Chapter 19 I’ll Live #2
She didn’t say Saeris’s name. Didn’t need to. The female eating the apple on the bench was me. I knew exactly who she was talking about.
I faltered, suddenly unable to lift my own feet. “I know I’ll have to do that,” I muttered. “But I’m not afraid. She’s worth it.”
I walked through the image of my mother, leaving her behind as I crossed the room.
“Stop! No! Don’t! She’s sick! Please! Please, please, please, don’t take it.
I can’t help her without it. I’ll do anything, please, I promise—” Carrion’s eyes went wide when I put my hand on his shoulder.
His pupils refocused, whatever he had been seeing vanishing as he realized I was standing in front of him.
“You’ve done it?” he panted.
“I have.”
He took the cup I handed to him, peering suspiciously at the liquid inside. “I’ve never considered drinking your blood before now, Fisher, but . . . I’ve got to say, I’m pretty fucking excited about this.”
I clinked my cup against his. “You’re welcome, Swift.”
We both downed the concoction and immediately began seizing.
My bones were broken. All of them. They had been badly set, their edges scraping against my flesh. My stomach churned with acid, my eyes burning so badly that I almost wished I was blind.
But I was alive.
“Do you ever wake up sometimes . . . and think . . . ‘Gods, wouldn’t it be nice if I hadn’t just gone toe-to-toe with a scorpion demon from hell?’ ” Carrion croaked.
“Hah!” I pressed my good hand against my solar plexus, curious to see if the pressure might ease the stabbing pain there. It did not. “More often than I’d like.”
We were sprawled on the floor, lying among the broken glass and destroyed furniture.
We’d been here for at least an hour, twitching, and spasming, and foaming at the mouth.
The fates must have been feeling particularly vicious today, because we’d been conscious the entire time as the anti-venom had wrought its work.
Slowly, I closed my eyes. “How do you feel?”
“Shitty,” Carrion answered. His voice was stronger now, though. His breathing didn’t sound as labored as it had twenty minutes ago. “You?” he asked.
“Shitty,” I agreed.
“Are you still seeing dead people?”
I took a moment to answer. Then: “No.”
“Me, either.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Appreciate that.” He shifted, the sound of broken glass crunching underneath him. “If I lie here for much longer, I’m going to pass out. And I do not want to pass out here.”
“Me, either.”
Carrion made a pained sound as slowly he dragged himself up into a sitting position and then miraculously up onto his feet. “Come on, then. Let’s go.”
I opened my eyes, and there he was, holding his hand out to me again. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I let the smuggler help me to my feet. But this time, I was too tired to scowl at him all that much.
“Careful. Last time I was home, there was a bartender in my bed. There’s a good chance she might still be here.” Carrion ducked his head, scooting through the window he’d just jimmied open, disappearing into the darkened room beyond.
I was drenched in sweat. According to Swift, reckoning wasn’t as hot as usual today, but the heat was hellish.
Moving through the Third’s deserted streets had been easier, though.
The people of Saeris’s ward knew to find shade during the hottest part of the day, when life slowed and those who were smart found a place to rest for a few hours.
I followed Carrion, vaulting through the window and immediately wishing I’d taken it slower, cradling my broken hand to my chest. The rooms were quiet.
Still. There wasn’t much by way of furniture within.
A chair. A desk. A bed. The kitchen was small, but there were pots stacked, neat and clean on the counter.
In the living area, Carrion found a note waiting for him on the rickety table.
He plucked it up and read it, then screwed it up into a ball and tossed it into a bucket in the corner of the room.
“The bartender?” I asked.
He huffed a breath of laughter down his nose. “The bartender. I am now officially banned from the Dusty Crab.”
“Shame.”
“I’ll live.” The smuggler grunted. “They do have the best whiskey in the ward, though. Speaking of which . . .” He headed into the kitchen.
Cupboard doors squeaked open and thunked closed.
When he came back, he was carrying two cut-glass tumblers half full of pale amber liquid.
He didn’t ask if I wanted the drink. Even a priest chained tight to his morals would need one after what we’d just gone through.
I accepted the glass and threw back the liquor inside, and Swift did the same.
The alcohol burned much like Joshin’s venom, but this time the sensation was self-inflicted, so it didn’t count. I considered the glass, processing the past few hours. We had our silver—bags of it, courtesy of the trunks stowed in the bell tower—but gods above, it had cost us.
“She made that, y’know.”
I looked up.
Carrion was propped up against the side of his small dining table, leaning his hip against it.
He gestured tiredly toward the glass. “You had her hammering out quicksilver, but she made other things before. The man who gave her work after her mother died? Elroy? He makes incredible etched glassware. Delicate. Sells them to the people in the Hub. The stuff Saeris made was never fine enough for the likes of them, but they were more than good enough for the people of the Third.”
Suddenly, the glass in my hand became brand new.
It was a lovely thing. Small. The rim was embellished with a wound glass rope. A pattern was engraved into the sides of the glass, depicting a tower that looked an awful lot like Madra’s palace being engulfed in flames. Dogs with curled tongues chased each other around the glass’s base.
She had made this.
When I’d found her, I’d been full of panic.
How was this woman, this human, the person I was supposed to fall in love with?
How was I going to protect her from the kind of life I lived?
She had surprised me. Where I had thought her weak, she was strong.
Her heart was bigger than the horizon half the time—too big for her own good.
I’d misjudged her. She was incredible. For twenty-five years, she had survived this harsh place and still had fire enough in her soul to create the kind of art that would undoubtedly have cost her life were it to end up in the wrong hands.
As if reading my mind, Carrion said, “She had a penchant for incendiary designs. Elroy couldn’t sell them.
I’d take them off his hands sometimes, when I could convince him to part with them.
” Carrion disappeared into the kitchen and came back with an earthen stoneware jug.
Again, he didn’t ask. I watched him pour the whiskey into the glass in my hands, chewing on the inside of my cheek.
A nest of vipers writhed behind my rib cage.
They wanted me to punch Carrion in the face.
Hard. But it was exhausting, this blind anger I harbored toward the male.
It served no purpose. I was tired down to the marrow of my bones, and I didn’t have the energy to maintain it.
I knocked back the shot and set the glass down carefully, still staring at it.
Her hands had touched it. Her hands had made it.
That made me feel . . .
Fuck, I just ached for her. I wanted her here, next to me. I wanted to hold her; the fact that she wasn’t in my arms right now felt like the greatest injustice that had ever been inflicted upon me. There was no breathing my way past it.
When I looked up, Carrion was watching me. “Go on,” he said. “Ask.”
It was beneath me to pretend that I didn’t know what he was talking about. So I asked. “Are you in love with her?”
He let his head drop, laughing quietly as he pulled out a chair at the table and sank down heavily in it. Stretching his legs out in front of himself, he rested his hands on his stomach, one on top of the other, and looked up to meet my gaze. “No,” he said simply. And then, immediately, “Yes?”
Heat flared up inside me, making my throat close.
“It’s not a simple thing, Fisher. She’s . . . well . . .”
“Spectacular,” I whispered.
The smile that spread across his face was sad.
“Right. Exactly. She always has been. When other people are full of the kind of fire that burns inside her, it eats them alive. It hollows them out until there’s nothing left inside them but the fire.
They burn everyone around them with it, until all that remains is scorched earth.
But not Saeris. Her fire keeps others warm in the cold dark.
It is her strength, not her weakness. Being around her reminds you that you’re alive. ”
It made me want to vomit, hearing him talk about her like this. But he wasn’t saying anything that was untrue. If I could see how incredible she was after knowing her for such a short time, then how the hell could I expect him to be blind to it when he had known her for years?
No, I couldn’t blame the male for seeing what was obvious. I could only pity him that she wasn’t his and be fucking thankful that she was mine.
“I could have loved her. Truly,” Carrion said softly.
“But this place broke me centuries before Saeris was born. I made the mistake of letting myself fall for a human once, and believe me when I say that once was enough. A long time ago, someone told me that the pain of loss was a temporary thing. That it would soften as the years went by, until the ache became an old friend that felt comfortable to be around. But the person who told me that was human.” He sighed the kind of sigh that had been held in for a thousand years.
“I didn’t have much to go on when it came to my kind, but it always seemed to me that the Fae must experience grief differently from humans.
Humans live for such a short time. It made sense that their pain visited them and left soon enough after.
It would be cruel. Would swallow up their entire lives otherwise.
But for me . . .” He shook his head, looking down at his hands.
“Every year that I live, it seems the magnitude of my loss eclipses the last. So yes. I love Saeris Fane, because she’s electric, and fierce, and loyal, and being around her brings the world back into focus.
But I’m not in love with her, Fisher. I tried.
But my heart was just too full of sorrow to make room for her. ”
The fire in my chest had gone out as the smuggler was speaking.
Renfis would have had something profound or comforting to say in this situation.
But I knew the eternal well of grief, how deep it ran, on and on forever, so I just nodded.
It was all I had to give him—my understanding, and my presence.
I dragged myself over to the chair in the corner of the room and sat, my broken hand singing with pain as I tried to hold the glass that Saeris had made in it.
“You barely even flinched today,” the smuggler noted. “The pain of that venom. The pain of your dead.” He didn’t say anything for a moment, but then he asked, “Will you show me?”
Show you?”
“How to close it off. To shut it all down, so I don’t have to feel it anymore?”
Sinners. I puffed out my cheeks, unable to look at him for a moment. “No, Carrion. I won’t.”
“Why not?” He sounded like I’d just kicked him.
“There’s only one way to learn how to endure pain the way I have.
You have to suffer through it. Again, and again, and again.
It galvanizes you. Tempers you like steel.
But I wouldn’t wish the kind of pain I’ve lived through on anyone.
I’ve borne it because I had to and for no other reason.
Feel the pain you’ve been given, Carrion.
Don’t be fool enough to ask for more. It’s a curse I would spare you from, believe me. ”