Chapter 75
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
NORA
Airik howled, the sound so inhuman that Nora wondered whether the kudra hadn’t reached him, too, and he was dying alongside her.
Silver and gray and turquoise—the colors of what had become her peace—clouded her vision.
And red. He was covered in blood.
“Stop!” Airik cried, shoving another bucket of water away. “Enough…enough…it is enough.” He pulled her into his arms, pushing the sopping-wet hair off her face. “I…” His voice broke, his fingers digging into her until it hurt. “Nora…I don’t…I cannot fix this.”
Iver pressed something small and black into Airik’s chest. The gold-embroidered pouch Airik had carried in his bag. “You have this,” he said. “It might kill her, but if it doesn’t work…at least you’ve given her a better death than the kudra will.”
He didn’t wait—he tore open the bag with his teeth.
Cold air blasted over her chest as he tore open her shirt, exposing her breasts to everyone.
Her arm wouldn’t move to cover herself, but she managed a laugh. She regretted it immediately. It felt like someone had banged on her throat with a spiked mallet.
“Don’t talk,” Airik said. His fingers pressed hard over the center of her chest, walking down her sternum and under her breast, as if searching for something. “Please. Slow your breath.”
No problem, she wanted to tell him. I can’t breathe at all. Her arms kept falling at her side as she tried to raise them, still trying to cover her chest.
The woman crawled into view, sitting just above Nora’s head. Moving slowly, the woman pulled the torn halves of the jumper together, holding it in place over Nora’s chest.
Nora tried to say Thank you, but her mouth only opened a little, and she gave up mid-word. Did dying normally take this long to do, or was she just slow at doing it?
“You’re welcome,” the woman said. Though her face was still covered, Nora thought the woman must have smiled because the corners of her eyes crinkled. A twist of dark brown hair poked out from under the coverings she wore.
A deeper fear than death surged up, and panic finally caught her.
“My hair,” Nora cried. Searching for Airik, her vision still swimming, she was rocked by wave after wave of full-body shocks. “He—he won’t know me.” Her gasps turned to sobs. “He won’t know me…like this. Theo won’t—”
“Nora,” Airik moaned. Something twinkled at the end of the cylinder he held between them. His hand shaking, he pointed the sharp tip at the center of her chest. “Don’t you remember, demon eyes? Your life is mine. All of it. So many years of it still that I will have—for your hair to come back.”
“You’re wasting time, Prince.” Iver stood beside him, a worried look on his face that annoyed Nora. “If you can’t bloody do it, I will—”
“No,” she screamed. “I don’t want him to touch me—”
Airik pounded against her chest, a sharp pressure driving into the center of her. He swallowed her scream with a kiss, tears dripping on her like it had been his own heart that had been pierced.
She heard a hiss as he depressed the plunger, and somehow the pain worsened, as if razor blades were flying into her veins at full speed.
“The hurting will stop,” he said against her mouth, pressing his lips to hers with each of her gasps.
She felt a pinch as Airik pulled the needle out and tossed the cylinder aside.
He lifted her into his lap, then dropped his head to her chest to listen.
“Sleep will have you soon, my love—it’s not death.
Never death, not for you. Not right now. ”
She cocked her head, peering at him through half-closed lids. How did he know how to say my love like that?
The cold pins prickling her skin slowed, then stopped.
“Prince…” she said, so happy she had learned that about him while they still had time.
Airik took her hand and pressed it over his chest. “Not a prince, cheranna. Only Airik.” He said his name as she did.
She tried to argue but only managed a weak cough.
Warm, wet fluid dripped from her nose. Was it snot?
Probably. But there was no embarrassment—not even a little.
Maybe this was what it meant to be loved.
Leaking fluids everywhere and still being looked at as if the answer to life’s purpose lay in the shimmering space between their gaze.
“Hero,” she said, the odd desire striking to tease him one last time.
“I am not a hero. Not an angel. I am nothing.” His brows drew together in anguish, and he pressed her hand over the gash on his heart. “But yours.”
He brushed a trembling finger under her nose, tickling her. But when it came away bloody, any silliness and joy she felt died.
Better than snot, she supposed.
“I’m…okay,” she said.
His gaze remained fixed on the blood on the top of his finger.
“You’re bleeding, too,” she said, trying her best to get up, but whatever he’d injected had flushed through her, making everything slow.
He stood, still clutching her to his chest. “I am also…okay,” he responded, suddenly a little absent.
And then everything streaked past her—lights, walls, alien writing on the walls—as Airik carried her quickly toward the back of the ship. “The regeneration chambers,” he called over his shoulder in that Major Asshole tone of his. “Bring your things, vruukar. You will force it to accept a human.”
The smell of raspberries overwhelmed her as Airik cradled her higher in his arms, murmuring commands into her ear.
“You promised me your entire life—so give it to me.”
“Don’t leave me—please.”
He drew her closer, his harsh, warm breath filling her ear. “If you do, demon eyes, I will come after you in death. I will find you. I will have you in every world.”
With a burst of strength shocking even herself, Nora grabbed his hair, tugging his head down. “Not very…princely.”
She must have managed a scowl because Airik drew back, as if in shock at her anger.
But then he must’ve reached an internal resolution, and his face went stern. “In every world, that’s what I said—in every world I will love you.”
He dimmed the light in the healing-pod room as he brought them in, then swung open the pod they had put Lucky in before. He laid her in the pod, its bed spongy and yielding, then turned her face toward him. “Stay with me here. Let me love you here.” He was no longer commanding but begging.
Yes, I want to.
Iver came, ducking to clear the doorway. He stood in the middle of the room, hesitating behind Airik.
“You can speak with numbers to machines,” Airik said, directed at Iver but not taking his eyes off Nora.
Iver stiffened, his fist closing on the metal band that had been his collar. “Yes.”
Airik let out a small sigh, his eyes fluttering shut in relief. “My father—he spoke in numbers. He could fix anything, make things work in ways they weren’t meant to.” He turned to Iver. “Fix this chamber. Make it accept her.”
Iver paused, then looked to Nora, his eyebrows drawing together. “The chamber will see her as wild, just like you. It won’t heal her.”
“I don’t need it to heal her—just to hold her safe so I can navigate the drozekar—” His grip tightened on her. “To somewhere.”
“Where will you take her? You’ll have an hour at most—”
“I know!” Airik exploded, squeezing her so tightly that whatever breath she managed was forced out. He took a deep breath, then eased his grip. “But it will make her pain stop. Keep her asleep. Slow everything so I can…fix this.”
Iver tucked the broken collar he’d been holding into his pocket. From the other pocket, he pulled out the case he’d been using when tinkering with the ship. He looked to Nora, questioning.
She didn’t like him, but Airik seemed to think he could help. “It’s okay,” she said, trying her best to nod.
He sighed, then moved behind them and the pod, where she couldn’t see him. “All right,” he said. She heard a click, which must have been him opening his small computer. “As long as you don’t blame me for any ill effects.”
The black fabric of Airik’s shirt hung in tatters across his chest. She grabbed a torn shred and tried to draw him near. It didn’t work, but he caught her hand and leaned over her, bracing himself on his hands. “Help me touch you,” she said.
He raised her hand to his cheek. “As much as you want.”
“Your hair.”
“Like this?” He separated her fingers with his own, then combed them through his hair.
She nodded, memorizing the feel. Threads of snow she hoped would populate her final thoughts.
“I want you to sleep, cheranna. Dream good things.”
Metal clanged as Iver dropped a tool. He said the word cheranna as if learning it for the first time, though he had a vague memory of it. After a moment, she heard him groan as he got up, evidently satisfied with whatever system he had hacked, and then he left the room.
Airik hadn’t even flinched, fanning his fingers through what she now knew was the chopped remains of her hair.
So what? Her hair had been a burden to take care of.
Her free hand flitted, reaching for something that had always been beside her. Wrapped around her wrist. Warm. Soft. Purring.
Pain throbbed behind her eye—why couldn’t she remember what it was?
Oh well, the thought would return.
“Cheranna,” she said, wanting to feel the word in her mouth—something good. “Tell me…what it means.”
Airik shook his head, his fangs flashing in the dim light. How had she ever been afraid of them? He was beautiful. “When you wake—I will tell you.”
“No—now.”
“When you wake again,” he insisted, shaking his head more urgently.
Making her best attempt at a scoff with the bit of control she had left, Nora tugged on his hair.
Her fingers went limp instead, as if the small tension had been too much.
Her hand slipped right through the silkiness of him, and for the first time, a pain burst in her chest. She wanted to touch him more.
Airik caught her hand, pressing it to his lips, and a little of the fear relaxed. He could hear her thoughts, she knew.
“Telling me…no?”
Glittering tears dripped from his cheeks. He pulled a sheet from under the pod and tucked it around her body in a cocoon.
Then he dropped his head against her chest, pressing an ear to her heart.
His breath shook, uneven as it came and went.
“When we are born—when ti’rosi species, like me, come into the world, we cannot see well.
Our eyes have no light. It comes slowly—a painful process.
Like teeth growing. Do you know? Is it the same for humans when a tooth comes? ”
She released his hand, pressing a finger between his lips—an exhausting effort—until the tip of his fang pricked her.
In another universe, would their children have precious little fangs?
“Yeah…teeth hurt. We have…a fairy.” She tried to draw a deep breath, preparing to tell him about the Tooth Fairy, something she’d never gotten to tell Theo, but a thick glob caught in her throat, smothering the tale before it could be spoken aloud.
Kissing the tip of her finger first, he continued.
“One day, after many months of pain, a child—always tired because the hurting won’t allow rest—falls asleep.
When they next wake, there is light. It is sudden.
Unexpected.” The glow of his eyes wavered.
“Everything is bright. Clearer. And we can see in the dark. The day was once more important than birth—but both are not remembered anymore.”
He brought her hands to his cheek. “That moment—it is called cheranna. When the light blooms. When the pain—so much of it that I remember crying, begging for it to stop—is over. When, finally, I could see the world—how I think I was meant to see it.” His voice dropped to a whisper as he turned his head to speak directly over her heart.
“Do you understand now, Nora? What you are to me? What, from the moment you first touched me and no matter how many lies I told myself, you have become in my heart? There is no light if you are not where my eyes can have you.”
God, yes. She knew. He made her know it.
Airik’s arms slid beneath her back, holding her to him. He rubbed his cheek against her, pressing kisses against her breast.
If there were more words, Nora didn’t hear them because Airik’s lips crashed into hers.
A last kiss. That was what it felt like.
Eternal in what it gave and took. He was scared.
She could feel it through her skin, which had begun to lose sensation.
By how he squeezed her closer and closer until even molecules of air couldn’t keep them apart.
Nora didn’t believe in anything. Not God or gods. Not a coherent force that bound all life on Earth—or in the universe, now that she knew better—together in some shared consciousness.
But she knew, as well as she knew her own name, that he had been what pulled her through the stars. Their hearts might have even broken at the same time, before either had known the other existed.
Airik had called her to him. An explosive love that had drawn her out of a sleep she had once wanted to die in.
And though the poison in her mind had just started to fade and maybe with time would have just been a whisper, the one flowing in her body now held her strong. There wouldn’t be any healing from this.
But he made her hope for it anyway.
What a terrible thing it was to love. To want someone so much more than life could ever allow, beyond the boundaries of body and mind.
Terrible…and yet she wanted more of it with Airik.
Just as the drifting, deepness of sleep took her completely, a thought struck her—probably the last one she’d ever have.
Nora didn’t have as many words in other languages as Airik. But she knew a few, one being her own name.
With the last bit of air she had, she said, “Nora…means…light.”
His light, now she knew. She had always been meant to be his.