38. Chapter 38
Chapter thirty-eight
D espite the chill of the morning air, sweat beads along Willa’s forehead, plastering thick tendrils of her hair to her skin.
“I think I’ve had one too many of the Lunaedon’s donuts,” she exclaims breathlessly, to my amusement. “Are we almost there?”
“Only a few more minutes,” I assure her.
My breathing is far more labored than hers, and my tongue feels like cotton in my mouth, but I forge forward through the overgrown foliage, determined to make it to our destination despite my body’s protestations.
The will-o-wisps hum in the branches above us, and the winter wind teases the hem of my cloak, as I slice through a particularly thick bramble. Though the flurry of air is gentle, the words drifting through it are not.
Time rushes on. Time rushes on.
They dig into my skin more surely than my death, an icy echo of my own fears. I’ve been mired in place for so long, now that the world has begun to move again, the velocity is terrifying. I’d forgotten what it is to age—forgotten how it is to desperately wish to stay in a moment forever and have it slip from your grasp anyway, lost in the blurred ocean of memories. I’d forgotten the way time pulls taut with dread and races forward with love, and though I’m thankful for every moment with Willa I’m granted, there exists a bitter part of me that is terrified it won’t be enough.
That there will never be enough of anything when it comes to Willa.
“Keeping me up all night and then waking me up at the crack of dawn to hike up a mountain…you better have alcohol in that bag of yours.”
“It’s 7 in the morning,” I reply with a laugh.
“I’m immortal. Time is a construct that means nothing to me.” She wiggles her eyebrows in challenge. “Unless getting liquored up and debauching me in the woods is too unseemly for His Royal Highness.”
Her mouth wraps around the title in a taunting drawl that immediately heats my blood. “You forget…I was a pirate in a former life, Darling.” I pull a bottle of rum from my bag, jostling it at her. “How is it that I had you on your knees in the middle of the forest, and you still underestimate my penchant for debauchery?”
She grins cheekily, running her tongue over her teeth the same way she’d run it over me. I’d intended to wait until we reached the springs, but whatever flimsy tethers to decency I possess unravel entirely every time I’m near Willa, as proven by our earlier foray and by my readiness now. A word, a glance, a damn breath, and I’m at her mercy.
Before I can decide whether to lunge at her once more, Willa slows her pace and reaches out to touch one of the thousands of night flowers carpeting the forest floor around us. Instantly, the blooms curl toward her fingers, straining for their own piece of her power in the same way everything on the island does. In the past few weeks, as Letum has tied her more firmly to its magic, Willa has tied her heart to the kingdom and been rewarded for her love.
With each tender touch, each wondered sigh, a bit more of the land of dreams shines through the growing fractures in the land of death.
Affection rises in me as her fingers brush the petals, and for the first time in a century, the sight of living beauty doesn’t raise a wave of shame and hatred in me. It doesn’t matter that I will never be able to touch them when I have the pleasure of watching her do it. Who cares about feeling the silk of flowers, when I’m the only one with the pleasure of feeling the silk of Willa’s skin?
I brush aside the thick curtain of foliage, and usher Willa through the opening. Her gasp of pleasure threads through me as she takes in the private lagoon. Heated by the same volcanic activity as the walls of the Crocodile, steam curls off the dark water in thick spirals, providing even more privacy than the black rock walls and thick forest.
“This is gorgeous!” she cries, her happiness tugging at my heart.
The infernal organ of mine is perhaps not as decayed as I’d once thought, as it is rarely still these days, always lurching and skittering and expanding. Every small thing Willa does seems to burrow inside it like dynamite, waiting for the day it’ll all explode. But even that hint of uncertainty, of dread, can’t temper how much I love to see her happiness. She’s had so little of it in her life, I’ve dedicated the last few weeks to giving her every bit I can.
Willa flings herself over the slippery rock ledge without a care for the deep red dress she’s chosen for today, soaking the fabric as she kneels down to touch the water. She dips her fingers in with a sigh of pleasure, before shooting me an adorably suspicious look.
“You didn’t tell me to bring a swimsuit.”
I merely raise an eyebrow. “Your sudden modesty is unappreciated in present company, Darling. There’s no part of you I haven’t already memorized.” I pause to shoot her a wicked smirk. “Or had on my tongue.”
Willa grins. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Entirely.”
She splashes me with a laugh, before rising from her crouch and shimmying out of her clothes. With a wink, she tosses the wadded fabric of her dress at my face. I don’t bother to catch it, instead taking the moment to breathe in the scent of her lingering on the fabric like an absolute lunatic.
Her curves slip beneath the water far too quickly, but her moan of pleasure makes up for the disappointment, snaring me as surely as if she’s hooked me straight through the spine. I shed my clothes, trying to ignore the crunch of rotted plants beneath my bare feet, as I climb into the hot spring.
The heat of the water is a divine balm for my aching muscles. The short hike took far more out of me than it should have, and my joints feel, at once, too knotted to move, and too loose to hold up the heft of my body. Both my pain and my pleasure have increased tenfold in the few weeks since Willa opened the wards, warring for control of my body with an exhausting vehemence. And I’ve done nothing to help the pain, having forgone rest in favor of spending my time soaking up every bit of Willa I can.
Teaching her piano, watching her and Sam paint horribly, hiking through the forests, tangling together beneath the sheets. I’ve pushed my body far beyond its limits, but as Willa surfaces a few feet from me, long lashes beaded with water and skin glistening in the starlight, I can’t bring myself to regret it even while the pain grinds relentlessly through me.
That’s always the problem with Willa and I, though, isn’t it?
I can’t bring myself to regret any of it, no matter how much my loose morality dictates I should. I’ve never thought of myself as a decent man, but I thought I was a good king. One that loved his kingdom and his people, that would do what was necessary to protect it from my mistakes. And instead, I’d nearly damned us all once more for the woman in front of me.
And here, weeks later, I contain no remorse. I feel the regret lingering on the edges of my sanity, waiting in the dark to overcome me, but my selfishness is far too great to give it any weight. My want has sanded down the edges of the holes inside me until there’s nothing left for regret to hold onto. Whenever it reaches up to try, rotted vines pulling tighter and tighter, Willa looks at me like that and it slips back down from the depths it came. Buried beneath the weight of my want.
The irony isn’t lost on me that my worst qualities are both what drew Willa to me—and what will ultimately rip her away.
She swims toward me, her hair fanning out behind her in sodden ropes. Without thought, I wrap my fingers around her waist and lift her against me. Threading her arms around my neck, and tightening her legs around my waist, she leans her forehead against mine as she declares, “I bet you take all your captives here, don’t you, Corpsey?”
The absurdity of her statement releases a surprised laugh from my mouth.
“It’s pretty freaking romantic.” She tips her head back with a satiated sigh, gazing at the lush curtain of flowers, the warm, deep pool and the dark sky above it. “I bet they wouldn’t even have minded getting a little decomposed for a chance at this.” She wiggles her eyebrows suggestively at the death ribbons swirling a few inches above our heads.
A full-bodied guffaw barrels out of me. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who could make that sound seductive.”
“One of my many talents,” Willa hums in agreement, shifting her hips slightly against mine.
She’s slippery and warm; soft curves against sharply carved muscles. I’ve lived three lifetimes, and nothing in this world or another has ever come close to the way she feels against me. It’s unadulterated decadence, and for an absurd moment, I feel like crying at the multitude of sensation.
I’ve spent so long with pain, sometimes the pleasure is nearly unbearable. It is too consuming, too encompassing—it heats my skin and rearranges the synapses of my brain—a wave threatening to pull me under.
“I don’t bring anyone to this place,” I admit suddenly. I’m not even sure why, other than it feels important Willa know that as she’s trusted me, I trust her. She gives, so I give too, a game we’ve been playing before either of us realized it. I gave her my chronic pain; she gave me her nightmares. I gave her my magic; she gave me hers. I gave her my kingdom; she gave me her freedom.
Everything has a cost, but with Willa, I don’t mind paying.
“No one?”
“Not even Sam.” Willa’s mouth parts in a pretty little ‘O’ of surprise, and she leans forward like she’s desperate for more. She does this a lot—digs into every part of me like she can’t get enough of what she finds—and I find myself humbled by it each time.
“I haven’t even been here in—” I shoot a breath through my teeth, considering. “—probably over two centuries. Since before I left the island.”
“Why?”
I shrug with a casualty I don’t feel. “Because I made the mistake of showing it to my brother once. A boy who ruins beautiful things.”
A dubious crease appears between Willa’s brows. “You have a brother?”
I nod. “You’ve had the distinct displeasure of making his acquaintance. Dawson.”
Willa nearly flies out of my arms, her eyes growing so wide, for a moment, she looks like a rosy-cheeked doll.
“ Dawson is your brother?” she spits out in disbelief, shaking her head.
I run my hands absently over the curve of her thighs. “The family resemblance was more pronounced before I left the island and grew up. And before…” I trail off, motioning vaguely to the color of my eyes, the snow-white tone of my skin. The waifish state of my body. All physical manifestations of the death inside my heart. “Well, before everything, I guess.”
“I don’t know what’s more unbelievable…that you’re related to that—that…rat-faced asshole…or that he was ever kind enough to take you swimming.”
“Has anyone ever told you, you have quite the penchant for creatively poignant insults?” I remark with a chuckle. “And he wasn’t—kind, that is. Or at least, never without an ulterior motive.”
I glance around at the small hot spring, remembering my own wonder when I’d first laid eyes on it. Peaceful, quiet. Everything the world I knew growing up in the Hollows was not.
“I was too young when I was taken to remember anything about our parents. Dawson was the only family I knew. For a long time, I chased after him, hoping to somehow earn his approval. He, of course, only used my allegiance and naivete to his advantage.”
The softness in Willa’s gaze chafes against my skin, but I force myself to continue. “I used to explore the island in my spare time. I found a lot of hidden places, but this was the first one I’d wanted to share with someone. I didn’t know much about love but something about it…it felt special. Like it needed to be shared.”
Willa runs her fingers through my hair, gently scraping my scalp with her nails as she listens. I lean into the touch, letting myself only feel her and not the horrors of my past.
“When I came back, it was filled with rotting bodies. Bloated, decaying. Skin half-sloughed from bones and the hollow, empty sockets of eyes I’d once known well. The smell was horrid. Inescapable for miles. I couldn’t look at water for months afterward without being sick with the imagined scent of death.”
I bury my face in her hair to keep the scent from surrounding me now. To inundate myself in Willa—in something alive —even as I ruin the beautiful moment between us with my decay. Just as I always do.
But when I finally pull back to look at Willa, her face isn’t pitying or angry. It’s full of that fierce determination I glimpsed the first day in my throne room, when she’d fought against me with everything she had. And by the second star, I am so thankful for that fight—for her vengeful fortitude. The way she survives, no matter what, and demands reparations for what’s been stolen from her.
“We’ll make him pay for everything he’s taken from you, I promise, Niko. I feel the island’s magic growing stronger every day. When I’m the anchor, there will be death again…and his will be my first.”
Her words are lethal, and they sink beneath the cold armor of my magic to penetrate my heart. In my centuries alive, no one’s ever been able to stand next to my death. And Willa not only stands beside it, she understands it. The depths of its wants and the ravening edges of its hunger.
My throat constricts and my eyes sting, and before I do something ridiculous like throw myself at her feet, I kiss her. Languorous and deep, the sound of her moan driving all thoughts of Dawson from my mind.
“Your violence is the most stunning thing, Darling. And I doubt I’ll ever deserve its fervor.”
“I think you’ve deserved it quite a few times, you necrotic ass,” she laughs, sweeping her fingers along my tattoos.
I grin, leaning in to run my teeth lightly over her throat. “You’ll find no arguments from me.”
Willa shivers beneath my mouth, her legs clamping tighter around my waist. And despite the wasted state of my body, I have every intention of claiming her right here in the middle of this hot springs—of painting over the memories of horror with the beauty of us—until she says, “I wish there was a way we could speed it up.”
Her words drip like ice water down my spine.
“The anchoring. I hate waiting…it makes me feel like I’m going to come out of my skin. I want to be doing something instead of just waiting around for Dawson to attack again.”
My fingers tighten in desperation on her waist and for a moment, I consider fitting my mouth over hers and swallowing whatever else she’ll say. Lapping it up with my tongue and shifting her body over mine to bury myself inside her. To fuck her until she forgets my brother and the island and magic; until she has no other words to hold onto but my name.
Instead, I tell her the truth. “I won’t wish away one moment of being with you, Willa. Not for the island. Not for anything.”
One last selfishness in a lifetime of them, a final vow to the creed of my own avarice.
Willa smiles, open and luminous, and it knocks the fucking air from my lungs just as surely as a blow to the chest. She guards her smiles behind a vicious wall of thorns, never giving them just because they’re expected. Each one feels like a precious gift, a secret intimacy. One I never in a thousand years would have imagined bestowed on the likes of me.
I’m still reeling from the feel of her happiness, the feel of her, when her eyes flare. “Niko!” she gasps, her mouth parted in awe.
I don’t look—not as the sky lightens above us, nor as an alien heat flares over my skin. I only look at Willa, memorizing the glow of the rays in her hair; how they illuminate her hazel eyes in way the starlight never could.
The sun has risen on Letum, but I do not feel warm.
Because though the island has begun to heal, I know in the depths of my magic—in the deterioration of my body—my time is running out.