At first I think it’s a trick, but when the shock doesn’t leave his eyes, when his hand doesn’t come up to strike me, I finally look down to see what he’s looking at. To see what my mother was looking at before.
My arms are bleeding, which is probably why they hurt so bad. But it’s not the blood that makes my eyes go as big as saucers. No, it’s the black things sticking out of them, sharp little points that have driven through my skin like they pierced straight through me.
At first, I think maybe some of the splinters from the stable broke off and stabbed into me. But the longer I look, I see that’s not the case. The things are identical on both of my arms, and they didn’t stab into me. They came out of me.
I’m frozen in shock as my father reaches forward and presses against one of the black things. Both of us hiss in pain. I look up and notice that his thumb is now bloody, as if the black spike was so sharp that it cut him.
All the previous rage from his face is replaced with a strange grin as he looks at the blood for another second before he moves his attention to me. “My son.”
He quickly grips me by the shoulders again and makes me bend, and then I feel another jolt of pain when he presses a spot on my back, making my spine arch as I jerk upright again. “Ow!”
My father laughs as he releases me. “Look at you!” he says, his grin wider than I’ve ever seen it before. “Only eight years old, and look at this!”
“What is it?” I ask worriedly, staring at the bloody drips coming from the sharp black bumps. There are black veins stretching from the base of them, going down my arms like Ryatt took a quill to my skin and drew all over. I try to rub it off, but it won’t go away.
“You transformed,” Father says excitedly. “Your power came in.”
I feel myself go cold all over. “What?”
He grins and then yanks up my arm to show me. “See! You’ve already manifested.”
My eyes track from the veins in my arm to the veins in the ground that trail up the rotted outer boards of the stable wall. They’re the same.
“I knew my son would be powerful.”
I don’t feel powerful. I feel tired and everything hurts, and I’m so angry and so scared…
When I start to cry, I know it’s a mistake, but I can’t help it.
The pride instantly leaves his face, and he looks at me with disgust. “Stop that. I will not have a blabbering baby for a son,” he says coldly before his black eyes track to my mother. “Get him cleaned up and then send him to the gardens. I want to start testing what he can do,” he tells her, and then he adds, “and you, stay in your room. I don’t want to see you for the rest of the night.”
My mother’s grip on my leg tightens.
He turns and stalks away, and so many tears fall down my cheeks that I can’t even keep track of them all, but I’m glad he’s not here to count them. I try to stop, I really do, but everything hurts and I don’t understand, and my mother…
Just then, her face appears as she kneels in front of me, her eyes red-rimmed to match the mark on her cheek, the split in her lip.
“Am I…a Breaker?” I ask, and it makes me cry a little harder, because I don’t want to be anything like my father. But I somehow broke the stable wall, and I broke the ground, and these spikes broke through my skin…and I feel like a monster.
She shakes her head, gently tipping my chin up. “No, Slade. Not you. You don’t break things. You protect them.”
But when I look around the yard, this doesn’t look like protecting. This looks like ruin. My father ruins things too. Just looking at my mother’s face reminds me of that.
Even though my arm hurts a lot to move it, I lift my hand and softly touch her cheek. “Are you alright?”
Now she’s the one whose face crumples as tears start to run down her cheeks. Dropping my hand, I reach forward and carefully take hers and squeeze, trying to ignore all those black lines spreading to my fingertips.
“Don’t cry, Mother. I’ll protect you.”
This doesn’t make her feel better, because she just cries harder. My eyes drop, and I wish I was older, wish I could do something. Looking down, I see the grass stains on the hem of her white dress, from when Father hit her and she fell to the ground.
“Slade?”
We both turn to see Ryatt behind me, frowning and holding a bunch of strawberries in his shirt. He must’ve wandered off to the garden for a snack. I forgot he was out here. I’m so glad he didn’t see.