“The installation? And the Forum?”
Tristan sighed. “Suppose they just want to see what we’re capable of.”
“Suppose it’s real,” Callum mused alternatively. “I don’t suppose you have a lead, do you?”
“A lead?”
“A target would be the less sensitive term,” Callum said. “Or a mark.”
Tristan bristled a little, and Callum’s perpetual smile thinned.
“Do you find me callous now, too, Tristan?”
“A cactus would find you callous,” mumbled Tristan, and Callum chuckled.
“And yet here we are,” he said, summoning a pair of glasses, “two peas in a pod.”
He set one glass in front of Tristan, pouring a bit of brandy he procured from the flask in his jacket pocket.
“You know, I don’t remember the first time I realized I could feel things other people couldn’t,” Callum commented anecdotally, not looking up from the liquid in the glass. “It’s just… always been there. I knew, of course, right from the start that my mother didn’t love me. She said it, ‘I love you,’ just as often to me as she did to my sisters,” he continued, shifting to pour himself a glass, “but I could feel the way it lacked warmth when she said it to me.”
Callum paused. “She hated my father. Still does,” he mused in an afterthought, picking up his glass and giving it a testing sniff. “I have a guess that I was conceived under less than admirable circumstances.”
He glanced up at Tristan, who raised his own glass numbly to his lips. Like always, there was a blur of magic around Callum, but nothing identifiable. Nothing outside of the ordinary, whatever Callum’s ordinary even was.
“Anyway,” Callum went on, “I noticed that if I did certain things; said things a certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her… soften towards me.” The brandy burned in Tristan’s mouth, more fumes than flavor. “I suppose I was ten when I realized I had made my mother love me. Then I realized I could make her do other things, too. Put the glass down. Put the knife down. Unpack the suitcase. Step away from the balcony.” Callum’s smile was grim. “Now she’s perfectly content. The matriarch of the most successful media conglomerate in the world, happily satisfied by one of the many boyfriends half her age. My father hasn’t bothered her in over a decade. But she still loves me differently; falsely. She loves me because I put it there. Because I made myself her anchor to this life, and therefore she loves me only as much as she can love any sort of chain. She loves me like a prisoner of war.”
Callum took a sip.
“I feel,” he said, blue eyes meeting Tristan’s. “I feel immensely. But I must, by necessity, do it differently than other people.”
That, Tristan supposed, was an understatement. He wondered again if Callum were using anything to influence him and determined, grudgingly, that he did not know.
Could not know.
“I,” Tristan began, and cleared his throat, taking another sip. “I would not wish to have your curse.” “We all have our own curses. Our own blessings.” Callum’s smile faltered. “We are the gods of our own universes, aren’t we? Destructive ones.” He raised his glass, toasting Tristan where he sat, and slid lower in his chair. “You’re angry with me.”
“Angry?”
“There’s not a word for what you are,” Callum corrected himself, “though I suppose anger is close enough. There is bitterness now, resentment. A bit of tarnish, or rust I suppose, on what we were.”
“You killed her.” Even now it felt silly, inconceivable to say. Tristan had been numb at the time, only half-believing. Now it felt like a distant dream; something he’d invented when his mind had wandered one day. The call of the void, that sort of thing. Gruesome ugliness that danced into his thoughts and back out, too fleeting and horrid to be true.
“It seemed like the honorable thing at the time,” said Callum.
It took drastic measures not to gape at him. “How?”
Callum shrugged. “When you feel someone’s pain, Tristan, it is difficult not to want to put them out of it. Do we not do the same for physical pain, for terminal suffering? Under other circumstances it’s called mercy.” He took another sip from his glass. “Sometimes, when I suffer someone else’s anguish, I want what they want: for all of it to end. Parisa’s condition is lifelong, eternal. Degenerative.”