16. Chapter Sixteen
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ASH
Pain lances through my spine as we crash onto the unforgiving concrete. The physical sensation is so new it shocks me more than the actual fall.
My lips graze Maven’s ear. “You are mine. You do not get to leave me again.” Whether she receives that as a promise or a threat, I do not care, because it is both.
My flower’s weight embraces my own—fragile yet somehow the heaviest burden I’ve ever carried.
What have I done? The thought tears through me, merciless as the stone below.
I shouldn’t be here. Not like this. Not solid or breathing Earth’s air, not tangled up in her the way I am right now, with her back curved into me like she was made to fit there.
Technically, she was. But that’s not the point.
The point is, I shouldn’t be able to feel her at all.
For a thousand years I’ve been smoke and invisible to this world—a ghost she never believed existed.
I’ve reached for her in endless lifetimes and caught nothing but the thirst of what I wanted.
Needed. I’ve watched her die more times than I can stomach, always from the wrong side of a barrier I couldn’t cross, screaming her name into a void that swallowed every syllable.
And each time, I’ve had to stand there and let it happen because the rules of this world are older than me, older than the Bright Gods who wrote them, and they’ve never once bent.
Except…
I’m holding her.
My arms are locked around her middle. My hands—which should pass through her being—are gripping fabric and warmth and the small, frantic rise and fall of her lungs. She’s here. She’s real above me, and I’m real under her, and the world hasn’t cracked open to swallow us both for the sin of it.
So I wait. I lie there on the freezing rooftop with her heaving against me and brace for it—the tearing, unmaking, or whatever punishment the balance decides to deliver for a god who forgot his place.
There are reasons we cannot be here. Our forms would break the minds of mortals who looked at us, for one. The gods do not walk this world with skin and bone. We haunt it and feed at its edges. We savor our little tastes of sustenance and slink back to the Otherworld.
And yet, as I lie here, nothing happens.
The snow keeps falling. Somewhere below a car horn blares, and the city hums along as if nothing at all has shifted in the order of things.
Just the two of us breathing, while Maven’s heart beats like a rabbit’s and mine—well, do I even have a heartbeat here?
I’ve never checked. Never had a body to check with.
But I don’t have time to catalog the impossibilities right now, because it finally sinks in; the thing that matters more than the rules I’ve just broken:
I’m touching her.
I roll us before I’ve decided to, some instinct turning her in my arms until she’s flat on her back and I’m braced over her, one hand planted by her head, the other still hovering like a fool in the air between us.
Her eyes widen, gray in the center and wet at the corners.
I wait for the fear. I know her fear—the same I’ve watched flood her features across centuries before she ran from it and me every time I got too close.
It doesn’t come.
She only stares at me, chest jumping, lips parted, and there’s no terror there at all.
Awe. That’s what it is.
I know she still can’t see me. The silk she believes I wear is nowhere—it doesn’t exist, not really; it is but her mind’s mercy, so her mortal brain doesn’t crack trying to hold my gaze—but she stares like she’s trying to see through it anyway.
Like if she looks hard enough, she’ll find me under the veil.
The phantom weight of disappointment settles over my features, the same as always, and I hate it.
I’ve never hated it more than right now.
Because for the first time in a thousand years I could show her.
Fuck, I want to show her. I need her to look at me and know exactly who has loved her this whole time.
Even solid, here with her breath fanning warmth across my jaw, that one thing stays locked away from her:
Pity.
“You’re real,” she says. It’s not a question. It barely even sounds like it’s meant for me—more like she’s telling herself and testing the shape of it on her tongue.
An undeniable urge engulfs me.
I peel the glove from my right hand with my teeth, quick and clumsy, spitting it aside because I need it gone. Nothing shall remain between my skin and hers.
And then I touch her.
I trace two fingers down the curve of her cheek, following the track of the tears she cried on the ledge, and the noise that scrapes out of my chest is embarrassing.
Undignified. A thousand years of composure gone in the half second it takes to learn that she’s soft.
And, oh, so warm. That mortal skin gives a little under a touch and holds the heat of the blood beneath it.
She smells of salt and something floral, the thing my instincts have chased across a millennium of lifetimes.
She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t shove me off or scramble back or start bargaining with her mind about tumors and hallucinations the way she has every other time I’ve gotten close.
She allows me this moment, regarding me as I trace each beautiful feature.
I’ve never wanted to weep before, but I’m close to it now, mapping the arch of her brow like I’m reading something written there in a language only I speak.
“Exquisite,” I breathe, the only appropriate word in this moment.
This is the exact moment I realize I’ve ruined myself.
There’s no going back from this. There was never much hope of it regardless, but now—now that I know what she feels like and I’ve had her life force under my hand—there is no version of the future where I let her go.
Not to another life. Not to the next roof or knife or the next slow-motion vanishing act her sad little mind keeps trying to conjure.
She’s mine, she’s always been mine, and now that I’ve touched her, I’d tear both worlds down to the studs before I’d release her.
And that scares me. Because I can feel the hunger already, the thing that lives within my soul where mortals grow their hearts, uncoiling and stretching while asking for more.
How bad will it get when I taste her? Fuck, to feel the whole of her.
Every scar and freckle calls to me. And the sounds she will make—
Enough.
I drag myself back from the edge of the cliff. As much as I need her, there is a line I will not cross, not for all the wanting in either world.
It would be so easy to take her. She’s spread beneath me, flushed and pliant, and some ugly, ancient part of me knows she wouldn’t stop me right now.
But she must say yes. The choice has to be hers.
Made with a clear head in a place she’s comfortable, not wrung out of her on a rooftop she came to die on with her defenses in ruins. I respect her too much for that.
She is the one thing in existence with the power to clasp a leash on the worst of what I am, and I’ll be damned before I prove myself unworthy of the hand that holds it.
So I answer her instead.
“I am,” I say, my voice a strange cadence in this physical form. A breath escapes her as I force myself to sit up—one of the more difficult things I’ve done because every part of me is screaming to stay pressed against her.
A hundred emotions flit across her face at once—disbelief, fear, wonder, each one raw and powerful. She’s cataloging me. My lips tilt while her eyes peruse, and whatever internal argument she’s been having ends as she decides to reach for me.
Her fingers find the place where she thinks the silk exists. They touch my jaw instead.
She tenses, sucking in a breath as her fingertips rest against the bare line of my face, and I watch confusion war with the shock of it.
“It isn’t there,” I tell her, holding very still, terrified she’ll pull away. “The covering. Your mind gives it to you because you cannot bear my face as it truly is—not in this world, at least. But there is no fabric, Maven. There never was. It’s only me.”
Still, she doesn’t run.
She shuffles onto her knees, leveling our bodies. And by every Bright God, she does the thing I have wanted for longer than most civilizations have existed:
She touches my face.
Both hands now. Chilled fingers begin at my jaw and trace the edge of it, slow and careful.
Up over the line of my cheekbone. The bridge of my nose next—her fingertip travels the entire length of it, and my eyes sting, actually sting.
I don’t dare blink for fear of losing a single second of this.
Her thumb finds my brow, presses lightly, and follows the shape.
The pad skims the corner of my eye where she’d have to feel how wet I’ve gone, but she doesn’t say anything, just keeps learning me with her hands the way I’ve dreamt every night since I first laid eyes on her.
My breathing stops. The air holds in my chest as I silently beg her to continue. She may not see it, but she is building a face in her mind out of nothing but touch, painting me blind, and she deserves my absolute stillness while she does it.
The last feature she traces is my mouth. A delicate finger slides over my lower lip, and I have to close my eyes then—need to—because it’s too much.
It’s everything.
The urge to do the same to her demands to be met, but I remain as I am.
I memorized everything about Maven’s face and body long ago.
In each lifetime, no matter her circumstances or location, she looks exactly the same.
Just as beautiful, with her gray eyes and voided hair, as all her lives before.
While her last name changes, nothing else does.
This magnificent creature will always be my Maven, my flower, and it’s time she learned me as well.
She’s still touching my mouth when she catches herself.
I know her too well, and feel the shift—the second her body remembers to be embarrassed. Her hands drop as if they’ve been burned, and she rocks back onto her heels as both cheeks deepen their pink hue.
“I’m sorry,” she blurts. “God, I don’t know why I—that was weird, I shouldn’t have—”
“No.” It comes out rougher than I mean it to, and I gentle it.
“Don’t. Do not ever be sorry for wanting to touch me.
” My eyes catch her gaze, and I would almost believe she could see them if I didn’t know better, with the way she holds my stare.
“I have waited lifetimes for that. For exactly that. I would wait a thousand more just to feel it happen for the first time again.”
Something crosses her face, darkening those eyes. She pushes up onto her feet, wobbling, and backs toward the stairwell door with both arms wrapped tight around herself.
“I have to—there’s something I need to do,” she says, and it’s a lie, a clumsy one, her voice thin and shaking. “Alone. I need to be alone. I just—yeah.”
I stay on my knees. Every instinct inside longs to rise and follow her; close the distance once more and tug her back into the warmth that is us.
But she shakes like a startled bird, one breath from bolting, and I’ve lost her too many times to spook her now.
So I let her go. My body remains in the snow as she fumbles with the door and vanishes into the building.
Only when it clicks shut do I let out the breath I’ve been holding.
Well.
First, the obvious problem, the one I keep circling back to and keep flinching away from: I’ll be forced to watch her closer now.
Much closer. She came up here to die, and she’ll try it again the second despair swallows her back down.
It’s imperative I’m always near enough to catch her.
This time was pure luck. Tonight was—I don’t even know what tonight was, and that’s the second problem, isn’t it?
Because I still feel the cold of the concrete beneath me and the chill of the air. Everything appears solid and heavy, and I have absolutely no memory of choosing it. I lunged for her on instinct, begging fate to stop her from succeeding this time, and my arms actually closed around something.
Grunting, I try to relinquish it. To thin myself back out into smoke and return to the way I’m supposed to be. I reach for that state of being and…
Nothing happens.
Still solid. Still kneeling in the snow with breath fogging just beyond my face.
How do I fix this? Do I even want to fix this?
No, not a chance. I got what I wanted: to touch her.
But I have a terrible feeling I’m going to pay for it.