Alastair Von Vexx's Arc

Chapter 7 of 13

Alastair knelt on the cold stone with his head bowed. The second clasp clicked. Then the third. Each fall struck him like a hammer inside his chest. By the sixth, his hands had gone numb on his knees. He waited for the seventh, ready to accept whatever bargain the boy named. But before the last clasp moved, the bond stitched through him by the ritual flared hot. A warning burned along every nerve — sharp, urgent, wrong. The heat curled around the shape of the child at the pillar and did not fit. The phantom's tether was telling him, in a language older than words, that the small face lifting the locket was not his brother at all. The warning tore up through Alastair's spine and burst from his skin in shards of colored light. The crystal pillar behind the boy answered it, splitting open in a shower of bright fragments that hung in the air like broken glass. Wisteria cried out behind him. Alastair forced his head up. Through the falling shards, he saw the child's face flicker — older, then younger, then wrong around the eyes. "You wear his flowers," Alastair said. His voice scraped low. "But you are not him." He rose slowly from his knee. The bond burned steady now, certain. Somewhere under the roots, past a stone box soaked through with holy water, past a small iron gate hung with their mother's blooms, the real boy was still waiting. This thing in front of him had stolen a face the way the phantom had stolen memories. The seventh clasp trembled but did not fall. The creature's hand had begun to shake. Alastair did not draw his weapon. He met the false child's eyes and spoke plain. "Take that face off, or I will tear it off." The locket snapped shut in the creature's fist. The enemies behind it stepped back one pace, then another. The trap had broken — not because Alastair had won, but because he had seen through it. He turned to Wisteria and took her hand. His brother was alive somewhere below them. And now he knew he would have to go down and find him.