FOREVER KNIGHTS: #6 Malevolent Attentions
What Savage Does for Chavias

Let you kill him? What in Ardae do you have on him?

“Why?”

“Because it would’ve broken him. He raised me.”

How did he raise you?

“What?” Alazareth gestured so widely he tossed the bone he’d held into the trees.

“You heard what I said that day.”

The afternoon Chavias and Radix showed up to invade the Blue Lark. Alazareth vividly recalled the day.

“About him telling you who you could and couldn’t kill?”

I’d learned more about the strange boy that day then I have in all the years I’ve known him.

“Yes. He mentored me.”

“You care for him?” Alazareth asked stunned.

There was a long pause and for a moment, Alazar wondered if he’d pushed the young man too far. Savage Jaxson was like a heated powder keg prepared to burst into violence in an instant. Without hesitation. And very little provocation.

“He was like a father to me.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone fathering you!

“What in the Holy Hell!” Alazar couldn’t keep from expostulating in shock.

It was the last thing I’d imagine hearing tonight.

“That still doesn’t explain why you haven’t tried to kill me this eve?”

“Tried?” Savage Jack paused eating to quirk a brow.

Fine. Likely succeeded. There was a long moment of silence as even Alazar acknowledged the truth.

“He wouldn’t want you dead, so I don’t kill you.”

“He’s killed countless of us!”

“To save you. And them.”

How is he saving us by killing us? Alazareth scoffed. Trying to process this strange flood of information. None of it making a lick of sense!

“What?” Alazareth couldn’t recall a time he’d been more confused.

“I lived with him in those caves, Nauvree.” He tossed the bones from the squirrel over his shoulder. Tossing his head toward the remaining bits on the spit.

Alazar shook his head and gestured for him to take them.

“I watched the hell he went through night after night.”

What kind of Hell? What did Radix do to him? How were you there? Why? Questions flooded Alazareth’s brain. Overwhelming his thoughts.

“I never knew you were there for that. I’d thought you were just one of Radix’s slaves.”

“I was Radix’s prize.” He corrected blandly. “Chavias is his slave.”

“What’s happened to him?”

“Radix bleeds him most nights to keep him weak. Then drinks that blood to read his memories. So, to keep them from Radix, he blanks his mind while tortured. Think on that. Not even his mind can escape the torture to remember better things.”

Alazareth hissed through his teeth. I’d had no idea!

“Radix’s Commander, Okine, a yellow skinned monstrosity nearly cuts him apart. Regularly.” Savage Jack stopped eating to look at Alazar, blue eyes sparking with vengeance. “That creature is a dead man ambulating. If Chavias doesn’t first, there will come a day I rain suffering on him.”

“If Chavias is your family, why haven’t you gotten him out?”

Savage Jack’s face hardened. Eyes darkening. “If he was your brethren, why haven’t you?”

That’s a raw nerve. Alazareth recognized.

“He made us promise we wouldn’t.”

Savage Jack stared at Alazareth a long while, conveying the message. Not bothering to blink until Alazar pieced it together. “Oh.”

Savage Jack averted his attention back to the meat, eyeing it a moment, before tossing it aside as though the conversation made him lose his appetite.

Perhaps not as emotionless as I’d thought.

Of all the people he’d have an affection for, it’s the most hated Forever Knight he calls family. Strange turn. Alazar shook his head. Taking it all in.

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