Page 9 of Of Blood and Banes (The Arterian #2)

AN OLDER brOTHER

M elaina’s silhouette disappears into the distant tree line toward Midkeep.

I sit next to Daeja, shuffling in between her neck and shoulder, welcoming her warmth.

I rest my head on her black, rugged scales as she lifts a wing and tucks it over me.

Her easy breathing lulls me into drowsiness, and we sit in the quiet of the night.

The only thing to break the silence is the rushing currents of the river in front of us.

As I fight against my heavy eyelids threatening to drag closed, I watch the water glide by, glittering in the moonlight, before I drift off into sleep.

The blackness of sleep transforms into a room washed in golden light.

Sunlight spills through the windows, dust motes dancing in the beams that drag across the room.

The singsong chirping of birds rings in the distance.

I scan the room, instantly recognizing the wooden table with several rickety chairs.

The front door. The makeshift fireplace hearth.

It’s my home back in Padmoor.

Immediately, I swing my attention to the wall with my mother’s carving all those months ago: secrets never die, they’re just buried in a grave . But it’s free from any imperfections.

Someone touches the back of my head, and I spin to try and face them, but my hair is stuck.

“Stop, Kat! You’re going to make me pull out more hair!” a boy’s voice scolds me from behind.

A boy’s voice I haven’t heard in years. My heart shrinks into a piece of crumpled paper, and I fight to take a breath. Am I dreaming? I turn again to look at his face, but I’m only afforded an inch to my right. My hair screams at my scalp, preventing me from fully pivoting.

The boy snaps, “Will you hold still? I’m almost done with your braid!”

“You’re pulling too hard!” It’s my voice but…much younger. Echoing around me as if a ripple in a distant lake.

“I am not!” the boy snaps.

“Yes, you are! Oww! Mother!” the younger me calls out.

Footsteps approach us from the right, where the hallway leading to my mother’s room is. My mother’s chime of a voice rings out, clearer than I’ve heard in years, “You two, quit bickering! Kat, sit still for your brother. He’s just trying to help you.”

As I grit my teeth to block out the pain and turn to glance at her, the room blurs and swirls out of perception. The memory melts as if liquid, until it stills into an entirely different scene.

A small, trembling hand clutches an old, quill pen, hovering over a paper with wrinkles. The page has the same two unreadable words repeated a quarter of the way down. The sensation of the trembling quivers in my body—it’s my hand as a little girl.

“Try again,” my brother chirps from behind my shoulder.

I lower the pen and drag the inked tip across the page, but it jumps sporadically over the wrinkled paper.

“I can’t!” I whine.

“Well, you shouldn’t have given up so easily! If you hadn’t crumpled the paper on the first try when you got frustrated, it would’ve still been smooth. You have to keep practicing if you want to be any good.”

“I don’t want to keep practicing! I’m not good enough!” I shoot back.

“Here!” my brother barks and wraps his hand around mine.

His hand is only slightly bigger, but he holds mine with a steady confidence while directing the pen across the page.

When he finishes the signature, he releases my hand and I drop the pen to the table.

With his guidance, the two words I’d continuously attempted to write are clear.

Katerina Blackwind.

“See?” He huffs. “Stop giving up so easily, and you might actually be good at something.”

I cross my childish arms over my chest and sink back into the chair. “You’re just better than me.”

“No—I’m older than you. I’ve been writing for four years longer than you have, so don’t compare yourself to me.”

I force myself to turn toward him. Fighting against some invisible barrier keeping me locked in place. I’m growing angrily desperate just to see his damn face?—

The memory shifts and fades, as if sand gusted away by invisible wind. Everything turns black again. But two pairs of panic-stricken breaths echo around me, along with the rising drum of my heartbeat.

“Don’t look, Kat,” my brother commands with a tight voice.

My hands are cold against my sweat drenched face. I open my eyes, and light leaks through the cracks of my fingers. A hand is gripping my shoulder, both comforting and alarming. I can’t help it—I’m terrified yet still morbidly curious. I split my fingers apart slightly to peek.

“I said don’t look!” my brother snarls.

I flinch, terror creeping down my spine as I whimper, “What’s happening?”

“Nothing! It’ll be okay, don’t be scared. Just keep your eyes closed and stay here. Okay? Do you understand me? Just keep your eyes closed?—”

A glass-shattering scream rips through the unsettling silence, and I cry. A hand slaps over my mouth.

“Shh, keep it down, or she’ll hear you!” he whispers near my ear.

The scream tears through the room again. With my face buried in my hands, I curl inward and squeeze my eyes shut so hard an ache flares behind my eyelids.

“Stay here,” my brother whispers, and his warm hand over my mouth disappears before his footsteps hurry away from me.

Terrified of being left alone, I lift my face out of my hands and scan the room for him.

Candlelight bathes my bedroom in dim, flickering light.

I’m sitting on the floor, tucked back as far as I can be into the corner between my bed and dresser.

I catch a glimpse of my brother’s back and his sandy blond hair as he slips out of my door into the hallway.

I stare at the door as he shuts it behind him—the same one behind which I last saw my mother, when our house was burning down.

“Wait,” I whisper. “Please don’t leave me!” Crawling forward, I inch across my room toward the door. I pry it open a few inches and peek out into the hallway across to my mother’s room.

My mother sits on the floor against her bed, her arms crossed and fingers digging into her shoulders before scraping her nails down her bare arms, leaving angry red marks.

Her eyes are round with a wildness and disheveled insanity I’d grown to know.

But now, looking through my younger eyes, I don’t realize what it is.

I see my mother, but I don’t recognize her.

It fills me with dread so heavy I’m struggling to pull in a decent breath into my lungs.

A cold terror drips down my back as if it were water from melted ice.

My brother crouches a few steps away from our mother and rolls something into her direction, the item clink ing as it bumps over the floor. She snatches it, fumbling with it frantically before pressing it to her lips and swallowing.

My brother leans forward into her direction. “Mother…? Are…are you…are you alright?”

She snaps her attention up to him, her face contorting, and eyes almost bug-like. “I told you…I told you!”

My brother falls back off his heels and catches himself on his hands, crawling backward to reveal pools of blood around my mother.

Oh, Gods.

Now that I recognize it—it’s everywhere .

Crimson stains splash her pale throat and blonde hair, coating her nightgown in an unsettling burst of color.

The red scrapes on her arms aren’t scratches —they’re blood.

Strange twists and jerks animate her movements as she drags herself toward my brother, her head twitching and eyes rolling.

He holds out a hand, panic lacing his voice. “We’ll get you more, okay? We just need?—”

Willard , I want to whisper, but it won’t go past my lips. She needs medicine. And quick.

Black bleeds into the corners of my vision, threatening to overtake and drown out the memory. Everything dulls to a painful silence.

No, wait! No!

I sink my fingers into the floor, desperate to not leave them, my fingernails cracking under the pressure. But the wooden boards beneath my nails wave like liquid, and despite how many times I frantically try to claw at them, they meld into a sea of brown. And then…green.

As if someone snapped their fingers, sounds explode around me.

Birds tweet and chirp, and a river gurgles nearby.

The flat green beneath my hands pop into vibrant sprigs of grass, bursting between my fingers.

A crisp moisture hangs in the warm air, and I scan my surroundings.

Dew drops glisten against the pine needles, the grass, the rocks.

The gushing river splitting the Northern Forest shines almost white with snow runoff from Dragon’s Back Ridge.

The water spills out past the shallow riverbanks my brother and I played in last summer, swallowing much of the land and growing dangerously close to the roots of the pine trees.

I push up to my feet, and a pain flares in my right kneecap.

“Ow!” I whine, my voice still childlike, then grab my doll resting on the ground near me.

“I told you to stop running around! It rained last night so everything is going to be slippery.”

I toss a glance over my shoulder at my brother. He’s bent over near my father’s gravesite, laying wildflowers we picked in the hills near our home at the cross’s base.

I still can’t see his face.

“I’ll only stop if you can catch me!” My childish amusement kicks my voice into something high-pitched. I sprint past him with my doll in one hand.

“No! Stop!” My brother rises to his feet out of the corner of my eye.

Wind whips my hair behind me, the river roaring next to me as I race the currents downstream.

His heavy footsteps sound behind me, closing in.

I swear I can almost sense his fingers reaching out to grab at my collar.

My feet nearly glide off the ground. The bend of the river approaches quickly, and I skirt right to run alongside it, stumbling as my feet lose traction on the slippery grass from such a tight curve.

“Kat—” his voice is interrupted by a loud thump and splashing sound.

I turn. My brother slides across the ground, and the river pulls hungrily at his legs, sucking him into its abyss inch by inch as he claws at the ground.

Hold on.

“Aiden!” I scream, my throat burning from how hard I shout his name. I dash forward, sliding to my knees and diving for his hand.

Hold on.

Before I can wrap my fingers around him, the river’s current drags his legs sideways, pulling him deeper into the water.

He scrambles, digging desperately at the ground glistening with dew, but it’s no use.

The river swallows him up to his chest, and the shock of the icy water drags a strangled gasp from his lips.

Hold on.

I snatch his wrist, my hand too small to wrap around his completely. As soon as I touch him, his head snaps up to me.

His face .

I know it all too well.

I’ve memorized every etched wrinkle creasing his pinched brows. The expanse of white around his brown irises. The unmistakable horror coating every inch of his expression before it settles into a Gods-fearing acceptance.

I know what comes next. I’ve tried so hard to push this memory out of my mind.

This is the very last time I see him. And yet…

and yet I can’t look away. I can’t close my eyes.

Everything moves in slow-motion, trapping me in the moment and forcing me to look at him.

The river behind him rushes by with a speed that’s eerie, and the hammering pulse in my ears slows.

His skin, normally flushed with rosiness by our days playing in the sun, is zapped ghostly white. Gritting his teeth, his forearms tremble with all the strength he can muster into anchoring himself to the riverbank. His brown doe eyes hook into every corner of my soul.

“Hold on!” I cry, wrapping another hand around his other wrist. Summoning every bit of strength a five-year-old has, I pull him as hard as I can. But my heels slip on the grass, and I fall back, breaking my grasp on him. I fling forward, scrambling to him and snatching his wrists once more.

“No, Kat! Let go! Or you’ll get swept off, too!” he barks.

But I can’t. I can’t let him go. A fierce determination flares within me, and I wrap my fingers even tighter around his wrists. My fingers ache at how hard I grip him. My arms tremble.

“Let…” he grunts, heaving himself up on one forearm to pry my fingers off his wrist. The motion allows the river to tear him farther back away from me.

His eyes meet mine.

One.

Last.

Time.

“Go,” he breathes as my grip on him loosens, and the river sucks him in.

“No!” I scream, jolting forward but missing his fingertips by an inch.

He disappears under the roaring white waves and is swept into oblivion.

“Aiden!” I scream as I race downstream, scanning the surface of the river. “Aiden!”

I spot something dark clinging to a fallen tree, its gnarled branches reaching out into the water like angry claws.

Running as fast and hard as my little feet can go, I slip and slide on the wet grass, slowing every stride.

Hope rises in my chest the closer I get. Aiden’s cloak is caught on a branch.

It’s him. It has to be.

Ignoring the roaring water swinging the tree back and forth, I crawl over the trunk to get closer.

I grab a handful of the fabric caught on the branch and sink my other hand into the river, its icy water biting into my skin.

I seize another fistful of fabric beneath the surface and pull up with all my might.

It comes free. Easily. I stare at the freezing, soaked heap of fabric in my hands. But no Aiden. My heart shatters into pieces as fine as dust, and my own voice—new and old—echoes in my head.

Hold on.