Chapter 5 #3
"I'm here on behalf of the Guardian and the Keepers of the Veil.
" His voice came out rougher than before.
He didn't move from where she'd left him, three feet between them, and he laid it out for her like the truth didn’t sound completely bonkers, the font her ancestor had sealed five centuries ago, the wards failing, the only crossing into the Veil shut to the Shadowguard who had to reach Chaos.
She kept her face still and let him finish.
"You're the lock. I'm the key. We have to figure out how we fit, or Chaos breaks his bonds and there's no Reality left to come back to. Only you can open the way."
She blinked.
The words registered the way words registered when she was concussed, the syllables arriving and the meaning trailing behind them, none of it penetrating.
It was nonsense. It was the kind of nonsense Eva used to spin out late at night when she was drunk on whiskey and grief, all gods and bargains and the old prayers of her grandmother.
This was nonsense, and she opened her mouth to say so.
She couldn't.
The dreams she'd been ignoring even with her sheets soaked through.
The waking nightmare in Caracas two months ago, the one where the air around her had thickened until she couldn't push her hand through it, the one she'd written off as dehydration and adrenaline.
The visions she'd been seeing on the edge of sleep, smoke over stone, gold running molten, a man's face under a helm she couldn't quite see.
Her head snapped up. The blackout here in her hangar, the chakana on her ribs had started to burn, white-hot, the ink lifting off her skin like it remembered something her body had forgotten.
It had been tied to him.
She knew it the way she'd known the blade in her hand, the way she'd known the blood on her palms, the way she'd known his name was Jae before he'd ever told her.
The knowing arrived without permission, and there was nothing she could do with it except stand and look at him across the light and understand that something had been trying to reach her, and she had not let herself listen.
She collapsed inside.
The training held the outside of her upright, the way it always had, but the part of her that had been running for six months and the part of her that had been running for even longer meshed, and all she could think was getting to him. Having him make everything all right.
"Jae." She barely heard her own voice. The cushion slid out of her grip.
He was already moving.
He came around the couch in two strides, the gray of his eyes gone soft and dark, and he pulled her against him, his arms wrapping her so completely she felt the air leave the space between them.
The eagle's outline pressed warm along her back through the line of his hands.
He smelled the way she'd remembered, gun oil and salt and the clean of him underneath, and the wanting she'd been denying herself for a year unfolded inside her in one long shudder she couldn't have hidden if she'd tried.
She was lost.
His mouth found hers as if his lips had been finding hers for centuries, already in motion before either of them had agreed to it, his hand cradling the back of her skull, her fingers fisting in the front of his shirt, her body pressed flat against the length of him.
She knew him. How and why were irrelevant.
Recognition, deep and total and almost grieving, the recognition of a thing she had been refused for so long she had stopped knowing she was hungry.
His mouth was warm and slow and confident, and underneath the slow was something close to pain, opening to him because her body had already decided, and his tongue stroked against hers.
She made a sound she didn't recognize, something low and broken, and his arms tightened around her until she was almost off her feet.
She wasn't crying, so how could her face be wet?
She gripped the back of his neck, keeping his mouth against hers, hungry for more of his soft lips, the aching taste of him that fed her soul.
The light bloomed soft along the edges of her closed eyes, and somewhere a long way off she could hear her own breath shaking apart against his mouth, and she didn’t care, she didn’t care, she did not care.
He pulled back just enough to find her face with his hands. His thumbs traced her cheekbones. He looked at her like he was reading a language he'd just realized he'd always known.
"My owl," he whispered. “My beautiful stubborn owl.”
The name settled softly even as her body responded. A blessing instead of a wound.
She kissed him again before she could break.
His hand sought the edge of her shirt, pulling it up, his hot fingers against her skin as if he hungered for the silk. “So soft,” he murmured against her mouth.
She bit his lip and he made a deep, rough sound in his chest. Breaking the kiss, he tucked her head under his chin. “As much as I want to kiss you until the end of time, it’s closer than we think.”
“Don’t you dare make a joke now.” She dug into his ribs and he grunted, but his arms tightened around her. There was nothing she could do. He wrecked her body and soul. The only thing that had saved her was distance, and now any hope of resistance was fleeting.
Was the world truly doomed, and had she been chasing a ghost or something else entirely?