Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
The Assistant did not feel fatigue. He could walk until the moon dimmed and the earth’s roots grew brittle. Carrying Goldie was effortless, his stride as steady as the earth’s slow turning. But deep in his chest stirred a sharp, persistent ache.
Goldie didn’t speak on the walk back. Her tears came quietly, trailing warm lines down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away. Didn’t shake. She simply let them fall, each breath a thin, uneven hitch as if sorrow had to force its way past a locked door.
She trembled against him, and he did not know how to fix it.
He adjusted his hold, careful not to jostle her, and kept to the smoothest stones, stepping around the cobbled dips in Bellwether’s roads. The late spring wind was cool; she shivered faintly but made no complaint.
He did not ask her to stop crying. He did not speak until her voice cracked through the silence.
“You don’t have to keep carrying me.”
He looked down. Her eyes were glassy, her cheeks flushed, her voice thick. Her cheek rested against the curve of his collarbone.
“I know,” he said, and kept walking.
Somewhere past the alder-lined stretch of Seventh Street, her breathing softened, deepened. She hiccuped once, shuddered faintly, and then went still in his arms. Asleep.
The ache in his chest sharpened. He only knew her as loud, glittering, sharp-edged, filled with chaos and color. Now she was quiet. Dimmed. The sight pained him—an illogical, useless sensation he could not excise.
When Greymarket Towers finally rose before him, its windows flickering faintly like drowsy eyes, some of the tension eased from his shoulders. Home, or at least the shape of it. Safety. Routine. Something he understood. The front doors sighed open at his approach.
Mycor, Splice thought, reaching inward along the roots that tethered them. I have returned.
The response came slow and vast. Speak.
Splice’s jaw tightened. He shifted Goldie more securely in his arms as he crossed the threshold.
I went to the Grove Core. Marigold Flynn was there.
She found a body at the bonfire site. The disturbance deepened.
I removed her before it could spread further.
Something has changed, but I know not what.
A pause. The building hummed faintly, like sap drawing inward, deep roots listening.
She is safe, Splice added—too quickly, the urgency spilling unchecked. I brought her home. I carry her still.
The connection gave no reply. Only vast, patient silence filled the link.
Greymarket’s elevator doors opened with a sigh. Splice stepped inside, adjusted Goldie in his arms gently, and pressed the button for the fourth floor.
She stirred once as the elevator rose, murmuring something he couldn’t hear. Her head turned against his shirt, then she stilled again.
The elevator chimed. The doors parted. He walked to her doorway.
The wards on her apartment recognized her and the door opened quietly, no key required.
He stepped over the threshold, and somewhere in his memory bank, an image surfaced: a groom carrying a bride across the threshold of a shared home.
Inside, the apartment smelled like cinnamon and bergamot. The lighting adjusted automatically, lowering to a soft amber hue.
Splice moved without hesitation toward the couch in the open space living room, but then paused when he felt it.
Pressure. Observation. Predation.
They emerged like summoned spirits. First, a dark, sleek shape, leaping silently from the top of the bookcase with a flick of its tail. Then, a rounded ginger form, materializing from under the credenza.
Their eyes gleamed in the low light. Twin orbs of judgment. And then, horrifyingly, they began to approach.
Splice froze. His grip on Goldie remained steady. Her breath ghosted against his collarbone. He dared not jostle her.
But the cats were coming closer.
The dark one, a male, moved with the languid confidence of something that feared neither gods nor men. He sniffed the hem of Splice’s trousers, then sat between his feet, tail wrapped neatly around his paws, and stared with cold, half-lidded yellow eyes.
The ginger one, female, did not sit. She twined. She brushed up against Splice’s shin with deliberate force. His spine went rigid.
Do cats eat plants? he thought suddenly, with a spike of very real alarm. Some cats eat house plants. Some plants are toxic. Some plants are made of—am I edible?
The dark one flopped to the ground, his head resting on the Assistant’s shoe and his body on the floor. He rumbled. The ginger rose onto her hind legs and placed her paws against his shin. Splice made a faint, involuntary sound in the back of his throat.
He had survived the Collapse at Hollowmere, had stood unblinking before a dying saint as she screamed prophecy into the void, and had navigated a tribunal that lasted thirteen hours and briefly reversed the flow of time. He had walked unburned through ritual fire. But this… this was untenable.
“Stop,” he said softly, addressing them both. “Please don’t. I am not… a snack.”
The dark one on his foot purred louder. The ginger one made a sound of disappointment and plopped herself down, leaning to menacingly clean the male’s face. He hissed, but did not move away.
Splice anxiously dipped his head toward the woman in his arms. “Your familiars are touching me.”
Goldie stirred, her breath catching. “Whuh…?” Then, a little more clearly, “Are we home?”
“You are home,” he clarified. “But you… you have cats.”
That earned a soft snort. “Is Maeve trying to assert dominance?”
“The dark one has claimed my foot, and the orange one will not allow me to move.”
“Mmm. Sounds right.” Her hand uncurled from where it had been tangled in the edge of his coat. She blinked up at him, eyes heavy with exhaustion, but clearer now.
“You can put me down,” she said gently.
Splice hesitated. Then, carefully, he shuffled away from the felines, who made sounds of disapproval, and gently lowered Goldie to the couch. He released her fully only when she was seated, her feet brushing the rug, her balance her own again.
Goldie sat still for a breath, grounding herself. The ginger female launched into her lap with no hesitation, purring like a possessed cello. The dark male hopped up beside her and butted his forehead into Goldie’s ribs.
Splice shuddered and took a step back.
Goldie grinned faintly and ran a hand through the ginger one’s fur. “They’re grumpy and demanding, but easily distracted when their food source returns.”
Silence bloomed in the apartment. Splice stood in front of Goldie, very still, without a protocol for what came next.
He shifted his weight. From below, a slow pulse rippled, fungal and quiet.
How fares the golden flower?
Splice drew a sharp breath.
Goldie looked up. “What was that?”
He exhaled. “Mycor. He is… asking about you.”
“Mycor?”
Splice froze. He had never before spoken so casually in front of another. It felt... exposed. Like letting someone look at the page where the story was still being written.
He fumbled. “That is to say… the Thornfather.”
Goldie’s voice was soft, a little hoarse. “Oh. Is that his name? Mycor?”
Splice looked away, jaw twitching. “It is...” He swallowed. “It is what he is. To me.”
Goldie leaned her head back against the couch cushions, “Well,” she said slowly, voice thick but edged with that familiar, crooked, maddening sparkle. “Why’s he asking about me? What about you?”
Splice frowned, the motion carving deeper lines across his bark-textured skin. He wanted to strip the glitter from her words and feel that raw, quiet version of her again, the one that had brushed the inside of his chest, briefly.
Only belatedly did he register her actual question.
“Why would he ask about me?” he said, genuinely puzzled.
Goldie let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I mean, you’re his assistant. You’d think that’s a little more important than checking on me.”
Splice didn’t answer at first. He needed to think, which was odd in itself. Most things came quickly: observation, response, movement. But this…
“Do you have a name?” Goldie asked. “I keep calling you the Assistant, but that feels a little clinical. We did just find a body together. Pretty sure that bumps us straight to a first-name basis, right?”
“I…” His voice caught. “I have no need of names.”
The words came out flatter and more defensive than he meant. As if names were weaknesses he couldn’t afford.
Goldie nodded. “Okay. But what does Mycor call you? Assistant?”
The god-name uncurled from her tongue like a vine seeking light, each syllable sliding over Splice’s skin. He shuddered. The word burrowed down his rootlines, struck the vein that tethered him to the Thornfather, and Mycor answered—a low pulse, sap-thick and possessive—inside his ribs.
Something else answered, too. A bloom of heat beneath his sternum. Sudden and lush, as if petals were forcing themselves open.
He swallowed, the motion rough. “Splice,” he breathed at last. The word came out soft, unsteady, a leaf trembling on its stem. “It is what I am. As close to a name as anything.”
Goldie’s lips parted, and she whispered it back. “Splice.”
The word fell from her lips, and it slid through him, warm and wet, rooting in places he’d never felt before.
He wanted her to say it again. Wanted it brushed against the tender seam of his ear. Wanted it panted as her body arched beneath his.
The surge of need snapped through him, his hidden vines flexing just under his skin’s surface. He forced his gaze to the floor, steadying his breath until the air felt cool again.
Green gods above and below. What is wrong with me?
Goldie’s hand slowed, carding through the fur of the cat in her arms until ginger hairs clung to her sleeves like shed sparks.
For a heartbeat, he could almost see her habitual glitter flaking away in delicate slivers, exposing tender cambium beneath bright bark.
His breath hitched and he swallowed, hard.
“Do you wish me to… find someone for you?” he asked, haltingly.
Goldie shook her head. “No. I’ll text someone.” She summoned a flicker of dramatics, wrist rolling. “Can’t have anyone see me in this tragic mess.”
You are not a mess, Splice thought. You are unbearably alive.
His god’s pulse echoed agreement.
“I’ll stay until they come,” he exclaimed. The words felt like seeds thudding into fertile soil.
Goldie finally looked up. Beneath her tear-rimmed lashes, her eyes were all raw earth: brown, rich, ready to be tilled.
“If you don’t mind,” she whispered, voice catching on the fragile edge of honesty. “Yes. Stay. Thank you.”
A breath he hadn’t known he held seeped out between his lips. Mycor’s approval thrummed inside him—a low chord that carried both duty and desire, winding through his own like twin roots seeking the same water.
Splice sank down beside her, careful as dew on new shoots. Goldie’s shoulder brushed his sleeve, a slight graze of warmth that had every hidden vine in his body reaching toward that contact, aching to coil around it.
“Are you okay, Splice?” she asked, voice tinier now. “I mean, you’ve probably seen… a lot of dead bodies. Maybe it doesn’t hit you the same way, since you’re not, you know, human.”
It does affect me. Because it affected you. And I don’t know why that matters, only that it does.
“I’m… fine,” he managed, the words reed-thin, almost splintering.
He shifted on the couch, and at the movement, the dark feline flowed onto his lap. Splice froze, body locking as the cat butted his chin with a low, imperious cry. The ginger one, not to be outdone, jumped from Goldie’s arms to the couch back to sniff at the living wood of his neck.
Splice closed his eyes, muttering an inward litany. Green gods of earth and sky, grant me the strength of an oak, the serenity of a stream, the steadfastness of a forest.
A soft sound beside him snapped his eyes open. Goldie was crying again, quietly now, her thumb moving clumsily on her phone. A single tear slipped down her cheek, and he felt it like a blow to the sternum.
Instinctively, he leaned in and pressed a hand to her damp cheek, his thumb tracing the tear’s path. The cat in his lap gave an indignant mmrph and hopped off.
Goldie’s breath caught. Wide, earth-brown eyes locked on his for a moment before she surged forward, arms looping his neck, as she pressed her mouth to his with desperate heat.