Tears flowed freely down my cheeks, making warm, salty trails that I tasted on my tongue. I’d let my emotions go, though I hadn’t meant to. Where had that come from?
The psychologist in me said I was only letting out an emotion that I’d had trapped inside for a very long time.
Geth’s face no longer held that hardened, hate-filled stare. Instead, his eyes were sad, pain-filled, as if I’d struck a chord with him.
“I see,” he finally said. “Then it appears that you and I are not so different. My own father abandoned my mother and me when I was not old enough to protect her. He left us in the worst situation—with no food, minimal shelter, and no chance for survival. My mother’s sheer willpower was the only thing that kept us alive. On the infrequent occasions that he returned, he beat my mother. As a child, I lay on my cot during the cold night, hearing her pleas and unable to defend her. Although she has been dead for many years, I still wake to the sounds of her screams. It is a sound I could never forget.
“Years later, when I had grown into a man, I killed my father. It was not a climactic event. By that time, my father had degenerated into a sickly, pitiful creature. He made no attempt to stop his own murder. In truth, I suspected he knew it was coming. He wasted his last breaths begging for my forgiveness, but I had sworn long ago that I would never exonerate him from his crimes. No matter what, I swore that I would never become the man he was.
“My father could never truly experience the pain he had caused me and my mother. No matter what I did or how hard I tried, I could never make him suffer the way he made us suffer. Killing him too quickly is a mistake I regret every day of my life.”
The story of his childhood was heartbreaking, but he was deluding himself to think that the suffering of others would bring relief to his own pain. I’d seen enough damaged clients who could attribute their screwy lives to events that occurred in their childhood, but I knew very few people who had overcome their past. There was only one path they could take to truly be whole again—they had to forgive those who had hurt them.
Geth had done the exact opposite. Instead of forgiveness, he had killed his father, causing his anger and resentment to deepen.
“Killing your father didn’t put an end to your pain, I suspect. And now, you’re taking revenge on every race possible. But hatred will never allow you to heal. It will only consume you, until you become the thing you fear most.”
I expected some sort of retaliation, screaming and yelling on how wrong I was, but instead, he simply nodded.
“You are right,” he conceded softly. “My hatred has become a drug that consumes me—one that I do not know how to control.”
“But it can be controlled. If you’ll just let go of your past, forgive your father—”
“No!” The anger in his voice returned. “That is something I will never do.”
“Then you are more like him than you think.”
Without warning, he slapped me. Searing hot pain exploded through my skull. I felt the sting immediately, and already I could feel my face beginning to swell. My reflex was to hold my hands to my cheek, but that was impossible to do with my wrists bound together.
Geth motioned to his two men, who walked forward and grabbed me roughly under my arms, then hauled me to my feet.
“If you will not talk,” Geth said, “then perhaps you can persuade your pixie friend to do what you refuse.” He pulled out his knife. Its reflective surface mirrored the firelight as he waved it through the air. The knife was more than a weapon, I realized; it was also a magical talisman used in creating portals, much like my own mirror.
The room vanished. Instead, we sat on an open moor. Ragged trees grew around us, so crooked and bent I wasn’t sure how they remained standing upright. The sky was tinted a deep purple, and the stars overhead seemed unnaturally bright. There was no sun, yet the twilight sky was bright enough to light the hilltop we stood on. I’d seen this place before.
When I’d encountered the Regaymor in Mog’s Keep, the Dreamthief had used a mirror to send the dark creatures away. For a moment, I’d seen a strange world in the Dreamthief’s mirror—a world that looked eerily similar to where we’d come.
Dark magic emanated from the trees, the ground. I felt its taint in the sky, in the very essence of this place. It tugged at my senses. I didn’t know of any other way to describe it, except that it felt like death—a void that tore away emotions and left me empty of feeling. It was a black, viscous, foggy magic that stank of decay. My stomach sickened.
I closed my mind against the magic as it tried to intrude on my thoughts. I wasn’t familiar with it, which at any other time would have piqued my curiosity, but this was a magic that was more dangerous than anything I’d felt before. If I let it touch me, I wasn’t sure there would be anything left of me.
Something moved beneath one of the trees. Focusing, I saw a man tied beneath the branches. It was Mochazon, although I almost didn’t recognize him. His face was swollen, one of his cheekbones sagged as if it had been broken out of place, and dried blood was caked to his cracked lips. Jagged cuts crisscrossed his bare chest and arms. His once-shimmering, dragonfly-like wings were broken and bent at awkward angles, and they gave an audible snap as he struggled against the chains that kept him bound to the
