Ch 89: Joseph Bright

Joseph Bright stood beside his twin sister Olivia and could not help but keep staring at Lucien's blurring figure, watching him cleave down an enemy in one spot and then, in the span of a tenth of a second, reappear somewhere else entirely, his blade already swinging through another body before the old corpse had even begun to fall.

"What is this speed?" Joseph muttered in a daze, unable to believe that a boy who looked no older than himself could be so impossibly powerful. He had to rub his eyes multiple times just to assure himself that he was not imagining things, and had even gone so far as to pinch his own cheek. It hurt. In the most bitter and immediate way possible, reality confirmed itself.

And yet, despite everything, he could not help but feel his own blood surge and quicken watching Lucien cut down one figure after another. Only half the kidnappers remained now, and the leader who had been barking orders earlier had already crumpled to the forest floor, his body cleaved cleanly from the crown of his skull downward, not a shred of mercy afforded to him. The man's eyes, dark as an abyss in life, had frozen open in death with a look of pure disbelief etched across his face. The surviving kidnappers had long since abandoned any thought of attacking Joseph and Olivia. They were no longer fighting to kill. They were fighting to survive.

A sharp rush of wind carved through the air exactly where Joseph's head had been resting a heartbeat before.

"What are you dazing at?" His sister grabbed him by the collar and hauled him aside, saving him from a dagger that had been hurled at him without his noticing it at all.

Maybe he was wrong, they were still trying to kill him and his sister.

For a single split second, Lucien turned toward them. His face was utterly impassive, carrying in it the quiet confidence of someone who had already trusted that Olivia would pull Joseph from the incoming dagger. Then Lucien turned back to the remaining kidnappers without a word.

"Thank you," Joseph breathed, releasing the tight knot of air he had been holding in his lungs. What would have happened if Olivia had not reached him in time? He shoved the thought away the instant it surfaced, but it was already too late. His mind had already conjured it for him, the image of a dagger punching through his skull, of blood and grey matter spilling out across the dark ground. His stomach lurched and bile burned the back of his throat. He pressed his nails hard into his palms and held it there, letting the sharp sting of it pull him back to himself. The bitterness in his mouth faded slowly to that familiar dry residue, and he swallowed it down.

"Please, spare me." One kidnapper had dropped to his knees at the base of a broad trunk, scrambling backward across the ground with his palms clawing at the dirt, desperate for any handhold that might let him escape.

Why is Lucien not finishing him? Joseph wondered and the answer instantly came to him as it was already present bare open before him. He scanned the forest floor and found the answer in the scattered bodies lying motionless across the ground. Every last kidnapper was dead. Only a single one remained.

How fast? Joseph bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, unable to believe that while he had been lost inside his own swirling thoughts, Lucien had killed the rest of them. All of them. Is he on something? The thought rose unbidden, and Joseph nearly laughed at himself for thinking it, except that it was not entirely without basis. He had caught it more than once during the fighting, a small smile pulling at Lucien's mouth each time he vanished from one spot and materialized in another with a body falling in his wake. It was not a wide grin, barely even a smile at all, more of a curl at the corner of the lips, subtle enough that Joseph had second-guessed himself each time he noticed it. But there was no mistaking what lived behind it. Lucien had looked ecstatic.

Am I hallucinating? Joseph turned his head to ask his sister, and found that her sister was no longer present.

She looked nothing like herself.

This is not my sister.

That was the only thought he could string together, because the girl standing beside him bore no resemblance to the rough, untameable twin he had grown up alongside. In her place stood someone who looked very much like a maiden whose heart had just been run clean through. Olivia's jaw hung slightly open, her eyes fixed and unblinking on Lucien's face with an intensity that Joseph had never once seen directed at anything in all their years together.

I am definitely hallucinating, Joseph told himself firmly, and he truly hoped it was the truth, because if it was not, the implications were severe. A royal elf bloodline entangling itself with a human bloodline would be considered a stain on their house, a tainting of a lineage that stretched back generations, and the consequences of it would be devastating.

He sighed and kept hoping.

While Joseph wrestled with his thoughts, Lucien had already crouched down in front of the last remaining kidnapper, who had pressed his back against the trunk with nowhere left to go. The man was shaking visibly, his whole body trembling.

"Please spare me," the kidnapper rasped, his voice stripped raw with desperation.

Lucien pressed the flat of his blade against the man's throat without ceremony. In what appeared to be a last desperate reflex, the kidnapper reached for a short sword strapped beneath his cloak. Joseph sucked in a sharp breath, because he could not track Lucien's hand at all, could not even catch a blur of the movement, only the result of it: Lucien's fingers locked around the kidnapper's wrist, and the blade fell from the man's grip with a thin metallic clatter against the forest floor.

"You are not kidnappers," Lucien said, his voice perfectly even. "Who sent you after them?"

Lucien turned his head slightly toward Joseph and Olivia. Olivia immediately began picking her way toward him through the scattered dead bodies, stepping carefully around the bodies. Joseph followed a step behind, clearing the corpses with somewhat less composure.

The kidnapper said nothing. Instead, with his free hand, he reached inside his black cloak, fingers groping for something hidden within the folds of it. Lucien caught that hand too, and this time he did not simply restrain it. He wrenched both of the man's arms backward with a deliberate, unhurried force, and something cracked loudly at both joints in succession, a wet, loud cracking sound that made Joseph's stomach drop. The kidnapper's arms went limp, wrenched completely from their sockets.

"Aaaaghh!" The scream that tore out of the man's throat was the kind of sound that did not belong in a human mouth, raw and animal and endless, ringing out through the dead quiet of the night forest. Joseph felt it rattling inside his eardrums long after it had faded.

"Tell me," Lucien said with a thin smile, "and I might let you go."

Joseph did not miss the word might. However, he doubted the kidnapper had caught it like Joseph did. The cloak figure’s mind likely only focused on seizing the possibility of words let you go, the way a drowning man seizes on anything that floats within reach. It was what people always did when fear had stripped away everything else.

***

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