Page 44 of Sanctuary

“No.” He scrounged for the right words. “Men make plans, but gods pull the strings of fate. I was a soft-hearted kid. When I was about five, our cat got hit by a car, and I found him on the side of the road, dead.”

He could still vividly remember the ice-cold rush when he saw the mangled body.

“I cried for a really long time, to the point where they took me to a therapist to see if there was something wrong.”

“What did the therapist say?”

“She said I was sad. Gods become attached to a particular bloodline. It’s familiar, and they are creatures of habit. It was clear that Chernobog would choose his priest from our family, and neither of my parents thought I could handle it. They thought I was too soft, and that serving Chernobog would kill me. That I would end up like some of the others who tried to be Black Volhvs and, as my dad once put it years later, be found hanging from some branch with a vacuum cord around my neck. If anyone could carry that burden, it would be my brother, who had his shit together. He was...colder. Less affected by things. Better suited to our particular brand of priesthood. And he wanted it. It felt like the best decision for everyone, and they were determined to stick to it.”

“Parents mean well,” Andora said.

“They do.” Roman shrugged, the tree a steady weight behind him. “My earliest memory is from Nav.”

She glanced at him.

“I don’t know how old I was. Young. Maybe three. I was outside. It was dark, but there was this big fire burning. A giant man sat by the fire. He was cooking meat on skewers, and he gave me one. It was so delicious. It was too hot to touch, but I couldn’t eat it fast enough. The man watched me and chuckled.”

Andora’s eyes went wide. “You made—”

“Shhh,” he told her.

“You made him laugh?” she murmured.

He’d gotten more than one chuckle out of Chernobog, but it wasn’t something to talk about.

“After that, I didn’t visit for a long time. I had convinced myself that I’d imagined it, and then I turned ten and the dreams started. By that point I knew enough to put two and two together. Like it or not, I was wandering through Nav at night. Eventually I told my dad, and he lost it. Looking back on it, I think it scared him, and he was trying to protect me, but what I got out of it was that I, an epic screw-up, was trying to steal my perfect brother’s glorious destiny.”

“Ugh.” She shook her head. “The guilt.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t stop dreaming no matter how hard I tried. By twelve, I had run around Nav so much, it was like coming home. I was getting weird powers, and my magic was erratic. My parents’ separation put a cherry on top of that cake. I started failing my classes. It felt like I kept falling into a hole and couldn’t get out of it.”

They were almost out of the forest. Another half mile and the Glades would begin. He had to get to the point.

“I would sit around and brood. The more I brooded, the darker things seemed, the more my magic bucked against it. The first time the snakes happened, I had failed a quiz. My brother had warned me just that morning not to do anything that would aggravate Mom or Dad. So I sat there, trying to think of some way to hide the bad grade and the more I thought, the angrier I got, and the harder it was to keep a hold of my magic, until it exploded.”

“Aha. It just happened. Of course. It couldn’t possibly be your fault.”

“It was my fault, but it wasn’t targeted at you. It was omnidirectional. I sat in the last row, in the corner. There was nobody to my left or behind me. Dabrowski sat in front of me. Daciana sat to my right. You sat in front of Daciana. Dabrowski has a natural resistance to Nav- and Prav-based magic. Something to do with his nature-based powers. They peg him as neutral and fail to notice he is there.”

“Mhm.”

“Daciana always carried so many protective charms, her belt was like one of those baby mobiles. You didn’t have anything. It makes sense now, looking at it as an adult, but at the time I had no clue. When your pencils turned into snakes, I didn’t even know what I did. I couldn’t undo it, I tried. I told them I didn’t mean to, but nobody believed me, since I had a school rap sheet a mile long.”

She gave him a skeptical glance.

“My parents were called. It was a big deal. The second time, I realized what happened as it was happening, so I looked down to try to contain it. I ended up looking at your shoes. And then you had shoelace snakes, and I went back to the office. My mother talked to me, my father talked to me, everyone talked to me. Everyone explained how I couldn’t keep doing this crap. My father put a bone charm on a cord and told me to always wear it around my neck.”

“Mhm. And the third time?”

“The third time was…intentional. Again, not targeted at you specifically, but intentional.” He could still recall the splash of boiling hot anger that overtook him.

“What happened? Something must’ve happened.”

“It wasn’t good.”

“You’ve come this far, Roman. Let’s have all of it.”

There was no escape. He sighed.