Page 193 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
What?
Hallie narrowed her eyes, her gaze going between the Stradat Lord Kapitan—who clearly had lost his mind, if he thought he was talking to Zeke—to Kase, who looked ready to punch something or someone. Then to Jove, whose face had lost all color.
“As we’ve already established several times, I’m not Zeke,” Kase spat, still raring for a fight.
“Sorry,” Harlan said. His voice sounded like gravel. He didn’t look at anyone, much less his sons. “I’m…sorry.”
Kase curled his hands into fists. Jove was still pale, but he looked more intrigued now, as if his father had just spoken an entirely different language.
No one spoke for a few more seconds after that. In those moments, it was almost like they truly were in a place where they’d buried the dead. The air weighed heavy. All that surrounded them were the bones of secrets and memories left behind by beloved dead.
Zeke had died a hero, and his soul soared among the stars. That was something even someone like the Stradat Lord Kapitan could respect. So why would he connect the idea of losing a soul with his middle son?
There was something she was missing.
“The cost of what is his soul?” Hallie asked, not understanding what this had to do with his adamance that Kase not operate the Cerl hover. Was he somehow alluding to what King Filip’s Essence power could do?
“Kase does look extraordinarily like him,” Jove said quietly.
Both Hallie and Kase turned. “What do you mean?” Kase demanded.
She wanted to know, too. Kase looked far more like Jove than he had Zeke.
A sad smile flickered across Jove’s face, but he didn’t look at Kase; he still looked at Harlan. “That’s why you’re so hard on Kase, isn’t it?”
Harlan finally looked up at his eldest son, his eyes hard. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jove’s stare stayed level. “I know everything. I’ve seen the files.”
Harlan’s jaw clenched. He looked away again. “Then you know I did what I had to do.”
“Will one of you please explain what the blazes is going on?” Kase asked, his voice shaky.
“I barely remember him as it is, so I hadn’t made the connection until now,” Jove said, placing his hands behind his back. He looked right at Kase. “You’re the spitting image of Uncle Ezekiel.”
Ezekiel Fairchild. The man who betrayed all of Jayde.
Hallie sucked in a small breath.Oh. Oh stars, this is…not where I need to be.
Whatever was going on between the Shackley men, she didn’t factor into it. But Kase’s stance and the clench of his jaw told her if she left, he might lose it. She slipped her hand into his. It was cold, opposite to her heat.
“Explain.” That was all Kase said. He tightened his hold on her hand.
The Stradat Lord Kapitan opened his mouth, then closed it again. Like he had to work to dredge up the words.
It’d been nearly fifteen years since the war ended, twenty since it’d begun. It was a long time to keep a secret.
“Tell us,” Jove said quietly.
The Stradat Lord Kapitan crossed his arms and stared into the stone beneath his feet. “I met Ezekiel in the army. We were both medics, and we became friends…he even opened his home to me once or twice during the rare times we got leave together. That’s how I met your mother.” Harlan smoothed a hand over his mustache. “But near the end of his tenure, his wife gave birth to a baby girl. Both his wife and daughter died shortly after the birth. Complications stemming from the pregnancy. He joined the engineering corps, determined to stop the endless war no one would admit we were part of. He not only discovered a way to infuse Zuprium with electricity, giving us an advantage on the battlefield, but he…sold everything that made him human to do it. Even his sons joined, but they went too far.”
Hallie’s heart broke for a man she didn’t know. What Hallie had been through in her short life had been bad, but it wasn’t nearly as terrible as what had happened to Kase’s uncle. She also had a feeling the Stradat Lord Kapitan couldn’t tell the entire story. Grief could make you do horrible things, and with the amount of trauma Ezekiel Fairchild had experienced, it made sense he’d been lost to it.
But what went further than infusing Zuprium with electricity? That discovery alone changed the tide of the war.The electropistols and electrobombs allowed Jayde to gain an advantage and push Cerulene out of Jayde.
But what else was there? The Yalvs had their own powers, but she didn’t think Ezekiel was Yalven, though she guessed it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility—but no, that would have made Les part Yalven, which would have madeKasepart Yalven, and nothing that had responded to Hallie’s Yalven blood had never done the same for him.
What else was there? Was it another secret that had been buried with him?
