Chapter Twenty-Six The Nova
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Nova
He brought me home through the water. It was the strangest of feelings. Everything went black. Before I knew it, I was taking my next breath while surfacing through my bathtub.
Altair didn’t speak to me. He kept his human skin, the dark markings reappearing as he distanced his appearance from Dorian’s and buzzed around the room, gathering towels before leaving down the hall, I assumed to find clothing that wasn’t stained with ocean salt.
Could it be that he felt some way about the appearance?
Perhaps guilty for using my husband’s image.
Did he sense the pain it was causing me, or did he only feel bad for invoking my husband’s image to keep me here?
I stepped from the tub, my clothing heavier than I expected when I pulled myself out. I began to undress, lest I collapse from the weight. One by one, I placed the garment pieces over the ridge of the tub—skirts, petticoats, corset cover, corset, all of it.
Altair’s returning footsteps made me flinch.
He was rather awkward, standing a moment. He shifted his weight where he stood before laying the fresh clothes on the vanity chair.
There was no containing the shivers. The salt irritated my eyes and stuck to my skin. My hair was already becoming crisp in some areas as it dripped dry. The moment my body trembled, he covered me in a towel, making a hood over my head as he wrapped it.
I gripped the towel at the top to keep it closed.
I felt his fingers through the hood, scraping and pressing against my head and back to encourage the absorption.
Somehow, it felt nice. Like my mother used to do, when she had to wash me after I’d slipped in the street, my entire backside covered in mud.
He pushed the hood off my head, only to catch me looking up at him. His expression was cold, concerned. But I didn’t think that was inherently an expression he would know without practice. Which only further bewildered me as to his reasoning for not letting me drown in the first place.
The towel tugged over my face with such quickness it jolted my head forward. When I stumbled forward, there was no one to run into. He was gone, like a puff of smoke.
“Coward.”
I gathered the clothes he’d brought. There was a nightgown, a formal blouse, a petticoat that was too long, another petticoat that was a little fancier than necessary, and a robe that was too warm for the season.
I supposed you could know the secrets of the universe and still not understand women’s dressings.
I slipped into the nightgown, made of cotton light as air, the sleeves long and spacious enough to not overwhelm the skin. The trim was lined with simple lace, a silk ribbon tied in front of the breasts.
With each step, I could feel my circulation improving, the brain fog clearing the more the shivers slowed. A dim light was glowing from the second floor, but it was faint as I stood on the top of the steps.
As I descended the stairs, the light crept through the study door left ajar.
Somehow it was like I was intruding on my own office. I hesitated to open the door. Perhaps the hypothermia wasn’t quite gone, with that nonsensical thinking.
Altair sat in the chair in the corner, the biolamps offering a calming atmosphere. He was reading, a couple of books queued beside him in a pile. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and, oddly enough, Shakespeare.
He did not regard me, not one bit. But it was unlikely he didn’t hear me enter.
Are you angry with me?
I couldn’t even believe the thought. What right had he to be angry when he was pretending not to care in the first place?
Even as I stood in front of him, not even a glimpse from him.
“You won’t speak to me now?” I disturbed the silent study.
He flipped the page, shifting his gaze to follow to the next line.
“Truly? This is the game you wish to play?”
No response.
I slapped the book from his hands, his palms held up as if he still held it. Only then did he look up. His jaw was tight, eyes sharp.
I crossed my arms, raising a brow.
“What would you like to speak about?” he asked, his question monotone.
“Why?” was all I said.
“That’s far too broad.” He tipped his head at me.
“Everything!” I gestured, my arms wide.
“You may need to narrow a bit more, love.”
The sarcastic tinge made my mouth sour.
He propped his elbows on his knees, as if waiting for my interrogation to be over. But I was far from finished.
“Why are you really here?”
“I told you—”
“Not everything,” I said shakily. “My father warned against the likes of you. It scared him enough to put sigils on the chair he’s practically bound to out of fear. You aren’t telling me something, and it’s scared him enough that even his ill mind remembers the threat.”
“Is that so?” His voice was muffled as he rubbed his face with his hands.
“You weren’t supposed to come through,” I said. “I shouldn’t have let you through.”
Altair stood, stretching his neck to the side as he stepped forward.
I backed away.
“I just needed you to let me through.”
“You took advantage. My father was keeping you away, wasn’t he?”
“I waited a long time.”
He backed me into the bookcase, my head hitting the wood.
“Why me!” I yelled in his face, pushing my hands into his chest. I couldn’t stop the nip at the back of my throat, but the tears had run out by now, or had been stripped from the salt. “You’re lying to me.”
“Why would I do such a thing?”
“Because you’re here to kill me,” I said.
He didn’t reply, but he seemed truly and utterly worn. The lack of eye contact wasn’t soothing my worries.
I shoved him again, and he did take a stumble back. “Why are you here? To steal souls? Eat your fill? Why?”
“To die,” he said simply.
The words took a moment to process.
To die?
He ran a hand through his hair, unable to really look at me. His eyes darted away whenever they even came close to a glimpse. “You assume because I am not a person, that I am not capable of understanding the very human feelings that I consume.”
When he finally looked at me, it seemed his eyes had gotten red. Out of anger or pain, I couldn’t determine, but his expression looked real.
“I’ve known loneliness since before your earth formed from dust. I’ve known the pain of a thousand lives not unlike your own. I have been an observer for so long, watching things begin and end, that I can only dream of my turn—to live and to not.”
“If you understand so well,” I began, stepping forward, but I was shaking; quakes erupted through my body, from my abdomen down to my fingers and throat, “then why wouldn’t you let me go?” I croaked.
His eyes searched mine; his breathing picked up. Heat radiated from him: I could feel it in the space between us. His fingers by his side twitched. Would he grab me? Choke me? Had he just saved me out of his own selfish need to consume? I could only expect as much from a greedy, hungry—
“Because you changed my mind,” he said—and suddenly his hands were holding my face, and his shoulders shrugged forward for our lips to meet again.
I was still. His lips pressed so hard into mine, I thought maybe he might cut my lip with his teeth. But then my eyes closed, my mind swam away from whatever he’d just said, and my lips moved against his.
He walked me backward into the bookshelf, a couple of books toppling to the side and knocking a bookend to the floor. His fingers touched my face, one entangling in my hair. We barely had moments to breathe—every second our lips parted might be our reason to stop ourselves, so they never stopped.
The warmth of his skin, the tangibility of his touch. He was here now. There was no illusion, a completely lucid body. His lips wouldn’t stop; even the taste of his tongue just made me want it everywhere.
I tipped my head back. He held it to the side as he tasted my skin, the sounds of kisses right by my ear and down my neck.
“We shouldn’t,” I breathed, but even I knew the declaration was a stalling tactic.
His hands moved down my waist, but I felt the needlelike points of claws. I buried my fingers in his hair as he kissed over my collarbone, then my breast. One of his hands cupped the other, squeezing. He knelt before me, not even a moment of hesitation in doing so.
“You shouldn’t,” he corrected, his voice changed.
There was such a hunger that I didn’t realize it wasn’t something from my imagination.
“Let me break the rules for you,” he offered, a long, monstrous tongue slipping from his mouth.
I could see the hints of sharp teeth, and his eyes, when he looked up at me from between my breasts, were glazed over and white.
A shudder ripped through my spine, the reminder of what thing was touching me, savoring me, so eager to touch me in this moment. It wasn’t a man; it was something much worse.
But that wouldn’t stop me from indulging.
Not with such a temptation.
I touched his face, moving the curl of black hair from his forehead as I gripped the locks.
“Not with that face,” I whispered.
His lip twitched, a hint of a smirk before the black marking spread, covering his body as he grew, his limbs becoming more monstrous, more beastly, while keeping the vague shape of something humanoid, a sick perversion of a man.
He stepped back, lingering.
I turned my back to him to approach the sofa.
The nightgown ribbon wrapped around my fingers as I pulled gently at the knot. I could sense him near, like when the hairs at the back of your neck rise when someone is staring.
His shadow cast over me as the form grew, blocking the light from the biolamps on the wall. It had to be over seven feet tall. The form shifted, and limbs appeared and went as it settled on something.
Something wet by my leg.
I looked down; something moved by my ankle.
It was pink like a tongue, a few tips as if it was split multiple times at the end. It brushed over my leg, then around my calf. Not long before it was hidden beneath my skirt. It moved upward, the position shifting under the fabric, the bulge moving up.
It brushed against my inner thigh.