the year before my ascension.”
Quinn frowned. She wanted to say that wasn’t normal, but judging by his expression he already knew it. “Was your ascension difficult because of that?”
She was also a late bloomer. While her magic had shown up before either of her sisters and she’d been toying with it for years … she was also years past the age Maji entered their ascension. Would that cause it to be more painful? Perhaps even…
Draeven’s shoulders stiffened, drawing her back. “During it? No. My family suspected what I was because they both were—though magic runs in the blood, magic doesn’t always choose the children of Maji. Sometimes it may choose the grandchildren or great-grandchildren. My mother was a potion master, my father a light whisperer. They knew what to expect, and when I finally did start showing signs—though we couldn’t tell what I was yet—” he paused, grinding his teeth for a moment as he inhaled through his nose. A sharp spike of heat filtered through the camp and Quinn was sure it didn’t come from the slowly dying fire.
“The ascension itself, while painful, I knew how it would affect me,” he finally continued after a brief, but tense moment. “It was what happened afterwards that I didn’t expect.” Draeven dragged his eyes away from the sky and looked directly at Quinn. “Unlike you, I didn’t receive my magic until that previous year. I was in no way prepared to control it. That’s why you need to learn to control yours sooner rather than later.”
Quinn opened her mouth to reply, but it was Vaughn that leaned forward and spoke next. “Did you not yet know your master?” he asked.
Draeven twisted his head, blinking as if he had just realized that Lorraine and the Cisean were still there with them. “No. Lazarus didn’t find me until a year or two later.”
Vaughn’s brows furrowed. “A year or two? Do you not know?”
A dark shadow fell over Draeven as he stood up and moved away from the fire, finding his pallet on the far side of the clearing. “The years between my ascension and the beginning of my employment with Lazarus are eclipsed in my mind,” he said, his voice dripping with darkness. “Don’t ask again.”
The conversation died there as Lorraine went back to cleaning up the mess of dinner. Vaughn stared at Draeven’s unmoving back with a pinched look of regret. Quinn sighed and stretched her limbs. If nothing else, Draeven’s story had given her another hint.
She leaned back on her palms and closed her eyes. The darkness of the night called to her, and she let the tendrils slip from her skin and slither free. It was almost too easy for her to bring up the field of vision. She didn’t expect to find anything, but she was curious—Dominicus and Lazarus had yet to return.
What she saw in her mind’s eye, however, had her stiffening. Without wanting to alert Vaughn or Lorraine, she slowly got to her feet and stretched again. When Quinn began to make her way to the edge of the clearing, Lorraine called out to her, wanting to know where she was going, and Quinn surprised even herself when she lied without thinking. She said something quickly about relieving herself before bed and then ducked under a low hanging branch as she strode away.
She needed to relieve herself, alright. She needed to relieve the slowly building malevolence in her system and she suspected Lazarus had just the thing she needed.
Unlikely Tormentor
“It’s not the words of a dying man that speak volumes, but the eyes of one as they stare out into oblivion.”
— Lazarus Fierté, dark Maji, heir to Norcasta, soul eater
Watching. Waiting. For once, it wasn’t the voices of souls he’d eaten that stalked him, but the enemies who thought to slay him while he slept.
“Fools,” Lazarus muttered to himself. As if he wouldn’t notice the eight men that lurked in the shadows around the camp. He’d have picked them off while Quinn was training, but they were still too far out. One of them might have escaped, and with him, word of the very woman he was trying to keep under wraps. No, he needed to lure them in. Let them think that they’d all gone to sleep. He needed them to think that they were easy. That he was easy. And then, when they least expected their demise, he would slit their throats and let them choke as they bled to death.
And that’s just what he’d