12
The Bargain
Melody
I barely see Blair over the next months.
Well, I barely see her sober . Only when I hear her coming home in the early mornings, stumbling through whatever run-down highway inn, motel, or apartment we’re currently staying in, swearing when she stubs her toes.
Usually right before she devours some rancid slices of leftover pizza I ordered for me and Aris and left for her on the counter.
Then she passes out headfirst on a sofa or a bed.
I undress her and tuck her under the blanket before I curl up between her and Aris, thanks to that damn guardian bond that makes me crave her physical closeness.
She always smells of men, of sex and alcohol, and it’s hard to block out.
On other days, she sleeps off her hangover while I drive, Aris nestled in the passenger seat beside me, a blanket ready to throw over him in case the police make a random stop—after I’ve made sure Blair is wearing all her glamours to hide her silver claws and fangs.
That magic, bound to jewelry, seems to work on her, but not on Aris.
He can’t shift here, and I can feel his unease and pain through our bond, even though he tries to hide it—which only stokes the guilt in my chest.
Thanks to Lyrian or those creepy shifters, we never stay longer than a few days in one place, so as not to put anyone on our tail.
I wonder what Blair’s punishing herself so hard for, though.
It’s clear that she’s suffering—missing her moms, and probably a lot of other shit that has to do with me.
I see her aura bleeding with sorrow. I can also see that a part of her hates me.
Our bond is so fucked up, though, that I sometimes find her curling up next to me and Aris, spooning me while I’m trying to sleep.
Not that I ever get the chance to talk with her about it. Because whenever I dare so much as ask where she’s heading, she usually ignores me or kicks the door shut in my face when I try to follow her.
Not that I could anyway, I’ve gotten that weak over time.
I can barely eat. Barely sleep. A strange pain has consumed my body.
Aris has explained to me more than once that it’s my magic, building up inside me.
But with no way to release it in the human world, it’s corroding me from the inside.
Hells, it feels like ages ago, but it’s just months since my magic awoke.
Every day I don’t spend it, it takes another bite out of me.
Turning greedier and hungrier. Not spending magic long-term is deadly for every fae, but somehow it seems to be killing me faster than other fae.
Blair had no problem staying in the human world for more than a year when she was looking for me, barely feeling it.
“Because she is full fae,” Aris gently cuts into my mind.
I quickly pull up the shields between us to keep him from my brooding thoughts. It’s enough that he sees me deteriorating; he doesn’t need to feel all my despair and anger.
But it’s not only my magic that eats away at me. It’s something else.
If I’m being totally honest, I suspect it’s the bond right next to Aris’s and Blair’s. One that is currently blocked. The dark bond to Caryan.
It costs me to keep those walls and shields up between him and me.
More than I want to admit. But it also hurts, whether I want to acknowledge it or not.
On most days, I try not to think about him—and fail miserably.
Not a day passes that I do not at least mentally pass this gate between our minds, maybe five times, or ten…
a dark, dark part of me craving to be closer to Caryan no matter what my brain says.
As if he were a drug and I, an addict.
Not to mention avoiding thinking about another certain man, with the same ink-black hair and amethyst eyes, to prevent my heart from shattering even more. Riven.
I suck in another breath and wrap my arms around my legs, trying to focus on some dark-skinned dragon riders with unusual whitish hair on a screen, battling another pale and blond one, whose eye is covered with an eyepatch like Connus’s had been.
I cringe and look away, digging my nails deep into the skin of my thin legs while guilt sinks its teeth into me again, as it does whenever I think of those wolves and Connus.
I nestle closer to Aris sprawled out on the sofa.
These are our evenings in the human world.
I usually sit by the window and look up at the moon, or Aris and I watch some stupid show on Netflix.
He loves shows with dragons or movies with so much clichéd romance that it makes my skin itch.
Not that he’d ever admit it, but he’s definitely a romantic marshmallow inside.
The days I spend reading books to him. I can’t paint or draw. Colors have lost their allure for me. To catch something on paper feels useless. I can’t even go for a run anymore. With my strength gone, I can’t run it off. I’m just…dead inside.
“Eat, little one,” Aris says, nudging a salad we ordered over to me with his round baby-dragon snout.
I plaster a smile onto my face, just for him. I know he’s too worried already. I know I’ve lost too much weight, that I look like a ghost. I don’t even need the mirror I rigorously avoid to know that much.
“It will get better, I promise,” he says every day. I just nod. “Now eat. You need your strength.”
I don’t have it in me to argue either. I can’t tell him that I can barely keep it in me, so I take the salad and obediently swallow down a few leaves of lettuce. Just for him. But I know that he hears me vomiting into the toilet at night because my body just can’t digest it.
“You should stop here, Melody,” Aris says one night, and I pause my reading.
His voice in my mind is unusually somber.
He lies with his dragon head on my lap while I read him a cute fantasy book where the men have membrane wings like Riven.
I’ve been burning through the series so fast the delivery service can’t ever bring the next book fast enough.
I love those stories, although the steamy scenes make me blush. And the bat-winged boys remind me too much of Riven. Well, so much for that—I’m twenty-four, and still, I’ve never been with a man. But it’s the least of my concerns. I’m probably gonna die this way, but who the fuck cares?
His remark startles me though. “Why? Because you can’t take another scene where he drives her wild with his, you know—”
“Sugardick?” Aris suggests, so unfazed I just stare. “What? As much as the copulating habits of humans amuse me, it is kind of repetitive, but I must say I’ve adopted a whole new list of vocabulary I am not sure will ever come in handy.”
“Maybe you just don’t like men with wings. I ordered another book. It’s about a war college with dragons, where the dragons…” I joke as lightheartedly as I can while I fumble for the book I ordered online, somewhere in the pile on the bed.
He rolls his eyes. “Why would dragons amaze me? I’m a demon.”
“A demon in dragon form, ” I correct him.
“This has been chosen without any affection for the actual scaled kind I took that inspiration from.”
“But I mean—would you find a dragon attractive? Hypothetically?”
He turns his head to me and gives me a look that says Really?
I give him my best grin in return and hold up the new book between us. “I read in a review that the dragons in here do it quite—”
“Enough,” he sighs into my mind, and I grab the book I’d been reading from before.
“Where was I?” I tap a finger on the page. “Oh yes, Hold on to the headboard, N—”
“Enough, little one,” Aris whines into my mind.
“I really can’t take another flimsy scene.
And besides—just know that fae fuck even wilder than in those books,” he continues, and I almost choke on a sip from my tea.
“But we do have something to discuss,” he adds, oblivious to my plight when I start coughing.
“Okay, the dragon book then,” I say, ignoring him and snatching the other book up.
“Melody. You do know that you have to go back at some point,” he says, unbearably gently.
I ignore him. “You want the flap copy or jump right in?”
“I mean it, Melody,” Aris rumbles over my own voice in my mind. “At some point, you have to return. No fae with magic in their veins can stay away too long or they will die.”
Right. It’s not the first time he’s mentioned this, but he’s never been this direct.
“We can find a way,” I answer evasively, but put the book down.
“No, we cannot. There is no other way, little one.”
“We can think of something ,” I retort loudly, getting up.
He trails me into the bathroom, his little golden wings tucked in tight, the bluish scales on his back dotted with tiny golden sprinkles glowing in the harsh fluorescent light. They remind me of the night sky in the desert, in Caryan’s kingdom.
“You know it sounds weird when you call me little one when you’re in your baby form,” I tease over our bond while I start to brush my teeth.
He growls softly. “Do not change the subject.”
I sigh, suppressing the guilt roiling in my stomach like bile. It’s because of me that he can’t go back. That he can’t fly anymore. It’s one thing if I don’t care too much about my own death. But in running from Caryan, I doomed us all.
“The guilt is wrong,” he chides, and too late I realize that I let my shields slip.
I slam them back into place, not for the first time glad that this doesn’t happen with Caryan’s bond, or we would all be fucked.
“I’m a few thousand years old. One might assume I can make my own decisions,” Aris continues.
I spit out and rinse my mouth. “I can’t go back to him, Aris,” I whisper back mentally.
“He might have changed. You could strike a bargain. You can’t get much weaker than this, Melody.”