Page 11 of Broken Souls

And with that realization comes another one.

Feeling cold, I flip over the bacon.

Varius has no real understanding of what love is. So how can he ever truly love me?

Five

HER

After breakfast, I start to clean up, and Sau joins me in the kitchen.

“Are you sure you should be up?” I ask her. She looks just as flawless as always – her long black hair beautifully shiny and lush, her green eyes highlighted by dark eyeliner, but there’s a heaviness on her shoulders that seems to bow her inwards despite the strict posture of her back.

“I’m a single mother of eight boys. It’s going to take more than a curse to keep me down.” She gives me a look that reinforces that statement, and I smile at her.

“I don’t know how you did it,” I say, shaking my head as I stack the dishes in the dishwasher. “I know there’s over a decade between them all, but how did you ever survive their teenage years? Especially Maddox’s?” I shudder.

She laughs as she grabs a dishcloth to start wiping down the table. “With a lot of weed.”

I glance at her in shock.

“I used to ‘hide’ a stash in my room. The boys would find it, do it, and then I’d get a blissful few hours of peace as they zonked out. Though once, Rudy and Talon watched a snail for three hours as it tried to climb a wall. They were torn between rooting for it every time it went higher and being sad that it was going further away from any food source. The next morning, I find out they spent the night attaching shelves to the outside of the house, then stacking them with all our fruit and vegetables. I was livid as Varius was hosting his first meeting here, and all the shops were closed so I couldn’t restock. Thank gods, none of the capos were vegetarian then.”

I laugh. She comes over to the sink and shakes out the crumbs she collected on her cloth.

“You weren’t worried about weed leading to the harder stuff?” I ask as I turn on the dishwasher.

She gives me a look. “We run a drug empire, Micha. If they wanted to try something, all they had to do was throw their last name around. Everyone wanted their favor.”

I incline my head.

Hanging the dishcloth over the sink to dry, she turns to me. “We’re making healing potions today. The boys used a good amount of them last night, and they will need more by the time this war ends.”

“Can Varius use them?” I ask as I follow her out of the kitchen.

“Of course.”

“So it’s just premades he can’t use?” I press. I know she traded all his magic to save his life when he was a baby, but there’s just something about that story that is bothering me. I don’t know what, so I’m just fishing for information.

Premades are wands created for non-magic users to use. They work by pulling on the dormant talent of the person wielding it though, so not everyone can use them. Humans from Earth (rather than the collective ‘humans’ that cover anyone who’s been created in the image of a god) can’t use them. Nor can any sup who hasn’t passed their ascension – a sort of magical evolution that hits during puberty, as they don’t have any magic in them before then to activate the wand. Unless that sup is a witch; we are born with magic. It is a part of us, entwined with our blood, our souls.

So if Varius was a vampire who’d never hit his ascension or a werewolf or a dragon or one of the thousands of other humans out there (those who have a humanoid form gifted to them by the gods), then it’d make sense why he couldn’t use a premade.

But he is a witch.

Sau might have traded his magic to save his life, offering it up as payment in some dark spell, but she couldn’t have ripped it from him without killing him. And in evidence of that, Varius’ brothers are able to use him as a sort of battery from time to time, topping up their supply with his.

So I know he still has enough magic inside him to be able to use a wand, and the puzzle is driving me insane.

“It seems to be so,” she says.

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you cast the spell.” I try not to make the words come out accusatory, like I think she’s hiding something. But a part of me wonders if she is.

She glances at me as she takes that first step down the stairs, heading for the basement. “Have you ever used dark magic, Micha?” she asks.