Chapter Two
Lai
Dragons didn’t burn; in fact, dragons rather enjoyed the sensation of being boiled alive.
That’s why I lingered in the shower that morning, the handle turned all the way to the red dot, as water hot enough to strip flesh off a human cascaded over my body.
Steam filled the bathroom, thick as cream, as I stepped out, not bothering with a towel.
The moisture evaporated from my body as I strolled naked to my dresser, and by the time I sat on the plush velvet stool and picked up a hairbrush, I was almost completely dry.
Today promised to be good.
I ran my brush through my long lavender hair and froze.
Countless men had died by my hand, and most of them saw just one thing before drawing their last breath.
A flash of silver.
A flash of silver and they were no more.
I stared at my own reflection in the mirror, an ivory carved brush in my hand, frozen in mid-air. In that moment, I saw the same flash too. One single strand of silver stretching from my temple. Perfectly white against the freshly toned lavender.
So that’s what it felt like? To finally face your mortality?
I should have expected the Fates to be so ironically cruel.
I plucked the silver hair, ripping away the evidence of my decaying body, defying the gods that had set the countdown to my damnation.
‘One thing is for sure,’ I thought grimly to myself as I threw the offending strand into the trash in disgust, ‘This day cannot get any worse’.
◆◆◆
Leaving the cruelty of the dresser mirror behind me, I dressed myself in my freshly dry-cleaned suit. Red, as always; I looked good in red. Great, even. I could still turn this day around.
I frowned as the top button strained a little before sliding into the buttonhole. Can dry cleaning shrink wool? Was it senior prank day already? Surely this was just a cruel joke.
Maybe it wasn’t my suit. I reached inside it, finding all the hidden pockets my tailor had put in.
Definitely mine, and definitely a little bit too snug for my liking.
This day had one more strike left before I would return to bed and sleep until the reset of the next morning. Gods help me, it was only 8 am.
But my prayers landed on deaf ears, as always.
I eyed my cane by the door, but today I needed to salvage what was left of my pride. I could do without it for a day.
Or so I thought. I barely made it out of the family apartments on the second floor before my boot caught a bunched-up corridor runner, tripping me like a toddler who’d learned to walk yesterday.
I gasped, stumbling forward, both hands in front of me, catching myself on the wooden paneling of the hallway wall.
I spared my face, but the damage was done.
I felt it; the leg that had refused to heal fully was in the jaws of gnawing pain that radiated through my right ankle as I carefully adjusted my weight onto my left leg.
I was going to need that cane after all.
Strike three. I considered calling it a day, but alas, I had classes today. Important ones.
Besides, they say misfortune comes in threes, don’t they? So that surely meant I was done with the day’s foul surprises.
All I had to do was go back for my cane. Cursing, I limped to my apartment, fishing my key out of my slightly-too-tight jacket pocket.
I didn’t get a chance to unlock the door.
It swung open; my husband was standing there, fresh from the shower, wearing nothing but a towel.
Water dripped down his gray skin, glistening over muscle that could have been carved from silvery marble.
Normally, the sight of him waiting for me while wearing next to nothing would fill me with a hungry warmth, but today it only made me bitter.
Damned elves and their perfect immortal bodies.
“You forgot this, love.” Finch handed me the cane with a soft laugh escaping him. “Made me worried. You okay there? Just going a bit senile?”
I fixed my husband with a withering glare that vowed divorce being added to my to-do list for the day.
Fortunately for Finch, he realized the error of his ways almost immediately, his long, pointy ears drooping as he sheepishly offered me the cane.
I tried to soften my scowl as I took the damn thing.
I might apologize later. Or I might make him apologize. That all depended on how the rest of the day went, but with the current track record, I didn’t have high hopes for classes.
◆◆◆
I watched as my students launched themselves one after another from the rooftop.
It was a simple exam. Run, leap, stab, land.
That was all. A clean assassination drop from a height that was frankly tame by academy standards.
The training dummy was stationary. The landing zone was clear.
The mats had been checked twice. I had even given the kids a demonstration first, ignoring the snarl of my aching ankle and landing the hit on one foot.
Perhaps they assumed that because I made it look effortless, gravity would be equally nice to them.
Overly confident, the first student missed the target entirely, clipped the dummy’s shoulder with the flat of his dagger, and went down with a crack that made everyone on the roof wince.
The second managed the leap beautifully, forgot to stab, and only remembered halfway through the fall, flailing heroically before landing on his backside.
The third screamed before jumping, which was never a good sign.
By the fifth, I stopped correcting their form and started tallying paperwork.
Broken ankle. Failed grade. Incident report. Parent notification. Probable complaint from the nurse. Another failed grade. Another incident report. Sprained wrist. Possible concussion.
Then I watched my own daughter prepare for her leap.
Holly stood at the edge of the roof, dagger in hand, her yellow-blonde hair tied back with a ribbon that was far too cheerful for what was quickly becoming an academic massacre.
I did not have high hopes. I wasn’t being cruel; that was just fatherhood combined with an understanding of her coordination. Holly was clever, fierce, and perfectly capable of tripping over a rug that had been removed three days earlier.
Still, she was the only one who actually stuck her dagger into the dummy.
For one glorious second, I felt pride.
Then she promptly lost her balance, bounced off the dummy’s chest, and tumbled down the rest of the way, landing face-first on the mat with a muffled groan.
I slowly closed my eyes.
“That’s…” I raised my hand, silencing the wounded chorus of whimpering, groaning, and one student loudly insisting that his ankle was “not meant to look that way.” I took a slow breath through my nose. “Take yourselves to the nurse’s office.”
No one moved.
“With your working limbs,” I added, my voice dropping low. “While you still have some to crawl with.”
That got them moving. Slowly. Pathetically. In pairs and trios, leaning on each other, limping, dragging, sniffling, and complaining about injuries they had absolutely earned.
I waved them away and headed back inside the manor before I said something that would result in a closed-door faculty meeting.
The halls were blessedly quiet as I made my way toward the teachers’ lounge.
The manor held its breath around me, all polished wood, old stone, and the faint smell of smoke that had never quite left the walls despite the decades between the fire and now.
The quiet did nothing to soothe my aching ankle or my wounded pride, though, and by the time I reached the lounge, my patience had worn down to nothing but bone.
The room was empty. Good. I needed a moment to think.
Or not think.
Not thinking sounded much better. I limped to the coffee machine and jabbed at the power button with more force than necessary before placing a cup beneath the spout.
I pressed the button for a mocha, because if I was going to drink something bitter and disappointing, it might as well have delusions of hot chocolate.
The machine hissed. Spluttered. Made a sound as if it were considering death.
Relatable.
Then it spit coffee out sideways, missing the cup so spectacularly I could have sworn it was deliberate.
I stared down at my suit, at the brown stains blooming over the red wool.
The damp sank all the way to my skin, the boiling liquid leaving no marks.
I felt no pain—heat didn’t affect me. I did, however, feel my eye twitch.
How much more could one man handle?
My jaw tightened at the sound of footsteps behind me. I did not turn around. I knew who the footsteps belonged to; we had spent too many years together for me not to know the weight of Al’s stride, the lazy confidence of it.
I did wonder how on earth he had become the head of the academy; that man legally should not have been within a hundred yards of a school, let alone in charge of one, but here he was.
“Rough–?”
“Yeah,” I cut in, because I did not have the strength to sit through the entire script of small talk before we arrived at whatever point he wanted to beat around.
I took my cup from the machine and stared into the greasy foam like it might hold answers.
“All my students are hopeless. This world is going to die because not one of its future gods can hit a stationary target.”
Al chuckled, because of course he did. “Let me guess. The nurse’s office line is at least a dozen long.”
“At least.” I shoved my coffee cup into his hand and turned back to make myself a fresh one. “Oh, and you know. I’m dying.”
Al raised a brow. “How immediate is your upcoming death? Want me to find a sub for the rest of the day?”
I groaned, irritated by how oblivious the man could be, and sat in the nearest chair, pointing at my temple.
“I don’t follow.”
“I found a gray hair today. Like a beacon for Death, announcing to the reaper that I’m ripe for the afterlife.”
I swear, if Al had laughed, I was going to dispatch him then and there so that I would have someone to carry my baggage through hell. To his credit, though, he didn’t.
“You are probably just stressed,” he offered after a sip of coffee.
“Stressed?” I muttered, unconvinced. I was not a man who got stressed. To me, life had always felt like a river. Most people exhausted themselves fighting the current, but I never saw the point. The river knew where it was going. All I had to do was float.
When opportunities appeared, I took them.
When storms arrived, I weathered them.
When the current changed direction, I changed with it.
Simple.
I’d never paddled against the current until now. Now I knew the river ended in a drop.
Our world was dying, and for the first time in my life, I could not simply float along and trust the current.
I had to paddle. Hard.
“You need to relax,” Al said, leaning over the seat.
I glared over my fresh cup at him. Al suggesting relaxation was like a wildfire suggesting hydration. He immediately threw his arms up in surrender, coffee cup still in one hand. “See? Exactly. You’re so fucking tense, it’s unbearable.”
“I am not tense,” I muttered tensely.
“You made third-year students jump off a building. Some of them still tie their laces with bunny ears.”
“You are not usually one to care for my well-being.” I raised my gaze to him, suspicious. “So what is this really about?”
Al’s humor softened by a degree. But it didn’t vanish.
It never vanished.
“Ghost,” he said.
I looked up. “What about him?” I asked, though I already knew. Of course I knew.
I had neglected him. Not intentionally; I hadn’t meant to leave him sitting in the garage for three weeks, but I had avoided driving him. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, though he was much, much larger than any other car I’d ever gotten behind the wheel of; it was what Ghost demanded as his price.
I had felt it from the moment I first stood before him. The pull. The hunger. The invitation to let go of the wheel, even while holding it. And I knew how closely chaos followed when I slipped.
I also knew how badly I wanted to slip.
Ghost needed my surrender, and I couldn’t risk giving myself over like that; I couldn’t be caught by the rapids and carried away from this stuffy teachers’ lounge, from watery coffee, from broken students and dying worlds and Al’s judging look.
I couldn’t stop bracing for disaster even if it was killing me.
“You need a long drive,” Al chuckled, as if reading the thought straight from my face. “You need to break some rules, cause some chaos, and have your guts rearranged.” He raised his coffee cup in a mocking toast, because apparently even emotional insight required obscenity.
I was too stunned to speak.
Somehow, after all these years apart, after the toxic whirlwind of our relationship, after all the ways we had ruined and saved each other, he still knew exactly what I needed.
Worse, he had said it out loud.
All I could do was exhale, the sound slipping into a hissing laugh as I shook my head.
“You are vulgar,” I told him.
“You used to like that about me.”
“I used to like a lot of things that were bad for me.”
Al pushed off from the counter and stood. When he held out his hand, Ghost’s keys dangled from his fingers.
“Don’t ask me how I know,” he said, “but I know Ghost needs it too.”
◆◆◆
‘Going to be home late, going for a drive. Don’t wait up.’
I sent the message to Finch from the garage doorway, thumb hovering over the screen for a moment before I hit send.
His reply came almost immediately.
A kiss emoji.
That was all.
No questions. No worries. No ‘where are you going’, no ‘be careful’, no ‘do you want me to come with you?’. Everyone panicked when I mentioned driving.
Just a kiss.
I stared at it. He knew, too? Did everyone know but me?
No. I knew. Maybe I was just too stubborn to admit it, but I knew.
Driving had never been relaxing for me. I had never understood people who went driving to clear their heads. Nothing was calming about constant honking, near misses, and angry shouts from strangers. Roads were a test of survival.
Maybe that was just my driving, though.
Maybe I had only ever driven with my hands too tight on the wheel and my mind too tense to relax.
Maybe it would be different with Ghost.
The keys rested heavily in my palm.
I slipped my phone into my pocket and looked across the garage, where Ghost waited for me in the low light. The overheads slid across his paint in long, glossy strokes, catching on every curve, every sharp edge, every detail of the 1970 Dodge Challenger.
I had been avoiding him. There was no point lying about it now, so I stepped closer, my heels echoing softly against the concrete.
“Apparently,” I whispered to him, “we both need this.”
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the driver’s door unlocked with a soft click.