Page 109 of Her Psycho Beasts

Nothing has changed.

Everything is cold, calculated elegance, straight lines and smooth surfaces. Sculptures of our forefathers in their dragon forms line the wide corridors, their names written on gold plaques beneath.

And yet this was home.

My sister runs her hand along the gold scrolling metalwork of the railing that stands between us and the drop to the first floor below. As a child, I’d leap over the railing and swing onto the lower floor, instead of simply walking down the grand staircase just ahead.

My mother would scold me, but my father would smile and say that I needed to be strong. That I needed to learn to fall and get up again.

None of that mattered when my mating mark appeared.

We make haste towards the entrance to the underground archives, which is a narrow stone staircase that spirals straight down. The air gets progressively colder and drier, perfect conditions for delicate manuscripts. I used to come down here all the time, when I sought the quiet, but coming down here now gives me a narrow sort of twisting feeling, like I’m being wrung out by giant hands. Sissy leads me down the familiar stone corridors by the light of the lantern. There are no automatic sconces permitted down here.

I’d never been scared playing here as a child, but I get an eerie feeling from the place now, as if the shadows playing on the walls are ghosts and the spluttering of the lantern light are spooky protestations to my presence.

Perhaps Scythe’s land psychosis is catching. Maybe I’m finally losing my mind.

“Here.” Sissy turns into a room with long shelves that tower up to the high ceiling. Setting the lantern on the side table, she pulls out the chair and sits in it, shifting heavy tomes and shoving aside piles of yellowed parchment that wait there.

“Two kids, a full-time job, and you still have time to haunt the family archives?” I tease.

“Asshat. If it concerns you, then Ido. Father was curious about her powers and I wanted to make sure I got the info first. Some are in a different language, which appears to be the realm the Boneweavers originated from, but there’s a couple in English that seem to be either translations or original texts written when there were more of them about.

“Here’s the one. I thought it was really interesting.” She pulls out a tome that looks like it’s been bound with animal skin. The pages are yellowed as she carefully leafs through the pages. “Here, it says that the Boneweavers were originally a patriarchal inheritance. So a child could only be a Boneweaver if theirfatherwas one. But in one of the family trees, a Boneweaver male was mated to a particularly powerful female sorceress. There was magical genetic mumbo jumbo, and it switched to a matriarchal inheritance. That’s Aurelia’sline. It’s why Mace Naga never imagined his daughter would inherit the gene. Must’ve been a nasty shock for the old cobra. Losing his serpent heir like that.”

I grunt. So her male children wouldn’t be Boneweavers. They would be whatever order their father was. That’s what Mace wanted to breed her for. Her male children. Male snakes. That was the missing piece of Scythe’s puzzle.

“Anyway,” she continues, “Dad’s been trying to figure out how powerful she is, because it looks like her mother wasn’t up to all that much. She might have had weaker gene expression or something.”

I grunt again. “But in theory, if a Boneweaver were, say, more powerful thanus, would there be a way to siphon her power down? Do they have weaknesses? What’s their kryptonite?”

She sits on the edge of the chair, deep in thought. “Nokryptoniteas such. Although, there was mention of the need for some Boneweavers to use a ‘vayashi’.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a term used to refer to the mate or mates of a particularly powerful beast who needs to offload explosive power. It’s where power-sharing originated from. Now we do it as a form of bonding, butreallypowerful mythic shifters couldn’t hold all that power in a human body, so their mates helped take the burden off so they wouldn’t explode and cause other problems.”

“Other problems?”

“Like your powers setting off randomly when you’re feeling strong emotion like anger, or sadness.”

Great. So her weakness was that she could be so powerful she’d fuck everyone else up by mistake.

“But anyway, I suppose the council could mandate her to offload, if need be.”

“Have you told anyone else this?”

“What?” She straightens, affronted. “Of course not. You know I wouldn’t mention this stuff to Father. He’d probably try to use it against you in some way.”

Relief staunches my irritation, though I don’t even understand why. “You’re right, he would.”

Booted footsteps approach from a distance. Slow, deliberate. Predatory.

My heart seizes. Sissy’s lips are pressed together in guilt. I turn my eyes to look at her aura, something I don’t normally do with her. A fading, grey spot marks the pale blue field.

I’m not crazy after all. Just a complete idiot who’s walked right into a trap.

“You planned this.” Hurt drips from my voice like blood. “How could you?”

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