Chapter Twenty-Nine Claire
Je me défends—that phrase was so effective in justifying one’s own greed that criminals still use it today. Avoid those who say it; Diu will punish them eventually.
—Sermon on The Tale of Stars (L’Histoire des étoiles), Part II: The Book of Dark Days
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Claire
The last boy who kissed me thinks I’m dead.
Briefly, his face visits my memory—eyes a little darker, scruff a little fuzzier, less vivid than that sunny day when Papa and I first met him on a dock in Port-de-Chance.
He was a sailor for a livestock shipper and helped unload the broodmares down the ramp.
When he handed me the lead rope to my sassy new palomino, he had me at that crooked smile.
That feverish mouth was on mine behind the inn’s stables once Papa went to sleep that night.
Abel’s kiss moves slower. Insistent, but languid. As it deepens, pleasant shivers ripple down to my toes.
The girl I was before the Dames Blanches might have been that sailor boy’s perfect match. Obsessive in the heat of the moment, yet patient enough to wait for him while he travels the coast.
I’m greedy for Abel.
I want to wrap my arms around his neck and melt into his frame, but with his injured shoulder, I claim his waist instead.
“Don’t stop,” I breathe.
His mouth finds my cheek and jaw, planting delicate kisses as if I were made of glass.
I stir with impatience, then sigh when he finally reaches my neck.
Anne-Sophie would lecture me for allowing him this close—for jeopardizing my secret—but I can’t help myself.
My fingers curl into the fabric above his belt.
His fingers twine through my hair, just firmly enough to tilt my head aside.
I’m already weak with satisfaction by the time his hand begins to shake.
I giggle, half from the subtle sign of nervousness, half from the tickle of his breath. “You can slow down,” I whisper into his ear. “We have all night.”
Abel walks me backward until I hit the dresser with a gasp.
The pitcher, candle, and medicines rock dangerously, but Abel doesn’t stop long enough for me to see what happens to them.
I’m just grateful for the added support as the shock of his mouth returns to that delectable spot on my throat.
He’s there for several seconds or minutes or days, until his newfound assertiveness peaks and he nips at my skin, a gasp-worthy sharpness that inspires me to pull our hips together.
When his tremors spread to the rest of his body, his mouth abruptly leaves my skin.
“What’s wrong?” I breathe, looking up at him.
“Hold still.”
“If your shoulder hurts—”
“Hold still,” he commands, voice like ice. The lust in his gaze freezes over. His attention drops to the spot on my neck where he intently kissed.
I shove him off me, slapping a hand over the spot to hide it. Did he leave a mark? Is it fading?
Did it heal?
“Did you kiss me as an experiment?” I ask, betrayal thick in my throat.
Grief strains his handsome features as he takes several steps backward, shaking his head at what he saw.
“Claire.” The frail tone of his voice breaks my heart. “Tell me this is a trick.”
A trick. A con.
“Tell me you’re not a dragon!” he pleads.
I hug myself, as if that can protect me from the consequences of the lies I’ve told.
“You weren’t supposed to care about me,” I whisper.
“You didn’t hire me back in Bourlin because my services came cheap,” Abel realizes, eyes wide. “You’d heard the rumors about my experiments. You hoped I’d found a cure. So when you read my journal and discovered that I hadn’t…”
“I kept lying.”
Emotion brings my body to a terrifying tremble that compels me to pace the room. Abel wavers in place, hand half raised, as if the truth has already killed his desire to touch me.
“Claire—”
“I’m none of those things you said about me!
” I scream. Candlesticks, fire pokers, pillows—one by one, I snatch them up, then throw them across the room with all my might.
Not a single crash drains the rage and resentment that’s festered beneath my guilt.
“I deserve this curse! I’m an evil person who wanted to have your heart and crush it too, once the time came for you to kill me! ”
I lift my satchel next. Abel grabs my wrist.
“Stop, Claire!”
“No! Let me go!”
“You’re scaring Lucy!”
My satchel falls from my grip. The contents spill, including Abel’s journal. It lands open, on a bloodstained page, still unwrapped after Lyle read it. Lucy scurries under the bed to avoid the impact.
The sight of her watching me, shaking, under the shelter of the bed skirts, douses my fury like a bucket of water on flame.
“You were right.” I smile, wobbly. “Lucy is a good judge of character.”
He releases my wrist, but only to trace my cheek with his thumb. I’m too greedy for connection to stop him.
“But your scar,” he says. “How did you get it?”
“I clawed myself during my first Ignition. I tried to use the pain to regain control of my senses,” I confess. Lies are pointless now. “I woke up healed.”
“That’s impossible. Dragon healing power doesn’t leave scars.”
“I wish this scar were another con, too. But it’s true.”
The new knowledge processes behind his eyes, on that handsome furrowed brow.
Even without experimenting, I know what he’s theorized: When dragons turn for the first time, they’re still capable of being wounded.
Wounds inflicted during that half-formed state will heal as they would for a normal human—with scarring—but with rapid speed.
That theory changes nothing.
Abel runs his hand through his hair. “Is this why you asked if dragons can commit suicide? Is that why you stole my dagger?” He pales. “Did you already try?”
“You said it wouldn’t work,” I whisper.
I can’t admit to him that I wish it would work, but my welling tears must admit it for me. The anguish in his gaze cuts me deeper than his dagger ever could.
“Claire…”
“I’m sorry,” I sob. “I’m so sorry.”
I sit on the edge of my bed, strength draining from me, and cover my face with my hands. Lucy emerges from her hiding spot as if nothing happened and leaps onto the bed, shoving her nose into the space between my arm and my ribs. I clutch her against my chest and tuck my face into her fur.
“At first I meant to distance myself from my feelings for you. I really did,” I insist. “But after spending so much time with you, I couldn’t resist. I wanted as much of you as I could get before I had to die.”
“Maybe you don’t have to,” Abel says, and I hear hope in his voice. “If Lyle can make the right equipment, then maybe—”
“Abel, no! I won’t live the rest of my life running back to a cage every month.”
“I wouldn’t keep you locked up, so why not? We know better now. We can take precautions.”
Fighting for my life is hopeless; I don’t want to try anymore. Not when that means it’s a matter of time until I hurt someone else.
“You’re suggesting we break the law. The Guild would find you, and after an Ignition or two, they’d most certainly find me.
Lyle already knows what I am. He saw the steam when the bolt struck my leg.
” Abel flinches, but I press on. “He’s kept it a secret out of respect for you and Micah, but even he won’t let you sabotage your life for another dragon. I won’t either.”
Abel looks longingly through the window, at the snow drifting down to the wet streets below.
“I could visit the étoile Palace and request an audience with King Philippe,” he offers.
“A royal decree can force pharmacies to administer increasing doses of sleep powder to dragons. Like a public safety law.”
I close my eyes, tempted to imagine the world he’s painting.
A world where succumbing to the Ignition is no more than a health condition to maintain.
A world where I could ingest unfathomable amounts of the drug to sleep through the Ignition again and again, never spending a single stolen coin to keep myself from harming anyone.
“You know that won’t work,” I say. “He would never allow it.”
For dragons to be identified, they must have turned and done damage already. There’s too much grief and anger in their wake. King Philippe would be asking civilians to stake their lives on the hope that no dragon fails to take their medication.
Such a law would ask slayers to forfeit their income too.
There’s no practical way to save people like me without a cure, and Abel’s journal proves there isn’t one.
“Forget the rest of them, then. I’ll buy your sleep powder,” he says. “As much as you need.”
“What?” I shake my head. “You’re not listening.”
“The bounty on Gérard’s head is mine. My reputation is improving. I’ll find more work, enough to buy the right doses, no matter the cost.”
“You would spend every cent of your earnings slaying other dragons to keep me alive?”
“No price is too high if it means you’ll live.”
He must see the madness in his suggestion. A slayer protecting a dragon at the expense of his oath to protect innocent lives from dragons?
“I don’t deserve to live anyway.” My voice wobbles. “That night, when I murdered that thief…I was trying to buy sleep powder, but she refused to sell it to me.”
He startles. “That was your blood on your clothes. She hurt you!”
I stare in disbelief. “How could you possibly determine that? The obvious answer is that she bled on me.”
“Because I know you. You’d only attack in self-defense. If there was that much blood on you, some of it had to have been yours.”
“But I can heal,” I cry. “I would’ve been fine.”
“You shouldn’t have to endure pain just because you can survive it!”
“Then don’t do this to me,” I whisper. “Don’t drag out my suffering like you did Micah’s.”
Abel’s inhale is sharp. I hide my face in Lucy’s fur. It’s a low blow, but I need him to stop. I can’t let the hope in. Into him, or into me.
The mattress sinks with added weight. Abel’s arm wraps around me and pulls me tightly against him. Lucy squirms out from between us and gives me room to plant my hands on Abel’s chest.
“Your shoulder.” I push lightly, but Abel’s grip tightens.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
My insides crumple and I curl into him, grabbing fistfuls of his tunic.
Sobs rack my body, ugly ones, a dam releasing all the anguish I’ve been concealing since Abel first treated me like a human being.
I’ve been ostracized and isolated and vilified for so long.
A man who sees my curse and my humanity won’t feel real if I let go.
But kindness shouldn’t only have come from him.
I deserved this from the Church and the rest of the slayers.
I deserved this from everyone, well before I made marks of them.
“Why did you have to be such a good person?” I cry.
“I’m not.” He strokes my hair. “The good in me only exists because of you.”
That’s a gross exaggeration, and we both know it. He was always capable. He just didn’t fully commit to it until I came along.
His breath shudders in his chest, dread working through him. “Tell me what I can give you. Anything you want. It’s yours.”
I want time. A do-over. A life where none of this ever happened.
But I’ll never stop blaming myself for every crime I committed, so I lock my true desires inside my heart. All Abel can do for me is end this cycle of counting down my final days only to see death slip oh so slightly further out of reach. Only he can put me out of my misery.
“Give me mercy,” I say.
Abel’s hold on me tightens. I let him have a moment for reality to sink in.
Sleep powder, caging my dragon form until the Ignition is over…
Every solution he can think of, every preventive measure he can take, will never be enough to make my life worth living.
I can’t embrace life’s joys if I fear every Ignition, hoping I won’t wake up to the ashen aftermath of the one time we happen to slip up.
“You’ve given me more than I could’ve wanted.
All I ask now is that you let me go.” I wish I didn’t have to ask this of him.
He already cried for Gérard, a man he came to know only on paper.
“Please,” I beg, a tremble in my lower lip.
“Please. You’re the man who will change the slayer industry, remember? ”
Abel buries his face in my shoulder. After a long, long pause, he nods.
“All right,” he says. “I’ll do it.”
“Promise me.” I clutch him tighter. “Word for word. I trust your honesty.”
It takes a moment, long enough for some of the firewood to crumble, and for his wet cheek to press against mine. We remain wrapped in each other’s arms like that until he sets the day of my death in stone.
“I promise,” he says. “On the Ignition after my shoulder heals, I’ll give you mercy.”