Page 118 of Eldritch (The Eating Woods #2)

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

ZEVANDER

W here in seven hells am I?

Zevander glanced around the unfamiliar surroundings in search of something he might recognize.

Crude cob walls and a dirt floor released the pungent odor of damp soil and mold.

The sound of a woman’s moans bled through wide cracks in a wooden door ahead and through them, Zevander could make out two bodies fucking each other.

The stench of rot clung to his nose and frowning, he stared down at the decaying corpse of a rat on the floor.

Quiet whispers reached his ears, and Zevander turned toward a small wooden table behind him, following the sounds to the two children, no more than ten years old, who sat huddled beneath.

The boy, pale and thin with pink eyes and two small horns protruding from his forehead, bore the telling characteristics of a spindling child.

The little girl clutched in his arms looked to have suffered the worst deformities Zevander had ever seen on a child: one eye black and sunken, her face sallow and scarred.

Vaguely familiar, somehow.

“I’m going to find the cure, Melisara. I’ve been reading endlessly. There is a way to cleanse you,” the boy said, kissing the girl on the top of her ratted hair.

“Perhaps I can still ascend into Mother’s bloodline.” She stared up at him, but the boy seemed unbothered by her deformities, didn’t so much as wince when he lovingly gazed back at her, stroking her long red locks. “I can change faces, just as she used to.”

“She is Nilivir. If her blood magic was going to pass onto you, there would’ve been signs by now.” He affectionately kissed the top of her head, where the hair had thinned at her hairline. “Only knowledge, studying the scrolls, will change our circumstances.”

“No spindling has ever been permitted into the House of Sages. You’ll never have access.”

“I will.” Brows pulled tight, he flattened his lips. “Someday I will be the most powerful mage in the world.”

“And I’ll be the most beautiful.” She smiled up at him.

A loud gurgling scream broke their quiet whispers and Zevander turned for the bedroom door, beyond which, he’d heard fucking.

“I can make him stop. He’ll never lay a hand on her, or us, again,” the boy said, his words grinding through clenched teeth.

“Don’t Alastor. You have no power against him. It will do nothing. Besides, Mother says we need the coin.”

Zevander froze at the mention of his mentor’s name—one he’d thought was given out of deception.

He tipped his head, studying the boy’s face, hidden behind his long black hair.

Beneath the obvious malnourishment, he could see a glimmer of his former mentor there.

Could hear the slightest resemblance in his young voice when he said, “The rotting drunk deserves to die.”

He was staring at Cadavros as a young boy.

Alastor must’ve been his birth name.

The door creaked and then thudded open, and a man stumbled out, his finer clothes giving Zevander the impression he hadn’t been borne from squalor.

He tipped back a tankard of ale, running into the wall as he made his way toward where the children hid.

“C’mon, you little monster. Let me see your ugly face. ”

The little girl turned into the boy, hiding her face in his chest.

“C’mon you wretched little beast. Give me a good scare and show me where you are!

” The stranger stumbled over his own feet and tumbled to the floor.

The moment he caught sight of the children, his lips stretched to an evil grin.

“There you are.” Lips peeled back he swiped out a hand for the girl. “Get over here you little bitch!”

“Leave her alone!” the boy screamed, shoving at his arm.

The drunk took hold of her bony little leg and gave a hard yank that sent her body flying out from beneath the table. As she flipped around, clawing at the dirt for the boy, he gave another yank, drawing her dress up, exposing her bare lower half to him.

The drunk gripped her hair and tipped her face into the light.

A howl ripped from the man’s throat as the boy lurched forward and bit the drunk’s arm. The little girl scrambled in the opposite direction.

“You fucking rat!” The drunk shot a blast of Aeryz that sent the young boy flying back into the wall behind him.

Zevander’s muscles tensed as the drunkard twisted around for the little girl who lay trembling, staring back at her tormentor from the corner of her good eye. “You are the most repulsive creature I’ve ever set eyes upon. You should be burned.”

“You’re going to die today,” she said in a quiet voice.

At first, Zevander might’ve thought she was a seer, but he turned to see the young Alastor quietly sliding a dagger from a holster on the table. The boy tiptoed toward them, his footsteps hardly making a sound against the dirt, as he approached the man from behind.

“By whom?” The drunk belched in her face and laughed when she grimaced. “You and your little spindling brother? Murdered by a monster and her weak, powerless?—”

The boy jabbed the blade into the back of his neck and backed away as the drunk reached for his throat, gasping.

The girl scrambled out from beneath him only seconds before he collapsed face-down in the dirt. Blood pooled around him, his body twitching as the last remnants of life escaped him.

“Alastor!” the little girl whispered. “What have you done?”

Eyes wide and panicked, the boy glanced up at her and back to the dead man. “He…He was going…to hurt you.”

Her face twisted to worry, jaw trembling. “They’ll throw you into a vein for this. He was a highblood.”

The dread in the boy’s eyes hardened and he crawled toward the man on hands and knees, and rifled through his pockets, until he pulled out a small rock of vivicantem, dangling from a chain. Alastor glared at the man as he held it up to the light. “Nothing more than jewelry for them.”

Words Zevander had said himself a time or two.

The boy unclasped the chain and pulled it through the hole in the white stone, leaving it free in the palm of his hand. “I could take it all at once. They would blame me, not you.”

“No. You’ll become Carnifican.”

“Better than burning in the flame.”

Zevander’s stomach clenched as he watched the boy pop the stone into his mouth and swallow it.

“No going back now,” he said, tears wavering in his eyes as he held the young girl’s hand in his. “I love you, Melisara. No matter what happens.”

“What are you doing here?” a voice growled from behind, and Zevander turned to see Cadavros standing behind him.

“You lied about who you were,” Zevander said. “You were nothing more than a spindling child.”

“Yes. I was born a spindling. Not even the king is privy to my past.”

It made sense now, why a mage as powerful as Cadavros would criticize the king and highbloods. Why igniting the vein may have once been important to him for innocent reasons.

Good reasons.

“Do you know what happens to a spindling when he’s given an excessive amount of vivicantem at once?

” Cadavros pressed his lips to a hard line, as if he were holding back a surge of emotions.

It was strange to see him that way when Zevander had always known him to be cold and detached.

“His bloodline magic is restored. But we wouldn’t know because we continue to starve our spindlings.

More mouths in search of vivicantem. More competition for power.

Spindlings aren’t worthless, after all. I became Magelord.

An impossible feat, as I’d been told the entirety of my life.

” Cadavros crept toward the children who sat curled into one another on the floor.

“I acquired my mother’s ability to steal identities rather easily after that.

Face eater, she’d once been called. Sanguidin .

A vampiric blood magic my sister inherited naturally.

The ability to summon fangs at her will.

” He nodded toward the drunk lying on the floor.

“Eventually, I assumed his son’s place as an apprentice in the magehood by stealing his identity as well.

It wasn’t as easy as drinking blood, like Melisara.

I had no fangs to call upon for the task, therefore, I had to consume them whole.

” His lips curled in repulsion. “A disgusting dilemma. To conceal who we were, I went by Cadavros. She went by Melantha.”

Zevander froze and swung his gaze back to Cadavros. “Your sister is Melantha. Apprentice to the Magelord?”

A memory sprang to mind, of sitting in a tavern across from an old woman who bore an awful disfigurement. The one who’d gotten Zevander’s father arrested. The one who’d insisted on keeping young Zevander for reasons he couldn’t understand at the time. “You hoped to cure her. That was your intent.”

“We all begin with good intentions, don’t we? Even the darkest of souls.”

More revelations came to light as Zevander pieced together snippets of thought. “It was her. Killing the sexsells in The Hovel.”

Cadavros chuckled. “She always harbored a bitter resentment toward our mother, though it was our mother’s vampiric magic which offered her a way to stay youthful and beautiful, drinking the blood of attractive women.”

“Why flammapul? She used that to kill them.”

The old mage sighed. “She loathed conflict. It was easier for her to seduce her victims in brothels. No rituals or ceremony, nor violence or ancient chants. Just hunger and the desire to walk amongst other mancers without judgement. Flammapul simply kept them from fighting. As a child, Melisara was gentle as a butterfly.” A darkness shadowed his eyes. “The world made her a monster.”

“Zevander?” The sound of Maevyth’s voice had Zevander twisting around, searching for her.

The small hovel blurred and shifted.

Zevander stood before a colossal tree, the width of the trunk about the size of the home he’d just stood in moments before. The dark hollow had him staring, recalling a time when he’d seen it once before. Weeks ago, in the woods.

“Zevander?” The distant sound of Maevyth’s voice called him from inside the tree.

“Go on, then,” Cadavros urge. “Find her.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Zevander strode forward, and stepped inside the cavity of the tree.