Chapter 2 #3
They did it the way a candle flickers in a draft—a small unhappy guttering, a thinning of the body of the flame, a moment in which the flame is still there and is also already on its way out.
The leaping smallest, suspended six feet off the silver with its tongue uncoiled, thinned.
I could see, as it thinned, the cinder of the held sky through the place its shoulder had been.
The other five thinned with it. They went translucent for a long courteous half-second and then they were gone, and the silver where they had stood was bare, and the silver under the place the youngest had been hanging was bare too, and the long wet dark line its tongue had been dragging across the air came down onto the floor and hung there a moment, dark on the silver, and then thinned, and then was gone.
The held silence resumed its breath.
The cinder above me—which had been frozen mid-shift, the lavender stopped on its way to bronze—let go of itself. The colors finished. The bronze arrived. The plain went on with the small slow pulse it had been doing under my feet before I had been able to feel it pulsing.
He turned to me.
He did it slowly. He looked.
I knew the look from the inside out. The look was not desire, although it had desire in it.
It was not appraisal, although it had appraisal in it.
It was the look of having found, after a long quiet patience, the thing one had been searching for.
It was a look that knew, exactly, where the load of the sentence was sitting.
It was a look that knew which word was carrying it.
His eyes were the color of mirrors.
Not metaphorically. Pure mercury. Polished.
I saw, in them, my own face looking back at me looking at him, and I saw my own face — the one I had not been able to look at over a basin in a hotel ladies’ room without shame, the one I had slid past in the dark glass of McNally Jackson on Prince Street — clearly.
Bare. Hair down. Hazel. Tired. Wanting. He held my gaze, and he did not let me look away, and he did not, in the holding, make me feel held against my will.
He made me feel held. The way a sentence holds a word at its load-bearing point.
The way a hand holds the shape of a thing it has been waiting to hold.
“Rachel,” he said, in a voice that was pure desire. “I have been expecting you.”
“Where am I?”
“Sweetheart,” he said, softly. “You’re in hell.”
Hell?
I felt it then.
It came at the inside of my left wrist first.
A thread of cold. Not unpleasant. The cold of clean water on a hot wrist after a long walk.
It traced, in a thin line, the small soft hollow where the radial artery came up under the skin, and then, a fraction of an inch above the heel of my palm, it went still.
It became, as I watched, opalescent. The color of the inside of an oyster shell.
The color of the shimmer along the line of his cheekbone.
It held there, in a small bracelet of itself, and then — without anyone having decided to draw them—sigils began to sketch themselves along it.
They were not in any language I had ever read.
The sigils sketched themselves slowly. They drew themselves in the order a hand draws a thing it has drawn many times before and is, now, drawing for somebody specific.
My jaw unclenched.
That was the part I felt last. It was the part that had been clenched the longest. There was a small permanent ridge of scar tissue on the inside of my left cheek where I had bitten the same molar for a decade, and the molar let go of the cheek now, and the masseter on the left side of my face, which had been a small private tight knot of itself since I was nineteen, eased.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’re just yourself,” he replied. He held out a hand to me. “Take it.”
I did as he asked, and the instant our fingers touched, I felt a surge—pleasure, want, envy.
My whole forearm flared, an electric ice climbing the webwork of veins and nerves.
The sigils were awake now—alive, not drawn but burrowing, shining through my thin rain-wet skin like gold leaf hammered onto glass.
The cold went in, and then in again, and where it touched the bone at my wrist, it caught fire.
I made a noise. Not a scream, not a whimper. A noise I did not recognize myself making. It was a sound that belonged to a wet animal in a storm drain, to a person who has never once in her life been allowed to want anything and now finds herself wanting everything at once.
The man—no, not a man, not a thing I had ever written—caught me as the world blurred and righted. He caught my jaw with his left hand, and his thumb pressed under the edge of it, and the frozen knot of my face dissolved, and my mouth fell unguarded open.
“He didn’t move for a moment, thumb pressed just at the hinge of my jaw, holding my head gently but with a pressure that made my next breath come very shallow.
The hand was gloved, but I could feel the heat of it through the lambskin.
When I dared to meet his eyes again, the mirrors in them had gone soft.
Not less reflective, only—less resisting. Letting my own face in.
“Rachel,” he said, and there was a catch in it this time, a fraying of the perfect even voice, as though he had waited too long and was afraid I would not hear. “You understand what this is, don’t you?”
I didn’t. I wanted to. I shook my head, and his hand followed, thumb rubbing the point where my pulse stuttered at the edge of my jaw. The motion unlocked me. I found my voice.
“What are you?” I asked, smaller than I meant to.
He smiled, and his lips peeled back from his teeth in a grin, and the sight of it was exquisitely wrong and exquisitely right, the way the missing word in a poem lands when you finally remember it.
“Envy,” he said. “I am Envy, Rachel Booker, Lord of the Argent Halls, the seventh and the oldest of my father’s sons, the last rival, and the first watcher.
I have waited for you through countless human empires and endless years of this place, and I will never not know you again.
” The last sentence came out like a confession forced by torture, simultaneous with the tightening of his fingers at my jaw.
I made myself listen. I made myself not look away.
“You’re a demon?” I said. I heard the skepticism in my voice, the disbelief. I wanted to laugh at myself, the way a person laughs at a child who thinks the moon is a god—but I could not. My mouth would not make the laugh. The words sat there, stillborn, in the back of my throat.
He did not look amused.
He did not, for a long second, do anything at all.
Then, very quietly, as though he thought I might not want it, he ran the backs of his gloved fingers down the side of my face.
The motion was not kind, not yet, but it was careful.
Measuring. As if he wanted to see if I would flinch. I did not flinch.
“I am your demon, Rachel,” he said. The words landed like the crack of a whip. “And you—” The smile again. Teeth this time. Human, but not. The canines were a hair too long. “—you will be my Queen.”
I think I was still trying to stand, but he was holding my jaw and I couldn’t move, and the cold inside my arm had stopped being cold.
It was a live wire now, crackling in exquisite, almost erotic pain, and every heartbeat sent it further: up my shoulder, behind my right breast, under the edge of my ribs.
I couldn’t see the sigils anymore but I felt them—crawling, rooting, reproducing behind my skin, staking territorial claims in the tenderest, most private parts of me.
I wanted to weep from the pressure of it.
From the impossibility of it. From the fact that I had, by some freak accident of anatomy or fate, survived almost thirty years before meeting someone who could hold my face and not look away from what was inside it.
It was a pleasure so sharp it was a wound.
He bent in, and with a motion both frightening and familiar, pulled me so close that the line between my front and his was measured in the heat I felt from him.
His chest was solid; it pressed through the coat and into the bones of my own, and though I tried to brace myself, my arms went up and around him on their own.
I could feel the ridges of his ribs. I could feel the silk of his shirt.
I could feel, most of all, the engine of his heart.
It ran so hot that I thought it would cauterize the ice traveling through me.
The world tilted. No—more than tilted. It inverted.
The floor that had been warm sky under my feet became the air above us, and the sky above my head became the floor, and there was a moment in which I hung between the two, suspended by nothing but the embrace of a man who called himself a demon and called me Queen.
My head spun.
Me? A Queen?