Page 32 of Anathema

“Yeah. They didn’t actually kill her, though.” He lowered his gaze as if shamed. “She turned wild. I was afraid she’d hurt Rykaia.”

“You killed her?”

“Broke her neck. I’m sorry. Is mother mad at me?”

“No. Just scared, I think.”

“She should be scared. You should all be scared.” He stared off, then crammed another handful of bloody meat into his mouth.

“Why do you prefer that it’s not cooked?”

Branimir chewed slowly, as if contemplating the question. “It isn’t me who craves it. It is them.”

“You share it with them?”

“They taste what I eat. They feel what I feel.” He ran his hand across his skull, where small patches of baldness showed he’d ripped out his own hair. “I have thoughts … very bad thoughts.” His eyes shifted as he spoke, brows pulled tight. “I pray they are not my own, but I can’t be sure.” Branimir let out a whimper, and the spiders behind him shifted on the web as if nervous. “I don’t want you to come down here anymore, Zevander.”

“But you’ll starve.”

“I don’t care. Let me starve. The silence of death would be welcome.”

“Bran … you don’t know what you’re saying. I won’t let you starve. I refuse.”

Not a breath later, his brother lurched, knocking the boy onto his back. An intense pressure struck Zevander’s throat, as Branimir gripped tight, his eyes feral with rage. Spiders crawled over his shoulders and head.

“I could feed on you for weeks …”

“Bran …” Zevander rasped, clawing at his brothers hand. “Bran!”

Zevander shot upright on a gasp, every muscle locked with tension. He looked around to find himself surrounded by water that bubbled like a cauldron, boiling hot, though the heat of it had no effect on him, at all. Black fire licked the air in sporadic bursts that mirrored the twitching of his muscles, and he pulled the rogue flames back into him, cursing his lapse in consciousness.

He ran a trembling hand down his face, his breaths heaving. The day Branimir had held him by the throat was the day his scorpion sigil had first appeared. While the air had waned in his lungs, and the spiders had sank their poisonous teeth into his flesh, he’d thought of something bigger. Faster. Impenetrable. From the darkness, a venomous beast had risen and struck with no fear.

And from that moment on, the spiders kept their distance from Zevander and his scorpions.

The memory faded, the image sharpening to the rippling water beneath him, where his reflection stared back. Deep black veins branched from a black crevice that ran along his cheek, the unsightly black scar he’d had since he was a child. The branches crawled over his jaw and down his neck, to his collarbone and left shoulder. The curse that’d corrupted his blood. It longed to eat his heart, to turn him into the same vile creature that’d claimed his older brother.

How much longer before that day? He couldn’t say.

Branimir’s physical changes had developed immediately after the ritual. It was his mind that snapped without warning. In a single moment, it seemed as if he’d lost himself, giving in to the dark madness.

The thoughts clawed at him, sending a cold sensation across his chest, as if his lungs were crystallizing.

From the holster lying beside his leathers, Zevander unsheathed his dagger and carved a long wound into his thigh. The pain seared through his muscles as the poison on the blade’s surface swam deep into his veins.

The fucking hypocrite in him. That he could chide his own sister for what she did to herself, then turn around and contaminate his blood with deadly toxin, but he’d had the visions before. Knew the power they had over his mind. How quickly they could trigger an episode.

Branimir had always served as a source of unrest for Zevander, torment, unless he had something to pull him out of it, to distract his mind from the black vortex that threatened to pull him under. The more his attacks had evolved over the years, the stronger the poison required to break him of it, and the more Zevander began to believe his brother’s fate could very well be his own one day.

No. He’d sooner cleave out his own fucking heart than risk what’d happened to Branimir.

He needed to track down that final bloodstone, or gods be damned, he’d take matters into his own hands.

He let out a hiss while the vicious toxin worked its way into his gut and up to his ribcage where it spread across his chest, swallowing the icy sensation. He grunted and groaned and trembled, as white hot pain devoured his muscles. Hands balled into fists, he let the poison tear his insides open in splitting agony that had him arched out of the water, until, teeth grinding, he shook with violent convulsions, his consciousness thinning.

Slowly, by the gods, the ghostly presence in his mind faded under the wild flame of suffering, and finally, Zevander could think of nothing more than bleeding it out of him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

---