A Want Like Ours (The Sevenfold Deep #3)

Firelight

MARIN

The Riptide was quieter after three in the morning.

Not silent. Marin doubted the building had ever managed silence in its life.

Somewhere below, pipes clicked as they surrendered the heat accumulated through an evening of too many bodies.

The harbor worked beyond the windows with its usual disregard for civilized hours, chains groaning against bollards, rigging tapping hollow rhythms against masts, an engine coughing itself awake three piers over.

Rain had begun sometime after midnight. It moved against the glass in thin silver tracks, catching the harbor lamps before wandering downward into darkness. Marin had been reading the same paragraph for six minutes. After six minutes, the repeated paragraph had started to irritate her.

She lowered the report slightly and looked across the room.

Oliver Hawkins was standing barefoot beside the western window.

The packet of Caldrin intelligence balanced open across Marin's knees deserved her attention: three pages of statements concerning everything that had happened after Second Frostglass and almost nothing concerning the questions she actually cared about.

Oliver merely made concentration less efficient.

He had apparently abandoned clothing as an unnecessary inland convention sometime after they came upstairs.

His shirt lay across the back of a chair.

His boots had been left beside the bedroom door.

Dark pajama trousers rested dangerously low on his hips, held there by some combination of tailoring, arrogance and physical law Marin suspected would fail eventually.

The fire behind him threw amber over bare skin.

He had always been lean rather than bulky, built by years aboard ships and the irritating habit of remaining physically competent at nearly everything he tried.

The light caught the long planes of his chest and abdomen, moving over muscle that tightened subtly when he shifted his weight.

Lower, the lines beside his hips disappeared beneath the loose waistband in a manner that appeared specifically designed to make objective observation impossible.

Marin returned her attention to the report. She reached the same sentence again and discovered that recognizing every word did not obligate the sentence to become useful.

Across the room, Oliver lifted his glass. He did not drink from it. Marin looked back. There were marks on him now that had not been there when she first met him, and the familiarity of his body made each new one more conspicuous rather than less.

Some were ordinary scars. Others belonged to the last several months and had not yet faded enough for memory to become comfortable around them.

Marin knew too much about several of them.

She knew which injuries had bled badly and which had looked worse than they were.

She knew where his muscles had locked under her hands while she worked Restoration and where he had gone frighteningly still because pain had exceeded his interest in pretending otherwise.

She knew how many of those marks existed because other people had decided Oliver Hawkins was valuable enough to preserve and expend in the same breath.

Knowing where the damage came from did not make him less beautiful.

It made beauty harder to separate from memory, because Marin could admire the shape of him and still remember blood on her hands, the particular set of his jaw when Restoration hurt, and the quiet fury of watching other people decide that his survival made him available for one more risk.

Marin let herself look anyway. That was one of the things she had stopped pretending she did accidentally. The fire shifted. Light traveled across Oliver's stomach as he turned slightly toward the harbor. Something beneath his ribs moved the wrong way.

Marin's attention sharpened. Oliver remained unaware.

Rain whispered against the windows. She set the report aside.

The fire was low but steady, banked into a bed of red coals beneath two partially burned logs.

No obvious draft reached it. The windows were shut.

The flue pulled correctly. A lamp on the side table burned without flickering.

Oliver shifted again. His shadow moved with him. Mostly. Marin remained still. The darkness cast across his abdomen followed the change in angle, reshaping itself over the shallow ridges of muscle and the newer pale line along his side.

One narrow patch did not. Beneath his ribs, where firelight should have thinned the darkness as he turned, a small wedge of shadow remained fixed to the old position of his body.

Half a heartbeat later it slid into place, smooth enough that a less familiar observer might have doubted seeing anything at all. Marin stared. Oliver turned his head. Sapphire caught the window's reflected harbor light.

"You've been reading the same page for approximately seven minutes."

Marin did not answer immediately. One corner of his mouth lifted.

"There are several explanations," he continued. "I prefer the flattering one."

"What is the flattering one?"

"That your professional discipline has finally encountered an obstacle worthy of it."

There he was. Marin glanced pointedly down his body. Oliver followed her gaze with exaggerated consideration.

"Ah."

"Don't sound pleased."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were."

"I was going to be gracious."

"You have never been gracious in your life."

"That feels historically unfair."

He turned toward her fully. The firelight moved again. Marin stopped listening. Oliver noticed. The smile faded. Not completely. Oliver did very little completely when he could instead become attentive.

"What?"

"Stay there."

His eyebrows rose. Marin stood.

"That is usually a more interesting instruction."

"Oliver."

He obeyed. That alone would have been worth appreciating under different circumstances.

Marin crossed the room slowly. The carpet muted her steps.

She watched his body rather than his face, which would have been difficult to explain to anyone who did not know them and immediately understandable to anyone who did.

The fire painted warm lines across his chest. Shadow collected beneath his collarbones, beneath the slight definition of his ribs, along the inward narrowing toward his hips. Normal. Then Marin moved left. The geometry should have changed. It did.

Except for the darkness along Oliver's right shoulder. That portion deepened. Marin stopped. It was not merely the absence of light. Marin knew what poor illumination looked like, and she knew what magical dimming did to contrast. This was neither.

That distinction arrived with the same certainty she felt when Perception revealed damage in tissue that looked perfectly healthy.

The darkness behaved as though it had been given a preference. She looked toward the hearth. One flame bent sharply away from Oliver. Marin's pulse changed.

"Don't move."

Oliver's expression went still. He knew that tone.

"What are you seeing?"

"I'm determining that."

"Comforting."

"Be quiet."

His mouth closed. Marin moved another half-step.

The flame straightened. Then Oliver breathed in.

Darkness crawled almost imperceptibly over the muscle beside his spine.

Marin froze. The movement gave her the proof she had been waiting for.

Not illusion. Not fatigue. Not a trick of uneven firelight.

Something occupied the relationship between Oliver and the light.

Her gaze moved slowly upward. The darkness over his shoulder had become too black, not in color but in implication, as if the eye were being asked to accept more depth than the wall and Oliver's body physically allowed.

As though the shadow contained distance where no distance should exist. Marin opened Perception. Magic settled behind her eyes as pressure rather than sight. She kept the working narrow. Light. Heat. Residual Will. Binding tension. Strain. Oliver. The room.

Nothing immediately announced itself. That worried her more.

"What do you feel?" she asked.

Oliver considered before answering.

"Observed."

Marin looked at his face.

"By me?"

"Frequently."

"Oliver."

His expression changed.

"No."

The humor left completely. He turned his eyes toward the dark window.

"Not you."

Marin let Perception widen a fraction. The response came not as a presence but as a failure of ordinary structure. The fire existed. Oliver existed. The light between them existed. And yet the shadow behind him possessed more consequence than those facts permitted.

Marin closed Perception before curiosity encouraged stupidity.

"How long?"

"I don't know."

"That is not an answer."

"It's the accurate one."

She came closer. Oliver watched her now rather than the window.

"Have you noticed anything unusual since Caldris?"

He looked almost offended.

"That question has become unfairly broad."

"Your shadow."

A pause. Oliver glanced down. Nothing happened. His shadow lay across the floor at the expected angle.

"You've noticed it," Marin said.

"Not exactly."

"Oliver."

"I've noticed that darkness has become..."

He searched for the word. Marin waited.

"Interested."

The answer raised cold along her arms.

"And you neglected to mention that."

"I was hoping it was exhaustion."

"You do not believe that."

"No."

"How long?"

"Since Second Frostglass."

Marin stared at him. He had the decency to look mildly guilty.

"Not continuously."

"That improves nothing."

"I thought it might."

"It does not."

"I'll update my methodology."

She stepped close enough to touch him. Oliver went still. Marin placed her palm flat against the center of his chest. Warm. His heartbeat was slightly elevated. Human. She slid her hand upward, over the edge of one healing mark and toward his shoulder.

The shadow there darkened around her fingers. Marin stopped. Oliver looked down. He saw it this time. The darkness did not merely occupy the hollow beneath her hand. It gathered against it. Like something pressing from the other side.