"This is the last time you will ever attempt to run away, do you understand me?”

Bek glared into the flinty eyes of his captor, mere inches from his own. He tried to shake away from the steel grip that held his face so tightly in place that it made the muscles in his jaw ache. Those hands had caused him pain a hundred times before, with a gesture, a demand, but never a strike, as if their wielder were above the possibility of physical punishment. Or perhaps the man’s reasons were more insidious, because men of the law knew best to never leave evidence, never draw blood – leave the scars where the light of day could never touch.

The pressure on Bek’s jaw decreased slightly, but it made no difference – just the touch of his captor’s fingers made his skin crawl. His bronze eyes were dark beneath the length of his sandy blonde hair, his skin pale with rage. He would never let this man see how afraid he was. Never. Because there was no one he hated so passionately as his grandfather…how could there be, when he was bound to Jorik by blood, ensnared before he had any chance to escape?

Jorik’s expression hardened. Alarm flared through Bek’s body, but his arms were bound behind him by someone larger and stronger than himself; someone who, at that moment, he hated as much as the man in front of him.

“Are you happy, Bek? You’ve graduated. Even if you only suffered your compulsory education in the hopes I would become complacent due to your obedience, you’ve accomplished something notable,” Jorik continued.

Bek continued to glare as the man let him go and turned away, presenting the stiff, all-too-solid back that had dominated Bek’s vision for too long. It was better when Jorik’s unnervingly piercing gray eyes were not on Bek’s face, easier when he saw only the claw-like hands grasped behind the man’s back and the silvering hair at the base of his skull – then Bek could hate Jorik freely and without fear. Bek’s face contorted into a snarl as he struggled and felt the pressure on his arms increase. There were cuffs around his wrists, locking them in place.

“Tell me, Trent, where did you inherit the guile to carry your schemes for years at a time? When did you learn to be so patient, so…gullible?” Silence. Bek ignored the jibe. “Your father? I thought he died before he could ruin you, but blood is a powerful curse, wouldn’t you say? You’re a little more like him every year.”

Those claw-like hands stiffened, the muscles strained. Then Jorik turned slightly, calmly reading something off his desk. He never moved, but the papers in front of him shifted, just slightly, as his eyes narrowed. He moved them with magic.

“You know, if you’d used your head and applied to a university somewhere, I might have let you gallivant off to earn your degree. You would have had three or four years of freedom,” the man paused, “assuming you took longer to finish your studies there than you did in high school.”

“You never would have let me go,” Bek’s voice came out louder than he had intended, and Jorik turned slightly, but not enough to look at him. Bek felt the pressure on his arms increase, the wood around his wrists digging in. If not for those restraints, he could have used his magic. Then, the tables would have been turned. Jorik hardly ever used more than a pittance of magic in front of Bek, and he had an inkling his grandfather was barely half as powerful as he was.

“And why do you think that is, Mr. Trent? Could it be because this is your fifth attempt at running away, and you would’ve disappeared the moment we took our eyes off of you? Could it be because you seem set on becoming the very kind of criminal the MASO has sworn to protect society against – one who is willing to use magic to disrupt the foundations of our agency, forge documents related to his own identity, and steal not only dangerous artifacts, but government secrets? Oh yes,” Jorik met his eyes for a moment, “You can imagine how pleased I was to hear from the FBI. Lucky for you, you’re a minor, and equally lucky, you failed to do any real harm. But rest assured, in all of this you’ve accomplished something else notable. You’ve proven to me that you are a very valuable asset, unlike your father.”

Bek felt his breath hitch. It was this man’s fault that his father was dead. This man…

“Take him.”

Those words were his death sentence. Bek twisted around to see the face of the agent behind him, but rough hands pressed him forward again, and then he was being pulled around to an open door and pushed down a narrow tunnel that seemed to descend into the pits of the earth itself. How had they captured him? Where had he gone wrong? Bek had been so sure this time he would succeed, maybe only because it had been his last chance to escape and he had known as much.

Dark walls engulfed them. They were walls of a stone as black as jet, lit by magic that ran like electricity through pale blue trenches in the stone. Only the oldest parts of the MASO had channels like those. Despite the light, he could see no end to their way forward, no end to the tunnel that stretched before him or the suffering that he would inevitably find at its end.

Jorik’s footsteps sounded behind Bek’s, counting out the steps to the end of his life. That was…assuming his life had not ended five years ago on the night his father died. It felt like it had. At just eight years old, Bek had already been unwilling to give up everything for the agency that kept an iron grip over his family. It was possible that was where he had first gone wrong.

He had refused to give his life to the MASO.

Pain lanced through Bek’s shoulders as he was thrust forward again. He had begun to shuffle without realizing as much, deep in thought. Now, abruptly, he saw that there was an end to this passage. They were nearly there. His bronze eyes fixed on the narrow arch of stone that ushered them into some new space. Beyond that arch, there was only blackness. He heard muted voices whispering from that blackness, however, and his nostrils flared as he smelled metal and a coppery scent that made his stomach roil.

Blood.

This place had seen so much of it over the ages that the scent of it had eked into the very walls until it hung, suffocating, in the air. A primal surge of adrenaline sent electricity through Bek’s joints, but he had no chance of escape and he knew it. Others must have tried here, at his very point. There were gouges in the walls from ancient weapons, chips at the edges of the light channels that cupped the shadows around them. An evil pall made the air so thick that it burned his lungs, and it took all of Bek’s will to suppress an involuntary shudder.

But it was not fear or the certainty of failure that kept him at bay. He had long since shirked the paralyzing effects of his terror, even if he could not keep his heart from fluttering in his chest as if set on escape, or the sweat from making his skin as cold as the stone walls around them. This was a game. It was all a game. This was just one more play, one turn of the cards in the match that comprised his life. Whatever his grandfather had planned, Bek would suffer it without revealing the last of his cards. He had already overplayed his hand. This was the only way to win. Hold his advantages close, lose a few chips while betting both sides of the table.

Just keep hold of that dying breath until the right moment.

Cool air brushed the hair from his eyes as he stumbled farther from the snaking walls of the tunnel, into the cavernous underground chamber. Bek’s gaze immediately danced to the depths of the world around him. What he saw was a great stone cage with pillars that disappeared from view far overhead. There was darkness all around those pillars, as if the chamber stretched on forever just beyond where his eyes could see. The pillars themselves were all built of the same twisting, blue-tinted stone wreathed by hundreds upon thousands of etched words. It was too dark to make out what they said.

The voices he had heard came from the shadows around the pillars, their speakers indiscernible, but the stench of blood was stronger the closer he drew to the center of the chamber. The speakers must also smell it, though Bek doubted it made them afraid. It was possible they even felt empowered, standing on the other side of a wall of darkness, obscured in the shadow of death. Corruption. Avarice. Pride. They were all no better than his grandfather, and they were all afraid of what Bek knew.

Bek’s scathing glare turned towards the space at the center of the pillars, where the dim light of the overhead channels was bright enough to make out the shadow of more words inscribed into a diamond etched in the stone floor. It was to that point of illumination that he was hurried, as much dragged as pushed. As soon as he had reached the diamond, which was easily a man’s height across, the agent behind him forced Bek to his knees so hard he nearly slammed his forehead against the cold stone of the ground. He could see the words clearly now, and his eyes widened as he realized they were written in a dead language – Altian. The language of witches, and of the blood arts. The language of a people lost to history, swallowed by legend.

For the first time, Bek felt less sure of what Jorik was planning. As if the words inches from his face could give him some clue of what was to come, he began to read rapidly. This was a language his father had taught him as a child, one as familiar to him as any other. Then Jorik’s booted feet obscured his vision. The man’s chilling voice rang in the room as knelt to run a hand slowly across the words.

“There are scholars who would pay any price to see this place, and to study these words laid down in a dead man’s tongue.”

There was a pause as someone begged a question from the shadows – a question that Bek neither heard nor cared to hear. Then Jorik’s attention returned to Bek as he gestured to the expanse of darkness and the soaring heights of the ceiling.

“Every Trent, including your father, sets foot in this room at some point. We call it the Inscription Chamber, but its real name, Bek, is Zaranal Zekela, the Hall of Shadows. This is where the most powerful magic users have been condemned and executed for centuries. But don’t worry. Your father raised you well to be a dog of the MASO – you’ll die for better things than petty crimes.”

Bek’s eyes gleamed in the dim light of the room as he wished all of his hatred into the glare that he fixed on Jorik. His grandfather merely smiled slightly, and Bek hated him all the more for having a smile like his father’s – so slight that most people would never even see it.

“Like any dog,” Jorik stated flatly, “you’ll need a collar.”

Bek stared as Jorik slid a dagger from the fabric of his jacket, the metal glinting dangerously between his bare fingers. Uncertainty stirred in Bek’s gut. But Jorik did not cut him – instead, in a motion nearly too quick to follow, the man cut into his own flesh, letting the blood run fresh and fast down his palm. Bek’s bronze eyes narrowed.

“Krisgaard, remove his shirt and the bindings.”

Icy terror gripped him. The man at Bek’s back breathed a reply. His hands were uncuffed. The fabric was wrenched from his body, his skin left bare to the freezing air of the chamber. Bek was aware that he was trembling despite his anger, or perhaps because of it. Sweat beaded on his skin. The voices beyond the shadows were growing louder.

Then Jorik’s steely eyes ensnared and held Bek’s gaze. He could not move. Krisgaard’s grip tightened around his shoulders, pressing him to the floor. Meanwhile, Jorik was putting the dagger away, and then dipping the fingers of his uninjured right hand in the blood of his left.

And finally, Bek understood. His feet skidded uselessly against the ground as he tried to pull away. Then there were hands in his hair, pulling his head back until he was staring into the darkness overhead. His eyes unfocused in his panic. He could not see what Jorik was doing, only feel the touch of heat against the skin of his throat, directly above his collarbone. His breathing came fast and ragged, no matter how he tried to control it. Still, the warm touch lingered, until he realized that Jorik was standing back, eyeing him warily.

What had Jorik done?

There was a second of silence in the chamber. Jorik opened his mouth to speak…

And his grandfather’s voice swelled in Bek’s ears, ringing through his very mind. He wanted to scream. Krisgaard’s fingers were still entangled in his hair, holding him fast. He opened his mouth, unable to hold his voice in any longer, but any sound he might have made died in his throat. The heat was spreading through his body, through his blood. He felt the answering call of his magic, and it seared through his bones and his muscles, burning him from the inside out. At the same time, the heat against his skin faded to ice that spread across his neck and shoulders, down his back and arms. It trickled like cold water, congealing when it reached his shoulder blades and before it passed his elbows. The cold was excruciating. It ate him away from the outside, just as the heat did from within.

Then he gasped as a sense of vertigo took him. The numbness in his body seemed to extend to his mind. His thoughts became sluggish, his magic clouded. He was falling, unable to move. Stupid mistakes. It was always stupid mistakes that brought him to moments like these. This time, the mistake had been failing to imagine that he would ever encounter a blood curse. He had underestimated Jorik.

Bek blinked, unaware that his eyes had been closed. The pressure was gone from his scalp, and he realized he was hanging limp with his arms still in someone’s grasp. His breathing was becoming slowly more regular, though it was still shallow and quick. Where the chill air touched his skin, it was cold and clammy, slick with sweat. His body was wracked by tremors that left him too weak to care that he was staring again at the words scraped into the floor, reading lines that read to him like poetry. A room with a door, a window, and a mirror. Strange words to carve into the floor of a place meant for the condemned.

Slowly, the ringing faded from his ears. Summoning all of his strength, Bek lifted his head, bronze eyes burning as they found Jorik’s face.

The man was smiling again, gray eyes cold and unyielding. Several seconds passed as they stared at one another, the one in triumph and the other in refusal to surrender, before Jorik reached out. The man’s unbloodied hand was nearly at Bek’s face when, so quickly that Bek surprised even himself, he lashed out. His teeth missed by mere centimeters.

The displeasure on Jorik’s face and the quick, curt motion of his lips were the last things Bek saw before a pain like none he had ever felt scoured his body. His throat burned. His lungs filled with liquid fire. No matter how he gasped for air, they remained empty. He tasted blood and metal and nothing else. When his eyes were open he saw black, when they were closed he saw red. He could hear his heartbeat, and he could hear how it stuttered and he thought it stopped. It was moments before he realized that the pain in his shoulders was because he had ripped them from Krisgaard’s grasp and was clawing at his throat.

“Take him to his room.”

The lethal voice deafened him. It was all Bek could do to lower his gaze to his grandfather’s face, promising so many terrible things in his pain that he wondered if all of them could be inflicted before death. Someone threw Bek over their shoulder, and it was not until he could breathe again that he remembered the name of the man once more. It was Krisgaard – dark hair and dark eyes, hands twice and again the size of his own, the smell of smoke and oil. By then, they were already moving away from the center of the room that smelled of blood and reeked of death.

Bek’s eyelids flickered, but his bronze eyes remained trained on Jorik’s face until the tunnel walls closed over them. The man was not even looking at him. He was looking elsewhere, standing, speaking. Pain of a different kind ached through Bek. It blinded him entirely.

“I’ll…kill you. Everything…” he whispered, finding his voice lost in the echo of Krisgaard’s footsteps. But Jorik could no longer see him. Only Krisgaard could hear, and he had no plans to answer. Freed from the scrutiny of his grandfather’s gaze, Bek finally succumbed to unconsciousness.

It was hours later that he woke to the cold darkness of his room, his body curled defensively amid the rumpled sheets of his bed and his gaze fixed forward, unblinking. The burning pain had receded to a dull ache in the skin of his throat, but he hardly noticed. He did not want to notice, or to care. He did not want to think. He did not want to feel. He simply lay in the bed, his eyes not seeing the walls of the room, or the dark dresser pressed up against them, or the window that ate away the wall beside his bed and looked out on the black forest of the night. His mind turned endless, torturous circles, but his memories turned to dust when he struggled to grasp them. His thoughts were like the eddies of the brackish forest rivers, so cold that he drowned in them, so deep that he lost sight of the surface.

Bek did not notice when he began to dream. It was a warm dream that vanished when he woke for a second time. This time, when he opened his eyes it was to a dark, moon-flooded room. His entire body ached, and the sheets beneath him were stiff. After several seconds, he slowly pushed himself up, staring down at the thin fabric until his bronze eyes turned to the window.

Silence. An absolute stillness that belied the deepest depths of concentration took hold of him. He sat unmoving, not so much as blinking, for long enough that he might have forgotten how to breathe if he had remained still any longer. Finally, ignoring the ache that flared into life in every muscle of his body, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stumbled to the window. His fingers touched the frigid glass and he shivered immediately, but again, he hardly seemed to notice. His attention was drawn to his reflection instead.

Pale, Bek was still dressed in the black pants he had been wearing earlier in the day. No doubt his shirt would be returned to him in the morning, washed and pressed, clean as if nothing had happened. In the glass, his face was as ghostly as he had imagined. Only his eyes were striking, and those were turned to the reflection of a deep-black, floral tattoo that writhed around his neck and shoulders. He traced the marks slowly with one hand, his eyes narrowing. They were as much a ghost as he was; when he looked down, there was no mark against his skin. It was only his reflection that revealed the MASO’s curse.

Feeling that the chill of the window had seeped into him and taken hold there, Bek shifted his gaze to the outside, leaning against the glass. It was an invisible window. From the outside, it was impossible to see in, or to even know that there was a room where he stood. No one would see him, nor know of his suffering. A dog of the MASO was indeed a ghost.

Lacking whatever motivation or determination it might have required for him to return to his bed, he sank to the ground where he stood, leaving fogged smears down the glass where his fingers touched.

“I promise you, Jorik,” he said aloud, “every rule I’ll break, every law I’ll shatter, until the MASO is no more. I’ll live just to destroy you...” It sent a thrill through him to speak the words, because he knew they were true. He would not hesitate. He would not be stopped. No longer was his goal in life to escape, but now it had become to seek out every secret that the MASO had been built to protect, bare it all to the world, and bask in the chaotic results of their discovery. He would do what was necessary….

Bek’s bronze eyes narrowed at him in the glass, aglow in the moonlight. He swallowed and pain throbbed through is throat.

Yes.

Whatever was necessary…