The Black Flame #2
I’d felt for so long that I had an evil, hateful beast inside me, warring with my own thoughts—which certainly sounded like what the prophecy meant by duality.
Or maybe it meant my mortal upbringing versus my true fae nature.
Growing up a mortal could certainly make me sympathetic and influence my desire for retribution.
Or maybe it was the fire and the shadows?
Alone, they each weren’t inherently bad.
Controlled shadows could be used to protect my loved ones, and my fire to forge instead of burn.
But together, the black flames…maybe those were inherently bad. But I could choose not to use them?
Did I really have a choice when in my vey form, when my evil nature had control?
Drayce refused to slip into his vey form out of fear of what it was capable of. Maybe I could choose that too. I had to believe I had some choice in these matters, that the prophecy was open to interpretation.
It bothered me, though, that word circumstance. That didn’t sound like a choice. I didn’t have a choice in the connections or broken bonds in my life. I’d had no control over Nella or my mother’s deaths, no control over Varyn’s betrayal…
I thought of him down here too. Had he really betrayed me, or was Malvina the cause of everything that had happened from the moment I set foot in Ashthorn?
I wondered what he was doing now, with his father dead and Malvina on the throne.
Would he fight to overthrow her, or would she control him the way I’d been controlled?
The worst of it, though, was the ever-persistent anxiety over her last words to us. What did she know that we didn’t? What game was she playing where we were just pawns? What could she possibly be planning that would make any of us go back to Ashthorn, except to kill her?
She’d asked me to join her in a partnership, and I had a horrible, sinking feeling she would stop at nothing to get what she wanted.
She’d already ripped one family apart, tampered with a child’s heart and magic, killed a queen, then made a king kill himself…
all just to be Ashenholt’s sole queen. She really was willing to do anything.
These thoughts chased each other around in my head day and night, awake and in my sleep. My head felt too full.
Noxie spoke to me daily, mostly just to check in, as I never said much. Some days, he came into the house and sat with me in silence. Some days, he gave me the space I asked him for.
I was detaching from all that I knew.
It was Aerie who came to visit me one day in the Arcanum house, finding me at my favorite spot among the books nearly a month after the throne room.
“Hey,” she said gently. “You up for making some dinner for us? You spoiled us, and now we can’t eat Orrin’s boring-ass food.”
I looked up at her, seeing the concern and sadness lining her face. I hated to see them fret over me like this, but they didn’t understand the burden I carried with all that had happened, all that was said.
“Alright.” Her voice grew stronger and more stern.
“Dray was all for giving you as much time as you needed to process what happened in Ashthorn, but not me. Damn it, I need you up there. We need you. You’re part of this family, and frankly, none of us stand a chance without you.
I know you fear becoming what she wants, what the prophecy said could happen, but I know you.
And I know that won’t happen. You care too much; you love too deeply.
Your fire burns too damned bright for your shadows to consume you.
Just…come have a meal with us and let us be there for you. ”
I fiddled with the ring on my middle finger, a habit I’d grown into since…that day.
“Dray and Noxie are driving me nuts up there, worried sick over you, losing their minds. If not for your own sake, do this for our sake. For Dray’s and Noxie’s sakes.”
She reached for my hand, and the contact sent a blossom of warmth spreading through my cold fingers, her glowing blue tattoos facing me.
She looked at them, then at me, and said, “Hey, I have an idea!” Suddenly, she was very excited. “Do you trust me?”
I swallowed and gave a slight nod. I wasn’t sure I even had a voice anymore.
Still holding onto my hand, she led me up the stairs and out of the Arcanum house, where I squinted at the bright sun. As soon as we emerged from the dark house, Noxie was there, flying in our wake.
“Thought you’d turned into a vampire. Good to see you out, kid,” he said.
It was the beginning of summer now, and the weather had grown hot and sticky. It had been nearly a year since Nella and I left Briarstead.
How had it only been a year? How had it not been fifty or a hundred?
Aerie walked me to male barracks I had never been in.
“Hey, Masocae! C’mere!”
The barracks was about half full, and the males and men present each turned to look at Aerie, then me. I was immune to the uneasy stares at this point.
A burly male walked over to us, his short sleeves revealing tattoos of all colors in various patterns, shapes, pictures, and words all the way up both arms.
He eyed me for a moment before responding to Aerie. “Yeah?”
“I think Naci here might be interested in some ink. What do you say, Naci?”
I blinked in surprise, glancing between the two in front of me. I contemplated for a few moments before my eyes fell on Aerie’s tattoo for her fallen avian family.
A smile spread across my face as I spoke my first words in over a month. “I think I would like that very much.”
Aerie lifted me off my feet in a hug and spun me around in circles with the biggest grin I may have ever seen on her face. She was clearly so happy to have me speaking and functioning above ground that I couldn’t help but feel a little bad about my time in seclusion.
Masocae—I assumed a tattoo artist—looked confused but followed us out of the barracks when Aerie finally put me down. Noxie followed too.
He led us to the healer’s house and into a small room off the back where he had bottles of ink in every color and a menacing-looking tool with a needle-sharp point.
“What do you want, and where do you want it?” he asked me.
I already knew I wanted something on my forearm, close and visible to serve as a constant reminder, but I wasn’t sure what. I looked around at all his art covering the walls in the small room, thinking.
When I spied the single black flame on a card he had stuck to the wall, I recalled what Bramick had said in the throne room. “Gods…the black flame.”
I had produced black flames because of my duality—I was the black flame.
I knew then exactly what I wanted on my arm, and I smiled through every sting of the needle as Masocae tattooed it on me before my eyes. The prickling pain anchored me to my body in a way I hadn’t felt since Ashthorn—sharp, present, real.
When Masocae was done, I let Aerie lead me to Drayce’s house, Noxie landing on my shoulder on the way and giving it an affectionate squeeze. He stayed there as I entered the house.
Drayce, Bramick, and Kellan were seated at the table, Drayce subtly removing his hand from where it had covered the scorch marks I’d left there so long ago in his absence.
He stood up from the table, looking from me to Aerie.
I cleared my throat. “I hear you guys are starving and miserable without me,” I said to break the palpable tension in the room.
Bramick laughed, Aerie went and joined him at the table, and Drayce came to stand in front of me.
Before I could say another word, his lips were on mine, and I felt the weight of the world melt off my shoulders as Noxie took off with a caw toward the table. Gods, I’d missed the taste of salt and smoke.
Someone catcalled from behind us, and too soon, he broke the kiss, but Drayce had eyes only for me. He eyed the fresh tattoo on my arm and whispered in my ear, “You look so godsdamned hot with ink.”
I smiled as I looked toward the symbols now permanently a part of me.
“It’s perfect, Naci,” Noxie said.
At the top, just under the crook of my elbow, were two stars, one for my mother and one for Nella. They sat as guiding stars above the symbol that represented me.
A single black flame.
The design as the rebellion’s symbol had been my mother’s art, I had learned from Masocae, a foretelling of what I’d become, whether she knew it then or not.
Not a symbol of destruction, but a symbol of hope.
I was…the black flame.