“You sense emotions the way others hear or see. You taste their longing and anger, and it gives you strength. That’s the anathreia in you. It hungers for the souls of others. At first a sip would do, but now you need more to sustain yourself. You’ll need to drink from those with powerful energeia for your anathreia to thrive. Divine, like champions. Like Petros.”
“Let me through!” Petros shouted as a second guard held him back.
Madoc’s hands flexed, then fisted. She was talking in riddles, trying to get into his head. “Everyone’s soul is the same. Energeia doesn’t make a person’s soul stronger.”
“What is a soul but the collective will of the heart? Intention is power, Madoc, whether it be a storm of rage or a whisper of regret. Energeia amplifies that intention, turns it to action.” She pressed her fingers just below her collarbone. “You know what your heart wants, Madoc.”
Energeia listens to the heart, not the mind. Ash had told him that when they were in the temple. He could feel connections forming in his brain—links between his intuition and hunger, between emotions and life. To take a person’s energeia was to open their chest and rip out their beating heart.
It was a good thing Petros didn’t have one.
He shook his head to clear it. He couldn’t listen to Anathrasa. He refused to make himself like her in any way.
But when he breathed in, his veins were tingling. He glanced at the guards who had beaten him, now holding back Petros, awaiting their Father God’s command. At Geoxus, watching him with anticipation.
At Petros, arms crossed, glaring at Madoc with the same smug superiority that had haunted Madoc all his life.
“Petros hurt you, didn’t he?” murmured Anathrasa. “He took your sister away.”
Madoc flinched. Petros hadn’t killed Cassia alone. Anathrasa had made it possible.
“He wanted to frighten you,” she said. “Great power comes from fear. He planned on taking the mother—he knew you were fond of her—but the girl got in the way. You remember . . . that day he came to ask about the street fights.”
Don’t listen, he told himself. But his anathreia was already swirling to life, and his throat was parched for a taste.
“He hurt her to incentivize you,” Anathrasa whispered. “She was begging for death in the end.”
Petros had taken Cassia because of him.
Petros had killed her because of him.
“What are you doing?” Petros now faced Anathrasa with his arms open, pleading. “Anathrasa, you condemn me? I have given you everything!”
Madoc’s hands were shaking. His jaw flexed. He could see Cassia’s face, twisted in pain.
A burning, poisonous anger raced down his limbs. His sister’s death demanded vengeance. Elias had known it. Elias had tried to act on it.
Now it came down to Madoc.
Petros’s arms dropped to his sides. A sneer curled his lips as he lifted his gaze from Anathrasa to Madoc.
Madoc tried to shove away the panic now blaring inside him, but memories were clawing to the surface. Things he didn’t speak about or even admit existed. He’d locked it all away, but it was spilling free now, like his anathreia, no longer able to be contained.
Madoc closed his eyes.
He was hungry. It was dark. He was in his bedroom, where his father had thrown him after he couldn’t lift a rock in the garden. He swept the dust and small bits of dirt into the center of the room with his hands and tried to move them. He tried and tried and tried, but he was still hungry, and it was still dark.
He was on the street. Starvation gnawed at his stomach, as if his belly button and spine were chafing together with nothing in between. He picked the pieces off fish bones that someone had thrown out. But a growling dog stole the carcass from him before he got enough.
Elias was at the table, spinning a clay bowl of broth lazily with the twist of his finger. You can have some if you can get it, he said. Madoc tried to pull the bowl his way with geoeia. He focused all his efforts. In the end, he slugged Elias in the shoulder, and the broth spilled on the floor, and they were both hungry.
Three brutes with rocks in their hands attacked him on his way home from the market. Pigstock, they called him. They stole the wheat he’d bought for Ilena. The beads he’d gotten for Cassia. They kicked him and pummeled him until his vision went