Chapter 19
NINETEEN
KHARON
She is the most beautiful, perfect treasure.
I want to keep her.
I can’t keep her. She’s not mine to have.
I am in agony, and all I want to do is be buried inside her again. I did not know. It is probably better that I didn’t know what I was missing all these years. I would’ve been driven truly mad, indeed.
To have this and then lose it. . .
I stare into the darkness, knowing morning will soon come. We will continue our journey to deliver her back to her world. To her life. A life where I am not welcome.
I will return to my cold prison. I’m not locked to dungeon walls anymore, but it’s still a prison all the same.
Hannah is starting to realize it, I think. Yes, she has the child, but what company are the rest of us? We are monsters who have tormented one another for our entire existence. We cannot escape our life or go among the humans because we terrify them.
Abaddon has condemned her to this life because he is selfish.
Even if Ksenia were willing, how could I do the same? How many years before she started to hate me for the isolation being with me would mean?
Romulus is the only one among us who can pass undetected among humans. He occasionally talks about taking Hannah on day trips to the cities where she can be among her own kind, but Abaddon is so concerned about the angelic threat he has cautioned her against it. And she has listened.
But how long will she be able to bear the remoteness? She calls us family and says we are enough, but I’m afraid it is lip service said out of love for her mate.
And yet, when the rectangle above lightens enough for me to leap and dig out the gathered snow so we might begin our journey again, I am loathed to do so. Growling at my hesitation, I leap and begin to dig, throwing the snow off furiously.
Only the winds outside are still howling, the snow still pelting my hide like angry little pellets.
The storm has not yet passed. Relief and joy slam through me at the realization.
We must stay a little longer.
I grin wide before I catch myself and frown. What am I thinking? I’ve just reasoned that being with the beautiful, amazing, perfect Ksenia is an impossibility. Any continued closeness with her will only be torture in the long run.
And yet, when I leap back to the church floor, bringing a load of snow with me for water, all I feel is happiness.
“Where did you go?” her voice says from the darkness. I need to add wood to the stove, both for light and warmth, and immediately get to the task.
“The storm has not abated,” I say gruffly, trying not to let my joy at this fact show in my words.
“Oh,” she says. My heart beats quickly, waiting for what she will say next. Will she express sadness that she cannot get home as quickly as she hoped?
“Then come back to bed. It’s cold without you.”
My heart sings with happiness as I shove the last of the wood in the stove and hurry back to her side.
I slide into the sleeping bag beside her.
We put one beneath us and zipped the second over the top.
Well, we could only close it on her side since it had no hope of closing over my large frame.
I worried she would not be warm enough without it fully zipped, but she said as long as the fire was going and I was at her side, she would stay warm.
It’s quiet as she wraps herself around me, slotting her small arms between my lower pairs and squeezing against my waist.
“Hold me,” she whispers, and I’m eager to comply.
She is quiet, and I wonder if she is falling back to sleep. But her breathing doesn’t even out the way it does when she slumbers. I slept only a short while during the night. Mostly I stayed awake, listening to the entrancing, melodic sound of her breathing, so I know it well.
But now she is quiet, and her arms around me tense. What is she thinking? Is she upset that we couldn’t continue on toward her home because of the storm?
She is not gone yet.
But soon. . . Like the breath vapors that appear in the cold when we speak, she will be here one moment and disappear the next. I want to grasp that which is ephemeral all the tighter, but she will slip through my fingers.
“What is it like?” I ask, and my voice sounds overly loud in the quiet. “Where you are from.”
She stiffens even more in my arms. “Why are you asking that?” Her voice is slightly muffled from her face pressed against my chest, but I can still hear. “I don’t want to think about anything except being here. With you.”
Her words should make me happy, but they do nothing except make the ache pierce more. She is the sun, and I am the moon. There is no sky we can share together. I cannot be in her world, and I refuse to imprison her in mine.
“Tomorrow, the storm will likely abate,” I say, my voice gruff. “And since we know I can carry you, there’s no need to make you walk slowly on your small legs. So as soon as the storm clears, I can run you swiftly to the city.”
I swallow hard. “You could be back home by as soon as tomorrow night, depending on where in the world you live—”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” She withdraws her arms and wriggles out of my grasp, turning around in the small space of the sleeping bag and giving me her back.
I frown and start to wrap my arms around her again, but she sharply says, “Don’t touch me.”
I expel a frustrated breath, laying back, half out of the covers. I haven’t spent much time with humans, so maybe I don’t know how they communicate. My brothers and I are usually only ever direct with each other, so she confuses me.
And then I remember. . . There was the century or so after I came back from the madness where I still refused to speak with Abaddon.
To be fair, he did have me chained to a dungeon wall at the time. But also, I didn’t know how to say… All the complicated things I was feeling. I barely understand them now and still don’t know if I can put words to them.
My head turns towards the spill of Ksenia’s honey hair. Is that what it is like now for the small human at my side? Is she feeling too many complicated things to put into words?
Or is it just me she prefers not to share her thoughts with?
I frown and begin to understand some of my brother’s frustration at not being able to know my thoughts without me speaking.
After being so intimate with her body, I want to know all of her.
Yet so much of her is still a closed-up box. A beautiful mystery.
The grains of sand fall so quickly through the hourglass, and I am greedy to know everything before she disappears. I’ll be left grasping for the shape of her memory, and it makes me even more desperate to discover her now while she’s here and real in front of me.
Moments later, she’s scrambling up and out of the covers. “We should get breakfast.”
I nod, quickly moving to help her with some rations from the pack. We work quietly side by side, but I feel as if there is a sea between us. It is painful after the closeness we shared yesterday, but I don’t know how to span the gulf to get back to her.
I move to the stove and add more wood so she can stay warm outside the sleeping bag. Then I start more water to boiling.
I listen intently as she crunches down on the trail mix Hannah packed and feel her eyes on me as I move around the large room. But whenever I glance her way, her eyes quickly dance to the ground at her feet.
My strained chest feels a little warmer to know that at least she is as much aware of me as I am constantly focused on her.
Though we are not speaking, it nonetheless feels like we are engaged in a dance.
Hannah taught me what it means when humans dance, which is what this feels like.
I turn, and Ksenia responds. I listen for her breath and movement, then I exhale and shift.
I gnaw on some jerky, and once the water is boiled and cooled, we drink some. It will be a long day if we continue to engage in this silent dance.
That is good, though. I hope it will be the longest day of my life. Because what I said remains true. Tomorrow, likely, she will be gone. So I will memorize these strange moments I have with her. However they pass, I am grateful for them.
I would prefer to repair whatever I seemed to break earlier. I have learned what it means to apologize by watching Hannah and Abaddon, so I try it. “I am sorry if I said something wrong earlier. I do not know many humans. My words are. . . perhaps bad?”
Her head jerks up from the cup of warm water she’s cradling in her hands, her eyes landing on my upper cheek. “No. No, your words are fine.”
I frown. “You. . . did not like them.”
She looks to the floor and expels a long breath. “It’s complicated.”
“I understand that words can be difficult. I do not require them.”
Her head comes up again. “You don’t?”
“I have gone many years without speaking at all. I. . . understand.”
“You did?”
I nod.
“Why?”
Without meaning to, my eyes lift to the church around us. When I am with her, I can almost forget where we are. If I believed in ghosts, this place should be choked with them. But I know better. The souls of this place have moved on.
I know because I was the one who took them all to the otherworld.
“Ah,” she says. “Some things are best without words.”
I nod, my throat thick, grateful.
We are quiet, then, but it is a different quiet from before. I feel together in intimacy with her, not apart in the discord of misunderstanding.
I do not know how long it passes like that before she finally says quietly, “I feel so lost. I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you want to do?”
Her head gives a quick shake. “What I want doesn’t matter.”
I frown. “Isn’t that all that should matter?”
She shakes her head quickly back and forth, and her hand goes to her thighs. She pulls out one of her knives and a small stone and quickly scrapes it across the surface, sharpening the blade.
“You are very good with your blades.”
She nods absent-mindedly.