Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
The Language of Warmth
Erevos
His little songbird was shaking so violently that Erevos thought for a moment she must be ill.
Her cries were loud and fractured, rising and falling in waves so intense that he could barely make out the words, and the fact that he couldn’t understand what she was saying did not please him.
He had always listened closely and paid attention, and now, in the moment when she needed him most, her meaning was lost in the noise of her pain.
Since he couldn’t ask her, Erevos concluded that he did not understand humans as well as he thought he did. For all his watching, for all his listening, there were still pieces missing.
And so, he decided not to speak.
He acted.
Erevos wrapped his arms around Lyssena gently, careful not to startle her further, and drew her into his embrace.
At first, he lifted her too high—her feet dangled, and she flinched—so he lowered her, perhaps too much.
But after a moment, he found the balance, and she was nestled perfectly between his chest and arms, her head resting just beneath the hollow of his throat.
As the seconds passed, her cries began to fade.
He did not understand why she wouldn’t look at him.
She had looked before, when they first met. He had given her permission again. And yet, instead of meeting his gaze, she had burst into tears.
That reaction troubled him. Erevos felt . . . uneasy.
He didn’t know the name for the feeling, didn’t know if demons were even meant to feel it, but he recognized that something within him was different, and he knew that it wasn’t right.
Demons didn’t feel much, after all. Nothing truly happened in their lives.
There was only hunger, and the feeding of it.
They were never bored, never entertained, never curious in the way mortals were.
There had never been anything that stirred the quiet in him.
Until Lyssena.
And now, for the first time in all his years of watching her from the edges of her world, for all the time he had spent memorizing her movements and expressions and habits, he realized he was still far from understanding her.
He wanted to understand her. So much so, he had defied the norms of his own realm, bent the stillness of The Void into something livable and breathable for her. He had created a home where she would not die.
And now he saw that this, too, was only the beginning.
There was only one solution to the problem before him.
“Little songbird,” he murmured, his voice as soft as shadow, as he pulled her closer, tucking her fully into the safety of his hold. He found he liked this more than he expected. He liked the feel of her heartbeat against his chest. He liked how small she was in his arms, how alive she felt.
She looked nothing like him, and that did not matter.
She was not like him in any way, and that mattered even less.
He found her . . . fascinating.
And the more he realized how much he didn’t know, the more he felt something new take root inside him. Eagerness.
Erevos was eager to . . .
To what? What, exactly, was he eager for?
“May I ask two questions?” Lyssena’s voice broke through his thoughts, and at last, her words reached him. He understood them.
Perhaps I am eager to understand.
“Was that the first question?” he asked, and Lyssena let out a small huff of laughter, barely more than a breath, but there. And Erevos felt something warm bloom within him, something that spread quietly through his chest.
Was that . . . joy?
“You may,” he said, and turned toward the bed and remembered it wasn’t one anymore.
He couldn’t sit with her there as he had hoped.
But he wanted to try. He remembered watching her, many times before, curling into her blankets and folding herself into softness, and he had longed to feel what that was like.
He had tried once, by himself, mimicking the shape of her rest, but it hadn’t felt as it looked.
“This isn’t . . . a goodbye hug, right?” Her voice came smaller again, threaded with shame.
And Erevos did not like that.
He did not want her voice to sound uncertain or brittle.
He wanted to hear that tiny sound she made when she found him amusing, that small flicker of laughter when he tried to mimic the human custom of joking.
He had learned about humor from watching mortals, seen how they twisted words and meanings into something clever, something that could bring warmth even to the coldest moments. And he found that he enjoyed it.
He wanted her to feel that again.
But Lyssena was afraid. He could feel it, so he would fix it.
He glanced at the bed and the chair, both reshaped by her will, both no longer serving to be seated on.
He could have returned them to their original forms with a thought, but he didn’t.
Not without asking Lyssena first. She had commanded his shadows, shaped them for her own liking, and he would not take that from her without her permission.
He did not want to undo her choices.
And he did not want to shift the conversation away from what mattered, so he didn’t ask. What mattered now was telling her the truth.
That with him, she was safe.
That with him, she would never die.
By the time Erevos finished wrestling with his own demons and was finally ready to answer his little songbird, he found that Lyssena had fallen asleep.
She had been so exhausted that her body had done what it must: surrendered to rest.
Once again, he had lost his chance to speak with her.
The first time he had tried, there had been a man in the way—a man whose blood still was being scrubbed in her room.
Then, Lyssena had needed food, and so Erevos had gone to find it for her.
And now, when he had finally returned, when he was eager with thoughts to share and things to say and the warmth of emotion burning in his chest, she had fallen asleep in his arms.
He looked down at her gently curled form, her breath warm against his throat, and thought that she needed more space.
And the thought excited him.
This house he had made, this quiet home of shadow nestled deep within a forgotten cave in The Void, would grow. He would expand it for her, carve new spaces from darkness.
There were already a few rooms, empty ones, half-shaped, waiting for meaning. And in one of them Erevos now stood, while Lyssena slept within his arms.
He needed one arm to use, and so he adjusted her gently, shifting her weight until he held her in his left arm alone, her head nestled into the curve between his neck and shoulder.
He was aware of what he was—his body all shadow-bound muscle as if made from obsidian stone. He did not know if she was comfortable there, pressed against hardness and heat, but he hoped she was.
And he began to work.