Chapter Twenty-Six #2
the disturbing part. The one that made him reflexively put a hand next to hers, and then when he seemed to register that he
could, he touched it. He put his own over it.
Held it gently at first, then tighter.
As if to reassure himself that she was still here.
That she wouldn’t just suddenly disappear.
While she finished his sentence. “You think I said something that unsettled someone,” she said and could see him trying to
resist, even as something he himself had known and raised.
“You never did, though. You only ever told me that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing? What specifically did I say, even if it was just to you?”
“Nothing much. You mostly just wanted to find a way that I could go back to Calabaraia—I think because you felt responsible for me getting stuck. Even though you weren’t at all.
I just couldn’t stay away from you. I didn’t want to leave your side.
It was never there that I missed, it was you; god, I missed you even when you were alive, all the time. ”
He shook his head at himself, half amused.
While her heart rose and sank, in the same instance.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, now I’m remembering that.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Lil. You just felt like it was. Plus, you know, you always wanted to do whatever you could to make
things better. It’s one of the reasons I fell so hard for you. I was different and clumsier at hiding it, and you were so
kind. You were so welcoming, even when you realized what I was.”
“It must have made it heartbreaking when I wasn’t this time.”
“It was heartbreaking to make that happen. And then again, when I knew that somehow you still cared. When you tried to stop
me falling into the long sleep, I almost broke and told you everything, there and then.”
She tried not to cry, at the end of that. But blinking tears back and holding her breath and looking at the ceiling did nothing.
They spilled down her cheeks anyway, so freely he noticed right away. He put his hand on her face and swiped one with his
thumb. Then when that just made it worse, he pulled her to him.
She wound up curled in his arms, cheek against his chest.
Soothed by the slow sound of his strange heart.
“It’s all right,” he said, as he stroked her hair. “Everything’s all right now.”
“But it’s not, though. We’re still in danger. We’re no closer to the truth than we were a day ago. And for all we know, the
clock is ticking. Whoever it was could have twigged and started plotting our demise as we speak.”
“I’ll protect you.”
“It’s not just me I’m worried about, Bram.”
“You should be—they let me live. Clearly, they can’t let me go.”
“And has them not letting you go been a barrel of laughs for you? Maybe this was just meant as your punishment. Leaving you here all alone, in hell. Or maybe not alone exactly, I mean you must have—” she said, embarrassed
by what she had just suggested. By the presumption of it. But he didn’t even wait for her to finish.
“There’s never been anyone else but you,” he said, calm as you like.
And in the ringing silence that followed, she tried to take it a different way.
Because you couldn’t risk it, she told herself. Because you didn’t have a chance, she told herself. Because they would never know the real you, she told herself. But really, she knew the truth. Thirty years of torment and torturous sleep and pretending to be someone
he wasn’t.
And he just couldn’t be with anyone else.
He couldn’t allow himself even a moment of it.
“Not even someone putting their arms around you?” she asked, thinking of at least some comfort for him. But even that made
him shake his head.
“Sometimes it happens when we win a match. Although to be fair most of the time I’ve numbed myself so hard to get through
any possible bloodshed that I don’t really feel it. And even if I did, it’s not as if I particularly like the people who do
it.”
“Yeah the game sure does attract a lot of arseholes.”
“Because the goal is to hurt other people.”
She heard him swallow thickly, when he said it.
Though she would have known anyway how he felt about that.
“God, you must fucking hate it. How do you even do it? You used to save spiders from drowning. Sometimes you half starved because you’d try to sustain yourself with slices of black pudding, from the cafeteria.
I remember you being horrified when you thought saying my dress seemed very tight was a compliment, then discovered it wasn’t. ”
“I’m still agonized about that now, honestly,” he said, with enough of a laugh in his voice that she felt a little better.
Or at least, felt relieved that he was feeling so. And to the point where she could laugh, too.
“The explanation was very good, though. In fact, I think that’s why—”
“You kissed me, that first time. Yes. Yes, it was. I fumbled through trying not to say what I meant, and you knew. You knew
it was more than books and kindness and affection between us. That I wanted you.”
“Lord, you did. And god knows, I wanted you.”
“We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”
“Not even in lectures. Do you remember that time when Hargreaves caught us canoodling and called us a disgrac—”
She stopped cold, the word half unsaid.
Both of them knew what the word was, though.
And they knew what it meant. “Oh my god. It’s her. Of course it’s her,” he said, while she was still sat there, frozen. Mind
going back over a million snide comments and pinched looks. Before finally, fury thawed her enough to burst out with words
of her own.
“Honestly, I have no idea why we’ve been wasting our time thinking of anyone else,” she said, caught between punching the
air and putting her face in her hands. “She hated us. She hated me then. She hates me now—oh my god the other day she told me that I was fraternizing too much with you! You need to consider where such things lead, she said.”
“You cannot be serious. Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Because she was kind of right, at the time. I thought I was in the middle of a horny toxic spiral with a psychopath. I’ve never wanted to fuck someone
so much in my life, despite the incredible threat of murder. What she said almost sounded wise. Instead of what it is now:
an intense flashing warning sign.”
She made said “intense flashing warning sign” with her hands.
It made sparks fly from the ends of her fingertips.
She had to take breaths, to stop herself setting something on fire. But it was all right—so did he. He went to stand up, on
the bed still, then sat back down. Put his hands in his hair, and made two fists, and couldn’t seem to get them back out.
And she could see his teeth.
He snapped them together, as she watched.
Like he was thinking of a certain throat between them.
Though that did seem to bring him back down to earth. Now was not the time for biting. It was the time for thinking this thing
through. “So she knows what I am. And she thinks it’s disgusting,” he started to theorize.
But something about that didn’t seem complete to her.
“It can’t just be that. It isn’t just that. There are other things—”
“The way she used to shut you down. Like that time you said the beings who lived in Calabaraia should be the ones to decide.
That they should be able to welcome who they want to their world, not the other way around. Not based on some test that some
stuffy authority designed, to let who they approved of see.
You said it should be dismantled, that it could be,” he rushed out, voice thick with passion and fury.
Then he seemed to remember one last thing, one final touch that put it all into place.
And he went to tell her that, too. “And when you did, she replied—”
“People have been beheaded for less, Miss Langley,” she finished for him.
Then Bram was on his feet. Already pulling on his jeans.
He did it so fast he put them on backward and had to start again.
But she stopped him, before he could. She clicked her fingers. And when that didn’t work, she clapped her hands, as close
to his face as she could get. “Hey hothead, we need proof before we go to someone with this.”
“And who exactly do you think we’re going to?”
“I don’t know. Anyone who will listen to us.”
“Darling, I’m not doing this so we can plead our case with a magical justice system that doesn’t exist. I’m doing it so I
can unearth who murdered you and then murder them. Maybe after some light torture. Or heavy torture, depending on how much
they beg for their lives,” he said, so matter-of-factly she couldn’t help looking a little aghast. She went to say something,
too, something about his soul and stains and if that was okay. But he got there first. “Don’t look at me like that, Lil. There’s
no other choice. This is what we will have to do, and you need to understand that. And understand something else, too: that
me being willing to find proof first is all the magnanimity either you or I owe.”
And after that, she had to say: He had a pretty good point.
“All right,” she told him. “I’m in.”