Chapter Twenty-Eight Even the Sun Must Sleep
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Even the Sun Must Sleep
Michal crouches in front of me a moment later, his expression impenetrable.
I stare back at him through tears, determined not to look toward the yew tree. Pull yourself together , I tell myself vehemently. Killing a revenant isn’t the worst you’ve ever done. Somehow, the admission only makes me feel worse. Perhaps because I’ve spent the last week imagining how my friends’ blood would taste, or perhaps because I tried to slaughter Jean Luc. Though I didn’t quite manage to rip out his heart, I did watch as both Frederic and Michal lost theirs. I reunited with my undead sister in the process, and met my fiendish husband, Death incarnate. Compared to him , this revenant should not matter.
My chin still begins to tremble as I look at Michal.
His eye, at least, has already healed. Though the blood remains, painting half his face bright scarlet, he suffered no lasting injury because of me. A tendril of relief unfurls at that.
And withers just as quickly, choked by the smell of smoke.
“Your hands,” Michal murmurs, and slowly, I look down at my burnt and blistered palms as if they belong to someone else, my gaze lingering on his wrist when he offers it to me. Blood stains his skin there too, stains his fingers and his sleeves and every single part of him. Every single part of me. “Take it, Célie. Drink.”
A terrible ringing starts in my ears.
Those hands— my hands—tremble as they accept his wrist, as they peel back the sleeve of his surcoat to reveal the veins beneath. I feel my head bow from outside my body. I watch my lips part, my teeth lengthen. And when I bite, piercing his skin, familiar panic claws up my throat. A maniacal laugh threatens to rise with it, but I swallow it down—I swallow it all because I must, because I died, because vampires feast on blood and gorge on violence, and because I am a vampire now. If I do not rip the heads from my enemies’ shoulders, they will eat me, or stake me, or threaten me with a corpse dressed in my likeness.
With each pull of my mouth, my chest tightens. My head shakes.
And every reason why I left Requiem rushes back to the surface.
This revenant represents too much of what I cannot change, of my sister, of a situation spiraling further and further out of my control. And somehow I know—deep in my bones—the worst is yet to come. We must all go to the clock room eventually.
“I’m sorry,” Michal says, his voice pained as he lifts my hair, as he holds it away from his blood and my tears. “I’m so sorry it happened this way.”
Though he exerts gentle pressure on my nape, pulling my face from his wrist, I cannot meet his gaze. I just can’t . Clenching my eyes shut, I turn away, but the darkness behind my eyelids rises swiftly to meet me. It smells of revenants and rot , like my oldest and most terrible of friends, but it—it shouldn’t have been able to find me again as a vampire. Because I—I can see in the dark now. I do not need to breathe, so why does it feel like I’m suffocating, like pale fingers are caressing my throat in a loving embrace? Are you frightened, sweeting?
Cold fear grips my heart at that voice, and I recoil instantly, lunging to my feet.
No no no —
“Célie.” Firm hands grip my own, and Michal’s face swims into focus, his black eyes blazing with purpose. “Listen to me. Focus on my voice. Taking a life is never easy, and it shouldn’t be. You did what was necessary to protect yourself, to protect me, and that creature—he was suffering. He was suffering , and you ended his misery as quickly and humanely as possible.”
My body continues to tremble, however; I feel faint, disoriented, as I say, “I ripped off his head.”
“You laid him to rest,” Michal says firmly. “Do you think he would’ve preferred to spend eternity as he was? Anguished? Mindless? Your blood might’ve resurrected his body, but it left his soul behind. He no longer belonged to himself.” He pushes the hair from my face before cradling my cheeks. “You set him free.”
His words pierce my heart because they’re true.
They make me feel even worse.
As if sensing the same, Michal moves behind me, his chest brushing my back and his hands lightly clasping my arms. “Pick something,” he says, “and describe it to me.”
“Wh-What?”
“I’ll start.” The air moves overhead as he gestures to the snow swirling around us, and too late, I realize I’ve accidentally fallen through the veil into the spirit realm. Another full-body shudder overwhelms me at the thought; I haven’t lost control like this in weeks, but Michal—he followed me through. He came after me. “The snowflakes look like falling stars,” he says.
“Falling stars?”
He lifts his hand to catch one on the pad of his finger, lowering it to my eyeline. “Look closely—you can see the shape of them better now than you could as a human.”
Because of his temperature—or perhaps because of the spirit realm itself—the snowflake doesn’t melt, instead sparkling upon his alabaster skin, its shape delicate. Its lines flowing and flowering.
I catch another on my palm, and I stare down at its sharp, glittering edges before tossing it away. They looked like little spears. Like carving knives. “I—I don’t think stars look like this, Michal.”
“What do they look like, then?”
“I don’t know,” I admit after another moment, forcing myself to inhale the frigid air through my nose, to exhale through my mouth. I brush my fingertips across the frozen fronds and shiver again. “I’ve never seen a star up close.”
“You should ask Odessa to show you sometime. She built a telescope last year—one of her more recent interests,” he adds in quiet explanation. The moment feels almost ethereal, delicate, as if it might break at a noise too loud or a movement too sudden. “She even invited a couple of astronomers to come examine it.”
“Did they survive?” I ask faintly.
“Yes.” He lifts his hand again, and together, we watch as the snowflake flutters from his finger in a gust of wind. “Pick something else. Tell me what you see.”
At his gentle command, my eyes skim around us, trying and failing to see anything but snow—and the yew tree, the corpse below it, which I do not ever want to see again. My breath hitches in response. The air freezes in my throat. “I can’t—Michal, I can’t do this—”
“Yes, you can.”
Still positioned behind me, he takes my hands, guiding me backward one step at a time until the temperature increases and the snow ceases to fall, replaced by the thick and pungent smoke of damp wood. We turn away from the latter, however; instead we face a hollow in the distance where the ferns grow thinner and ice does not cover the landscape. Patches of heather ripple between the rocks and trees instead. Dames Rouges often use sprigs of heather in protective enchantments. They allegedly bring luck .
They’re the same blooms that grew around his heart.
I blink away the memory, realizing Michal is waiting for me to speak. “I see... flowers,” I say at last, glancing back at him as warmth blooms in my cheeks. I feel sheepish. Graceless. Michal inclines his head, however, now with a hint of challenge. Still waiting.
When I say nothing else, a small smile tugs at his lips. “Not as descriptive as I would’ve hoped. Try again.”
I sigh heavily. “I see purple flowers—”
“What color purple?”
“Michal—”
“What color ?”
“Mauve.” That heat of embarrassment seeps into exasperation, and his grin widens triumphantly. “The blooms are mauve, cerise, magenta , and with the wind blowing across them like that, they look like waves.”
And they do. They do look like waves, which of course remind me of the maelstrom, of my sister, of the revenants all over again. Just as my throat starts to constrict, however, I force my gaze back to Michal; I force myself to still, to calm, to stay present in this moment. I cannot control the future. I do not know what will happen, but here—now—I am standing with Michal in a beautiful place. With him, I am safe.
More than that, I am supported, and I turn in his arms as gratitude washes over me. “It’s lovely,” I tell him truthfully.
He presses a kiss to my forehead.
“It’s where I first stepped foot on Requiem. The sea lies just beyond it”—he lifts his chin toward the horizon—“and my homeland much farther beyond that. I sought an escape,” he says in answer to the question on my tongue. “A fresh start. Before she married my father, my mother worshipped the land much like witches do, and she taught me a little of what she knew—enough that I recognized those flowers as a sign of hope for my sister and cousins.”
“But not for you?” Hungry for more information about his past, I tip my face to look up at him, to see him as he might’ve been in that faraway place, as a child clutching his mother’s skirt and learning the language of flowers. I cannot picture such softness on him now, however. I cannot imagine Michal as anyone other than who he is: pale and enigmatic, a fortress unto himself.
He doesn’t answer my question right away, still staring out at the field of heather as if seeing a different time, a different place. A different island. Indeed, he waits so long that I fear he might not answer at all. A wave of exhaustion sweeps through me at that, and with it, the last of the tightness leaves my chest unexpectedly. Somehow, I feel both brittle and incredibly heavy in its wake, as if a single frond might break me, or perhaps I’ve already grown roots in this dark and dismal place.
And I cannot help but wonder if it was ever the darkness I feared at all.
Michal’s arms tighten around me before falling away. His voice softens with regret. “I never meant for us to turn out this way.”
“Who?” I hesitate before turning fully, equal parts determined and frightened to hear his answer. It feels harder to look at him now than it did before—and not because I asked him to touch me. Not because I killed to protect him either. No. My chest aches at the sight of him because no one has ever followed me into the spirit realm before. No one has ever followed me into nightmares.
Distantly, I recognize he’ll soon lose that ability. When my blood leaves his system, he’ll never set foot there again.
As if sensing my uncertainty, he sweeps his thumb across my cheek with a wry smile. “So many questions.” He leans down. For a split second, it looks like he might brush a kiss against my lips, but he pulls away just as quickly, leaving me strangely forlorn. “You look exhausted, pet. You should sleep for a while.” With a heavy sigh, he adds, “It’ll take several hours for the revenant to burn.”
I recline within the roots of another tree—a different tree, this one across the clearing—and rest against its silver trunk, trying and failing to close my eyes with Michal standing beside me. Hands in his pockets, surcoat discarded, he leans against the tree and surveys the revenant’s makeshift pyre. The yew tree hides much of the smoke, but a thin plume of it still escapes the naked branches to the sky overhead.
Someone could see it. Someone could come.
He doesn’t seem concerned, however, his black eyes cutting to mine after several silent moments. They narrow slightly. “That doesn’t look like sleep.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Right.” He nods shortly. “And I can eat chocolate éclairs—just had one for breakfast, in fact.”
Sighing at his cheek, I tip my head back, heedless of the ice on the bark. There will be no salvaging my hair, nor my gown. Even if Michal hadn’t torn off an entire sleeve, all manner of gore stains the violet satin now. I try not to look at it.
“Was your mother a witch?” I ask after another moment.
He shakes his head with a mirthless laugh. “Oh, no. No, we aren’t opening that door.”
“You already opened it, Michal.”
“Consider this me closing it again.”
“Consider this me wedging my foot in the door. The only thing you’ve revealed about your rather extensive past is that your father was a cleric and remarried Odessa and Dimitri’s aunt after your mother passed away. Why won’t you tell me more about yourself?”
“Because the past is irrelevant, pet. We cannot live there anymore.”
I study him, worrying a sprig of what smells like wild rosemary, but cannot bring myself to further argue the point. Not right now. Because Michal is right—I am exhausted, my limbs and eyelids heavy, and never before have I missed the oblivion of sleep as I do in this moment.
“Lou mentioned you took a sleeping draught in Cesarine,” Michal says quietly. “Why?”
I scoff and toss the rosemary away, rubbing its astringent oil between my fingers. “I thought we weren’t allowed to ask questions.”
“If memory serves, you owe me several.”
“You and your wretched games —”
“Not this time.” He nudges my arm with his knee, coaxing me to look at him. And because it is Michal, I cannot resist the opportunity to do just that. I glance up at him over my shoulder, taking in his torn shirt, his rolled sleeves, the remnants of crimson on his striking face. He used the scrap of my sleeve to clean the blood as best he could, but—like my gown—the hideous truth of our encounter with the revenant cannot be so easily washed away. “Are you having trouble sleeping, Célie?” he asks.
Perhaps I am too tired for dishonesty, or perhaps I just want to keep telling the truth. To keep telling him the truth. “I haven’t slept since All Hallows’ Eve.”
He stares at me like I’ve just spoken in tongues, his eyes widening slightly. “What?”
“I haven’t slept,” I repeat, heedless of his reaction. “It cannot be too unusual—vampires don’t seem to need sleep, do they? I’m still alive, after all”—I grimace at the turn of phrase—“or rather, my body seems to be fine without it.”
“Seems to be fine without it?” Incredulous now, he pushes from the tree, his hands sliding from his pockets as the full weight of his stare lands upon me. “Célie... are you telling me you haven’t slept in over a week?”
I rise to my feet too, unsure what else to do. “It isn’t like I haven’t tried . It’s just—when I close my eyes, my body refuses to—I don’t know— relax . Before I took Lou’s draught, I could never settle enough to sink into sleep, but even with it, the sleep felt more like paralysis than true rest.”
“Fuck.” Shaking his head, Michal drags a hand down his face and asks, “Why didn’t you tell Odessa?”
“Like I said, I didn’t think it mattered.”
“It matters,” he says fervently, dropping his hand. “Vampires might not need sleep in the same way humans do, but we still need it—if not for our bodies, then for our minds. We consume vast quantities of sensory information per second , Célie, and you’ve maintained consciousness for hundreds of hours. Of course you’re feeling on edge.” With a sound of disgust, he turns away in an effort to collect himself, every line of his body hard and unyielding. Cursing again, he says, “This is my fault. I should’ve been the one teaching you these things, not Odessa. I should’ve—I should’ve been there—”
“Then why weren’t you?”
It’s perhaps the most frequent question I asked myself during those long and disturbing hours in Lou’s guest bedroom—why? Why did Michal turn me after telling me he never would? Why did he let me go to Cesarine after asking me to stay?
As is often the case, the answer he gives is not the answer I imagined.
“I didn’t think you wanted it,” he says simply.
The words are too raw, however, and much too close to the truth to hide what he really means: I didn’t think you wanted me . Instantly, I open my mouth to refute such a brutal claim, or perhaps to not, or perhaps to change the subject altogether, but he speaks again before I can decide. “No time like the present to correct my mistakes. Sit down, Célie. Please.”
Still not looking at me, he jerks his head toward the roots and the rosemary. “Let me teach you how to turn off your senses.”
Turn off your senses. The prospect sounds dangerous in a place like Requiem, but I return to the soft patch of earth regardless, trusting him, curling my arms around my knees. Michal crouches next to me again. Always crouching. Always tense. To see him sitting, lounging, sprawling like he did on the bank of the stream with me, seems as surreal and out of reach as sleep itself. “Lie back,” he instructs, “and close your eyes.”
I swallow hard. “I don’t... necessarily want to close my eyes.”
He levels me with a shrewd look. “Why not?”
“Are you really going to make me say it after what just happened?” When he nods, resolute, I grimace. “You know, Michal, you can be a real reprobate sometimes.”
“And you know you aren’t really afraid of the dark.”
“Excuse me?” I blink at him, insulted and also terrified at his discernment. “You confirmed it yourself at L’ange de la Mort while I was still human—nyctophobia, you called it. You heard my pulse spike, saw my pupils dilate—”
“Oh, I have no doubt darkness elicits memories better left forgotten, but I think you’ve conflated fear of darkness with a fear of something else.”
“Like what?” I ask warily.
“You tell me.” He rests his forearms upon his knees as he studies me, his black eyes glittering. “What is it that hides in the darkness?” A suggestive pause. “Or rather, who ?”
I narrow my gaze on him, not quite understanding his implication but not quite liking it either. Defensiveness pricks at my subconscious, and I tear up another sprig of rosemary for something to do with my hands. “No one can hide from me in the dark anymore.”
“Then you shouldn’t fear closing your eyes.”
Reluctantly, I do as he says, and I hear the air shift as he nods in approval. “Good. Now silence that glorious mind of yours and listen.”
I cannot help but crack one eye open suspiciously. “Do you really think my mind is glorious?”
He smirks down at me. “You know I do. And that is exactly the problem. Newborn vampires—all vampires, really—struggle with sensory overload until they learn to focus their attention. And you need to focus your attention in order to relax.”
“That feels counterintuitive.”
“Close your eye, Célie.”
My lips twitch as I shut it again, but this time, I allow Michal’s voice to wash over me like a balm.
“Imagine it like fire,” he says. “A wildfire is much harder to douse than, say... candlelight. And sorting through the sheer quantity of information we perceive can feel like standing in a wildfire. It’s too much. It’s excessive. Such an onslaught triggers a physiological response even in vampires, making it impossible for us to relax. If we narrow our attention, however—focusing on just one sense, one detail—that fire narrows too.”
My eyelids flutter. My grin gradually fades. “Into a candle.”
“Into a candle,” he repeats. “Sight is the easiest one to extinguish—you’re doing it now by closing your eyes. Next is scent. You can extinguish that by—”
“—holding my breath,” I finish, “which leaves... sound?”
His fingers brush my knee. “And touch.”
They vanish a second later, leaving me adrift in the treacherous darkness of my eyelids. You are not afraid of the dark , I tell myself fiercely. Not afraid, not afraid, not afraid.
Michal’s voice softens as he continues. “Focus on anything else you feel—the cool satin of your gown, its individual fibers, the moss and lichen underneath you. The damp earth. The tree roots. Even the air on your skin. Imagine each as a candle and simply... snuff them out.”
Swallowing hard, I try to do as he says, and to my surprise, my focus sharpens on the individual sensations without difficulty. I feel them. I separate them from my body one by one, and I hold them apart in my mind’s eye, blowing out each candle in turn. A thrill of satisfaction shoots through me—because I did it; for once in my life, I actually did it —yet now I am truly adrift without the mainstays of touch. Panic climbs up my throat once more, but Michal’s voice still finds me in the darkness. He’s still here.
After everything, he refuses to leave.
“Now do the same for sound. The wind through the trees, the ice melting, that rumble of thunder over the sea. If you listen closely,” he adds, “you can even hear Mathilde bickering with Guinevere and D’Artagnan.”
So I can.
Sitting with Michal, each noise seems to amplify as I shift my attention from one to the next, allowing them to build until they wash over me in a strange and soothing orchestra. My body grows heavier at the lilting chords, at even the faint voices of Mathilde and guests. My thrill of satisfaction quiets in their wake, and even the panic in my chest gradually eases.
Because I’m not alone anymore. Not truly. Not even in the dark.
Michal is here, and his voice wraps around me too—it cradles me as I take a last breath, as I hold it, as I blow out each candle and wait until the last possible moment to blow out his too.
Pressing a kiss to my forehead, he murmurs, “?ak i sunce mora spavati.”
But I’ve extinguished his candle before I can properly hear him, and I tumble headfirst into a dream.