Page 110 of Broken Souls
I storm out of the house not long after Khalid leaves with Vlad to go kill our brother – something I should be doing to please my wife. I know she isn’t an irrational woman, that even though I’ve called her crazy a couple of times when I have been pushed to my limit of frustration, she isn’t the type to risk everything for a moment of revenge.
Which means this is about more than just either of us killing Talon. If I can figure that out, maybe I can soothe the pain I saw in her eyes.
Because, fuck, that damn near crippled me. She looked as if I was torturing her all over again.
As I move away from the house, the screams she made in that chair ring inside my skull. If I thought they were hard to bear then, they’re damn near impossible to handle now. My stomach churns at the sound of her cries. She fucking begged me to stop, to listen to her, to believe that she loved me, and I fucking ignored her every time. I took out my rage on her. My jealousy that she kissed Antonio. My agony that she betrayed me. I looked her in the eye, and I hurt her over and over again.
“You say I’m yours, but you don’t even protect me! What kind of bullshit is that?”
My jaw clenches as my strides lengthen into a run. The need to move has me blitzing through the trees as her voice haunts me.
“What about your duty tome?”
The rawness she screamed that with echoes inside my skull. My feet trip over nothing but guilt, and pain flashes up my ankle as it twists. But I don’t stop running, don’t stop chasing that burn in my muscles and lungs.
Fuck!
No wonder my little monster skinned off my name from her pussy.
I gave her a promise. But it was fucking hollow.
She saw no meaning in it. No meaning inus. And she’s fucking right.
I claimed her in the moments where it was easy. I killed people who didn’t make a difference. Told her words in the dark of the night, in the shadows where no one else could hear. She might have said she didn’t care about me publicly claiming her, but I fucking care. I might not be able to kill Talon for her still, but I can damn well do this.
Storming through the house, I find her in the gym with her new wand. She’s aiming at a target on the other side of the room, her face scrunched up in concentration. Her spine stiffens as I approach, but she doesn’t turn to me. Keeping her focus on her target, she jerks her wand up, then waves it in a quick pattern.
With premade wands, you just point and shoot. They’ve been made to work for anyone. But with custom wands like this, you have to get them finely tuned into you. Magic is not a rigid science with steps to follow to get it to work how you want it. It is a fluid dance with an ever changing beat. The wand needs to learn her movements, and she needs to feel its soul. So she moves without firing it. Her wrist flicks in rhythm to the emotions inside of her, but the movements are clumsy and have too much thought in them.
Until the wand becomes an extension of her, it’ll be too dangerous for her to use. If a premade wand is like a gun, a custom is like a stick of dynamite that’s been left to weep nitroglycerin. It will give you the power to create what you want, to form the magic inside of you into the mold you wish it to take, but it will not control it after it leaves its tip. Custom wands are not meant for witches who don’t know how to use magic. They are merely a more powerful, more capable alternative to the runes we tattoo on our skin. The reason they are not the norm is that they get lost or stolen, and if that happens to a witch who has relied too heavily upon it, then you might as well have broken their hands, leaving them defenseless.
The average person will take five to six weeks to learn a wand enough to not blow their face up while using it, but it takes one to two years to really connect with it, and that connection is ever shifting. With the properties of this wand mimicking the wild, powerful nature of a kezja alicorn… I don’t expect Micha to master it for nearly half a decade, if not more. But when she does, the world will quake at her feet. A kezja alicorn is a master of fire, and Micha’s flames are hot enough to consume the entire world.
Feeling her frustration as I cross over to her, I ignore what I originally came here for and focus instead on what I can do to help her. “Have you ever danced, Micha?”
She ignores me, but I keep talking.
“A high quality wand isn’t like the ones kids get to help them during their ascensions. You can’t just jab it in the air.”
“How would you know?” she snaps. “You’ve never had magic.”
“No, but I practiced for hours every day with one from when I was twelve until I was twenty-two. I thought if I just connected with one strongly enough, it would work. It was a hel of a motivator.”
“But it didn’t work, did it? So what do you know?”
“I know you need to let it talk to you and let it feel you. Wands hold properties from both their creator and the item they were crafted from. What do you know about Suzanne Ledford or a kezja alicorn?”
She jabs the air a few more times before angrily turning towards me. She doesn’t say anything, but I can see the desire to know in her eyes.
“Suzanne Ledford is a romantic and a perfectionist,” I say. “Extremely skilled. Very powerful. If she ever had the motivation to take over the Seven Planes, she could make one hel of a run, but she prefers a quiet life of travel. One that brings her to harmony with the worlds around her.”
I reach for Micha’s wrist and hold it up so the wand lies horizontally between us. I glance at it as I talk. “She did not find the shed horn she used to make this wand. She found an orphaned colt in the Chisiho Desert, only a few days old. Starving, half-dead. His mother had been shot down by poachers, and the last thing she did was give birth to their son. His father lay underneath her, having used himself to cushion her fall.”
She sucks in a breath as her grip on the wand shakes.
“Now, anyone else would’ve stripped the two adult kezjic of all their fur and bones and horns, then either killed the colt for the same or kept it in captivity, but Suzanne Ledford shapeshifted into a kezja alicorn, then raised it as her own. And when it grew old enough to want to mate, she sent it out into the skies above, never trying to take one thing from it. Not the feathers it molted. Not the embers it left. She cleared it all, hiding it beneath the sands.”
I look up at Micha, and she is staring at the wand in captivation.
