Chapter 29 – — Professor Cane, Fracture and Form
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“The body keeps secrets the mind has not agreed to.”
— Professor Cane, Fracture and Form
Draven’s arm is across my waist when I wake up.
I don’t remember falling asleep after Poppy crawled between us.
She’s gone now, resting within me, and the fire must have burned out, because a cold has crept back into the room through the cracked window above us.
Draven’s chest is warm and hard against my back, and his hand is splayed open against my stomach where my top has shifted up in the night.
I keep my eyes closed.
If I move, he wakes. If he wakes, he’s going to pull back, and the moment will end before either of us decides whether we wanted it to.
Last night, I told this man things I haven’t told anyone, and he held me through the worst of it, and somewhere in the dark I forgot for a few hours that I don’t entirely trust him and that he’s a bit of an asshole.
I haven’t forgotten this morning.
He’s the only person at this academy who keeps appearing in places I don’t expect him to be.
He vanishes for stretches, and then he’s there again randomly in a dark alley, watching me.
He has secrets with the headmaster, and he has friends whose company I wouldn’t keep, and one of those friends is likely a murderer.
I can’t with any certainty say which side of any of that Draven is even on.
What I can say is that he carried me to my room when I was drunk, and he brought me Nella’s journal when he didn’t have to.
He trusted me to cut the corruption from his wing yesterday, not that he had much of a choice.
He saved a man’s life yesterday and admitted to being the prince, to worrying about his soul, to family drama I never expected him to share with anyone, much less me.
This man is such a conundrum. He acts like he hates me, like I’m a despicable human who doesn’t belong, and then he protects me, and now he’s holding me in bed. And I poured part of my soul out to him last night, though I can blame that on the alcohol.
These are all things I need to think about later when I’m not pinned under a vampire prince’s arm in a chapel bed pretending to be asleep.
His breath is even at the back of my neck, and I start to count it. Slower than mine. Around the eighth breath, he shifts, registering where his hand is.
His hand draws back across my stomach with careful slowness in an attempt not to wake me. I keep my breathing steady and my eyes closed as I feel him sit up and slip off the edge of the bed and then out the door into the nave.
I roll onto my back and stare up at the ceiling. My head hurts from a night of drinking, and I press my hands over my eyes and forehead. My eyes feel puffy from crying, and the memory of that night with my father floods my mind again.
My throat closes without warning. One moment I’m fine, and the next there’s a fist wrapped around my windpipe, squeezing.
The burning spreads down into my chest and settles behind my ribs like something alive, something with teeth.
I inhale through my nose and feel my eyes start to well.
I swallow hard, trying to shove the thoughts back into the locked box where I keep them.
I can’t let myself think of the memories again.
The good ones hurt worse than the bad ones somehow.
It’s easier to pretend. To remember him healthy and whole, humming off-key while he made breakfast, his reading glasses perpetually crooked on his nose.
To let myself believe that if I went home tomorrow, he’d be standing in the doorway of the clinic, wiping his hands on that old brown apron, calling me in for dinner like nothing ever changed.
I’m a coward.
The thought of letting the truth settle over me completely, of accepting that he’s gone, really gone, is so suffocating I cannot bear it.
Losing someone you love is not a wound that heals with time.
It is an amputation. It’s a piece of yourself carved out and buried in the ground with them.
And knowing they’ll be gone forever. For all of eternity.
For as long as your life stretches on, you’ll never see that person again.
Never hear their voice when they call your name.
Never hear them yell at you for throwing rocks at the neighbor’s fence again.
Never feel their steady hands guiding yours as they teach you how to stitch a wound properly, patient even when you mess up for the tenth time.
Never feel the weight of his hand on your head when you’ve done something right.
The pride in his eyes that said more than words ever could.
Knowing gone means forever.
It’s the most unbearable, suffocating, throat-wrenching pain I’ve ever known. And I can’t let it consume me. If I let it in, even for a moment, it’ll swallow me whole, and I’ll drown in it.
After last night, after reliving everything and telling Draven what happened, it feels so fresh in my mind again. Like in the day-to-day I can pretend it never happened, but when I let the thoughts in, it all comes rushing back.
I feel my eyes start to well up, and the last thing I want to do is cry right now again, but I think admitting the full story out loud last night made me really start to accept it.
I’ll never see my father again, never hear his voice again.
Tears blur my vision, and I quickly wipe my eyes, because I’ve cried enough and should be over it by now, but I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever get over.
One of the things I fear most in the world is death and what comes after, and I wasn’t ready to make peace with it. I may never be. Grief is not a wave that breaks and passes, it is the tide, and the tide always comes back.
Something small and warm presses into my side.
Poppy has appeared, and she climbs up my chest with her small hands, and her round dark eyes find mine, and she sits back on her haunches and tilts her head.
I sit up, lift her into my arms, and bury my face in her fur.
She doesn’t make a sound. She lets me hold her. Her fluffy body is warm and steady against my chest, and her heartbeat is the same heartbeat as mine.
“Hi, Pops,” I whisper into her fur.
She presses her face against the side of my neck.
I don’t know how long I sit there with her in my arms before I hear the clatter of something being set on the table in the next room. The soft scrape of a chair. The faint sound of a fire being stoked.
He’s still here. We have to walk back today, and my ankle is already protesting it.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and kiss the top of Poppy’s head, and slowly put my feet on the cold floor.
I cannot fall apart in front of him.
Not again. Not twice in two days. Whatever last night was, I let him see too much already. I’m not going to walk out into that nave with red eyes and a swollen face and let him think I’m the kind of girl who cries every morning, the weak human he already thinks I am.
I press my palms against my eyes until the pressure spreads. I take three slow breaths and glance at Poppy.
“Want to find some breakfast?”
She’s off the bed and at the door before I can even get my leather pants on.
Food is always the way to her heart. Whoever said eidolons don’t need to eat clearly never met a raccoon.
I get dressed and head into the tiny bathroom with a single toilet attached to the bedroom and get cleaned up the best I can. I run my fingers through my hair, because gods forbid Professor Bale put a brush in our midterm pack.
Once I’m feeling like myself again, I head out of the bedroom and find Draven sitting in the chair with his feet kicked out in front of him, staring at the fire.
His hair is pulled back into a usual half bun, but a couple of stray pieces have fallen near his mouth.
I follow a dark strand and notice how full and smooth his lips are, and when he clears his throat, I realize I’m staring awkwardly.
I brush my hands on my pants and walk over to the table.
“Seamkeeper Ostric was here. He said Lynn, Edric’s wife, dropped this basket off for us this morning.” Draven waves toward the basket sitting open on the table.
“Sad I missed him,” I say sarcastically as I walk over and peek inside.
Without Tomas’s family, I fear we would have survived purely on crusty bread this entire trip. Inside the basket are a few hard-boiled eggs and grainy muffins. I toss a muffin to Poppy and start peeling an egg for myself.
“So…your wing’s all healed?” I ask, looking over and realizing it’s no longer visible.
“Mm.”
“When should we head back?”
He gets to his feet, closing the door on the hearth. “I’m going to have a word with Edric, make sure he’s healing alright. Pack our things and tell Ostric we’re leaving, will you?”
I nod, rolling my eyes to myself, because I don’t really care to talk to Ostric.
“I guess last night didn’t change things. He’s back to his cryptic bossy self this morning, isn’t he?” I say to Poppy, who’s stuffing her face with pieces of muffin next to the fire.
I eat a couple of eggs, make the bed, and throw everything into our backpack.
I wrap up the rest of the muffins and the last egg and put it in our pack for later.
Everything is as it was when we arrived, and I head up the stairs to the bell tower to let the seamkeeper know we’re heading back to the academy.
The bell tower is set up as a bedroom with a giant bell in the center and floor-to-ceiling windows all around. Ostric has a desk and a bed up here. What a lonely life it must be, living here and observing the fissure in this mostly deserted village.
“Miss Rose.”
His voice snaps my attention back to the present, and I shake my head.
“Seamkeeper Ostric, I wanted to bid you farewell. We’ll be on our way imminently.”
He doesn’t look up from his ledger. His pen keeps moving for another moment, and then he sets it down carefully.
“You felt the seam, Miss Rose.”
I freeze with my hand on the doorframe.
“I’m sorry?”