Alastair Von Vexx's Arc

Chapter 4 of 13

They stood among the trees as the light thinned to gray. Wisteria held his hand, but Alastair's mind was already moving — counting guards, weighing exits, mapping the night ahead. Then the wind shifted, and a scent rolled through the grove. Damp bark. Burnt sugar. Something older underneath. He stopped walking. He knew this smell. He had never smelled it before in his life. He followed the scent to an old well draped in moss. The rusted bucket swayed though no hand had touched it. Beside it, a tall dark mirror stood among the roots, its cracked surface holding water at its base. Alastair leaned closer and the memory broke open inside him. A small hand. Wisteria's voice, younger, begging him not to leave. A promise he had made and forgotten. The memory was hers, planted in him by the phantom, and it carried a word he had been chasing for weeks. Devotion. His weakness was her. His knees gave. He sat hard on a cracked stone bench that had not been there a moment before. Blood splatters marked its surface like old proof. The grove had built it for him, a seat shaped to fit the shape of what he now knew. Kill her and he died. Threaten her and he would break every careful rule he had ever set. His enemies had read it in a vault. He had only just read it in himself. Wisteria knelt in front of him. She did not ask what he had seen. She only put her cold hand against his face and waited. Alastair drew a long breath and let the last of his distance go. "It's you," he said. "It was always going to be you." She nodded once, as if she had known before he had. The grove held still around them. The trap was set. So was the truth. Tonight, when they came, his enemies would find a man who finally knew what he was protecting — and exactly how much it could cost him.