to me.”

Blobby tapped out a reply in Morse. It took Kieron a moment to understand. [I am okay.]

“I’m glad you are,” Kieron said. “And I really need you to stay that way, so don’t wait to do whatever you have to do to save yourself, all right? Whether you have to run away or hide, or any time you need to change shape, that’s what I want you to do. Prioritize yourself, okay?”

[No thank you.]

“Yes.”

[No thank you Papa.]

“Don’t call me that,” Kieron muttered. “Elanus is your papa.”

[Creator is creator. Kieron is Papa.]

“Where did you even hear that word?”

[Context. Plus Daddy is already taken.]

Kieron sighed. “Yeah, I guess it is. Still, if I’m the papa, then you need to listen to me when I tell you to prioritize taking care of yourself, okay?”

[Creator said no.]

His fiancé haunted every interaction Kieron had with his kids. “Creator is wrong.”

[I also say no.]

“Blobby…”

[May I have a new name?]

That startled Kieron enough that he craned his neck down at the little bot. “You want a new name?”

[Yes please Papa.]

“Why?”

[Blobby is a name for someone who can only be blobs. I am someone who can be more than blobs. I can be a cane, and a ball, and a taser, and a spider, and a—]

“Yes,” Kieron agreed before he got lost in the recitation. “You can take on all sorts of shapes now.” A warm, fuzzy sort of feeling spread out from his chest. It might just be the painkiller wearing off, but it still left him feeling nice. “I guess you do need a new name.”

[Yes please. But not Catie. Or Catalina. Or Lizzie. Or Elanus. Or Kieron.]

“Right, not a name that someone else has. Something just for you.”

[Yes please Papa.]

“Okay.” He nodded stiffly. “Good. When we find Elanus, we can—”

[No Papa, need a name now!]

“You need a name right now?” Actually, that made a fatalistic sort of sense. Kieron didn’t know how far they’d come from the wreck of their ship. He didn’t know how far the edge of the plateau was, or if they were still being stalked by the tunnelers, or…much of anything. All he knew was that his kiddo had a request, and there was no good reason not to do it. “All right. Sure. Let’s see…do you have any names that you like?”

[Blobby.]

Kieron chuckled. “But you just said you don’t want to be called Blobby anymore.”

[I like how it sounds, but I don’t like it.]

“Ah. That’s a challenge. Well…what about…” It was so hard to think. His arm ached, and his headache was coming back with a quickness. Fucking concussion. “What about Bobby?”

[But…I don’t…bob.]

“Ah. No, Bobby is usually short for Robert, but it sounds like Blobby, so…it’s a good name, I promise. But there are millions of names out there, we can find more.”

The little bot heated up as he thought about it. Kieron waited patiently, and a minute later came— [I like it, Papa.]

“Good.” Kieron smiled. “Then you’re Bobby, baby. I love it.”

[I love you.]

“I love you too.” He basked in the warm feelings for another moment, then forced his eyes open. “All right, I guess we better—damn it!” Adrenaline surged hard and fast, and Kieron grabbed Bobby with his good arm and got into a crouch as he saw the lights flickering through the rain in the distance. “Shit, shit…” He began to back down the slope that Bobby had fallen down a moment ago, but it was slick enough that he started to slide almost immediately.

Fine. Be difficult. “Hold on, okay?” He set Bobby down, then unslung the rope from where it had been looped around his neck. He tied a quick and dirty knot, then wound the rope over his shoulder, between his legs, and around his thigh. He was able to slide down with more control this time, but every second felt like a second too long when a ship with all sorts of scanners was out there looking for him.

The scanners don’t work in the canyons. But they’re not in the canyon, and neither are we. But it’s cold, and we got down fast. It could miss us. It could. Kieron pressed his head to the rocky slope and stared up to see if the light appeared over the ridge.

He didn’t see a light. But he did hear a sound drawing closer. It sounded like…

Claws, scuttling against stone.

 

Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Thirty-Six

 Notes: Oh, the party is getting started now! Yay, on to the chaos! 

**Please note--there are animal injuries in this. They're not real animals, they're magical manifestations, but still. It's going to be a theme for the next few chapters, so please don't read if it bothers you.

Title: Lord of Unkindness, Chapter Thirty-Six

***

Chapter Thirty-Six

 

 Photo by Nikolett Emmert

If there’s one thing about his father that Ciro knows, it’s that nothing keeps him down for long. He pivots from defense to offense almost immediately. “An interesting threat,” Victor says, narrowing his eyes at Angelo. “Almost inspired. I wonder what made you think about removing my ability to feel things. Is it what’s happening to Ciro? The numbness taking him over?”

Ciro startles; he can’t help it. He thought he’d hidden it so well. He’d barely used his magic at all once he got here, and the numbness had bothered him so much less in Angelo’s protective home.

“It’s only going to get worse for him, I’m afraid,” Victor goes on companionably, stretching his long legs out before him. “You might know this already, specialist in familiars that you are, but perhaps it will come as a surprise to you. Witches who have more than one familiar are different in more than just their manifestation of magic. They, like their familiars, have a pack mentality.” He nods toward Nephele. “Why else would I keep this one around, when all she’s done is make my life harder?”

“Uncle?” Nephele says uncertainly, glancing from him to Ciro and back again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, my dear,” he says in a cloying, simplistic voice, “that my Tower houses so many of us not because I like a single one of you, but because our magic responds uniquely to the presence of our own kind. Ciro cut himself off from his magic while he was gone, and that led to him injuring himself, but pain would have caught up to him eventually no matter what. Our minds, and our magic,” and now he’s looking at Angelo again, his eyes shining, “are simply different from other witches. We need our own kind around, those with the capacity to connect to an entire pack of familiars, to provide us with the mental grounding we need to maintain our sanity.

“My brother Magnus is braindead now, but even his presence is better than nothing. It’s a matter of physiological proximity. Ciro’s mother didn’t lose her mind and decide to kill herself until she’d been isolated for months on end.”

The memory of his mother’s leap, her face barely recognizable beneath the damage she’d done with her nails, comes to his mind too easily. Ciro flinches and shuts his eyes for a moment. He’d been warned away from her, told to leave her alone until she’d calmed down, that she’d only try to hurt him again. She hadn’t meant to the first time, he knew that, but now…

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Angelo asks, calm but with a thread of concern underlying his voice.

Victor shrugs. “It’s provable. I’ve got MRI scans noting the anatomical differences in our brains that I can show you; reams of paperwork from tests done over the decades, if not centuries, to show that our kind are pack animals. The original Pied Piper of Hambly didn’t steal that town’s children simply to teach them a lesson. There was a girl in there like himself, the one who’d bonded with all the rats overwhelming her village in the first place. She was also losing her mind without more like her to stabilize her. He came for her, not the rats. She became his wife, and our lineage descended from them.”

Became his wife. The history sickens Ciro; what a polite way of saying a young woman was forced into a marriage with a violent man for the sake of preserving their sanity.

Angelo pauses, and Ciro can see that he’s thinking about calling Victor’s bluff. Do it. I’ll be fine, I will. Except Angelo’s safehouse had burned to the ground, and whatever healing spells had been laid on the land were undoubtedly gone, but—

“I need to see all the paperwork. You understand that I can’t simply take your word on this.”

Victor smiles. It’s the kind of smile that only shows up when he knows he’s got the edge in a negotiation. “Of course. I’ll have it brought in directly.”

“And we need to discuss the ramifications of this.”

“So we do.” Victor leans forward. “I propose that you move here, to the Tower.” Nephele gasps sharply, and Ciro is already shaking his head.

“Don’t let him do this,” he gets out before one of his father’s dogs bites sharply at his face, teeth leaving a bleeding nip on his cheekbone.

“The next one of your dogs that leaves Ciro in pain is dying,” Angelo says bluntly. Ciro watches as the golden threads press even harder against the barrier between them, trying to cut through and failing.

“Of course, my apologies.” Victor is apologizing to Angelo. He doesn’t even care that his own son is being hurt by his familiars; he’s focused on the perceived power in the room. And he’s not wrong to, precisely, but Ciro feels anger rising up in his chest. Both his birds are flapping their wings madly, but where Angelo raises a gentle hand to the raven on his shoulder, Victor just ignores them. “I’m fine with you continuing your work from here, of course. On the contrary, your expertise puts a shine on our own services that will appeal to a great number of people in power.”

The couch is literally shaking. It takes Ciro a moment to realize that the quivering sensation is coming from the hundreds of rats crushed onto it. He looks at Nephele and sees her flexing her hands, tears rolling down her cheeks as she stares at Victor.

“And you and Ciro would live together—in the family suites. Privacy, but not distance, if you understand me correctly.”

“Uncle, no!” Nephele wails before Angelo can speak a word. “You promised that Ciro would be mine! You gave him to me, he’s mine, not his!” The look she throws Angelo is so venomous that if it could kill, he’d be dead in seconds.

Victor looks at her like she’s dog shit he stepped in. “I need you alive,” he snaps. “I don’t need you here. Go to your father.”

“Uncle—”

“Go, you useless thing!”

And that’s when it happens. Ciro watches it, sees the break from reality in his cousin’s eyes. Her sanity, already on a thin tether thanks to what he did to her father, unravels completely. A sane person wouldn’t do what she does next; they would understand that it’s futile and will hurt them worse than anyone else.

But Nephele isn’t sane. She is enraged.

And her rats respond in kind, leaping from where they’re huddled against the walls and surging forward like a brown, living carpet…

Straight for Victor and Angelo.

The dogs respond in kind, and a second later—

Blood.

Everywhere.