Vesik 04 - This Broken World Read Online Free PDF

weren’t breathing. You had no heartbeat.”
    Mom tried to say more, but she couldn’t speak when she started sobbing. Tears trickled down her cheeks, and then I really felt like shit. “Something … something came into that room,” she said. “It came out of the walls, and the ceiling …” Mom hiccuped and buried her face in her hands.
    My dad looked at the ground. “The lights. “They … they dripped black. That’s the only way I can describe it. There were eyes, and a voice, but no body. Unless shadows count as a body. It didn’t say much. ‘Beware the Watchers. His master will reveal the path.Raise him well.’ ”
    Mom looked up at me for a moment before the words starting pouring out. “And then it … it just … that darkness reached out and touched the doctor. There was a flash of light. Golden light so blinding, you can’t imagine. I heard a scream, and at first I think it was just the doctor, but then a tiny cry started as the doctor collapsed onto the floor.” Mom looked up at me. “And then you breathed. You opened those beautiful gray eyes. And you were mine.”
    Sam’s hug crushed me, but I barely felt it. Warmth ran from my eyes and cooled before it reached my chin as the revelation hit me. Ezekiel had killed a man to bring me over, and that fact hit me like a cannon shot. I should have been dead. I had been dead. What the hell did that make the seventh son of Anubis?
    “No one suspected,” Mom said with a stutter before she broke into a half-laugh. “What would they even suspect? It was simply the doctor’s time to go.” Her fingernail clicked as she scratched at her thumbnail. “I didn’t know what you were. I just knew I loved you.”
    “He had no right,” I said. “To take the life of a man who helps bring life into this world?”
    “Don’t say that,” Dad said. “You’ve done great things for this world.”
    “I’ve killed … many things,” I said, my voice not much more than a whisper. The old clock on the wall ticked in the silence.
    “You’ve saved many more,” Sam said with her face buried in my shoulder. “You saved me.”
    My breath came faster. I threw my arm around Sam and squeezed her tight.
    “Without you, I’d be gone,” she said. “Without you, Vicky’s murderers would have gone free. Azzazoth would be walking the earth. Prosperine would be free to destroy the world. Ezekiel would have already won.” She lifted my head and kissed my cheek. “Make him pay.” She kissed my other cheek. “Make. Him. Pay.”
    “Samantha is right,” Dad said. “You can be his greatest mistake. The salvation for a world that doesn’t even know it needs you.”
    I smiled and closed my eyes, thumping my forehead against Sam’s. “I’m not that strong.”
    No one spoke for a time, and I tried to savor that moment of normalcy.
    “It wasn’t long before we realized your imaginary friends weren’t make believe,” Dad said, and the moment was gone.
    I looked up slowly as I considered that. “Jasper.”
    “And Koda, and Grant,” Dad said. “You’d tell us you’d talked to them, and then you would know things. Things about history that we had to look up online, for fuck’s sake. Terrible things about wars and demons and magic. You knew more about the Civil War by the time you were four than I’d learned in four years of college.” He squeezed Mom’s shoulder as she shuddered. “I still didn’t really believe it until I saw the dust bunny move.”
    I almost growled. “Jasper. He revealed himself to you? When we were kids?”
    Dad nodded as Mom took a deep drink. “We saw the parrot once too,” he said, “though we never mentioned it to you. I think it was best for your mother not to speak of it.”
    “Graybeard?” I asked.
    “We could see its bones, but it spoke like a man,” Mom said. “It was awful.”
    I’d never thought of Graybeard as awful. Other than his knack for telling Zola every little thing I did, and landing me on the chopping