Chapter 35
Nyxiana
My old room is at the end of the family corridor, third door, the small one nobody ever wanted.
Nothing in it has changed. The same bed, four posts and a canopy, too big for a room this size, which is half the reason nobody else ever wanted it.
A writing desk under the window with the same ink stain on the corner I put there when I was nine.
There’s a shelf of things I stopped caring about decades ago and never came back for.
The light through the window falls exactly where it fell when I was a child lying down in it, because the moon here has never moved.
My left wrist is still warm.
I get the case out of my bag and open it on the desk.
Three shards, each one wrapped separate in its own square of cloth.
The middle one came out of a hollow in the North Range that Valen opened with his own hands.
I set them out on the desk in a line and I hold my left wrist above them.
The star catches. All three answer it at once.
There’s a hum that comes up between the four of them, low, no louder than a struck glass in another room.
It holds. The light off my wrist and the light off the stones is the same.
It’s been the same this entire time and I’ve been carrying three quarters of it around in a case.
The key is whole.
I stand there, over my own desk, with four points lit and the hum going between them.
Nobody in any realm knows that except me.
The shards were never the point of it. They’re the parts that could be taken out and hidden.
The part that couldn’t be hidden was walking around inside a woman who reads everything.
I do what I do with any problem that turns out to be several problems - start talking it through out loud, to nobody, in an empty room. What Ash Hollow needs to hear,in what order. How much of it Dane gets before the pack. Whether Lyanna can hold the stones once they’re this awake.
Faelan is already going at the celestial realm through the crack Harper’s death and return tore in it.
He’ll keep at it until he’s through, because he means to reach the founders’ own seat and use it to fire all three marks at once.
Nova. Harper. Kari. Every institution in every realm losing the floor underneath it in the same hour.
He intends to break through the wall. I can open the door.
What’s on this desk and what’s on my wrist is the only key there is.
That’s the practical version. Underneath it there’s the other one.
Valen was built. The founders made him on purpose and set him in a wolf pack in the North Range as an infant to hold a seal for them.
I was born. My parents had a daughter, and the fourth point they’d already made went off on my wrist because I turned out to be exactly what their system was watching for.
Key and lock. Neither of us was ever asked.
My list stops there. It stops on a thing I can’t finish, and I stand in the middle of my old room with my hands on a desk trying to finish it anyway.
I straighten my spine. Four in, hold, six out.
I learned the count at this desk when I was small enough to need a stool to reach it, and I have used it in every room since where I could not afford to be read.
My hands continue to shake.
That has never failed me. Not at Doria in front of a court that belongs to Faelan’s own kind.
Not on a balcony with my hand at Faelan’s throat.
Tonight it does, so I turn to the case instead.
The lid goes down. I work the latch. Then open it again to check the cloths are folded right, close it and work the latch a second time.
Halfway through the third time I stop, sit down on the edge of the bed with the case still in my hands.
There’s no one in this room. No court, pack, father, mother, nobody at all in the corridor outside.
I’ve held myself upright in front of somebody every hour of every day since I left Ash Hollow.
In front of a dealer in the lower quarter, a fae crown, twice in one night in front of my own parents.
There’s nobody left in this room to do it for.
So I say it out loud. “It doesn’t stop with me.”
The room takes it. Nothing happens.
“I’m what they built the fourth point to catch. Not the shard. Me. And I can carry a line forward.”
There it is, out in the air where I can look at it.
If I ever have a daughter, she comes out of the same convergence I did.
She’ll be the same proof their system failed.
She’ll be the same target for the next person who works out what she is.
I would be handing her that on the day she’s born.
Nobody who did it to me knew what they had in their hands. I’d know exactly.
I put the case down on the floor. Underneath the fear there’s something else.
Want. I want Valen exactly as much as I did before any of this.
Before the archive, the doorway, before he walked off my porch and out across that yard.
The anger burned nothing out of me. There was a quiet assumption in me that it would, it turns out that assumption was wrong.
I can sit here on the edge of this bed with my spine straight and my hands still.
I can get through the night the same as I’ve gotten through every hard night I’ve ever had.
Or I can stop.
I lie back on the mattress. The ceiling in here has the same crack running out of the corner that it had when I was a child. I look at it for a while. Then I let myself think about him for the first time since I left and it comes immediately.
My mouth open on his throat on the floor of that room in Doria. Both points down against his skin and not one muscle in him moving under me. The sound he made when I ground down on him through both our clothes, with both my hands on his face.
Heat drops through me low and hard. My hand is at the laces of my dress and I don’t remember starting.
I work them loose down my chest and get the front of it open to my waist. The air off the stone floor is cool on my skin.
My nails drag down my own throat and over my collarbone, hard, hard enough to leave the line of it behind them.
My fangs come down on their own, the same way my eyes go gold under dragonfire.
They catch my bottom lip hard enough to open it.
The sting arrives with the taste of my own blood.
Days of holding every part of myself in place give out at once.
My other hand goes down my stomach and between my thighs.
I’m already wet from a memory of my mouth on his throat and nothing else.
Two fingers find my clit and circle it slowly.
I’m slick under my own hand. My free hand moves to my breast, thumb rough over my nipple, imagining his mouth where I want it.
My skin has started running hot everywhere I touch it, and none of that heat is coming off the room.
I sink two fingers into my pussy. It’s tight around them, wet enough that they go in with nothing in the way.
I curl them up hard but it takes teaching.
It isn’t enough. It never is. My own hand gets me close and leaves me there.
“Valen.” His name goes out into the empty room. It’s the only word I let myself have.
My hips rock up to meet my own hand. I lose the rhythm.
My fingers move faster, harder. My breath goes to pieces.
I stop caring about any part of how I sound.
Then my skin lights up, it comes up gold from the inside, fine, warm, spreading out of my wrist, up my forearm, into my chest, until the room has a second light in it. It’s brighter than it has ever gone.
I come hard. My back arches off the bed and I clench down on nothing.
I know the rest of it before I’ve stopped shaking.
I can put three realms between us. Every truth I have can stay locked down where nobody reaches it.
Standing in my father’s cathedral with the last piece of the founders’ work lit on my own arm, I can tell myself I did the correct thing by every one of them.
None of it makes me want him any less. Pushing him away never stopped me choosing him.
I lie there with my hand still between my thighs, my breathing coming down slowly. I let my thoughts go to him and stay there. His hands instead of mine. His weight over me instead of an empty room in my father’s house.
I fall asleep like that, still afraid of what I am, still wanting him.
Across the room the shards go on glowing faintly on the desk. My own wrist glows with them. The key stays exactly where I set it down.