“Father—” he tried, but a fist hit the side of his mouth, cutting his cheek on his teeth. Silas couldn’t help it; he covered his head. He had to.
“You think you’re better than me?” his father raged, slamming the toe of his shoe into Silas’s hip. “You think you . . . can take my place?”
“No!” Silas cried, fire radiating up his spine. His father stumbled back but shot out a kinetic blast that attempted to crush Silas’s entire body. Blood spilled from his lips. Stars danced across his eyelids. Something snapped and ached.
His father had never hurt him this badly before. Never.
“Please!” Silas begged.
A second magical blast had bile coursing up Silas’s throat. Acid splattered over his shirt.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
“I’ll show you—”
Silas’s blood lit white hot.
Kinesis blasted from his body and slammed his father into the stall door. Broke it off its hinges. Sent man and door skidding across the manicured lawn. The horses whinnied and reared in their stalls as Silas’s bloody fingers clambered for a grip. His joints seized with the use of power, but he worked his hands, knuckles popping, and strained to stand. Wheezing, he lifted his head and peered through the sweaty locks covering his eyes.
His father didn’t move.
Limping, holding his middle, Silas crossed the distance between them, the stiffness gradually easing. His father’s chest still rose. His breathing was loud in the quiet night. Had no one heard them? Or did the staff merely not want to hear, knowing they could do nothing to stop the master of the house? They’d never once stepped in to save Silas or his brother.
His father’s hand gripped grass as he lifted his head, eyes finding Silas. “I’ll . . . kill . . . you . . .”
The invisible hand wrapped around Silas’s throat.
Silas didn’t even think. Had he thought, maybe he could have coaxed the spell from his neck. Maybe he could have lulled his father into sleep and passed another day in his shadow. But he didn’t.
His necromancy came from his mother’s side. It seemed eager to serve, to penetrate his drunken father’s skin and mix with his soul. To drain him until the kinetic spell broke and his head thumped back against the ground. But the other spells grew jealous, and they rode along the path, merging with the first, stretching unseen lines between father and son—
Silas woke with his face pressed into the lawn. When had he . . . ? His ribs stung with every breath. The left side of his body, where he’d taken the kinetic blows, burned and pulsed with new bruises. Iron slicked his teeth. Scabs matted his hair.
Beside him, his father still breathed as though drawn into the deepest of slumbers.
But despite the injuries, despite the misery entangling his body and screaming in his bones, Silas felt . . . different. He felt . . . strong, somehow. Not in a physical sense but a metaphysical one. His magic . . . His magic felt like a thousand brilliant candles within him. Like it had . . . grown?
He stared at his father’s face. His slow breaths still reeked of alcohol.
Using a hand unattached to himself, Silas let the fingers pinch over his father’s windpipe. No more.
The breaths stopped.
And the surge of strength snuffed out. So suddenly that Silas found himself gasping for its loss. He gaped at his father’s corpse. Had he taken . . . but he couldn’t have . . . could he?
One thing was certain, as Silas carefully, joint by joint, pulled himself upright once more.
No one would ever have power over him again.
Chapter 1
September 4, 1846, Baltimore, Maryland
The reading of a will was far more exciting when one hadn’t been disinherited thirteen years prior. Indeed, Merritt Fernsby was not sure why the lawyer had contacted him at all.
He hadn’t come with his family, of course. He hadn’t spoken to them in a decade. Hadn’t been allowed to. There were letters in the beginning, all from him—the start of his writing career, in a melancholy sort of way, but melancholy things always made for great fiction. The coddled and content seldom told good stories. And though he was thirty-one years of age as of last March, he had yet to start a family of his own, for various reasons he could get into but never did.
And so he was very interested to receive a telegram from Mr. Allen, his maternal grandmother’s estate lawyer. Interested and confused, he’d made the trip out to Baltimore to satiate his curiosity. If nothing else, it might make good fodder for an article, or perhaps his work in progress.