Chapter 13 Caelus
Caelus
The love of my life shrieked as her body hit the water. I suppose that’s what happens when you unceremoniously dump someone into a frigid bathtub — especially when they’re feverish.
The effects hit her immediately — likely seconds before passing out — and she blinked and screeched her way through the fog of pain and ice, scraping at the rim of the claw-footed behemoth of a tub.
I gritted my teeth and climbed in after her, wedging my body in behind hers.
Fuck, that’s cold.
That is inherently the point, godling, Lykos snarked. Keep her in. Don't let her out until she feels cold to the touch.
Resolutely, I wrapped my arms around her middle, prepared to withstand the arctic climate for as long as was necessary. I pulled my Nightshade in close until her back met my bare chest, and I waited for her hysteria and violent trembling to subside.
Velira roared outside the window, even more helpless than I.
“I’ve got her,” I said, pausing the dragon’s terror. “She’s cooling, Vel. I’ve got her.”
Seconds, minutes, or maybe even hours later, Nyssa stopped fighting. She simply surrendered to the cold, and to the fortress that was my arms. A minute later, she rasped, “Caelus? I’m o-o-okay. You c-can l-let g-go now.”
Her teeth-rattling speech tore my heart in two, especially after feeling the agony she had endured, secondhand through the magic of our bond.
I abhorred doing anything that would cause her to suffer — it writhed against every inch of my haunted soul — but in this case, was the lesser evil.
And it was the only thing I could think of, in that haze between wake and sleep, to break her raging fever.
“What happened?” I risked asking.
Her seizing had ebbed into minute trembles and I felt confident enough that she could tolerate a little added warmth. Not wanting to relinquish her for even a second, I meticulously twisted the faucet with my frozen, wrinkled toes, and hot water streamed out of the tap a moment later.
She took longer than my anxiety would have liked to respond. So long, that without a soul-bond to know for certain, I’d have assumed she’d fallen asleep. As it was, her confusion coiled beneath my sternum, interlaced with something different. Something slimy:
Fear.
“I had a nightmare,” she finally offered, her voice little more than a rasping breath. The jaggedness of it had my arms squeezing a little tighter around her. “At least, I thought it was a nightmare… But Caelus… it was so real,” she whispered. “So visceral. So unlike anything I’ve dreamt before.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head, then inhaled deeply. “But I think I need to.”
“I’m here.”
It was nothing more than two simple words, but it was all I could offer her — the reassurance that she was not alone and never would be again.
“I dreamed that I was some woman… a stranger with bronze skin… and a tattoo of a siren on her arm — my arm.” She shivered involuntarily before continuing, “I burned, Caelus. She burned.”
“Do you know what happened?” I asked again.
“This woman — her people — they were from a coastal village. And before you ask, no, I don’t know where. Ephemeron, somewhere would be my best guess.”
“Mortals, then.”
“Mmm.”
She twisted in my arms to meet my gaze. I flinched at the sight of her bloodshot eyes and her reddened skin — as though she really had burned.
“Nyssa—”
“They were attacked, Caelus. Something — or someone — razed an entire village,” she whispered, horrified. “Every man, woman, and child…”
“It was just a dream, Nyss.”
Her eyes dropped to her fidgeting hands.
She rubbed at her forearm like she could scour away the nightmare itself.
“Then explain this,” she said quietly, lifting her arm to my face.
While it bore the eerily pink skin of a fresh burn, it also held a trace of something else.
I dragged her closer, my eyes squinting to make out a shape I knew hadn’t been there before.
The very faint outline… of a siren tail.
No fucking way.
Way, Golden. Her shattered green irises pierced mine, imploring me to offer some perfectly sane reason as to why that image was now etched into her skin.
But I couldn’t.
She sighed deeply, exhausted and defeated. “That’s not all…”
“Dare I ask?”
Swallowed roughly, she continued, “I — that is, the woman I was… wearing? That sounds all kinds of wrong…” She took a steadying breath and tried again. “Whomever’s last moments I just shared, etched a message in the sand as she died.”
“What message?”
But before Nyssa could respond, we were interrupted by a loud crash ricocheting up the stairwell. Both our heads snapped around to the bathroom door, neither willing to move, neither willing to make a sound.
Who would dare barge into the queen’s residence, deep in the heart of the Underworld, in the middle of the night?
A better question to ask, godling, is who could safely make their way past Sir Bruce? Lykos questioned from the first floor. He’d taken to sleeping in front of the living room’s enormous hearth as of late.
“Sir Bruce?” I bit my bottom lip, stifling an inopportune laugh.
Lykos didn’t deign to respond with words, merely an aggrieved grumble.
Your mate calls them that so often… apparently it stuck.
Mate.
Before I could second guess his choice in label, a secondary thud echoed through the palace.
A wicked-sharp shadow dagger materialised in Nyssa’s palm, and I gripped the edge of the tub, ready to vault out whenever the perpetrator in question revealed themselves. I didn’t think it wise to summon my misbehaving lightning while we were still waist deep in lukewarm water.
It’s only Aros, Lykos sighed.
The tension in Nyssa’s shoulders visibly eased as her dragon, no doubt, relayed the same message.
“Nyssa!” the god of war bellowed from somewhere downstairs. “Caelus!”
“We’re up here!” I shouted back, shrugging in response to Nyssa’s grimace.
Aros bolted audibly up the staircase and down the hallway, pausing just outside the bathroom door.
“I need to speak with you,” he announced.
“You can come in,” Nyssa responded wearily.
A pause. Then, “I don’t want to interrupt… actually, maybe I do. After all, I know what happens in this room.”
I could hear the smirk in his voice a heartbeat before he threw the door wide. Another beat later, he visibly deflated at the very unerotic scene that both of us, mostly-clothed in the tub, painted.
Aros scowled. “You’re wearing entirely too much clothing for this to be even a little scandalous.”
“That’s because it’s not,” Nyssa answered drily. She showed no outward signs, but I could feel her bone-deep exhaustion.
“Boring.” He frowned. “By the way, you look a little… pink, darling.”
“Long story,” she sighed. “But I take it you didn’t come barrelling into the palace at the pace of a centaur just to climb into the bath with us or comment on my skin colour.”
“No,” he said uncharacteristically sombre. Aros straightened, his face falling into an odd kind of solemnity — so very out of place on his features. “A messenger has returned.”
Nyssa tensed.
“Neros has fallen.”
An icy feeling that had nothing to do with the cold water crept through my veins.
“Did it burn?” Nyssa whispered.
Aros’ frown deepened as he eyed her curiously. “It did… but how would you know that already?”
Her terrified gaze met my own.
“I dreamed it.”