by V. St. Clair
“I do not discount the courage it takes to face me like this, knowing you cannot win. Many full-trained mages have not managed it as bravely as you, though you are obviously very frightened.” He still sounded cool and almost bored, though the compliment seemed sincere. “Now put that toy down and come here. There is something I need to know about you.”
Hayden stood frozen in place, unsure of what to do. Here he was, threatening this guy with a knife, and the man didn’t look the least bit worried. If this was really the Dark Prism guy that everyone talked about, then he’d killed tons of people, and was probably perfectly capable of killing him too. And what did he even want with a ten-year old nobody in the first place? Hayden’s mom had acted like she knew him when he came into the kitchen, or at least recognized him…
“What do you need to know about me?” he asked without lowering the knife, trying to buy himself time to think. There had to be some way for him to get his mom and run—maybe they could hide until he gave up and left them alone…
“I need to examine your Source.”
This meant absolutely nothing to Hayden, but before he could ask the man to explain properly, his mother lurched up from the floor and said, “Hayden, stay away from him! Run and hide!”
“You cannot hide from me, boy; from others, perhaps, but never from me.” The way he said it made Hayden absolutely certain it was true. It also gave him goose-bumps because it was such an eerie thing to say.
Hayden’s mom tried to push him behind her, but the Dark Prism lowered his eyepiece so that the large diamond was directly in front of one eye. He adjusted it slightly, the monocle making a soft clicking sound as it rotated in place, and then he aimed it at Hayden’s mother. Without warning, she screamed as though in terrible pain and fell back to the floor, writhing in agony long after the screaming ended.
Stunned, Hayden looked from his mother to the man who had somehow hurt her without even laying a hand her.
It’s that diamond of his…it’s magic, and evil.
“Now come here and let me examine your Source, or I will kill her while you watch.”
Put like that, there was nothing Hayden could do but obey. He didn’t think this man would hesitate to murder his mother, and that was something that Hayden couldn’t live with. Silently, he lowered the paring knife and stepped closer.
The Dark Prism withdrew something from his pocket—two long, glass needles. For a moment Hayden worried that he was going to be skewered by them, but he relaxed when the man settled for touching one to his chest and the other to his forehead.
“What are you doing?” Hayden asked cautiously while the man stared at the needles through his Black Prism. His muscles tensed, preparing to be thrown to the ground like his mother, who was still twisting around in pain on the kitchen floor.
“Gauging your Source strength and compatibility,” the Dark Prism answered flatly.
This still made virtually no sense to Hayden, but it was clearly the only explanation he was going to get. His captor spent a full minute staring at the needles through his diamond before he seemed satisfied, tucking them carefully back into his pocket.
He met Hayden’s eyes briefly and then nodded.
“This will work,” he said, seemingly to himself. He twisted the diamond slowly around into a new position. Hayden didn’t know what the man was looking for, but he lost his courage and took a step backwards, stumbling over his mother and falling onto his butt on the kitchen floor.
She was still in pain, sobbing quietly but apparently determined not to give the man the satisfaction of seeing her scream and beg. She did mouth, Run! to Hayden over and over again, but his legs felt like lead, and it was all he could do just to scoot backwards until he was nearly to the door that led to the living room.
The Dark Prism stepped over his mother’s twitching body and approached casually, dropping to a crouch when he caught up to Hayden so that they were at eye-level with each other.
“It is important that you hold still for this,” he informed Hayden casually, as though there would be serious consequences if he didn’t obey.
“What are you doing?”
“Removing your Source,” the man explained calmly. Hayden didn’t know what a Source was or why this guy wanted his so badly, but he’d do anything to get free of him at this point.
“Will it hurt?” he asked softly, voice quavering with fear.
“Terribly, I expect,” the Dark Prism confirmed without emotion.
Hayden swallowed hard and then asked, “When you’re done…will you leave my mom and I alone?”
One side of the man’s mouth quirked upwards momentarily, as though faintly amused, and then he became expressionless once more.
“Yes, when I have finished with you, I will leave.”
Steeling himself for the promised pain, Hayden asked, “What do I have to do?”
“Hold out your hands like this,” the Dark Prism instructed, holding his own palm-out to demonstrate.
Hayden did as he was told, still sitting awkwardly on the floor, and the man pressed his own hands against Hayden’s and interlocked their fingers so that their palms were touching. Hayden had no idea why they needed to hold hands, but maybe it was just to keep him from moving too much…
The Dark Prism stared at him through the diamond on his head, and from this close up Hayden could see little streaks of color in it from the light in the room. For some reason it made his head hurt, even though he’d seen the sun cast different colors through glass before and it had never bothered him.
Before he could think too much about it, the most hideous pain he had ever felt slammed into him like a wall of bricks. It felt like his entire body was burning up from the inside out, and he screamed as the pain exploded in his chest and shot down both arms. He was still screaming when the feeling changed from burning to tugging, as though something thick like molasses was being dragged from every part of his body and pulled into his protesting arms, which cramped terribly as the sensation moved from his shoulders down to his elbows and towards his wrists.
He could hear himself screaming, and his mother now as well, though both sounds seemed dim and faraway to his ears. It felt like his very heart was being ripped out of his chest, and he wanted to beg for it to stop—for the Dark Prism to just rip whatever he was pulling on out of his hands as fast as possible to make it all end—only he couldn’t stop screaming long enough to form words.
The tugging sensation was all the way down to his wrists…to his hands…it was going to come out soon…
Please hurry up…Hayden prayed, staring into the pointy end of the diamond that was hovering over him. Please just let it end…
Inexplicably, something recoiled inside of his hands and the tugging sensation stopped quite abruptly. For a moment it felt like a rubber band that had been stretched as taut as it would go had been released and snapped back to its original form, and then instead of something being pulled out of his body, it felt like something was being dumped back in.
The thick, fluid feeling in his arms shot back into his body and seemed to flood him, and at an alarmed sound from the Dark Prism, Hayden looked into the eye that was uncovered and saw fear. The man tried releasing Hayden’s hands and pulling away, but Hayden couldn’t unclench his fingers as pain continued to shoot through him like knives, and then the burning sensation was back, this time moving in reverse. He had shouted himself hoarse but was still screaming silently, fingers locked tightly around the Dark Prism’s as something bright and fluid surged through his hands and up his arms, streaming into him until he felt like he was overfilling and drowning inside himself. The burning sensation in his hands was agonizing and getting worse, and then all Hayden could see were explosions of light in front of his eyes, thousands and thousands of them flashing across his vision. It felt like his head was going to explode, like his brain was overheating and couldn’t process anymore, and then everything went white and the last sound he heard was his mother’s scream…
&
nbsp; Hayden had no idea why he was lying on the floor in the library, but he lurched upright and leaned over a nearby potted plant, vomiting horribly. He could still feel the ghost of the light-sickness he’d just remembered, and his Foci tingled unpleasantly in an echo of the pain he’d endured back then. When he’d emptied every corner of his stomach into the poor potted plant, he blinked tears out of his eyes and stared down at his trembling hands to make sure that his Focus-correctors were still in place. The sight of the intact three-inch correctors was the most welcome sight in the world right now.
His entire body shaking horribly, Hayden stared up at his father—who was standing idly nearby, watching him suffer without emotion—and said, “You…you were trying to take my Source?” he now knew enough about magic to understand what that meant. The Source was the spark that was essential to life, that all living things possessed even if they lacked the Foci to channel magic with it. “You would have killed me.”
Aleric Frost looked absolutely impassive when he said, “Obviously.”
“You lied to a ten year old who knew nothing about magic,” Hayden blurted out indignantly. “You told me you’d leave us alone once you had what you wanted.”
“And so I would have,” his father answered easily.
“You neglected to mention that you were trying to rip the very life from my body.”
“That would not have made you any more cooperative.”
Hayden still felt shaky and unsettled. He wasn’t sure whether he felt better or worse for finally knowing what his father wanted from him all those years ago. He had deluded himself into thinking that maybe he had been seeking an ally, and even though Hayden would never have agreed to it, at least it would have made him feel somewhat valued by his own father…
“Why in the world were you trying to remove my Source?” Hayden suppressed a shudder at how close his father had come to succeeding. He knew what the heavy, liquid sensation being pulled through his Foci was now. It had gotten all the way to his hands before he’d somehow pulled it back inside of him.
The Dark Prism looked like he wasn’t at all impressed with Hayden’s inability to extrapolate, though Hayden was still reeling from what he had just learned and wasn’t thinking very clearly at the moment.
“I intended to add it to my own to compound my power.”
The simplicity of it made it no less breathtaking. Hayden stared up at his father for a long moment as he digested this.
“You found a way to remove my Source and add it to your own?” A normal prism would never have been capable of such a feat; why did broken prisms seem to have stupidly powerful alignments? Or was it just the Black Prism?
“I believed so at the time, though it obviously needs fine-tuning since you were able to break the spell by willpower alone,” his father admitted.
“But why me? Of all people in the world you were planning to kill, why did you track me down specifically?”
“We are related by blood, which makes us similar in some ways. I believed—still believe—that it will be easier to merge with a Source that is more compatible with mine than a stranger’s.”
All this time, his only interest in me as a son was the fact that he could loot me for parts to make his own magic more powerful.
“There really isn’t a scrap of human decency inside of you anymore, is there?” Hayden asked quietly. “I can’t believe anyone ever thought you had been healed during your time in the schism and were one of the good guys now. Laris even wanted to approach you for a partnership…”
Aleric raised his eyebrows and asked, “Who?” with faint interest.
“Laris—he’s on the Council of Mages, assuming you didn’t kill him.” He frowned at the thought, little though he liked Laris. “We kept getting reports that you were traveling the Nine Lands, healing people’s warped Foci so they could do magic again, and he thought you’d gone humanitarian. He wanted to approach you openly and ask you to share some of your magical knowledge with the Council for the good of mage-kind, even though Asher insisted that whatever game you were playing, it wasn’t for the good of mage-kind.”
His father looked vaguely amused as he said, “They should have listened to my old friend. He may be a traitor, but he was never stupid.”
Normally Hayden would argue that Asher wasn’t the one who turned traitor, but he had other things on his mind right now and let it pass without comment.
“All of those people you helped—” he gasped and slapped a hand to his forehead as understanding washed over him. “You were healing their Foci to make sure it was possible. You were experimenting on them because of me…”
Making no attempt to deny this, Aleric tilted his head fractionally and said, “When I learned that you required heavy correction due to the damages you incurred during our first meeting, I knew that your Foci would need to be straightened before I tried again. I needed to be sure I had the right sequence of alignments before I attempted such a spell on you—I have never before had occasion to attempt to repair damaged conduits, and one misstep could have killed you at the outset. Better to practice on less valuable targets.”
“You’re still determined to pull my Source out, even after your disastrous last attempt?” Hayden had to admit, the man had nerve. He had been nearly blown up, thrown into a schism and forced to spend the last five years living inside the other realm without remembering anything about who he really was, and yet he was ready to give it another go as soon as he came back.
For a moment he worried that his father would strike him for questioning him like this, but the feeling passed when it became obvious that his father had his mind engaged elsewhere up until now. He finally turned his entire focus to Hayden—not necessarily a good thing—and seemed to size him up.
“While I do intend to extract your Source and merge it with my own, my more immediate concern is with regaining what you have taken from me.”
Confused, and suddenly feeling like he was in terrible danger, Hayden cautiously asked, “What did I take from you?”
“Have you always been this unintelligent?” his father asked softly, though still in that dangerous tone of voice. “When the link was opened between us, you managed to siphon off a sizeable portion of my own Source before I was able to break contact with you.” As the full implications of this hit Hayden for the first time, he added, “Did you honestly think you came by your power naturally? No one should be able to channel magic through such heavy Focus-correction under normal circumstances.”
Holy arcana…Hayden thought numbly. His spell backfired on him that day. I ended up with part of his Source added onto my own—that’s why I have such a ridiculous amount of Source power, because I’ve got more than my share to work with.
It all made perfect sense, and he wondered dimly how it had never occurred to anyone before now to think of it. Then again, he didn’t even know it was theoretically possible to remove someone’s Source and transfer it to another living host, or that it would merge successfully even then. He doubted that even Asher would have dreamt of such a thing, so maybe it wasn’t so surprising that it hadn’t occurred to them before now.
“Oh,” was all he said in response to this amazing piece of information, because really, what else was there to say?
Now I know why my father wants me alive…he wants his power back.
He had no idea just how much of the man’s Source he had siphoned off for himself, but it could only be a good thing that his father no longer had it to work with. That should make his spells weaker, or make him tire faster, shouldn’t it? Maybe it was possible to beat him this time around after all…
“Is that what you’ve been working on since you got back to this realm?” he asked hesitantly.
“Yes.”
Trying not to wince, Hayden added, “Are you, um, close to having your spell perfected?”
Without blinking, Aleric said, “I believe so, though I must be certain this time. It will take me a little longer before I am prepared to try again
.”
Right, so I have a little time to figure out how to destroy him, but not much…
“Um, may I be excused to shower?” He needed some time alone to process this enormous amount of information before his brain exploded, or worse, before he said anything to get him murdered preemptively.
His father waved him away like an irksome fly and turned back to his work without another word to him, as though Hayden had abruptly ceased to exist. Moving as quietly as possible to keep from drawing the man’s unwanted attention, he fled the library and put as much distance between them as he could.
13
The Black Prism
Hayden spent such a long time in the shower that under normal circumstances someone probably would have checked up on him to make sure he hadn’t drowned. As it was, his father didn’t seem to care where he was or what he was doing—or how much hot water he used.
When he finally emerged from the bathroom, skin bright red from the heat, he chose one of the numerous spare bedrooms to claim as his own, trying to decide who might have owned it before him, back when the Frost family was in its heyday. If there were any clues within the room itself, they had long been purged, because there were no pictures on the walls or personal effects of any sort to be found. Mostly he chose the room because it was as far away as it was possible to get from his father’s room on the second floor, and also because of the commanding view it had of the grounds, courtesy of the large bay windows. It almost gave the illusion of being free.
He dug through the closet until he found clothing to borrow. Judging by the size and fit, and the fact that the clothes didn’t have that dated look that spoke to fashions of an earlier era, he concluded that these must have been his father’s old things from his school days. He assumed the man wouldn’t mind him borrowing them, since he didn’t exactly give Hayden time to pack before abducting him.
Technically I own this house…so does it still count as abduction if I’ve been brought back to a place I legally own?