YOU ARE NOT DEAD
Dying was embarrassing.
You smelled bad and your body made annoying crackling noises. Your voice was all scratchy and your skin was dry. Damn shameful.
“Iksha almighty,” a voice groaned from across Esme’s room. She cracked her eyes open and found Simon slipping in through the open window.
They stared at each other for a long three seconds. How had his hair grown so much? It was up in a messy ponytail, bits hanging in his eyes because the climb up to her floor must not have been kind. How long had she been asleep? Days?
No, weeks.
“Oh, thank Ojalla.” Simon sighed, stumbling sideways into her room and holding his chest so hard she thought he might pluck out his heart. “You’re not dead.”
“I would never die privately,” Esme said. She coughed, her body’s reminder not to get too smart because she did, indeed, almost die privately. But she hadn’t cut out her heart. Might have cut everything else in her chest cavity, but not that.
“It was far from private,” Simon said, closing the window behind him. When he turned back to her, he grinned so hugely it felt like the sun was sitting at the foot of her bed.
Esme would ask what he meant in a second, but right now she just crawled out of bed (her knees made those embarrassing cracking sounds, but it was okay) and came to Simon. His eyes widened, and she took a step back. Were they not embracing yet?
A pitiful laugh tripped out of his mouth.
Tears clouded his eyes. He grabbed her and buried her in his burning chest. It didn’t matter that her bones were noisy and her skin was dry and she probably smelled like rot.
He held her so close that she thought she might melt into him, take up residence in his chest, and stay there forever.
After a few seconds, the room dipped into a shimmering heat, and Esme pulled away from Simon to find his glamour gone.
“You missed me,” she said, cupping his cheek.
A tendril of his dancing hair floated by, and she curled it around her finger.
To her, he was the very vision of godly—a bit unknowable and ancient and strange, but so beautiful in his otherness.
She traced her fingers up his cheek, and his smoke tattoos followed her caress until she reached the edge of his bone-white horns.
Just before she touched them, Simon grabbed her hand, pressing a thumb into her palm.
“Are they sensitive?” she asked against her better judgment.
Simon nodded, but set her fingers just at the ridge separating his skin and horns. When she oh-so-carefully ran the tip of her finger across the white, scorched bone, his eyes fluttered and his smoke shot south.
“Oh, you did miss me,” Esme teased, smiling at his clenched brow and unfocused eyes.
Simon narrowed that ash-and-flame gaze at her, and Esme caressed her thumb down the ridges of his horns before returning her fingers to his cheeks.
“No,” he said. “We just stopped right as Pemia and Marcus were about to kiss in your book, and I couldn’t finish it without you.” His fingers curled behind her neck as he held her, his grip on her arms tight enough to wrestle death should it choose to reclaim her.
“No, you missed me,” Esme told him.
“Not true.” Simon squeezed her tighter.
“Let me go, then.”
His arms didn’t budge.
It felt good to be alive, to burn in this man’s arms, to hear all the normal sounds of a busy Amaris beyond her room. A tide of tears rose in her eyes. Everything and everyone Esme loved was just beyond that door. She’d done it.
“I hear you crowned a king before your nap,” Simon said, drawing her in again. Pride glowed in his eyes. “You’re amazing, you know that? Terrifying, also. And pointy. But truly amazing.”
Esme’s face burned like she’d never been complimented before. She took every word off Simon’s tongue so personally. Every part of her was so tender for him, like they’d known each other for eons.
She anxiously licked her lips and dragged her gaze from his before she fell into his churning eyes completely. She played with the collar of his shirt and said, “I’ve done worse.” Just as she’d worked up the courage to look at him again, she caught the name embroidered onto his jacket. “Mr. Song?”
“You said I needed a last name.”
Simon Song. Esme wrinkled her nose. Somehow, the most normal name in the world for the least normal man she’d ever had the pleasure of knowing. “It’s just so…” She raised her brow.
“If you want me to change my name so bad, give me yours.” Simon leaned down, but not for a kiss—just to stare off into her eyes.
Esme grinned at their closeness, at the heat lapping at her ankles like the sea.
She closed her eyes and floated in her ocean of warmth.
It took her back to the balmy shores of Kalipos a decade ago, floating in waves so warm they almost steamed as Urias and Padrian bickered on the beach about whether fish were vegetables—
Ojalla alive! Urias and Tagas and Padrian, and all her friends and family. She had to tell them she wasn’t dead. She twitched toward the door, but Simon held her tight.
“It’s almost dawn. Balthazar and Willimina will be here soon,” he said longingly, like he wanted to hoard this time with her for himself.
“Why so early?” Esme asked.
Simon gently directed her back to the bed and sat her on it.
“Willimina used to spend the night here, but when more and more physicians agreed you were dead, she was told not to for fear your corpse would carry disease. But since Balthazar banned all of those physicians from rendering an opinion on you, they come together in the morning and spend the day with you. And the raven Wraith has maintained your glamour, even from afar.”
Bal stayed with her every day? Mina… well, she knew the strength of their bond. Mina and Esme would hold on to each other on a sinking ship. But Bal? “How many days have I been asleep?”
“You’ve been dead for a little over a week,” Simon said, careful of her legs as he took a seat on her bed.
Esme leaned back against her headboard. A week. It’d never taken her that long before. She looked down at her hands and found her glamour too thick. Her nails were the wrong color, and her thumbs were strangely short.
Esme rubbed her glamour between her weird fingers. Perhaps it was just because it wasn’t her own, but the magic that had been thrown over her felt like squeezing into last winter’s wool sweater in the middle of summer: simultaneously smothering and tearing at the seams.
“And what have you done in that time?” she muttered, picking at the glamour on her arm. She peeked up at Simon’s embroidered jacket and fine leather pants. He must have new employment.
He rolled his eyes, leaning back on her bed, still unglamoured. “Gotten new clothes and that’s about it. Balthazar’s stopped up the whole city while you’ve been asleep. No one’s done anything but wait and fear the war.”
“The war?”
“The one with Waldovia. Your friend with the birds—I’ve heard him speak about following the raven from the Red Rain back to Waldovia.” Oh, great. They’d named it. “No meetings took place, though, because Balthazar refused to leave your bedside.”
Yes. Yes, they were at war. Hundreds of people had been killed already. She had no time to sit in a lovely man’s arms and swoon. She smoothed her hair and moved for her washroom, only for Simon to grab her wrist.
“It’s not your problem until sunrise,” he said, drawing her back to bed as he massaged her pulse point. He set a hand on her knee, and Esme suddenly found it very difficult to move. “You’ve been awake for ten minutes, Esme.”
“Ten minutes is important in war,” she said, then sighed. “Why couldn’t I just sleep through this?”
Simon shrugged. “You can always lie back down. I’ll pretend I didn’t see you wake up.”
Esme grinned at him. He might be the only person in this whole country who wouldn’t rush her out of bed to put her to work.
As much as she knew she should get up, there was something so peaceful about building a temporary wall between her and the crumbling world.
In here, with Simon, where she was still Esme, but not a viper or a Wraith or anything so powerful.
Simon didn’t look at her like something old and strong to be feared.
He looked at her like he knew her, knew a version of her she’d lost. Someone simpler.
Despite a chemise on her shoulders and a syrupy glamour slathered down her arms, there was some part of her blisteringly naked under his gaze. Esme had no clue how to cover it back up. She didn’t especially want to, either.
“You’ve never seen me without my glamour,” she told him.
Simon’s lips quirked into a small smile. “No.”
“But you allowed me to see you without yours.”
He quirked a brow. “Are you calling me some kind of slut?”
Esme grinned. Not smirked or grimaced or any of those sharp-toothed faces she normally wore. Grinned. Like a normal woman.
“Would you like to… well, uh…” Ojalla in heaven, this was worse than her first time. “Would you like to see me without mine?”
Simon’s smoke gathered on his cheeks. She knew that was a blush. He swallowed thickly before nodding.
Esme peeled off her stifling glamour. Her skin was the color of her friends, the shadows, and just as smooth except for the parts ruined by Omniel.
Her hair was made of splendid white moonlight.
Its gleam spilled down over her night-colored body.
Her eyes were not black. She glamoured them to be so because it was hard for humans to look at the silvery constellations inside of her magical ones.
They danced across her black irises, twins with her home world’s constellations.