Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“You can speak,” he says, this tone undecipherable. It’s an unnecessary statement, but hearing it said out loud makes it real.
The spell is broken.
Panting, I draw back. I reach inside me for the drop of power, the well of my magic, but I still don’t feel it. What’s going on? Panic seizes me, robbing me of breath. Why can’t I feel it?
He’s watching me from far too close. “If you can truly speak, say something. Tell me what happened to you, what spell this was?—”
“I can’t tell you,” I whisper.
He jerks as if I’ve sucker-punched him. “Rae… your voice.”
I swallow hard. “What about it?”
“It’s… different,” he says.
Of course it’s different. Different from human voices. It’s one of the three signs of what I really am. I’ll have to continue being silent, or speak low and hope nobody notices. Few people, after all, know what finnfolk voices sound like, apart from mermaid singing.
Now the spell broke, now that I hear myself, I realize my voice is breathy, vibrating, resonant, slightly high-pitched and… I lift a hand to my neck, behind my ears. Hidden by my loose hair, the gills have reappeared and make rustling sounds when I speak.
My voice is back, but my power isn’t.
Is it Jai’s doing? Is it the pleasure he gave me? He’s somehow skimmed a layer off the spell, returning my voice and probably my ability to breathe underwater to me. That’s it.
It’s something.
But it’s also a giveaway, a tell that could betray me.
Beggars can’t be choosers, I remind myself, reeling from the shock, coming on the heels of my release. At least now I can ask questions.
And the first one is—can he restore me fully? Does he want to? Does he even know what he has done and how?
How did he lift a layer off the spell? That was the last layer, the last thing she took from me to hide what I am. He’d have to dig deeper to peel off the rest.
His dark eyes have turned a fathomless black, shielded by those long lashes. “You have magic. Are you even human? Who are you?”
“Will you give me in?” I answer his question with a question of my own. “Will you tell the king or the telchin about it, and have me excluded from the games?”
“What in the hells are you saying? Of course I wouldn’t fucking tell them.” Red blooms on his cheekbones, making his dark eyes glitter. “They’d execute you on the spot for lying.”
I nod, because he’s right. They would. “Maybe you did it on purpose. Giving me my voice back.”
“Me?” He shakes his head. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t know this could happen.”
I narrow my eyes. I don’t know what to believe.
Silver flashes through his eyes, turning them pale and brilliant for a single moment. The bunched muscles in his arms and the line of his jaw speak of tension. “By the Eosphors, Rae. I wasn’t supposed to kiss you, the gods know I tried my damnedest not to, but I couldn’t fucking help myself!”
He’s beautiful. So beautiful it’s damn distracting.
Is he telling me the truth? I wish I had a dragonbone relic that could tell me if someone is lying. It would save me so much anguish.
“Well, I don’t know if I can trust you.” I push at him, though I don’t expect him to budge. “You serve the fae king. How do I know you won’t betray me? You…”
I’m staring. Where I ripped his black shirt open earlier, I see his bared chest, I see… silver lines. They overlay in places the dark swirls spilling from his neck to his collarbone and shoulders. They are raised, pressing against my palm.
Scars.
This time, he does pull back. “I don’t enjoy serving him, believe me,” he bites out. “I wish I had a choice.”
“What are you talking about? You have plenty of choices. Didn’t you double the numbers of humans coming to the games? That was your doing.”
He holds my gaze, mouth tight. It takes him a long moment to reply, and then he says, “Phaethon is becoming stronger. When he takes over me, he sometimes acts before I can stop him. It’s still my responsibility.”
My heart starts to pound all over again. “Are you saying this was Phaethon’s doing?”
“I wish I could kill Phaethon.” He clenches his jaw, grinding his teeth. “I wish I could kill the king. But I fucking can’t.”
“But the king took you in. I heard the stories. Don’t you love him for adopting you?”
“ Love him? ” A choked sound leaves his lips. It might have been laughter, but it’s bitter and jagged like shattered glass. “Wrong guess, princess. There’s no love lost between the king and myself. When he first took me in, I thought he wanted to help me, but he quickly showed his true face. I can’t kill him, and I can’t stop him from leaving this world, though I’m trying my best.”
I’m trying my best. His words are slowly sinking in. His voice rings true, angry and honest.
“Are you forced to do his bidding?” I ask softly. “Is he holding something over you?”
His jaw clenches so hard a muscle leaps in it. “I can’t tell you more.”
“You’ve hardly told me anything at all. Who are you ? How come you have such powers, ordering dragons about, playing with the shadows?”
“I don’t know what I am,” he says quietly. “Or who I am. My memories of the past are a muddled mess. My mind shies away from them, and no matter how fucking hard I try, I can’t break through that wall. As for the fae king… One day, I hailed down a great dragon, this power surfacing in me. The king sent for me when he heard of that. And I don’t order dragons around. I talk with them.”
“But you can command them.”
He frowns. “Yes, I can command draks, and I have done it when the hour called for it.”
“What about the Great Dara?”
“I don’t command the Great Dara, or the darakin. Nobody does. But one thing I know is that pain can change you,” he says. “Death can change you. It changed me.”
Death. It strums a chord inside of me.
“Come, Jai,” I whisper. “You speak in riddles and expect me to just nod and accept it as the truth?”
“You want me to tell you everything,” he retorts, dark brows bunching together, “but you’re telling me fuck -all.”
We’re both breathing hard, glaring at one another.
“You’re in a position of power,” I remind him. “The King’s Sword. The king’s favorite. So excuse me if I can’t tell you everything.”
“I’m not his favorite, I’m his fucking tool. It’s Phaethon he wants, and that’s why I’m fighting him. Don’t you think I—” He gasps, jerks. “Fuck, Rae, listen?—”
“Jai?”
A grimace twists his strong features for a fleeting moment, then vanishes as his eyes… shift. He’s not normally so… sloe-eyed, is he? Or is it the dark blooms on his cheekbones that shift?
His dark lashes lift, and the look he shoots me is so cold and calculating, I flinch.
“Listen to you, little human, asking so many questions.” Jai sneers, and I jolt at the change in his voice, the oily clang in its depths. “Why wouldn’t we help the king? He offers what we need.”
We.
Okay .
“And what do you need?” I ask carefully, resisting the urge to back away from him.
“As if we’d tell you. As if we’d tell anyone.”
Phaethon.
An image comes to me. Jai smiling. Jai sneering. The black blooms on his cheekbones shifting as his character switches from nice to nasty. Gold flashing in his dark eyes.
“He’s offering you something you need, and that’s why you can’t kill him,” I whisper. “An alliance?”
“He found us, recognized us.” A burr has entered Jai’s voice, not the roughness of his voice when he kissed me, but a whirr and clank like distant metal cogs turning. “Don’t you see it, Leli? He promised to help us, keep us sane, and aid us in our mission, he—” Jai staggers back, hands clenching into white-knuckled fists, blunt nails digging into his palms, broad shoulders hunching. His teeth are gritting, jaw flexing. “Fuck. No. I said, no!”
I observe this with concern and fascination. The struggle. The cursing. The fight to regain control. I’ve seen it before. And I believe him now. I believe that he’s two-souled, as the telchin had said.
“Fuck…” He’s panting. A thin trickle of blood runs out of the corner of his mouth, and he spits a wad of crimson. He either bit his tongue or the inside of his cheek.
My hands twitch with the need to touch his face. “Is it still Phaethon talking, or are you Jai now?”
“Jai.” His voice is full of grit, but somehow, he sounds like himself again. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I told you, I’m learning how to control him.”
“How?” I whisper. “If you’re carrying another soul in you, an Eosphor’s soul of all things, how are you going to change that?”
His eyes blaze as he straightens fully to his impressive height. “I’ll find a way to tear him out of me like a fucking weed.”
“With the king’s help, huh? Is that how he controls you? How is he pulling your strings?”
“Don’t… make it into anything else than what it is.” He grunts, lifting one hand to rub at his neck where that bruise I’ve noticed before lingers. “The king needs Phaethon. He’s only helping me silence the howling.”
“He controls you . ”
“I need his fucking help,” he snarls. “I can’t do it on my own. I do my best, but it’s not enough. Without the king’s help, I’ll lose the last of my sanity, and all hope will be lost, too.”
“And how do you control Phaethon? Tell me.”
His face spasms, the black on his cheekbones shifting again, but he growls under his breath, and more blood trickles out of his mouth. “With pain.”
I retreat a step, both physically and mentally, moving sideways against the wall. “What?”
“Dammit, Rae, I’m trusting you so you can trust me back. I need you to tell me who you are, because I think I might have gone crazy already.” His voice drops and something darker than the dark flashes in his eyes. “I’ve been in love with a dead girl for so long, and then you show up, and I feel… cut right open. Where did you come from? How? How did you appear in the middle of the fucking swamps asking to be taken onto the barge, and why join the games?—?”
I lift my hand and shake my head. I can’t reply to those questions.
His jaw clenches. “Rae?—”
“What is the king giving you?” I ask more softly. “Drugs? Or did he put a spell on you to keep Phaethon in check? How is the king helping you?”
“You still don’t trust me,” he breathes.
“You are the king’s right-hand man,” I say softly. “He adopted you. He’s like a father to you.”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried to end him?” His voice rises, hoarse and hard. “But every time…” Blood starts dripping from his nose. He winces and wipes at it with the back of his hand. “Dammit, Rae.”
“Tell me. Talk to me.”
He shakes his head. Maybe, like me, he’s wondering how we went from kissing and making out to throwing barbs at one another. “We have a plan.”
“Who is we?”
“I fucking can’t…” He lets out a long breath. He lifts a hand, as if to tuck a stray strand of hair behind my ear before rethinking it. “Come to my room. Here the walls have ears. I need to know who you are, why your eyes look familiar, why I’m so drawn to you. Come with me, and we will talk.”
That’s a bad idea, yet it makes sense. I also want to know more, and from the corner of my eye, I see a servant hurrying by. We can’t quite discuss regicide in an open corridor. We’re too exposed.
I am too exposed—a human contestant dallying with the King’s Sword instead of attending the ball and speaking with an oddly resonant voice about murder.
Nothing suspicious here at all.
He’s watching me from under the thick fringe of his dark lashes, his gaze so warm and unsettling, a door I want to open, a gate I want to cross, a pull that persists despite the fear and doubt.
From the high planes of his marked cheekbones to the thick slabs of muscles on his chest and arms, from the chiseled jaw and soft mouth to the hard lines of that tall body, from the secrets and mystery, the power he wields and the pain that governs him, the sympathy and answering ache he elicits in me for him… everything about him is calling me.
I want it all, the dark crescents of weariness under his eyes, the glint lighting them that seems like hope, the memory of all the times he managed to save my ass in these past three days… the hint of that sweetness and the sheer amount of bitterness in his kiss.
I want to understand. Understand why I’m so drawn to him, and what he means with all these riddles.
He reaches out his hand, and I place mine against his rough palm. A zing goes through me at the contact, as his fingers close over mine, resonating through my entire body.
“Come with me,” he says again, and this time I nod.
Just to talk.
Figure this out.
Even if the look in his eyes makes me want more.