19. Phaeron
You’re kind of fucked up, huh? Ben had no idea how right he was.
He must’ve alerted someone that I was awake, as a sliver of too-bright light appeared at regular intervals to check in on Cress and me while I sat with her. My body was heavy with fatigue, but I refused to close my eyes for longer than a blink.
Yet I started nodding off anyway and stirred in panic at the sensation too akin to falling backward into Myuna’s control. The last time I’d slept, I’d woken up mid-combat with my mate.
I’d only gleaned what’d happened from observing those around me. Ben cradling a shoulder still healing from a blood rune on our way to the hospital. The uneasy glances from everyone, even the coven of our friends, whose eyes shaded with distrust when Cress fainted and I tried to carry her the rest of the way to a proper healing. Geo had given me a murderous look and pulled her from my arms.
For a few moments, I’d held her slight, battered form clothed in the torn rags of what had once been a beautiful robe. I had harmed her. My hands, Myuna’s will. It was inexcusable.
I paced the fatigue away, eventually changing from the cheery pastel-colored hospital gown I’d woken in back into the heap of scrubbed leather folded at the foot of my bed. The chest piece of my armor, with all its careful inscriptions, was hopelessly battered, and the gloves were gone, so I remained bare from the waist up for now.
I went to splash my face in the adjoining bathroom and inched up the light switch. As soon as the bulbs buzzed to life, I hissed from the pain that flooded my head and flicked them back off. I hated losing my human-like adaptations already. Their world was too bright, and I could not put anyone at ease if they couldn’t understand me.
I had some unpleasant conversations ahead if the magic could be salvaged. It was my duty to share news about Myuna, the presence of the Void around her—blessedly not clinging to me—and worst of all, what I’d seen while under her compulsion.
Cress mumbled something, shifting in the bed. Her hand patted the bare space next to her before she shifted to sit up with a wince. My hands were there the next moment, moving pillows behind her back and holding her shoulder so she didn’t twinge her bruises too much.
“Easy, bright soul,” I said, then muttered a curse. She wouldn’t understand me. Laboriously, I reproduced her name like a human would say it and skimmed my fingertips over her cheek.
Her hand caught mine and held my palm to her face. I imagined she saw a yellow-eyed demon in the dark of the room, as I’d covered the light displays of the machine hooked to her and the light leaking from the window with casual shadow magic. Meanwhile, I saw her sleep-softened face with perfect clarity, down to the ridge of a purple-edged bruise across her jaw.
“Phaeron,” she whispered with such hope and longing.
She shifted her weight up and used my arm to guide her hand to one of my horns, leveraging it to drag me into a kiss. I shouldn’t have allowed this, not when she was wounded and her soul so tempting just a nibble away…
My body heated at the merest brush of our lips; it was like emerging from the cold Void onto Earth for the first time. Warmth suffused me down to my tail-tip, and the animal in me took control. I cupped the back of her neck, drawing her in deeper. I could taste the change in her magic; it was like drinking sunshine, harmless but spicy to my otherworldly senses. My fangs nibbled on her bottom lip, my forked tongue twining around her blunt one for more.
She squirmed from the sensation. It was only natural to pin her hips and pull her closer, until the tube attached to her left arm was taut. Jostling it had her gasping, the pained sound melting to a needy whimper as I trailed sharp-edged kisses down the side of her jawline and neck.
I growled. Mine. In my impatience to have more of her, I pulled the needle and tape off her arm.
The machine released an ear-splitting shriek. We startled apart, and I cursed myself as I took in her kiss-swollen lips and the indentations my fangs had made on the column of her throat. I’d stopped a breath away from biting right over her half-healed bruise. Was I even thinking? She needed to rest, not be subjected to my lack of control.
Light flooded the room from someone coming to check on us. Instead of it being a nurse, the heavy footfalls and the gritty sound of his transformation betrayed Geo. He pointed an accusing finger. “Phaeron,” he rumbled. There was more, something about a “streem” and “away,” but the blame was clear from just the weight he put behind my name.
I smoothed my hand over Cress’s hair in apology before standing and stepping away from the bed. I coiled my tail around my legs and put my hands behind my back, head angled at an accepting angle. He had all the body language of a man about to strike me. I deserved it.
Geo didn’t hold back. With a fist like a brick, the force of his blow had me tasting blood from the tear of my own teeth. I slammed into the bedside table. A lamp and her phone went flying when the cheap wood splintered under my weight.
I groaned, feeling the twinge of several bruises old and new. Cress half fell out of the bed to get between us. “Geo, no!” she yelped. His broad obsidian palm descended to nudge her out of his way.
That was about the time a nurse rushed into the room and shouted. Geo’s wrathful expression doubled from whatever the woman was saying. Cress was breathing a sigh of relief and picking up her phone, just to tense as she turned it over to reveal several cracks on the screen. She made a distressed noise and tapped an intact section several times, producing a whirr of static and bands of color under the glass.
The combined noise and light was a little too much for me. I put my arms around her from behind, murmuring a promise—“I’m sorry. I’ll buy you another.”—before taking her into my shadows and carrying her out of the room, leaving Geo behind to argue with the nurse.
She struggled, and I had to drop her in the hallway, the two of us reforming out of dark mist. “No,” she said, stabbing a finger at me sternly.
I gazed at her, desperate to retreat somewhere dark and safe. There was only one place to go, really. Gesturing between us, I said, “Braza.”
Her face softened, and she nodded, not fighting when I took her into shadows again. It was the fastest way to the library and the embrace of the powercore’s crackling energy. Braza pulsed a feeling of welcome when she read my intentions, already formed within the powercore’s inner chamber when I arrived and placed Cress back on her feet.
“I’m glad to see you whole once more, my prince,” Braza said with her usual polite distance.
She tilted her head toward Cress and smiled warmly, replying in English to something she’d said. My mate plucked at her hospital gown and waved at me, stepping out of the powercore.
“She is going to get changed,” Braza explained.
I couldn’t blame her. I’d tossed aside the ill-fitting garment as soon as I could, too. “Will you take a look at my back?” I asked. If anyone could fix the rune that’d appeared on my skin in the Void, it’d be Braza. We called the Void’s work the “mark of language and humanity” from the benevolent way it’d warped us, and I yearned to have it back.
“Lie down on the bed. Let me see what she did to you,” Braza said with sympathy. I did as she bid and turned my head to watch her face, fearing the worst as her energy-formed eyes skimmed over the skin of my mid-back.
“She did not touch me,” I murmured.
“And yet she harmed you all the same. I see the trauma in your soul, my prince.”
I closed my eyes, shuttering my reaction. Braza knew my regrets all too well, but I would not think about that time and inadvertently burden her further.
After a short pause, she added, “But the mark can be repaired easily enough. I shall tell Cress when it’s done.”
I drew breath to tell her that it would be all right if Cress witnessed her work when the first spike of pain struck me. Braza had to forcibly transform me back, her purple-black energy shoving my nails to retract into the sockets and manipulating my teeth and bone structure. It felt like she ground and broke and healed me in stages through the process.
It took fifteen minutes at most, and by the time she finished, I was panting in a damp circle of my own sweat. I pressed my fingertips into my mouth, probing at the flat line of teeth and the points of two fangs. When I opened my eyes, I perceived the glow of her magic as dimmer. The disorderly use of light by the humans around me wouldn’t be so painful.
“I added the ability for you to switch back and forth at will,” Braza told me.
She told me how it worked as I sat up, head tilted. “Why?” I asked.
Instead of answering, she turned toward Cress’s reappearance. Her arrival came with the damp smell of soap and flowers—she’d showered and changed into clothes a little too big for her. She’d pinned her purple hair back from her face, and there was some color on her cheeks. “I, uh, thought it was wrong to keep you from your old self,” she said.
“I’m flattered you found me attractive at my most different, bright soul,” I replied. For a breath, I expected her not to understand.
A subtle shiver had Cress shifting on her feet. “You’re back,” she whispered.
I motioned for her to sit with me and looped my arm around her, tucking her into my side. “I am,” I confirmed, tracing my thumb down the curve of her shoulder.
Braza was in the process of reabsorbing into the powercore to give us some privacy when Cress asked, “Have you hugged your daughter yet?”
Both Braza and I stilled in surprise. Brows slanting lower, she pointed at the energy-formed dimensional. “Have you thanked her too? Do you realize how much she did to save you? The fact that she’s here and that she made me Guardian of Moongrove Library was all for you.”
“Picking a fight as soon as we understand each other.” I shook my head and stood, holding my arms out to Braza. The memory of her shadowborn form overlaying Cress’s body was hazy at best, but I had thought it was my protégé for half a second, ready to take me to paradise at last.
I hugged her jelly-like body, some of my regrets leaking to the forefront of my mind before I could hide them. In binding Braza’s soul to a ley line, I’d denied her access to paradise in the next life. I still wished I’d been strong enough to let her go that day.
She squeezed me harder. She knew. Of course she knew. Being able to read thoughts had revealed too many of the unpleasant truths that’d swirled through my mind over time.
But Cress didn’t realize all the baggage that came with the decision to save Braza while also condemning her to a half-life. All she saw was the distance and damage between us, and as they were now soul-tethered, she had firsthand knowledge of what we’d lost.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done. Though I wish you both had not endangered yourselves on my behalf,” I said.
“Into death.” Braza answered with an old oath of loyalty meant for Myuna and the royal family. How poorly that went for us.
I heaved an exhausted sigh and released her. I’ve buried too many of the women I’d loved across my long life. That they’d both risked themselves to drag me from Myuna’s talons was unbearable when I was supposed to be the noble shadowborn protector in this room, but to say that would only insult them.
“Into death,” I echoed, letting it become my new vow to them instead.