Chapter 13 #2
The air here hums at a frequency I can feel in my chest.
The bond made this space.
Celeste is standing in the grass. Barefoot.
Her hair is down and the moonlight turns it silver at the edges.
She meets my eyes. No confusion this time.
“You’re in my dream again,” she says.
“I deliberately followed you.”
“Or the mountain is helping.”
She tilts her head. The moonlight catches the ring on her finger.
“It’s different here at night.”
“The bond seems to be building what we bring to it.”
She walks toward me. The grass bends under her feet.
She stops a few feet away.
She just stands there, face tilted up, and waits.
I reach for her.
My hand settles against her cheek, and the contact is vivid in a way that the waking world can’t match.
No barriers. No skin temperature.
Just sensation, and the sound she makes when my thumb traces her lower lip lands behind my sternum and stays there.
“Something happened today,” I say.
“I know. I felt it. A spike.”
“Veyran confronted me in the corridor. The floor between us buckled. Half an inch of stone, displaced in a line from where I was standing to where he was standing.”
I keep my hand on her face. “Directed force. Projected outward. Aimed.”
She is quiet. Her eyes on mine.
“What is it?”
I let my thumb trace her cheekbone.
“It’s telekinesis. Seraphina confirmed it today. The bond is the conduit.”
“I’m not surprised,” she says.
“Why not?”
“The bond is changing you the way it changed me.”
“Slower.”
“You’re centuries old. Everything you do is slower.”
I laugh. In the dream, the sound is different. Younger. Lighter.
One corner of her mouth lifts and she leans into my hand.
“How long have you known?” she asks.
I don’t answer fast enough.
“Maximus.” Her voice sharpens.
“How long?”
“Since Erik’s territory.”
Several heartbeats of silence.
The stars overhead hold their place, and Celeste’s face doesn’t move, and the sharpening in her eyes is a blade I earned.
“You promised me no more walls.”
“I know.”
“This counts.”
Her hand comes up and covers mine where it rests on her cheek.
Her fingers press into my knuckles, and every ridge of the M and C crest presses between our palms.
“We had this fight already,” she says. Her voice is controlled, but the edges aren’t. “And you did exactly what I did. Kept something alone. Waited to understand it before bringing it to me.”
I have no answer that isn’t the truth, and the truth is that she is right.
“Don’t do it again.”
Her grip on my hand doesn’t loosen.
The forgiveness in it is harder than anger. Anger burns out. This stays. She is choosing to hold on.
“I won’t,” I say.
“I know.” She pulls my hand from her cheek, turns it over, kisses the center of my palm.
The sensation floods upward through my wrist, my arm, my shoulder, lodging behind my chest where the crescent mark burns.
“Because if you do it again, I won’t be angry. I’ll be disappointed. And we both know which one is worse.”
“Considerably.”
She lifts her head. The moonlight is in her hair and on her shoulders and her expression is open in a way that only this space allows.
No armor. No strategy. Just her, looking at me, holding my hand.
“Show me,” she says.
“Show you what?”
“The telekinesis. If it’s mine and it’s yours and the bond connected what was already there, then show me what yours feels like.”
I reach. Gently. The force that has been building since Iron Claw.
I find it under my sternum and direct it outward, into the dream space, and the grass around our feet ripples outward in a circle, pressed flat by something that isn’t wind.
Her breath catches.
I push. The ripple spreads.
Stones in the grass lift. Three of them, small, rising to eye level between us, rotating slowly.
The moonlight catches their surfaces.
I hold them there. The effort is different from the involuntary discharges.
Controlled. Clean. In this space, with her hand in mine, the force answers me.
“There you are,” she says quietly. Looking at the stones. At me. At the place where the two meet.
“That’s what I’ve been feeling. From the other side.”
The stones settle. The grass springs back.
She steps into me. Her forehead drops to my shoulder.
My arms close around her.
I hold her there, and our rhythms match.
“The convening is tomorrow,” she says against my shoulder.
“I know.”
“After that, when we get home, we train this together.”
“I’m counting on it.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me.
In the dream-light her eyes are darker than they should be and the gold in them catches the moon.
She rises on her toes and presses her mouth to mine.
The kiss starts gentle. Her hands on my chest, my hands in her hair, the slow press of her lips.
Then her fingers curl into my shirt and the gentle part ends.
She pulls me down to her and the kiss deepens and there is nothing restrained about it.
Her body against mine. Everything between us unshielded.
I pull back.
She makes a sound of protest that I feel in my ribs.
“If we don’t stop,” I say against her mouth, “we won’t stop.”
“I’m aware.”
“The convening.”
“I know.”
She presses her forehead to mine. Breathes.
She kisses me once more. Brief. Definite.
A promise pressed into skin.
The moonlight dims. The clearing softens at the edges.
She slides toward deeper sleep, the dream dissolving.
I hold on as long as I can. Her face. Her hands in my shirt. The kiss.
I surface in the dark chamber with her in my arms and her breathing deep and even and the feel of moonlight still on my skin.
The Lithenmere hums. Low. Constant.
Tomorrow. The four courts. The truth contest Seraphina warned us about.
And somewhere in the Court of Ember’s wing, a woman with banked-coal eyes is sharpening her arguments against an alliance that was written into the stone of this realm before she had a chance to stop it.
I close my eyes.
Celeste shifts in her sleep. Her fingers curl tighter against my chest.
I let her hold on.