Everly #2
All summer the bond was the loudest thing in me, and it hurt, and the hurt drowned everything else out.
The hurt's gone now. This is what moved into the quiet it left behind, and on a morning when I've just watched a room get scoured down to the ticking, the worst part is how much the steadiness of it feels like comfort.
The sky goes wrong around four.
I feel it before I see it: gooseflesh sweeping up my arms as the pressure of the whole day drops, and the threads in my chest yank taut all at once toward the one of them who could do this.
The clouds don't gather so much as arrive—low, bruise-dark, rolling in off nothing the way weather never does, the temperature falling ten degrees between the dining hall and my own door.
By the time I'm inside, the rain is coming down in sheets that turn the green to a gray smear, and thunder is walking the length of the campus, and every window in Callister hums in its frame with the charge of it.
A storm over the whole school. His output smeared across all of it at once, lightning answering from six directions so the thing on his hand can't say which strike is him, can't pin him to a building, can't swear he's anywhere he shouldn't be.
I understand what it is the second it breaks, and understanding it doesn't slow my feet at all. I'm already moving, already down the back hall, because if he's done this, it's because he means to be close enough to reach, and I have spent three days with no one to fall apart in front of.
He's in the back stairwell, the one with the door that never latches right.
Rain-dark. Dripping on the stone. The mark on his hand already livid against the wet of his skin, and the air around him so charged the small hairs on my arms lift before I'm through the doorway.
He shouldn't be able to stand here. The boundary is chewing on him for every second he's inside it, and I can see the cost of it in the set of his jaw, in the stillness that takes everything he has, the stillness I learned on a motel floor in Missouri with my hand flat by his bed. You're here. You're here.
"You're hurting yourself," I say. My voice doesn't come out the way I want it to. It comes out wrecked.
"I know." He doesn't move toward me. He doesn't move back.
Water runs off the ends of his hair and the storm leans on the windows, and his eyes are doing the thing they do, the thing he stopped bothering to hide somewhere around Oklahoma.
"I felt you all day. Whatever they did to you, I felt it pour up the thread and I couldn't get to you, and I've been standing in Fulmen Hall for three hours pulling a storm down out of the sky just to stand in a stairwell and look at you. "
The threads in my chest go bright and hot and tight, all of them. The heat arrives from outside me, from a direction my own body didn't choose. My heartbeat doubles.
And under it, because I can't not feel it, the other three pull. Three points of it scattered across the dark campus. The dim, awful awareness of the bond going warm in a direction none of them are part of.
They know. Wherever they are, Callum and Ren and Felix can feel that Atlas reached me and they didn't, the way you feel a door open in a far room of your own house, and there's nothing any of them can do but stand where the mark holds them and burn and feel it.
I'll pay for that later. We all will. The mark doesn't only leash where they go—it rations who gets to want me out loud, and makes the rest of them listen to it happen.
I should care about that more than I do right now. I don't. I cross the stairwell, because I'm the only one who can, and I put my hands on him.
"Your hand," I say, and reach for it, and he lets me take it, and the second my fingers close on his the charge jumps the gap between us and the bond floods warm up my arm and into my chest and I have to lock my knees against it.
The mark is raised and furious. Blistering at the edges, the looping half-moon gone white-livid where the boundary's been eating at it the whole time he's stood here waiting for me. He looks at it like it belongs to a stranger.
"Cheap," he says.
"It's not cheap. Look at it. Look at it, Atlas—"
"Everly." He turns his hand in mine so it's his fingers around my wrist now, his thumb dragging once across my pulse like he's checking it's still going, and the touch goes straight down through me, lands low, sets something off that has no business waking up in a stairwell with a man's hand blistered raw.
"You buried somebody today. I felt you do it from across campus.
I had to throw a storm over the entire school to get within reach of you and I still can't take you anywhere, can't do one useful thing about any of it, can't even—" His jaw works.
The rain comes harder, and it's his, and he's not stopping it.
"A burn is nothing. I'd put the whole hand in a fire for an hour where they couldn't see us.
Don't tell me what it costs. I'm counting too. "
And then there's no distance left, because one of us closes it and I honestly can't say which.
His forehead drops to mine, both of us rain-wet, neither of us mentioning it the way we never mention it, and for one second that's all it is—breath and breath, his coming ragged, mine catching on the lump that's been in my throat since the third cold kettle.
Then his free hand comes up into my wet hair and his mouth finds mine and it isn't gentle and I don't want it gentle.
It's a man surfacing. It's a gasp for air, and I'm the air, and I open to it before my mind has caught up with my body, my fists in the soaked front of his shirt, dragging him down into it, into me, because I have spent three days holding a line and this is the first thing all week that doesn't ask me to.
He kisses me like he's been starving and won't admit to a single meal he's missed. I taste rain and ozone, and under it the heavy old-storm charge prickles against my lips. The grief in him's gone molten, pouring up the thread, mixing with mine until I can't tell whose is whose.
His hand fists in my hair. The other comes off the wall to grip my hip and haul me flush against him, and God, the want of it—not pretty, not careful, the kind that scrapes. Want braided so tight with how much I've needed somebody this week that they come up the same.
The mark buzzes its warning against the small of my back where his hand is, a hot pulse of no, and neither of us is going to be the one to listen to it.
"We can't," I breathe against his mouth, and don't stop kissing him.
"I know." He doesn't stop either. His thumb has found the strip of skin where my shirt's come untucked and he's stroking it like he can't help it, like a current he's not grounding, and a sound comes out of me I'd be embarrassed by any other day.
"Tell me to go." His mouth drags down to my jaw, my throat, the storm howling against the windows now, lightning throwing the stairwell blue and white.
"Everly. Tell me to stop and I'll burn my way back across campus and never say a word about it. Just—tell me."
I don't tell him. That's the truth of it, the thing I'll carry. With the rain blinding the house and the watchers drowned out and his ruined hand fisted in my shirt and his pulse slamming under my palm, with three days of grief finally cracking open in my chest, I don't tell him to stop.
I tell him the other thing instead. The true one, low, into the half inch between us, because he's the only one I'll say it to yet. "One. It's Enya. The count's at one."
He goes still—not the costly stillness, a different one—and then his arms come all the way around me, both of them, the storm answering something in him so the thunder lands right on top of us, close enough to shake the stone.
He doesn't promise me it stays at one. He's the only one of them who wouldn't. That's why it's him I told, and why I'm letting him hold me up while my legs decide whether they're going to keep doing it.
It won't stay at one. I know that the way I know the taste of a tidy story, the way I know the penny tang of blood magic doing something it shouldn't.
But for ten stolen minutes, with the rain coming down hard enough to blind the whole watching house and his burned hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades, I let myself not count.
The mark goes on burning the entire time. He takes it. I let him. Telling him not to would be a lie about how badly I need him here, and I am done, today, telling myself things.