Chapter 24 #2
He lowers his sword and retreats a few steps, giving me space to breathe. But the absence of the soul-blade’s pressure against my throat leaves me feeling oddly bereft. Cold.
My hand drifts to my jaw where his blade rested, chasing the ghost of that carbonated hum.
I drop them the instant I realize what I’m doing.
This is Falcen Reaves, Elite Render and my prison officer.
I can’t afford to be distracted by how his uniform hugs his body or how his muscled chest tapers into narrow hips, or how he looked without clothes, wet and bare when we were by the lake…
Gods, that seems like ages ago.
“Focus,” he orders, as if reading my thoughts. “Reach inside yourself. Deep inside yourself. Find that place where your magick lives. That oily, lurching core that terrifies you.”
I close my eyes and reach. My mind gropes through the dark of my own chest like hands sweeping a room after the candles blow out.
Ember nudges me deeper, impatient, steering my focus past the familiar weight of her and into a layer that has been dormant for so long.
But in that space where magick should reside, my searching closes around nothing.
What if I can’t do this? What if I’m not really a Soulren at all, just a mistake, an aberration?
Stop grasping. You’re scaring it.
Ember doesn’t elaborate, but she presses against my breastbone like a second heartbeat, nudging me further in. Her pressure builds, not pushing me, just settling me. Like a hand on my shoulder. Like she’s teaching me to hold still instead of hunt.
I force the tension out of my body. Tell my breathing to slow. And instead of reaching, I wait.
Are you my soul-blade?
A sound akin to laughter rings inside my head. No.
Sweat beads on my upper lip, and I bite back a plaintive wail. Ember can laugh. Falcen can bark orders. But neither of them is the one standing here with their eyes shut and their fists balled and absolutely nothing to show for it.
“You’re not trying hard enough,” Falcen growls behind my closed lids. “Stop fighting yourself.”
Gritting my teeth, I keep reaching for this elusive blade. I imagine a hilt, the weight of steel settling into my grip. But there’s nothing. Just an absolute refusal that feels personal.
I open my eyes, blinking back tears.
“This isn’t going to work,” I whisper.
“It will. You’ve done it before, with me in the Blightwood and defending yourself against the rogue Soulren. You reached into that place inside you and drew out re-awakened, unfiltered magick. Do it again, but forge it into a tangible form.”
The Void hounds’ stench fills my nose. The rogue’s hand around my throat. Callie screaming behind the wall of my cell. I throw every memory at that dormant space inside me like kindling onto dead coals.
Nothing catches.
“I can’t,” I say, my voice breaking. “Just give me one of those weapons the initiates make in the forges. The ones for the human armies.”
Falcen’s hand closes around my upper arm. “Those weapons are for the fodder we send to die at the Veil rifts. Is that what you want to be?”
My eyes fly open to land on his. There’s no gold in them. Just the flat blue of a man who means every word.
“Again.” He releases me and calls his sword, the blade catching the chandelier light like a second edge. “Defend yourself.”
I gape at him. “What? No, I don’t have a weapon. I can’t—”
But he’s already moving, his sword slicing through the air toward me. I stumble back, arms raised to protect my face. The blade whooshes past, close enough that I feel the wind of its passage.
“Are you insane?” I shout, scrambling away from him. “You could have killed me!”
“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” Falcen says. “Now summon your weapon.”
“I told you, I can’t!”
He lunges again, and I dive to the side, rolling across the hard floor. My shoulder smacks against a table bearing broken swords and cracked shields, and I grunt, stars bursting behind my eyes.
Falcen presses his attack, not giving me enough time to grab a relic to defend myself. I dodge and weave, my breath coming in ragged gasps. He’s too fast, too skilled.
I roll to my feet, chest heaving, sweat stinging my eyes. Falcen stalks forward, his sword held low and ready. The cobalt veins pulse faster now, as if eager to taste my soul.
“Falcen, please,” I beg, backing away. “I’m trying, I swear I am. But I don’t know how to do this!”
He doesn’t respond, just keeps advancing.
“Falcen...” I try again, my voice small and pathetic to my own ears.
He lashes out. I barely manage to twist aside, feeling the kiss of the blade as it grazes my ribs. A sting rips along my side, and I cry out, more from shock than pain.
Falcen doesn’t give me a chance to recover. His sword is a blur of silver and whistling blue.
I duck under another swipe, Falcen’s blade slashing over my head.
My next inhale is shallow and useless. I can’t keep this up much longer. I’m trembling, my reflexes slowing with each passing second.
Help, I ask of my ember. Help me.
You’re reaching for the wrong thing.
I throw myself backward, my spine colliding with the bookshelf. Leather-bound tomes rain down around me, their spines cracking against the floor. The smell of old parchment and dust fills my nose.
Pain blooms along my arm as Falcen’s blade stabs through my sleeve, leaving a thin red line across my bicep. I hiss through my teeth, clutching at the wound. Blood seeps through my fingers.
“Is this what you want?” I shout at him. “To hurt me? To prove how weak and pathetic I am compared to you?”
Falcen remains unperturbed, but I catch a flicker in the one area he can’t control: the magick in his eyes. A small, golden ripple, there and gone, that almost looked like remorse.
He comes at me again, and this time I’m too slow to evade the blow entirely. His sword bites into my thigh, a bright flare of agony that sends me stumbling. I fall to one knee, gasping, my vision turning into water.
“Get up,” Falcen orders. “The Void won’t wait for you to catch your breath.”
I force myself to my feet. “I’m all too aware of that. Do you want to know why? Because we both endured it before crashing into this gods-forsaken academy!”
Blood drips down my leg, pooling on the tiled floor. “Do you remember what it was like in the Void, Resonant? Do you remember how it felt to fall, endlessly, with nothing but each other to hold on to?”
Falcen’s sword wavers. “Don’t.”
“We survived that hell together. You held me while the darkness tried to tear us apart. You whispered in my ear, telling me to hold on, to not let go.”
The icy cold of the Void. The sensation of falling, falling, with no end in sight. The feel of Falcen’s arms around me, his heartbeat against my cheek.
“And then I saved you,” I say in a harsh whisper. “You were fading, you couldn’t withstand the assault after all we’d been through, and instead of leaving you or hurting you, I—”
“You did fucking hurt me!” he roars, and the sound is worse than any slash of his sword.
I flinch. His eyes blaze with fury, gold overtaking blue.
“You think you helped me?” he snarls, advancing on me. “You think that what you did was a kindness?”
“I... I don’t understand. I pulled you out of the Void. I brought you back—”
Too late, I remember how his veins had gone black under his tattoos, how it crawled like living venom up his neck, into his face…
“You returned me to this!” He gestures wildly at the room, at the academy beyond. “To a place I swore I would never come back to. A place I despise.”
I stare at him, my lips parted in shock. “What are you talking about? It’s not like I demanded you bring me here!”
Falcen laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I never wanted to return to the academy.”
My back hits the bookshelf again. There’s nowhere to go.
“Even though they put your sister in the catacombs?” I ask, horrified that if he hadn’t stumbled upon Edon and me, he may have intended to leave her there.
“And then you came along,” he barrels on as if not hearing me. “You, with your untamed magick and your complete ignorance. I knew the moment I saw you that you were dangerous. Not just to yourself, but to everyone around you.”
“I didn’t know,” I whisper. “I thought I was saving you from the Void, I thought—”
“You thought wrong,” Falcen snaps. “I was ready to die in the Void, Verily. I welcomed it. Anything was better than facing what they did to me here.”
“Then why hand me over to them?” I half-shout as my ember shoves an image behind my eyes of Falcen tied to a stone slab, his face slackened with enduring pain, black sludge leaking out of his mouth.
Blinking rapidly, I say it out loud. “They tortured you. Why did they lock you in the catacombs? Why is there so much rot in you?”
Falcen reels back as if I struck him, his sword dissolving into thin air.
“How do you know about that?” he asks, his voice hoarse. “No one knows about that. No one.”
Slowly, I inch away from him.
“How do you know about that?” he repeats, but now it’s in a low tone that sets off alarm bells in my head.
“You told me,” I answer carefully. “After I healed you in the cave, I had a vision of you on a stone slab, but there was a hooded figure beside you, cutting you…”
I trail off when Falcen goes utterly still. He doesn’t even seem to breathe.
In a movement too fast to track, he slams me back against the bookshelf, his forearm pressing against my throat.
“You had no right,” he snarls.
“I’m sorry,” I rasp, barely able to speak past the pressure on my windpipe. “I didn’t ask to see it.”
He searches my face, his eyes flicking back and forth rapidly, before he releases me with a curt, “You’ll never speak of it again.”
Falcen’s proximity is unbearable. His exhales, the sheer power of him restrained under his skin. Every nerve in my body is attuned to this man, quivering with a mix of terror and a fever I refuse to diagnose.
His lips curl into a cruel smirk and he leans in, his mouth brushing the shell of my ear as he whispers, “You said it yourself. You’re nothing but a bargaining chip to me, and a failed one at that.”
Tremors run along my body at the feel of his lips on my skin.
I try to turn my head away, but his hand fists in my hair, holding me in place.
“You should thank the gods that I saw even that much value in you. You were never going to make it out of that clearing. I just extended your life by a few months, if that.”
I’m expendable to him. I meant nothing, mean nothing, to this man I’ve clung to, a man who has become familiar enough to care about. Maybe too much.
And even now, even as he’s breaking me apart with the truth of it, I’d still choose to leave Belgrave and go with him if given the choice again.
What does that make me?
There you are.
A searing pain rips through my core, tearing a scream from my throat. I’m being flayed alive, peeled apart layer by excruciating layer. Black spots dance across my vision as I convulse against the bookshelf, Falcen’s arm the only thing keeping me upright.