Chapter 16
EVER
Eli hops out, leaving the car on. And me inside.
I burst out laughing. I don’t know why. All the connections in my brain crisscross. Eli stands in front of the car with his back to me.
My laugh fades to a pathetic chuckle, then quiet, disbelieving huffs as I catch up to the moment.
What in the Calderan fuck just happened? And nobody cares. An alarm could go off, and they’d carry on, oblivious.
Eli strides to my side of the car and opens the door. His brown eyes are softened, glittering with flashes of honey gold and green and bordered by bruises on all sides. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”
I pick up a worthless silver coin from the cupholder and tuck it inside my bra.
Calmness trickles through me. “Actually, you can show me now that we’re inside.
” I reach for him as I get out, then remember my violent touch.
He shoves his hands in his pockets. The knives lining his chest cut the reflection of my face in endless angles, and I wonder if others can see how broken I am when they look at me.
I shuffle around him and guide us past the sea of glass and the front counter full of brochures and binders, snagging a red guitar pick from a display on my way by and hiding it with the coin and cork.
For extra security. We reach a small stage at the back of the room.
The top half of the surrounding walls are decorated with dozens of guitars hanging at matching angles.
Once he sees where I’ve led him, he grabs a stool from against the wall and arranges it two feet from the other one on the stage.
“Sit,” he says. That’s all the invitation I need.
Eli settles onto the other stool in front of a drumset. He stares, taking in the shiny metal frame and wires, the plastic surfaces—nothing like his nature-made drumset in Sonnet.
“Who taught you to play the drums?” I ask.
“I taught myself. I spent thousands of years inside a cage in my first body. I made music on any surface I could.”
“That’s… I don’t even know.” Unimaginable? Tragic and beautiful at once? I tap my toes on the wooden stage. Should I bring up what Kelter said? The car? All the unspoken words between us?
He shrugs his shoulders repeatedly, loosening them, then rolls his back and arms and neck. When he seems too floppy to stay upright on the stool and the complete opposite of his rigid self, he raises two drumsticks in the air.
The graze of fingers works its way lightly down my neck. I know it’s a curse, but I still wonder what’s behind it, who he is under there. The curse can push others away, make them want to run, but his actions, his words—they tell another story.
I shiver at the sensation. “Does everyone feel what I feel around you?”
He turns his head to me, sticks still waiting for impact, and serves up the finest fucking smirk possible. “Not everyone’s pussy drips when they look at me.”
I laugh. “You egotistical prick. Not that. I mean the fingers on my neck and the bloody taste. Everyone who sees your dark side feels that too? What about the breeze with your light side? The scent?”
He looks away, all his focus on the quiet beat he started. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The two feet between us feel like miles.
I scoot closer, scraping the metal legs of the stool noisily over the floor. “I feel things around you. Your dark and light sides have different effects. No one has ever mentioned anything?”
His brow scrunches. “No. And everyone else only sees one side.”
“Are you doing it to me then? Making me feel this way?”
“I told you I don’t know anything about that. And I wouldn’t do anything related to this curse. I don’t want it.”
Only I sense and taste and smell and feel all that?
I am losing my mind.
But what if it’s… whatever this is, this connection between us? I lean in, careful not to touch his drumming arms. “Do you feel things when you’re with me?”
He halts the rhythm, silence echoing in its absence. “When I’m with you, I feel everything. You turn my body upside-fucking-down and take over the beat of my heart like a favorite song.”
I look away, letting the desire sweep over me.
I couldn’t have predicted that answer to tumble from this man’s mouth so easily in all his lifetimes combined.
I swallow back the unease, only worsened knowing he can feel my heart going berserk in his own chest. Yet, in some manner, it’s a comfort to be felt in such an intimate way, not to be alone.
“Maybe your mother’s other lover could undo the curse. Is he still alive?” I recall Kaleida’s stories of the shortened lifespan of Vaile, their years cut short since the Separation. Calderans live twice as long, but no one has explained why… if anyone even has an idea.
“I don’t know who my mother was screwing behind my father’s back, only that he cursed me to punish her.”
I resist grabbing his hand, consoling him. “There has to be a way to break it. Every fantasy book I’ve read—”
“There’s a way.”
“And?”
He taps the drumsticks and returns to his beat with a heavy sigh. “It’s not an option. I don’t want to break the curse. I’d rather keep my dark and light sides.”
I don’t press him further. This is how he opens up, in his own time, his own way, sharing only as much as he’s willing. But what keeps him from breaking the curse if he knows how? What could be worse?
All in black with those raven curls and amber skin, he looks more like a shadow in the dark room than a man grappling with feelings.
“How did he curse you? Is casting curses one of the gifts of magic from the gods when linking?”
“No.”
Silence hangs between us despite the tap of the drumsticks.
I lose the smidgen of patience I had convinced myself to portray. “Dammit, Elivander. Give me something.”
His mouth tightens. “It’s not easy to talk about my mother.”
“Since she was your mother and your lover?”
“My father’s lover. I already told you she killed me—him.
” His breaths come faster, matching the quickening beat.
“It came out of nowhere. We were happy together. She loved my father.” He swaps back and forth between himself and his father, the merge of their souls and memories clearer than ever before.
I can’t imagine what that’s like, much less being intertwined with all his ancestors back to the beginning of time.
And Kelter.
As my heart begins to open, to let him into one of its gaping holes, it slams shut so hard my chest rattles. I throw a hand over it. What is wrong with me? Can’t I have compassion for more than a few seconds? Even after all he’s done, I want to. But my heart won’t allow it.
“She didn’t know about the mistake, about my broken immortality.” He slouches on the stool, then straightens, trying to find a comfortable position while he drums away. But clearly it’s his soul that’s searching for solace. “It was easier that way. For her sake. I don’t tell them.”
“All your lovers over the years?”
“Yeah.”
I lift my chin. “But you told me.”
He nods, so damn slowly it hurts to watch. But the beat goes on.
My stomach travels up and up and lodges itself in my throat. “Because I’m only for fucking, right? Not loving.”
He looks at me like he wants to pull me into him and mend my fractured heart. But it must be his own pain I see in the lines across his forehead, the heartwrench in his eyes.
“And for fixing you,” I add, looking away from the intensity in his stare.
The quietest words leave him. “That’s right.”
My heart plummets to depths lower than I thought possible. I reach for anger to extinguish the sorrow. “Then what are we doing here? You can’t fuck me. Or love me. Or barely talk to me about real shit. What’s the point?”
He tilts his head to each side as if preparing for a fight to the death, then this troubled, many-souled man sings.
And I can’t take my eyes off him. The way he attacks the drums with full-body movements, so fluid and jarring at once.
The way he slips into another world. And brings me with him.
His feet never let up, one hitting the pedal, the other the stage.
His elbows are loose and wild. He plays faster and faster, the sticks a blur.
And his face. That look. He’s living the song, breathing it.
He bites his lower lip and scrunches his nose between verses, letting the beat carry him deeper into the moment.
But the words, they lure me in. They tie me up and tighten their hold until I’m breathless.
I’ll part the heart that lingers
Play the part that stings
Be the poison that goes down sweet
And sweep you off your feet
Only broken hearts can sing
Don’t be surprised if you never walk again
If every breath is sourced from mine
If nothing falls in line
If you see a hundred thousand men
When you look into my eyes
Only broken hearts can sing
I’m more than a soul, more than a mind
More than memories combined
One heart is all it takes
One death
One breath
One beat
One song
He throws the sticks down and turns to me as he stands. I scold my heart for its scattered thumps and jumps, the damn riot in my chest. He pulls out his knife. “On your feet, little prisoner.”
My chest compresses, forcing a defiant huff of air from my lungs. My lips sharpen into a smirk. “Make me.”
His eyebrows nearly dance off his forehead with delight. He crooks his finger as if beckoning me close, and my body rises from the stool without my doing. My legs push me up. My back straightens. And my hands grab my ass.
“Hey!” I laugh.
I move my hands to my hips when I feel him let go of his control. “That’s it?”
A long groan rumbles in his throat as he walks me up to his chest, moving my feet with only his mind.
Or heart. I can’t quite tell how he does it, where he keeps that piece of me he took.
I can’t tell which part of me is missing either, but it brings new meaning to the feeling that I’m not whole without him.
The space between is unbearable, the forbidden touch torturous.
I stare at his chest, at the silver gleam of the knives, at each expansion, each sign of never-ending life, then my head is tugged upward without his touch.
He lifts it until I’m looking up at him.
Then raises his hands to my cheeks, holding them so close I don’t want to breathe for fear of contact.
“I can’t wait anymore.” Agony is scribbled all over his bruised face.
“You have to. I don’t want to hurt you again. Well, I do—a little—but I don’t want to feel that way.”
He flutters his fingers next to my cheeks as if itching to touch me, a quirk of a smile forming.
“You’re holding back your darkness. That’s why you can’t control the magic in you.
Emotions and magic are connected. You can’t resist the flow.
Magic becomes stagnant like that, uncontrollable. It throws you off balance.”
“I don’t want to be a killer. I don’t want to like the look of pain on someone’s face.
To think death is beautiful.” I swallow down the self-disgust, the shame…
the urges. “I’ve been trying so hard to stop it.
To not let out this dark cloud inside me.
This… this rage. These feelings. It’s getting worse—the desire in me, the need. I want to do terrible things.”
Eli’s eyes are pure midnight, the brown and green and gold gone, even the white is almost consumed by the darkness leaking out. The scar on his jaw sharpens. He licks those gorgeous lips, his hands trembling. “I don’t care how much it hurts—I need to kiss you.”
“No, you—”
But I’m too late. He pulls me closer. His palms cup my face, strong fingers on my jaw, thumbs pressing into my cheek bones. His lips meet mine.
And I love it. I love the feel of my warmth against his cold skin, of his tight grip, near bruising.
I love how safe I am in his grasp, how I belong.
And I even love the groan of pain that racks his body, the violent tremors that overtake him.
But I bury those thoughts as quickly as they surface.
He slips his tongue past my lips in a moment of sheer, wet ecstasy before tearing himself away.
He leans over, hands on his knees, gasping.
I hug myself, cold and numb from the surge of magic and the absence of his touch. The room grows larger as I shrink into myself.
“Shut up, Kelter!” Eli snaps up, gripping either side of his head as though he wants to remove it from his neck.
“Kelter?” I roll my head around the music school in search of him. “Why are you talking to him?”
“Because he won’t fucking stop talking to me.”
What? “Eli, I need you to be the sane one right now.”