Chapter 27
Valen
The stair runs down inside the castle wall and goes further under Gleann na Sidhe than either of us has had reason to go.
It isn’t cut stone at the top. It’s grown.
Root and rock have come up through each other over a long time until there’s no telling which one holds the other in place.
Whatever the fae do to make a thing instead of building it, they did it here.
All of it carries the same warmth as the halls above us and the same faint charge working at the backs of my hands.
Nyxiana goes down ahead of me, one hand trailing the wall. There are lights set into the root at intervals, small and pale. They come up as she passes them, go down again behind me. Nobody lit them. Nobody’s been down here to light anything in a long time.
Walking behind her doesn’t work on me the way walking behind a stranger does.
“It isn’t noon,” I say. “I’m under a fae castle looking for pieces of a thing nobody’s seen whole in a thousand years.”
She looks back over her shoulder and gives me the first real smile I’ve seen since we left the room.
“You say that like it’s a complaint.”
“I’m making conversation.”
“You’re making a report.”
“That’s the only way I know how to make conversation.”
“I know.”
Twenty more steps down. The light behind us is doing less and less while the pale lights in the roots do more.
“How did you land on this place?” I ask.
“Something Lachlan mentioned.”
In the room this morning she told me she’d turned it up in the court records. Those are two different things.
I wasn’t listening properly the first time - that’s the likeliest answer, the one I take. A woman who reads nine languages says a thing one way upstairs and another way an hour later. It means nothing.
She goes quiet after that.
Not the quiet she uses on a room full of people, that’s a working quiet. This one has her attention sitting on nothing. She’s a realm and a half from where she was an hour ago.
One realm nearly finished, three points in hand by the end of the morning. That would put anybody somewhere else.
Or she’s had the morning to think about last night and she’s arrived somewhere I won’t like. I turn that over once and put it down. She came down these stairs in front of me and has been within reach of my hand the whole way. Whatever this is, it isn’t that.
I don’t push it.
The growth thins out the deeper we go. Roots gives way to plain rock.
The warmth goes out of the walls a few steps at a time, so gradually I’m cold before I can name where it started.
By the time the stair bottoms out there’s none of the fae left anywhere.
Bare stone. Carved symbols along the lintel, worn soft at the edges.
There’s a ward across the threshold. It reaches for her, takes what it wants out of her blood, lets us through.
The room on the other side is bigger than the staircase had me expecting. Round, low-ceilinged, with a shallow basin cut into the middle of the floor and a channel running out of it to a drain at the wall. Whatever they cleansed in here, they wanted somewhere for it to go.
The air is dry and dead. No charge in it. After two days of Doria working at my skin every waking minute, the absence of it is the loudest thing in the room.
Nothing in here tells you where to look. No shelf, no stand, nothing cut into any wall.
It starts in my chest.
It’s the same thing that put my hand on the stone in Drakoria and the same thing that walked me across the North Range to a slab nobody had lifted in a thousand years. I don’t argue with it any more this time than I did before. I follow it along the back wall with my palm against the rock.
It sharpens low, at a seam I’d have walked past twice without it.
The stone comes away in two pieces. Behind it is a hollow no wider than my palm, cut to fit what it holds. The third point lies on its side in the dark.
I close my hand around it.
Heat answers under my ribs.
Not the same thing. This one has weight behind it. It comes up out of me and pushes outward, holds there while I stand in the dark with my hand shut around a piece of cut rock the size of my palm. The rock is warm, has no business being warm down here where nothing else is.
I should put it in the pack and go. I stand there holding it instead.
“Valen.”
“I have it.”
I set the feeling aside but i
t doesn’t go all the way.
We climb back out. The piece goes in my pack, the pack goes on my back. The warmth comes back into the walls the higher we get, roots threading in through the rock again, the charge picking up against my hands. Daylight is still coming down the stairwell when we reach the top.
The thing in my chest hasn’t settled by then. It’s gone down to a hum. It runs under everything I’m doing the whole way through the upper halls, low and constant, keeping time with nothing. I’ve got no name for it. I’ve got no use for it either, which is worse.
She’s quiet again on the way up.
“You want to say what’s bothering you?”
“It’s nothing.” She says it fast and
I let it stand.
Back in my room the midday light comes through the window, the whole valley is bright behind it. She shuts the door and stays right there in front of it, an arm’s length away.
I drop my pack by the wall, the piece still in it. The hum comes up a notch when it leaves my back, then settles again.
She doesn’t move.
Last night was hers. She knocked on my door because she wanted to. It doesn’t carry over to today.
Then she crosses the room and sits down on the floor against the far wall, in the block of light coming through the window. Her head goes back against the stone.
The light puts her face where I can see it.
There’s no color in it. There hasn’t been since we landed in this realm. Her hands are in her lap, one inside the other, which she does when she wants them still. She looks like a woman running on nothing and standing up anyway.
“You haven’t fed.”
“No.”
“Since Vampiria.”
“I got about a third of what I needed in that quarter.” She keeps her head against the wall. “I’ve been running on that ever since.”
I go over and sit down on the floor across from her, because I’m not going to have this conversation standing over the top of her.
“Drink from me,” I say.
Her head comes off the wall.
“No.”
“You’ve hauled me through the dark four times. Every one of them took more out of you than you’ve put back.”
“That isn’t why the answer’s no.”
“Then tell me why.”
She takes a while. The light off the valley has got into her eyes and turned the violet in them pale.
“Because I don’t feed on anyone I know,” she says. “Not once, not ever. A stranger forgets my face by morning. You wouldn’t.”
“That’s your reason. It isn’t mine.”
“You don’t have one. That’s the problem.
” She sits forward off the wall and her fangs are down when she does it.
“You’d put your arm out for anybody who asked.
I’d take it. Then you’d have seen me with no hold on myself at all.
There’s nothing to me at that point. There’s just the hunger and whatever’s in front of it. ”
“I’ve stood in front of worse things than a hungry woman.”
“Not one that wanted you.”
I’ve got no words for that.
I know what I’m good for. Every pack that ever took me in wanted the same three things. Somebody who could stand out all night. Somebody who could carry what two men couldn’t. Somebody who wouldn’t ask why the worst of it was always his. None of those three is a man they wanted.
“Nobody has ever said that to me,” I say.
“I know.”
“How.”
“Because you looked away from me. You haven’t done that once all day.”
She’s still sitting forward with her eyes on me. She leaves it out there between us.
Four steps and I’d have her mouth. Neither of us would have to say another word about any of it.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I haven’t moved.”
“You’re going to.” She doesn’t move an inch. “There’s nothing holding me together right now. If you put a hand on me at this end of it you don’t get the woman who just said that to you. You get whatever’s left of her once the hunger has the rest.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
She doesn’t answer that.
Nobody says anything for a long time. The light off the valley moves a hand’s width up the wall behind her head. Her fangs don’t go back up.
I’ve wanted her since the first time I laid eyes on her. I’ve kept it somewhere nobody could see it, the same as I keep everything else. It won’t stay down now. Her breathing hasn’t been right since she told me to stay put. Four steps of stone floor is all there is between us.
“Valen.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to come over there.” She isn’t asking me. “If I get near your throat you put me down on the floor and you hold me there. Say you’ll do it.”
“I’ll do it.”
She comes off the wall before I get my back off mine. She straddles me and takes my face in both hands.
She kisses me hard. I get one hand into her hair. The other goes to her ass and drags her down onto my cock. She moans into my mouth. Then she grinds down on me through both our clothes. Slow. She does it again.
Her fangs catch my bottom lip. She doesn’t open it.
Then her mouth comes off mine. It goes down onto my throat. Open. Then it stops.
She holds there. I can feel both points against my skin. Neither of them goes in.
I keep my hand in her hair. I leave the rest of it to her.
“Nyxiana.”
“Don’t.” Her breath is coming hard against my neck. “Give me a minute.”
She takes it. Then she takes her mouth off my throat and puts her forehead on my shoulder.
“If I’d gone in I wouldn’t have come off you until there was nothing left,” she says.
“I know.”
“You don’t.”
She gets up off me. She walks the length of the room twice with her arms crossed over herself and her fangs still down, past the window, past the bed, past me.
On the third pass she stops.
“I fucking told you to put me down on the floor.”
“You did.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“No.”
“God damn it, Valen.” Her voice goes somewhere I haven’t heard it go. “Don’t you understand what I could have done to you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why.”
“Because you’d already stopped. You were holding still with your teeth on my skin and you were the one keeping them out of me. I wasn’t going to throw you on the ground for something you weren’t doing.”
She stands in the middle of the room and looks at me.
“You’d have let me.”
“Yes.”
She goes back to her wall and sits down against it. Her head goes on the stone. Her hands are shaking. She puts them in her lap where I can’t see them.
It’s a while before either of us says anything.
Somebody from the household leaves food outside the door in the middle of the afternoon. She eats a little of it. I eat the rest. We talk about the piece in my pack and where the fourth one has to be. We talk about how long the road runs before it stops being fae ground.
Neither of us brings up what almost happened an hour ago.
“There’s a thing in my chest I haven’t told you about,” I say.
She goes still against the wall.
“It came up the first time I put my hand on that stone in Drakoria. It did it again in the North Range. It did it again downstairs today when I put my hand on that piece.” I keep my eyes on her while I say it. “It hasn’t gone all the way off since Drakoria. It’s going right now.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Warm. Steady. Like it’s waiting.”
She takes a while with it.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Is it stronger now than it was in Drakoria?”
“In Drakoria it was under my hand. Today it went through my chest.”
“Then stop bracing against it,” she says.
“Do you know what it is?”
She takes longer with that one.
“I know it isn’t anything wrong with you.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No.” She holds my eyes across the floor and doesn’t drop them. “Please don’t push me on this right now, Valen.”
“All right.”
That’s the second time since last night she’s asked me to wait. It’s the second time I’ve let her.
The valley goes down through its colors outside the window. Green, then gold, then the gold burning out at the edges.
She doesn’t go back to her own room. I don’t ask her why.
We go to bed when the window goes black. She takes the side against the wall. I take the side nearest the door.
She’s colder than she was last night. It comes through the blanket at me.
I put my arm over her and pull her back against me. She comes without a word and fits herself in against my chest.
There’s no plan for tomorrow anywhere in me. I don’t count the exits. I don’t run the room. There’s nothing at all in my head past the two of us right here in this bed.
Her hand comes over mine where it’s lying on her stomach. It tightens once and stays there.
There’s no last check of the window. My boots stay where they came off, nowhere my hands could find them in the dark. Nothing in me gets up to put my back against a wall.
I fall asleep before she does.
I have never done that in my life. Not in any pack, and not on any of the nights I slept outside the Ash Hollow treeline before they let me in.