Legacy

Chapter 7: Blood, Bones and Bad Behaviour

"You shouldn't have argued with him," Alaysa said quietly - but with an assertion that didn't come lightly. I looked up, blinking as I focused on her and not blinded myself by the sun filtering through the caramel blond of her hair. Valeryan glanced towards us, his hands digging into the ground he splayed his legs across. "You'll never get anywhere with him as a partner that way." 

"He was being a dick," I replied bluntly - defensively. I didn't like being wrong. It wasn't a state of mind I felt attracted to. "Stellaire deserved everything I said."

"He called you entitled," Alaysa pointed out calmly.

"He called me an entitled bitch," I corrected, more out of the need to feel right about something.

"What, and you haven't been called a bitch before?" she scoffed. "Come on, Kat. This isn't about some boy calling you names. You've been dealing with that kind of crap since you were old enough to punch them for it. What was it really about?"

I turned away, following the broken light of the dying horizon. Perched up this high on one of the abandoned ghost-shelters, you could see the whole of Solace laid out like a scattering of grey, black and silver. Ashes and sky-scrapers, bones and old blood. Power and magic. I liked being up here. You could almost pretend that you would never have to go back to the wasted war.

He got under my skin. Finding an opening, Stellaire dove inside, disrupting my flesh and breaking through the blood. I felt the shivers running through my shoulders were syllables he'd spoken, the furrows in my spine the assault of his words. I hated his assumptions about me. I hated his contemptuous, yellow eyes. 

"I hate how I can't... control him," I admitted, off-hand. Like it didn't bother me. Like all the other things I pretended didn't bother me. My features knew the arrangement of indifference that it probably spelled out across my face when I slept. "He's tricky. Been around enough power to know how to play with it. I need him to do well - but I need it without asking, I need him to want to do it for me."

"If you're thinking about making him fall in love with you," Valeryan said lazily, edging in. "It won't work. Whatever he said before, he doesn't even care much his mother's dying."

"Don't be an idiot, Val," I snapped, irritable. "When was the last time any of us saw love? I'm pretty damn sure people just fuck each other nowadays to see if they feel anything." He shrugged though his eyes were hard casts of green. Val knew. Most of our parents didn't marry for love. They married for power, for entertainment, for lust. Anything that gave them a distraction.

"I don't want to make Ryder Stellaire fall in love with me, I just want him to want to do everything for me. Obsession isn't love, it's the messed-up secondary family member. And I'm hoping I can get that cousin to come to town. If it'll make Stellaire make me look good in training and end in stunning results, I won't be questioned for becoming the next Sol's Light."

Sol's Light. Because that's what you want. Control. Power. Like your father...?

No, something inside me lashed out. Not like my father. Never like my father. Not losing myself in a handful of scattered desires every time I see something I like. Not letting my life spill out of me as I dragged myself through the monotony. Not dying day by day in several shades of slowest agony.

"Why do you have to force him to adore you?" Alaysa asked. "Why not just have him like you? Without control and power and distrust." I could hear the blatant frustration sliding through the layers of her voice. Alaysa could never understand the parts of me that just showed me to be slickly cruel. 

"Because controlling someone's obsession is always more powerful than friendship," I told her, flicking my eyes back to meet hers. Calais flashed into my mind and I remembered the boy who'd hurt her and how she'd eventually destroyed him for it. Words. Just words and the boy was bleeding out.