Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
Some distances can’t be measured or erased.
CELINE
The inside of the plane is exactly like the movies. Cramped, thanks to all the bodies, bags, and barely contained tension. My real beef is with the stale, circulating air. First, it was blazing hot, and now the tiny vents over my head are blasting me with arctic wind.
The witch who’s mentoring Hyacinth offered to spell a stone to drop us at the southern enclave’s headquarters, but whatever benefit-of-the-doubt energy I used to have died in the monster realm. I don’t trust magical transportation anymore.
The plane tickets were Ciprian’s idea. Faster than driving and less likely to be tampered with.
With my nipples threatening to poke holes through my shirt, I cross my arms and glance at Riven from the corner of my eye.
He’s as hot and cold as this plane. It’s the first time flying this way for both of us, and from the white-knuckled grip he has on the armrests, it’s not an experience he felt he was missing. So why is he here?
“Sir, please keep your feet out of the aisle.” The perky flight attendant smiles at Riven, but her expression is too tight to be genuine.
Obediently, Riven drags his long legs into his designated space. The attendant moves on, lecturing a woman three rows up about the strap of her purse.
“More cramped than you realized?” I ask, trying to break the ice.
Riven’s current body is . . . interesting.
A thin man with a thinner mustache, the face he’s wearing matches one of the IDs the guys had made for him.
He took one look at it this morning, sighed heavily, and shifted to match.
The only problem? Riven Anders Kristensson’s Colorado driver’s license lists a height of 6’7”.
“I need more joints,” he mutters under his breath.
I hide my smile. “Something tells me that chipper, eagle-eyed flight attendant would notice if you folded your legs under the seat like an accordion.”
He sighs. “I hate this skin. I’d rather wear anyone else’s.”
The woman in the row in front of us turns around to gawk. My smile disappears. The urge to kick the back of her seat is strong, but she would probably report me if I did, so I settle for staring at her until she minds her own business.
She’s being nosy, but we should watch our mouths. Talking about extra joints and wearing skin isn’t normal for humans.
The announcements start, and I listen, equal parts fascinated and horrified as the attendant walks us through the oxygen mask explainer and using the seat cushions as flotation devices . . . you know, in case the airplane springs a leak or we crash into the ocean.
I shake my head. Human ingenuity is impressive, but the lengths they go to for basic survival are wild. Even wilder: their fucking apathy about it. Miss Perky is doling out life-saving information, and no one is listening.
Except Riven. He yanks the laminated card from the pocket in front of him. Bowing his legs wider than a cowboy's, his left knee ends up wedged between two seats in front of us. He stares at the card, then the flight attendant, then the card again. His knees start to shake.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “I don’t think planes crash often. The odds are really low.”
A static band rolls over his face.
A man across the aisle glances at him, brow wrinkling.
Shit. I’m not helping. What does he need?
Tough love? Reassurance? I decide on a combination of both, pinning his trembling leg to the floor with one hand and grabbing his chin with the other.
“I won’t let you die,” I tell him. “If something goes wrong, I’ll rip those doors off—see, the ones four rows up with the red handle?
” I point his head in the right direction.
“We’ll go out through those, and I’ll fly us out of here.
You won’t even have to open your eyes. I promise. ”
Riven shudders, and I release his chin as he turns and rests his forehead against mine.
The contact lasts maybe a second, barely long enough for me to register.
His leg stops bouncing, but I don’t move my hand.
We may not be lovers, but we are friends, and I don’t hang my friends out to dry when they’re scared.
The plane taxis down the runway, picking up speed, and my heart thumps unsteadily in my chest. This is intense, but we’re the only ones who seem to think so. The kid across the aisle is laser-focused on her tablet, while the old man next to her is sound asleep, mouth open wide.
“They’re remarkably unbothered,” I whisper, nudging Riven with my shoulder.
He grunts, sliding the laminated card back into the seatback pocket before dropping his hand on top of mine.
I squeeze his leg. He squeezes my hand. Both of us use too much force.
Once the seatbelt light turns off, I ease my grip, but neither of us lets go. For the next four hours, we stay exactly as we are, living statues inside a tin can with wings.
I’m glad I’m not alone. The thought worries me. I’m in too deep with him, and I’m pretty sure it’s too late to do anything about it.
I adjust the straps of my backpack as we exit the plane. “If you tell anyone I was scared during takeoff, I’ll call you a liar.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Riven says.
I glance over my shoulder, then tilt my head to accommodate his inconvenient growth spurt. He grins, the skinny mustache wiggling like a caterpillar above his thin lips.
We exit the stuffy tunnel, and I blink a few times. This airport is way busier than the last. There are countless people, and they’re all in a hurry. “Gods alive and dead.”
“It’s a madhouse,” Riven says.
I roll my shoulders back and brace to carve a path through the crowd. “Ciprian booked us a car; we’ve just got to find the rentals.”
That proves to be more difficult than I thought. After a long tram ride and a longer walk, we manage to find the rental desk. By the time I have the keys, a folder full of things we’re not allowed to do in the car, and vague directions to the rental lot, I’m dying for fresh air.
We burst through the automatic doors; I take a deep breath and immediately feel like I’m drowning. “What the fuck?” I close my mouth. “I can taste the air. Why is it wet?”
“Humidity, darling.”
“I know what it is. I just didn’t expect it to have a taste. Is it heavy to you?”
Riven nods and grips the front of his plain black shirt to pull it away from his skin. As soon as he lets go, it sticks to him all over again.
It takes fifteen minutes to find our rental car.
Compact and red, with heavily tinted windows, if it has working air conditioning and brakes—in that order—we’ll be good.
Panting, I pop the trunk and hurl my backpack inside, dragging Luca’s flannel off so my skin can breathe.
What felt warm and comforting a few hours ago has been suffocating me since we got off the plane.
“I didn’t know it was possible to drown standing up.” I open the driver’s side door and get in, wincing when my bare shoulders touch the scorching leather.
Riven folds into his seat and manages to close the door, but his ridiculously long legs are everywhere.
I watch as he attempts to find space for his knees, then shake my head.
“Lose the grasshopper physique. If I pass out from heat exhaustion and wreck, you’ll impale yourself on your own joints and turn into a shish kebab. ”
“I don’t know what that is—”
“Chunks of meat on a spike.”
“Innovative,” he grunts, glancing out the window where several people are stumbling around the parking lot, searching desperately for their cars. “A human might see.”
“The windows are tinted, Riven, it’ll be fine.” I crank the air conditioning all the way up while he considers it. “And with this heat, they’ll assume you’re a hallucination.”
“How far away is the gateway?”
“With a working car, about an hour and a half.” I toss my hair over the headrest, adjust the mirrors, and punch the directions into the car’s GPS. By the time I’m done, Riven has chosen comfort over caution, and his familiar amber form is once again riding shotgun.
I don’t comment. I also don’t relax until we’re past the Atlanta city limits. There’s no lane splitting on four wheels, and the traffic is brutal.
“Your wings,” Riven says. “Is it difficult to keep them contained?”
I drum my fingers against the steering wheel. “Difficult? No. Uncomfortable? Yes. Especially if I keep them tucked away for too long. On a normal day, I hardly notice, but if I’m in danger, they go rogue.”
He hums, keeping his gaze focused on the horizon ahead.
“How are you holding up?” I was worried the plane would make him sick, but I forgot all about his motion sickness while we were in the air.
“I’ll survive,” he says drily. “It’s better without the stop and go.”
I nod. “Drinking something will help. I’ll find a place to grab dinner.”
We slip back into silence for a while before Riven clears his throat. “When your wings switch form, does it hurt?”
My eyebrows shoot up. No one’s ever asked me that before. “The change itself doesn’t hurt,” I tell him. “I’ve cut myself with them before, though, and when we fought at the Mouth of Hell, I got a few burns.”
“From setting me on fire?”
I grin. “Yeah. Once the flames are no longer attached to me, they’re dangerous. I’m not fireproof, so any secondary contact hurts like a bitch.”
Instead of being pissed off by the reminder, Riven chuckles. The deep, rough sound makes me shiver. I cover the reaction by messing with my air vent, but I’m not sure he buys it. I wouldn’t.
The night we faced off in the cage, his laughter terrified me. So much has changed since then. It’s hard to wrap my head around it.
“Why did you decide to help me?” The question bursts out of me, too sharp to be mistaken for casual curiosity. “In the tunnels. When Crag was hunting me.”
Riven’s made helping me a habit, but we both know things shifted between us that night. The night he sent me to die, then changed his mind.
I still wander those twisting halls in my dreams, screams echoing off the stands, my heart pounding against my chest. At the time, it didn’t matter why he did it—his motivations were secondary to my survival—but now . . . Now I need to know why.
I’m not sure he’s going to answer me. The clock on the dash tracks his silence, and I watch the digital readout change twice before he clears his throat.
“I ask myself that every day, darling.”
A non-answer with a tinge of regret. I could choose to be offended, but I keep my mouth shut instead, some sixth sense telling me he’s not done.
I’m too hungry for his answer to risk losing it.
“You’re mesmerizing when you fight, did you know that?
” He’s right next to me, but his eyes are unfocused, his mind far away.
“I thought it in the cage, then again in the arena. Your instincts combined with the stubbornness? Beautiful. Every time you survived, I wanted to cheer. I told myself it was because I enjoyed watching you fight. Something changed, though. Your fights stopped making me happy. They scared me instead. Terrified me, really. I was vulnerable.”
My throat is dry but Riven keeps his gaze locked on the horizon. I wonder if it’s making it easier for him to be honest with me.
“That night, you knew you wouldn’t make it out alive.
Every emotion showed on your face. I watched them all.
You didn’t beg for mercy; you begged for them.
Most would have given up, sinking to the sand to let death take them, but not you.
” His voice is raspy, and the hair on the back of my neck stands on end as I remember grieving my lost future.
“You watched the gates roll up, and you got to work.
Your best chance was in the air, and you fought to get there, giving it everything you had and more.
You were going to fall. It was my fault.
The shame—I could scarcely draw breath. I needed to look away, but I owed you more than that, and I knew it. So, I watched.
“Then the lights went out and the coup began. Everything I’d worked for was crashing around me, and all I could think was finally.
I ran. Faster than I’d ever run before, but it wasn’t fast enough.
I knew I would be too late, but part of me believed that if I could save you, maybe I could be saved, too.
And if I died trying, at least it would have been over. ”
I grip the steering wheel, my wings desperate for release. Braced on the edge of the driver’s seat, I wait for him to continue, but this time, he’s unable to break the silence.
I break it for him. “What would have been over, Riven?”
“The emptiness,” he whispers. “Your presence is undeniable. It has weight. But I’m only a husk, a shuck, hated, rightfully so, and cursed to mimic people who really live.
I can match every freckle and copy every mannerism, but I can never be, not even for a second.
Without a face of my own, I am nothing. And you—” He waves his hand at me, his voice cracking.
“You’re painfully alive, and it makes the absence of myself hurt worse. ”
“That’s bullshit,” I snap. “You know that, right?”
Riven looks at me. A warped line starts at his hairline and disappears under his shirt.
“Your face isn’t you; it’s just a fucking face. You’re the only one who gets to decide who Riven is, and it’s a choice you get to make every day.”
He doesn’t respond, and I swallow around the lump in my throat, ignoring the burn behind my eyes. “That night, when you saved me, you showed me who you were for the first time. That Riven was someone worth knowing, and no one—not even you—will convince me otherwise.”
Silence descends on the car again, and this time, neither of us breaks it.