XVIII
Evander
THE WOMAN GYRATED atop Evander with her back arched against his chest, his hands upon her hips, teasing at her thighs above her skirt, a throaty groan making him smile.
Her head fell into the gulch of his neck where it met his shoulder, her breath tickling his skin as she panted while her lower half moved rhythmically against his manhood. He grabbed at her breast, caressing the tender flesh through her shift. Desire raged through him. A dark desire.
“O Evander… yes… can we?”
Lifting the small woman off his lap with ease, he tossed her atop the bed and stood over her while she giggled. Her long, stygian hair made an unruly frame around her face as she licked her tongue across her lips, pulling the hem of her skirt up, exposing the innermost holy sanctum between her legs.
O how she looks so much like Snow Eyes.
However, the woman on the bed had unremarkable, brown irises and was a poor facsimile to the one he coveted. Not mysterious, not magical. A simple scullery maid in a Guilder’s villa. Not a trained aetheurgist who could stand beside him at the feet of his Divine.
The woman’s bland eyes pleaded with him as he stood there thinking of the girl who would one day be his. She held out a hand to him, urging him to come to her while she undid the laces of her shift with the other, exposing her breasts. Evander gazed down on her with a lust she would never understand. A pulsing in his body and mind, his soul. One she could vaguely satiate. She only saw his physical arousal, knew nothing of what could cure the tempest within him.
“SOLANINE KNOWS, MY DISCIPLE,” his master said, battering through Evander’s desires, filling him further with the need, “KNOWS WHAT IT TAKES TO BREAK THE BARRIER, TO THWART THE VEIL BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. PLAYTHINGS, THESE MORTALS. YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL.”
Solanine. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the aetheurgist out of his thoughts. Ever since their meeting, he barely thought of anything else, even Snow Eyes. The power his would-be-master had wielded, the aetheurgy of the void, O how he wanted it. He would do anything to get it. Anything.
Evander pulled his shirt over his head, the lowborn maid grinning as she admired the planes of his muscles. She sat up, running a finger—forever wrinkled from the tiresome work in the kitchens of her betters—across the valleys of his chest, down the length of his abdomen, reaching for the tongue of his belt, yanking it open. Her hand pulled him free.
“O how I’ve want—” Entwining his fingers in the tresses of cimmerian, she took him into her mouth, his eyes rolling back into his head as her words died upon him.
The pleasure. O Nocturne, the pleasure. But it wasn’t a lowly maid he thought of, but instead of the girl with ice in her gaze. You are mine, Snow Eyes. Mine. His fingers tightened in the waves of dark black, the woman continuing her assault with practiced ease.
‘She must come willingly,’ the words of Solanine ran through his head. She will be mine. Will come to me. I just need…
An explosion of his end came forth, his thoughts only of the girl he craved more than anything in this waking life. Anything besides power. Two, both can give him all his worldly desires. Both would be his.
The scullery maid drew back, her hand wiping her lips, plebeian eyes glimmering in hope up at him. She smiled, but he did not let go of her hair. The black locks wrapped about his fingers. Her smile withered. “Ow. Evander, you’re hurting me.”
“PAIN IS BUT THE FIRST STEP TOWARD IMMORTALITY.”
Evander’s gaze went slack. Pain, I can give it. What do I receive in return?
“SEEK AND FIND OUT.”
“There is felicity in the blood,” he started in a coarse whisper, using the exact words Solanine had spoken after crossing the veil to the Meadows using aetheurgy. “Immortality does not come from the proliferation of Life, but upon the wave of Death.”
Life and Death. His seed, her death.
“DEATH.”
Death…
Just then, the door to his chamber burst inward. In strode his brother, the floorboards groaning under Elian’s obese gait. Elian took in the scene, looking at the frightened woman with a slight hint of amusement. Two other shadows lurked behind, outside the room, one large, one small.
“Come, brother.” Elian beckoned Evander as if he was some lost puppy in need of training. “We have things to discuss.” Elian turned to leave, leaning toward Red Tulio. “Get rid of her.”
The orcirish thug barreled into the room and Evander tossed the small maid at him. The putrid beast caught the flailing woman and dragged her from the room, screaming and kicking. Nocturne, how she still fought. Just as Snow Eyes would.
He shivered with the thought. “Mors expectet,” he muttered, using the phrase Solanine had spoken when killing the Gutter King’s rat.
“Put your prick away, brother. Come.”
Evander reluctantly did as his need had not been fully sated. Later, he thought. Elian had denied him that end, that finish. Another tally to the list of why Evander cursed his brother.
Although The Colosseum was barely held together by more than sheer grit, the back halls even more so than that of the paying customer front façade. Evander’s chamber was nothing spectacular, mainly four walls and some scrounged up furniture. It was all he needed, for his Divine provided all the necessities. Evander’s room was on the opposite side of the building from Elian’s rooms.
Aside from the brothers and Quick Fingers, the hallway was empty of souls, only their footsteps made any sound within the rowdy tavern below them.
While his own room was simple, Elian’s was anything but. An office before led into a second room further back where his brother laid his head at night, but both were covered floor to ceiling with the types of furnishings one might see in Silk Circle. Draperies and velvets, carved furniture and statues. The vast majority were stolen from one job or another. Evander was drawn to a new addition: the satyr mask from House Soabin. It hung neatly upon the wall behind Elian’s desk, nestled between a gemstone shard mosaic said to have been created by Canlon Carr himself prior to the Fall of Eminence and the skull of a unicorn.
“Sit.” Elian might oversee the gang, but Evander knew who had the higher standing in his Divine’s hierarchy. Regardless, Evander sat. “Now, what did Solanine want with you?”
“Nothing you would understand.” Nothing you could ever come close to understanding, dear brother.
Elian glowered. He was a man used to getting what he wanted, whether that be information or elsewise. He toyed with the obsidian pendant that Solanine had given him. “Don’t goad me, Evander. What did that bitch want?”
Sitting there, watching his elder brother demand information from him, Evander couldn’t help but think the tides were finally going to capsize around Elian.
Growing up, both had lived a harsh life, their early days bleak. Their mother had been nothing but a street worker, their fathers some random aethecite miners with a spare bit of coin to spend on a woman of the night. They may be brothers by their mother’s blood, but neither resembled each other much other than their eyes and hair, although Elian’s had long since fled from his skull down to his back. Their mother had died of an easily treatable disease had she been anything more than a whore when they were but children, left to fend for themselves on the unrelenting streets of Drenth. Elian, being both older and stronger of will and flesh, had joined with the previous leader of Slag’s End, working and clawing his way up the chain, all while taking care of the younger Evander.
Evander even might have loved Elian once. Loved him as a sibling, as the only family he ever truly knew. But then the Divine had come into his life and their bond, the bond between brothers, had irrevocably changed.
