Chapter 4
REN
The hot plate has two settings: barely warm and actively hostile.
I found it in the motel kitchenette—and I use "kitchenette" loosely, the way you might call a shoebox an apartment.
A counter. A sink with rust stains. A mini-fridge that hums like it's plotting something.
The hot plate was shoved behind the fridge, coated in a layer of grease so thick I had to scrub it with hand soap and a washcloth before I could see the surface underneath.
This is what I'm working with. This, and whatever I could grab from the gas station: a box of dried spaghetti, a jar of sauce that lists sugar as the second ingredient, a sad block of parmesan that's mostly wax, and a stick of butter I'm not fully convinced is butter.
I cook because it's the one thing I can control.
The masking spell has been running for five days and it's eating me alive.
Not dramatically—not the way Atlas's nightmares eat him, all fire and noise.
Quietly. The way a low fever eats you. I feel thin.
Stretched. Like there's less of me than there was a week ago and nobody's noticed because I'm very good at keeping my hands steady and my face still and my heartbeat on the metronome.
Brittany noticed, before we left. She watched me rebandage my hand in the dorm room and said, "You look like shit, Ashford," in that flat voice of hers, and I said, "I'm fine," and she said, "Sure. You're fine. The bags under your eyes have bags. But you're fine."
I miss Brittany. She's the only person at Nyxhaven who ever called me on my shit without wanting something in return.
The water boils. I drop in the spaghetti and stir with a plastic fork because there are no utensils in this kitchenette, obviously, because why would there be.
From the other room: Atlas pacing. Four steps, turn, four steps.
His agitation buzzes against my skin like a live wire held too close.
Felix is on one of the beds, cards out, running whatever internal probability game he runs when he's thinking.
Callum is in the bathroom—door open this time, sitting on the edge of the tub, staring at his phone and not answering it.
Everly is cross-legged on the other bed, trying to read a gas station paperback. She feels like —
I stop stirring.
She feels like someone trying very hard to be okay.
The effort of it. The brightness she forces on every morning like a coat that doesn't fit.
I can feel it because blood magic doesn't lie—I feel the fatigue underneath the smile and the fear underneath the fatigue and underneath that, deep enough that I don't think she knows I can reach it, a loneliness so wide it makes my chest ache.
I go back to stirring.
The sauce is terrible. I knew it would be—sugar, salt, some kind of preservative that probably has a chemical name I don't want to know.
I add the butter. It helps slightly. The parmesan is a lost cause but I grate it on anyway because presentation matters, even when the presentation is gas station pasta on paper plates in a motel room in Missouri.
I make four portions. Set them on the counter.
Everly appears in the kitchenette doorway. She's still in the moose shirt—I don't think she has much else—and she's looking at the counter, at the four plates.
"There's five of us," she says.
"Is there." I keep my voice flat. Neutral. "I must have miscounted."
Her eyes flick to me. She knows what I'm doing. Of course she knows—Everly Grey can read a room the way I can read a pulse, instinctively, without trying.
"You're being petty."
"I'm being practical. I made what the supplies allowed."
"There's plenty of pasta left in the pot."
There is. There's enough for three more portions, actually. The box was full and I used half of it, and we both know I can count to five, and we both know this is about something else entirely.
I'm afraid of her. Not of what she can do—though that's terrifying enough, a girl who swallowed a shadow spell like water and walked away with four disciplines humming in her blood.
I'm afraid of what the bond means. What it does to me.
What it's going to keep doing. That I'll spend the rest of my life feeling her loneliness at three AM and her fear during storms and the specific ache she gets when Callum is cold to her, and I'll feel all of it because my magic has already decided she belongs to me and it didn't bother asking my opinion.
Four plates. Not five. A petty, stupid line drawn in shitty gas station marinara.
"Help yourself," I tell her. "There's more on the stove."
She doesn't move. Just looks at me with those grey eyes, and the bond pulls taut between us, and I feel her reading me the way I feel her—all the way down, past the steady hands and the even pulse, down to the part of me that's shaking.
"Your hand's bleeding again," she says.
I look down. She's right—the bandage on my palm has soaked through. It's been doing that. The masking spell pulls from my blood directly, and the cut I made to anchor it keeps reopening. I should close it. I have enough left to close it.
"It's fine."
"It's not fine, it's bleeding through the gauze—"
"I said it's fine."
She reaches for my hand. Just does it—no warning, no asking, just Everly Grey reaching out and grabbing my wrist like she has any right to touch me, and the moment her skin meets mine the blood magic flares.
I don't mean sparks. I don't mean a tingle.
I mean the door between us blows open and suddenly I'm in her—not physically, not like possession, but the way blood magic lets you feel another person.
Everything at once. Her heartbeat slamming.
Her blood singing with four different magics, tangled together, storm and shadow and chaos and the red thread of Sanguis that connects her to me.
The fear—Christ, the fear. She's terrified.
Has been terrified since we left Nyxhaven and she's been holding it in her teeth because someone has to drive the car and make the sleeping arrangements and ground Atlas through his nightmares and she can't be scared if she's going to do all that, so she just—isn't.
She shoves it down. Every morning. Puts on the moose shirt and makes a joke and keeps going.
And underneath the fear: want. Not desire—want.
The hollow, starving want of a person who has been fighting alone for months and is so desperate for someone to just be kind to her that it's become a physical ache.
A gap in the chest where connection should be.
She wants us—all four of us—not because the bond tells her to but because we're here and we stayed and she doesn't know how to stop reaching for people even when the people have been reaching back with fists.
I pull away. Hard. Fast. Like I've been scalded.
My hip hits the counter. A plate falls. Pasta on the floor.
Everly stares at me. Her hand is still out.
The cut on her palm—she caught it on a can lid earlier, a shallow thing, barely worth noticing—is sealed.
I healed it. Without thinking. Without choosing.
My magic reached for hers and did what blood magic does, which is fix the wound, because that's what I am.
That's all I am. A boy who heals things whether he wants to or not.
"Ren—"
"Don't." My voice comes out rough. Wrecked. I back up until I hit the wall and stand there breathing too hard and not looking at her and trying to get the door in my chest to close again.
I felt all of it. Her fear. Her want. The loneliness that goes all the way down to the bone.
She felt me feeling it. I know she did. Blood magic goes both ways.
We stand there. The hot plate clicks off. The pasta cools on the counter. From the other room, Atlas's pacing stops—he felt the flare through the bond, they all did, and there's a charged, careful silence from three men pretending they can't feel what just happened.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I shouldn't have—the blood magic reacted. I didn't mean to."
She pulls her hand back. Looks at her palm. The cut is gone. Clean skin where the wound was. She rubs her thumb across the spot.
"Thank you," she says. Quiet. "For healing it."
I nod. Don't trust my voice for more.
She goes back to the other room. I hear the bedsprings, the rustle of her paperback, the careful sound of someone pretending nothing happened. She's pulled back, tucked in, giving me space. The loneliness is still there. But she's holding it away from me now. Deliberately.
I stand in the kitchenette and look at the four plates and the pasta on the floor and the blood on my gauze.
Then I clean up the mess. Boil more water. Cook the rest of the box.
Five plates this time.
I don't apologize when I bring them out. Don't explain. Just set a plate in front of each of them and sit in the chair by the window and eat my terrible pasta and don't look at Everly and don't think about the way her loneliness felt like mine.