Dark Mate (Nethershades #2)

Prologue Stalker

Eight months at her wall. Eight months of two feet of stone between me and the only thing in this world I want, and every night the want digs in deeper.

The Cage sits in a clearing the canopy isn’t allowed to swallow.

Cut stone, a fountain I hear when the wind drops, slatted windows with gold light bleeding through the gaps.

I came down out of the understory the first night her scent reached me, and I have not gone far since.

I sleep against her wall. I wake against her wall.

I hold miles of canopy that answer to my mark, and I have made myself small at the foot of a stone box for eight months over a smell.

Her smell.

I don’t have the word for it. I had words once, three tongues’ worth, before the change tore them out of my mouth and left me grubbing for each one like a stone off a riverbed.

None of them fit her. Green. Warm. Something under it that stops my breath in my chest and stills my tail against the moss.

Something that is only hers, that I have started to need the way I need water, the way I need the dark.

Eight months of breathing it through rock, and my body’s gone stupid with it.

Half-hard most nights for no reason but the wind shifting and bringing me more of her.

And under it, the wrongness. They’ve put something in her.

A flatness laid over her scent like frost over grass.

A sweetness no living body makes on its own.

A quiet poured into her from somewhere outside herself.

Morning after morning I smell it go down, the edges of her smoothing, gentling, until the obedience comes off her clear across the clearing.

I know that smell.

I know it from the inside.

Someone kept me once.

A pen smaller than this clearing. A chain the weight of my own arm.

A hand that fed me and called the feeding kindness.

A blade drawn slow across my throat—not to kill, to mark, so I’d wear the line forever and know whose it was.

My horn snapped against a wall they threw me into and healed crooked, jutting wrong, because no one there cared to set it straight.

I came out of that place with a broken horn, a split throat, and no memory of the name I was born with.

The change took it the way it took every word I owned but one, whole, clean, gone, until I couldn’t find even the shape of the sound someone must have called me once.

It left me a single word.

Kept.

It’s the cruelest word there is. Not caged. Not chained. Kept, fed because you’re useful, kept whole because someone wants the use of you, smiled at through the bars while the lock stays shut. I learned the whole weight of it in that pen, and I have never once set it down.

So I know exactly what’s being done to her behind that stone. They’re keeping her the way I was kept. And I know exactly what it makes me, to stand here wanting to do the same.

I want to do it anyway.

There it is, with nothing clean wrapped around it.

I could tell you I mean to save her. It would be a lie.

The rut doesn’t save anything. The rut wants, and it has wanted her for eight months through solid rock, and it is nearly done waiting.

When it breaks I go through that wall, and I take her, and I keep her.

I’ll be the thing I hate, with my eyes wide open, because the wanting is bigger than the hating, and in me it has always won.

The night she found me, I had my spine to her wall.

A north face, no sun in it, no warmth in the stone but mine.

I’d folded down into the gap where the root-buttress meets the foundation, too big for it, jammed there anyway because it’s the nearest the wall will let me get to her.

Wings tucked. Breath slow. Close enough to lie to myself that the stone was thin.

And then—heat. Small. On the far side. A palm, flat against the rock, right over my spine. Holding. Not passing by, not leaning a moment and gone. Holding, the way you hold a thing you’re trying to understand.

Everything in me went still.

Out of all of them behind that wall, drugged, smiling, asleep on their feet, one had walked into a cold black corridor and laid her hand on the single warm stone in the whole Cage.

Because she felt me. Because some part of her the drug hadn’t drowned yet leaned toward the heat and needed to know what was breathing on the other side of it.

I pressed back.

I shouldn’t have. I’m the thing the robed ones use to keep them quiet—the death in the canopy, the reason the windows are barred.

If she’d known what her hand was resting against, she’d have run screaming.

I pressed my spine to the stone beneath her palm and let the warmth climb up to meet her, and for one held breath there was a hand, a back, two feet of rock that meant nothing at all.

Then footsteps somewhere in her dark, and the heat lifted away.

I clawed the wall when she was gone. A snarl tore out of me, low and helpless, and I couldn’t stop either one.

Four pale lines raked down the face of the stone, three stories up where nothing should be able to climb, put there with my own hand, so she’d find them and wonder, so the wondering would keep her leaning toward the seam.

I’ve worked that wall every night since.

Found where the mortar’s gone soft. Found the window that won’t sit flush.

The Cage was built to keep things out, and slow, patient, I have learned every place it fails.

The patience is nearly spent.

The rut climbs in me now, heavy, close, a pressure with her buried in the middle of it that I still have no word for and no longer need. Soon I stop breathing her through stone. Soon I go through the wall.

I’ll carry her down out of the bars they dressed up as a garden, away from the cup and the smile and the smoothing, into the deep dark where there’s no wall left for her hand to find.

She’ll fight me. She should. Whatever part of her they couldn’t pour quiet over should fight everything that comes for it, and I’ll let her keep the fighting, because it’s hers, and because it’s the last proof the drug didn’t finish her.

But she is mine. The rut settled that eight months ago, through two feet of stone, and nothing left in me argues it.

She put her hand on my wall.

She doesn’t know yet that the wall is coming for her.