Chapter 56
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
AIRIK
The streets felt too narrow as they walked toward where the drozekar had descended, only a few blocks away.
Even for Nora and Lucky, who both walked slowly, it would be less than a few minutes before they reached it.
He pressed his gun against his thigh until it held against the holster.
It felt strange, now that he hadn’t carried it in weeks.
But he had to take it back from Nora—she’d be punished for touching a morazir’s weapons.
Airik resisted the urge to rip open his chest and place her beside his still-beating heart, where he could ensure her safety and where she’d always be his.
Only her soft footsteps next to him kept him somewhat composed and still moving.
Beneath one of his arms, Lucky panted as he was carried. He looped his tail behind Airik’s back, twisting around Nora’s arm.
Airik ran the thumb on his other hand over her knuckles, easing her grip. “That ship—it is another morazir.” He had meant it to calm her, but his shoulders tensed with the admission. “They should not touch you. I told you—we only touch to kill.”
She drew the collar of his shirt tight around her throat. Giving him a weak smile, she nodded.
The drozekar’s engine hummed from around the next block, the sound jolting his nerves.
This felt like mourning, and by the True Father’s name, his chest ached as if these were the last moments of the best days of his life.
“Wait.”
Nora stopped, her right leg starting to shake. “Whoever it is will know what we did—” Her voice cut off in a sob.
He wouldn’t survive this—not without touching her.
He caught Nora’s wrist and dragged her into an alley, quickly checking that it was clear of kudra.
Pulling her against his chest, he brushed the hair from her eyes so he could see her clearly.
“Please…stop crying,” he begged, wiping away her tears.
“I have never asked you to stop your tears before, but right now I need that from you. I cannot act as if you do not mean everything to me if you…cry.”
“I—” She wiped her face with a rough hand. He stopped her, forcing her to look at him. “I…I can’t,” she said with heartbreaking sincerity.
He moaned, pressing her once more against his chest, her tears wetting his skin. “All right. That is okay.” Lucky, who lay at the alley’s opening, perked his ears and put himself on watch. “We can take a small moment.”
Nora looked up, and even with all the despair clouding them, he could see the sunburst of her brown eyes—the valleys and craters of her irises as they worked to see him in the dark.
“My light,” he said, his best approximation of what cheranna meant. “If they see your tears, they will know that we are so much to one another. I need to remain…untouched. Until I can fix things so I can keep you forever. Do you understand?”
After a small hesitation, she nodded. As if agreeing by force.
Lucky jumped up, limping into the street.
Airik silently hoped it was just an inconsequential sound, that they would have more time.
When the ooshi returned to the alley opening and sat down, Airik had to brace against the wall to keep from crumbling at Nora’s feet.
He felt a tug on his harness—Nora wanted him to bend down to her.
Instantly, he did, and she held his face between her palms. “How are you planning to fix things?” she asked. “It’s okay if you can’t. I just want to know for sure—”
“You are mine,” he said, his voice a low rumble. He clutched her hands, feeling himself slip into a haze. “I will make the Veynari understand it. I will fix it.”
“How?”
“I—” Shutting his eyes tight, he tried to think past the fear quickly overcoming him.
Nora was his. He’d seen a man defy the Veynari before—and the mistakes he’d made. Airik would do better. He’d allow freer access to the vault than his father had granted. He could be less greedy with everything else if Nora could stay with him.
“I don’t know,” Airik said, the sting of the truth forcing him to pause.
“But I have— My family before me, many mothers and fathers ago, collected parts of other worlds. They are hidden in places—locked. Only my blood can open it.” He hadn’t wanted to explain the vault like this, but if there was the slightest chance it could ease her, he would.
“When the Veynari and their morazir came from the sky, took our planet for its ice, and took Vorakon’s world-jumping portals so they could grow faster, they found my…
ancestor’s…things. Books. Tools. Technology so old that no one knows how to use them or what they were meant for.
The Veynari said none of it was of value but that it was important to keep.
To learn from the past.” Airik lowered himself to Nora’s level, bracing his hands on either side of her shoulders.
“But I think those things are becoming interesting to the Veynari now. I don’t know why, and it doesn’t matter to me—most of it is trash.
I have not been able to open the lock because it needs me to be calm.
Willing. I have never been that way before. But with you…I think I can be.”
She touched her forehead to his. “You think what’s in there is important enough to stop them from branding you?”
He brought his lips to hers, speaking against them. “If it’s not, it will still be okay. You’ll help me forget the pain after, won’t you?”
Her arms came around his neck. “Of course, sweetheart.”
He grazed her lips with his own. “I like that word, cheranna. I want it from you more.”
She laughed softly, then wiped the remainder of her tears. “I’ll call you sweetheart, then. Instead of your name. They won’t know what it means anyway, right?”
The sudden urge to leave his sword behind and run away with Lucky and her struck him. “You should not…talk to me too much. Not while we are with another morazir.”
“Oh.” Her arms fell away from him. “That makes sense. And I guess you can’t talk to me much, either.”
Lifting her chin, he said, “I’ll do this”—he swiped the scar under his eye—“when I want to remind you what you are to me.”
Her skin flushed a radiant red, then she grabbed the end of her braid and brought it to her lips. “I’ll do this, then. So you know. No words. Just me, being a dumb little Earthling.”
Lucky made a noise—between a bark and a growl—then rushed to Airik as quickly as his damaged gait would allow. He must have sensed movement from the drozekar.
“They’ll let me keep Lucky, right? On the ship, at least?” she asked, catching the end of his tail.
Airik searched his bag for the strips he had cut for Nora’s hair.
He tied one strip around Lucky’s neck in the two loops she’d shown him how to make and another around the hilt of his sword.
It was dark gray and the same color as the material of the handle—a secret between the three of them.
“This means we both belong to you now. The Veynari can’t part us. ”
Resolving to hold on to her until the last possible moment, he took her hand and walked them to the alley opening.
She took a deep breath and smiled. “It’ll be fine. Once they’ve figured out what to do with me and stuck me in some glass box somewhere for ‘observation,’ they’re going to see how boring I am—”
The image of her locked away from him—in a glass box—flashed in his mind. Airik hauled Nora against him, unable to live without one more kiss.
He kissed her viciously, drawing her breath into his lungs. Though he held her, there was no being more captive to another than Airik was to her. He had no religion but Nora. No shrine but her body. No prayer but his desperate moan, answered by hers as they kissed.
There would be days of separation ahead of them, and he needed something—anything—of hers to sustain him. Without another thought, he sank his teeth into her lower lip. One of his fangs pierced her with barely any pressure.
She let out a sweet gasp, and of course, he swallowed that, too.
But she didn’t retreat. Instead, she melted into him so that he could suck the little droplets of blood.
Nora. Nora. Nora.
Pulling away harshly, he held her steady, watching as she wiped her lip with her thumb.
Glancing at the smear of blood, something flitted across her expression, and she smiled. She lifted her bloody thumb to his lip.
That flutter he’d felt in his chest when she’d first woken up in his bed returned. Now he knew what it was—the word which beat hard in his chest, wanting to be said.
Once, he had tried to forget it. Wishing the word would bleed away as he’d lain injured, sometimes nearly dead, while being forged, covered in the blood of lives he’d been forced to take.
Still, the word had persisted even as the little good in his life had drained from him in unnamed wars and across infinite starfields.
Why had he not forgotten this word?
Yes, he knew it, and it danced just on the tip of his tongue. What if he told her now? Would she understand it?
He knew the English word because Nora had tried to say it before, and he’d cut her off.
Airik caught her wrist so he could lick her finger clean of the gift she offered.
Moving his lips, he shaped the words against her skin but didn’t give them breath so she could hear.
He was afraid—of both the word and of how her name was its echo.
The word was hers, and he wouldn’t share it.
Not with a universe that sought to cull it.
Hesitating for a moment, he led them to the alley entrance. He gripped her fingers against his stomach until he was forced to let her go or risk exposure to another morazir.
A chill ran up Airik’s back. The street had grown quieter than before. No hum from the drozekar. Its engines must have been switched to dormant—strange for an extraction that should take only a few moments.
He rounded the corner into a brightly lit square, with Nora and Lucky behind him. A large, suited figure paced at the drozekar’s entrance, arms crossed. Behind them, the glowing Sword of Ulliel, powered for combat.