Page 72 of A Dagger of Twisted Starlight

“Want to step outside for some fresh air?”

“Sure,” he said. He gently scooped Bambi up and placed her down on a pillow. She stood and stretched, her claws catching on the fabric.

“She’s probably going to want to follow you. I noticed she’s been your shadow lately.”

“She has, huh? She’s a good kitty. Probably can sense how messed up I am.”

I let out a pained breath. He really did look like he’d been through the wringer. He must have lost at least five pounds, and the dark circles under his eyes were like two permanent shadows he couldn’t escape from.

We walked out of the house in silence. The desert was calm, the last rays of sunlight stretching out toward the darkening sky. It was peaceful. A complete contradiction to how I felt inside.

Cassius sat down on the steps to the front door. I leaned against the railing. A gentle breeze started to stir, bringing with it the typical cool that came with a desert night.

“How did I get here?” Cassius asked. He kept his gaze trained straight ahead. “How? How did my dad betray me like this? Betrayeveryonelike this?”

“I wish I had an answer for you.”

“He could have gotten us killed. Did he even think twice about that?”

A hard, icy-cold lump formed in my throat. I could hardly swallow around it. I didn’t think he did, but I also didn’t want to say that out loud. I let the silence speak for me, filled with the occasional chirps of crickets. It was hard to imagine the position Cass was in. I couldn’t comprehend my own father ever betraying me the way Cass’s had. And it was made all theworse by the fact that he had already lost his mother. Her death had pulled them together with a bond that only true tragedy could form, and now that bond was ruined. Destroyed. And without it, Cassius was sent adrift. It was as if he had lost both his parents, even though one still walked this Earth.

“Maybe there’s a good explanation for all this,” I offered weakly.

“You and I both know there isn’t.”

“He could be being controlled somehow? Or coerced.”

“I know my father—at least, I thought I did. He’s not someone who can be controlled.”

“Anyone can be controlled by something or someone.”

Cassius offered a flickering smile. “You’re always the optimistic one. I appreciate it. I do. But I also think it’s bullshit. My father made his choice; he stole that dagger and worked with my uncle to try and abduct Xavier. He didn’t care who got in the way, who got hurt.”

A thought formed in my clouded mind. “Why does he want to use the dagger so badly?”

“You know why. They want to go back in time and free the Chaos King. Why else?”

“It doesn’t make sense to me. Your dad is a smart man; he knows that nothing good would come from that. And he never showed signs of ever being the Chaos King’s servant. So why is he so hell-bent on freeing him?”

Cassius shrugged. “Does it matter? The fact is that he does.” He leaned back, tilting his head back to stare at the stars. “What would happen if he gets what he wants? Would we even know? Or would we just blink and all of a sudden, the world isdifferent?”

I thought back to the brief moments that Xavier manipulated time, for vastly better reasons than the one Cassius’ dad wanted. “We’d blink and things would change. We wouldn’t even know it.”

“Fuck. Who knows if I’d even be born. How does he not… how does that not hurt him?” Cassius choked back tears, trying his best to hold them down. They were too strong. He sucked in a deep breath and let out a sob on the exhale. I wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him into my side. “It’s so fucked.”

“It is,” I said, unable to sugarcoat this. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I wanted to hold my composure together so that my pain didn’t add to my friend’s, even though my heart hurt so badly for him.

“It’s like… I just think back to being a kid. To him being so excited for me on Christmas mornings, to him taking me to school, to him being such a fucking role model. He was my hero. He was my mom’s hero. He… he… he’s a monster. And I never knew it. Never saw it.”

“There’s no way you could have. And he may not have been a monster back then either. People change. Something may have happened that caused him to crack. Maybe losing your mom affected him more than anyone ever knew. Pain can break people, especially that kind of pain, that grief.”

“You mean the kind I’m feeling right now?”

It was like a punch directly to the chest. “Yes.”

Cassius sniffled, wiping his face. I rubbed his arm. The moment drifted into a heavy silence. Not exactly the comforting kind. Nothing would be comforting through this. Especially not because the hardest part was still ahead of us.We had to now infiltrate that lab and take back that dagger, and that would put us directly in front of the man who caused all this trauma to begin with. There wasn’t even a guarantee that any of this would work either. It would be the most dangerous thing either of us ever faced.

My heart made a few errant beats. My chest tightened. It was as if my ribs had fallen loose and were clicking together inside my body. Nothing felt right. Nothing felt good. It was the anxiety eating away at me. And that was likely only a fraction of the turmoil Cass experienced.

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