Chapter 40
Forty
My thighs ache in a way that feels both victorious and punishing.
Two hours have passed since Falcen took me against the floor and since then, we’ve moved to his bed.
I must have fallen asleep, because one moment his lips are against mine, and the next, I’m waking up and reaching for him on instinct, but find cold sheets instead.
After a brief scan while sitting up, I spot him at the basin with his back to me, shoulders bowed.
Scales take up almost the entirety of his back now, an onyx oil that catches the thin light of dawn.
Steam ghosts off the water. He mutters to himself in that blighted tongue, the one that vibrates like a hive of angry wasps around my bones.
The sound makes my stomach pitch, my skin cold, causing a sort of animal terror I can’t quite scrub away even after weeks of brutal training at the academy.
His bed smells like metal and mint and a sharper note I wish I could pretend away.
I feel emptied out where I expected to glow. Fulfilled and scraped thin. Ember curls quiet yet alert in my chest, not repentant in the slightest for ripping me off Falcen last night and stopping me from healing his rot.
Falcen braces his hands on the basin and breathes like each inhale is an argument he’s losing.
“You’re up early,” I rasp, and wince at how sanded-down my voice is.
He glances over his shoulder. Not fully. As if he can’t let me see his face straight on. The ring of gold around his blue iris catches, then is swallowed when he closes his eyes.
“Don’t get up,” he says.
“You’re feeling bossy this morning. I’ll take that as a good sign.”
He leans on the basin while the porcelain complains.
I slip from under the sheets and stand, ignoring every complaint from the parts of me that had a very unholy night, and grab the sheet to wrap around myself. The floor is ice under my bare feet. Too cold.
Sensing my movements, he goes as still as prey.
A few heartbeats pass, and I feel that hum under my sternum, the thread I shouldn’t have spun when I took away some of his pain.
It’s stronger when he’s near, but Ember’s quiet snarl answers it, becoming a predator pacing the cage inside me, tail lashing and ready to pounce if I try again.
You must tell me why you won’t let me heal him, I bargain, otherwise, I will find a way to defy you.
Falcen turns, and I stop thinking about Ember.
His mouth is the only thing about him that still looks human.
The rest is a debate. Black veins branch under his collarbone like the rootwork of a poisoned tree.
Scales form a chest plate, each one arranged by a mad armorer.
But the worst is his tongue when he tries to speak.
Falcen catches on a word like he’s wrestling with two languages, and I watch it fork, just for a second, a split that heals back into one as he swallows with a curse.
I keep my gaze steady, because looking away would be a cruelty. It makes him flinch, anyway.
“I told you to stay in bed,” he says, and his tone is meant to be in his usual sourness, but the words stumble because the wrong syllables keep pulling at his mouth.
I’m not going to let him pity himself to pieces. If I can make him smile, even once, maybe I can trick us both into thinking this is survivable.
“You shouldn’t mean that in any context but one,” I counter.
That earns me a fraction of a look. Not a smile, but a crack where a smile could form if it remembered how.
I step into his space, sheet trailing, and reach for his wrist. He lets me take it, which feels like a miracle.
The soul-glyphs don’t flare at my touch because they haven’t disappeared like they usually do.
They’re swollen, permanent magick raised under skin like an angry scar and fighting the veins beneath.
The ache in my chest grows.
Ember bares her teeth.
I can do more to help him, I argue. I can hold his rot back for longer.
You will not. Ember wraps around my heart until each beat hurts. You are not strong enough to gain the attention of the Master Keeper and survive. And Falcen will not forgive you if the Master Keeper learns your soul.
Falcen must sense my conflict, because his hand closes around the back of my neck. Not to control. He sets it there like he learned the outline of my bones last night and can’t forget it.
“Don’t even think about it,” he says, his tone slightly improved now that I’ve distracted him from his demise by toying with my own.
I notch my chin. “Too late for that.”
I’m not afraid to let him know that I want to help him. I don’t have the talent for lying that most Soulren are born with. Maybe it’s a curse. Or maybe it’s why he keeps me around when he could have anyone. I will help him, somehow.
His lips turn bloodless. His hand drops, and I feel every inch of the loss. He goes back to washing his face, scrubbing at the shadows under his eyes like he could erase the last week. The rag turns black as he uses it, and he tucks it away as if I didn’t see.
“I can keep it leashed,” he says, his voice raked over gravel at first, then steadied by force. “I’m expected to attend classes with you today. If I miss them, the Keepers will notice.”
My gaze slides to the scales that now spill over his ribs and bite down his spine.
“Leashed,” I echo quietly. “Your leash looks like it’s fraying.”
Long fingers find the towel and twist. Falcen doesn’t look at me. “Collar. Gorget. Bracers. I’ll wear my full armor, which will disguise the changes. I can pass for a little while longer.” He swallows, then his tongue splits on the word pass but he grits his teeth. “I will pass.”
“Falcen.”
He steps around me and yanks a lacquered trunk out from under the bed and throws the lid open.
Cold breath rolls across my toes as his scales catch the dawn.
He lifts the gorget first. The piece fits to the base of his throat with a soft click.
A tailored high-collared tunic follows. He buttons fast, hands shaking only when they hover at the top, where black veins lick under his jaw.
A cape with the Elite insignia slides onto his shoulders, tailored to his back like a lie.
He straps bracers over raised ink, cruel buckles biting down until the scales and tattoos all but disappear.
He pulls gloves onto his hands, careful to hide the claws that have started to emerge at his fingertips.
He does all this without once looking at me.
I circle to face him, sheet tangling at my feet. “You barely spoke our language a minute ago.”
His mouth flattens, then he pauses when he sees my palms. Thin cuts crosshatch my skin where I pressed him and held. Some are healed pink. Some still bleed in little moons.
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “You’re hurt.”
“Oh, please.” I lift my hands before he can hook my wrists. “Don’t use that tone. You left teeth marks on my nipples and inside my thighs, too. These”—I wiggle my fingers, letting the sheet fall low on my breasts—”are tiny. Attractive, even.”
Falcen’s eyes darken with a flash of need so quick it could be a trick of light. Then the shutters drop.
In two strides, he’s at the window, dragging the blackout curtain an inch aside. He scans the courtyard, the training rings, the sky. Everything except me. I wonder if he’s looking for threats or just for a way to delay what comes next.
“Did you ever try to talk to them?” I say, desperate to maintain a connection with him.
He doesn’t turn. “Who?”
“The ones like you. The halflings.”
He stiffens, and I know I’ve hit a nerve, but I can’t stop myself now. Last night’s revelations have made me reckless. “I mean, when it started. When you were … down there.”
He’s silent for a long time. Then his shoulders slump.
“They don’t talk. Not with words. Not really.”
He runs a gloved finger along the window frame, as if tracing an invisible map. “But if you listen, sometimes you can hear…” He stops himself. “Never mind.”
I cross the room, dragging the entire sheet, and plant myself next to him. “You can’t start that sentence and not finish it, Falcen.”
He closes his eyes. His lashes flutter, just a little. “Sometimes, if you listen, you can hear them. Whatever you’re most afraid of, you’ll hear it in their heads.” He opens his eyes. “It’s not blood they want, Verily. It’s memory. They’re starving to remember anything that was ever theirs.”
For a second, I can’t breathe. I try to picture him as one of them, mutated and without any memory that makes him human, and the thought nearly tips me.
Instead, I reach out and take his hand. The glove is cold, but underneath, I can feel the heat of him, the pulse that says he’s still here. Still him.
He doesn’t pull away. He stares down at our joined hands for a long moment, then lets out a soft, voiceless sigh.
“One more day. We survive one more day.” His voice is steadier now, like committing to a plan gives him back a piece of his soul.
His shoulders lock. His throat works inside the gorget. Heat pulses behind my sternum, that thread humming for him, desperate and treacherous. Ember rakes along the inside of my ribs, a warning that makes my eyes prickle.
“You cannot heal me,” he says softly, hearing what I don’t voice out loud.
“I know.”
The admission tastes like failure.
“You are a light, Verily.”
Falcen’s confession knocks the wind out of me.
He’s never said anything good about my magick, merely finding it an untamed annoyance.
And my personality, even more so. Yet here and now, after the intimacy we’ve shared, it’s like I get to access a small, secret part of him that he shares with no one else.
This is a crack in his armor so fine I’m not sure he even means for me to see it.
Then he exhales, like he can fold that compliment into a seam of his uniform and hide it. “But I need you to be a shadow.”
I swallow down the sting. “What if I am not good at staying in the shadows?”
“Learn.”