I Have You Now
—SAGE
There was no sound to mark the fall. One breath, I was home, basking in the golden warmth of Eden’s soul. The next, the floor vanished, and I was dropped into a pit of tar.
The dark here is wrong. It’s not the gentle, velvety dark of our bedroom or the comforting shadows Ashán uses with Eden.
“Saevúra!” I scream, grasping at the dark, but my fingers close around nothing.
Magic spills out of me, searching for soil, for water, for anything alive to anchor into.
Tendrils of my power unfurl into the nothing, my roots scrabbling against a world with no ground in it.
Nothing grows here. Nothing has ever grown here.
The tether that connects my core to hers feels miles away, like a pulse muffled behind a wall of stone.
“Ashán?” I shout, the sound swallowed by the vacuum before it can even leave my mouth. I throw my weight against the suffocating barrier. “Ashán, can you hear me?”
Eventually, I stop screaming. Nobody can hear me.
Silence presses against my eardrums until they throb.
It’s so quiet it screams, and I find myself clawing at myself, desperate to tear through the static and find a single vibration that proves I haven’t gone deaf—or vanished entirely.
My fingers scrape against skin I can’t feel, and the absence of touch only deepens my panic.
My soul will starve in this void.
The memory of Ashán’s return after the dream dust flashes through my mind. The way he clung to Eden as if she were his salvation.
Is this where he was the whole time?
The thought paralyzes me. Ten days in a pit of pure isolation. I had been so angry with him when he took Eden’s consciousness. I threatened to have Therael separate us.
How did you bear it? I whisper inside my mind. How are you still sane?
I reach out again, searching for him so I can tell him I understand now… that I’m sorry I didn’t know before.
Time stretches and warps until seconds feel like centuries. I can’t tell how long I’ve been floating in the tar. Minutes? Hours? The uncertainty is a slow poison, dripping into my mind until I start to wonder if there was anything before the dark. Was Eden ever real?
The darkness surrounding me begins to vibrate, faint at first—a quiet pulse rippling through the silence—it’s Eden’s pulse, and it’s climbing. I can feel the phantom shift of our muscles, the slick slide of skin, and the unmistakable rhythm of her climax building.
He’s making love to her.
My body is out there, worshipping her, and I am locked in the trunk, forced to feel the faint hum of her orgasm while I rot in the dark.
Jealousy cuts through my terror. That’s my mate falling apart out there. My body wringing those sounds from her mouth. My hands, my mouth, me—
Except it isn’t.
Nausea rolls through my stomach, and my magic surges against the barrier.
“Let me out!” The void eats the scream, and somehow that makes it worse. He can’t even hear me raging at him. “She’s mine too! You don’t get to keep her. You don’t get to take—”
His words replay in my head: You get her smiles. Her laughter. Her body responding to your touch. I’m a passenger, begging for scraps of contact.
That day in the meadow, with Eden limp between us, and terror making animals out of us both. He stood in the dark of our consciousness and told me exactly what this feels like. And I pushed it aside, because it was incomprehensible that anything could be this lifeless.
The rage drains out of me, and there is nothing beneath it to hold its shape. I call my magic back. The tendrils stop their scrabbling and curl back into my core.
There is no way out. So I do the only thing left to a creature built for growth, buried in a place where nothing grows. I gather around the one warmth I’m permitted—the faint, muffled flutter of her pulse—and I hold on. The way he must have held on, ten days around a single heartbeat.
I’m sorry, I think at the dark. When we’re whole again, I will say it out loud.
A tremor rips through the vacuum. Before I can brace myself, the nothingness spits me out, slamming me forward with a force that knocks the air from my lungs.
The scent of honey and frost floods my chest. The sound of Eden’s ragged breaths fills my ears, and I have never felt so relieved to hear them.
My eyes fly open. I am still in the meadow, but I am on my knees in the dirt, my hands gripping Eden’s hips, holding her flush against my chest. Her pulse hammers underneath my palms, warm and alive, but before I can draw enough breath to speak, Ashán turns toward me.
—ASHáN
The void inside me is quiet for the first time in ten days.
Eden’s heartbeat is slowing against our chest, her skin warm where she’s collapsed into me.
My shadow lies draped over her as if it never intends to move again.
My skelva still drawing lazy circles over her kísh, every pass making her twitch and squeeze around my knot, pulling those small drunk sounds I will never get enough of.
The frost on the grass begins to melt as Sage floods back into our body.
I open my awareness to greet him, and then I taste it.
The cold, lightless residue clinging to his soul.
A dark I would know anywhere. Because it is mine.
He smells like the void. My fingertips still against Eden.
Where were you, Sage?
You know where I was, he whispers.
A sickening wave of guilt slams into me. The first thing I did when I escaped the void was reach for her with everything I am—and everything I am filled every corner of his body, leaving no room for anyone else. I didn’t feel him. I didn’t even look.
Sage, I didn’t mean to, I murmur. I didn’t know.
I know, he whispers back. His lack of anger is a thousand times worse than if he had threatened to separate us again. Ashán… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
Eden’s soft, warm weight shifts against us, her long copper hair tickling the spaces between my ribs.
“Why did you stop?” she whines, her pupils blown wide, a drowsy smile pulling at her lips.
“Just admiring the view, ash’kaela.” I press a kiss to her temple and force my skelva to resume their slow circles. “You make it very difficult to concentrate.”
She hums, squeezing around my knot in answer.
“Mmm. Liar.” Her hand drifts up, patting clumsily at the center of our chest. “Rahnové, why do you feel so heavy all of a sudden?”
Drunk on my venom, can’t even hold her own head up, and all it takes is her pressing a hand over our heart, and she knows.
“I’m not heavy, luváel.” The lie singes my tongue.
“Mm’kay,” she slurs agreeably, eyes closing, utterly unbothered. “Tell Sage I love him anyway.”
Her breathing evens out within moments.
She doesn’t know, Sage finally says. She didn’t even realize I was gone.
I stare down at her face, softened by sleep. Her chest rises and falls peacefully.
She’ll feel it when she wakes up, I offer. It was my venya; otherwise, she would have noticed it right away. And she did know something was wrong.
She thought you were heavy, Ashán.
She thought we were heavy, I correct. She said she loves you. She probably just thought you were letting me drive since I had been gone for so long.
Yeah… that’s probably it, he rasps.
We sit in uncomfortable silence.
Sage? I call out. I-I missed you. I’m glad we’re both back.
He doesn’t answer. Deep in our mind, his dim green-gold light shivers, tightly coiled around Eden’s heartbeat. I know how to handle Sage when he’s furious. I know how to match his temper, and fight him for every inch of territory in this body. But I do not know what to do with this…
I do the only thing no one could ever do for me. I let my shadow unspool into the dark, settling it beside that shivering green-gold light.
It’s real. I whisper the words I begged the void for and never received. She’s real. You’re out. I have you now.
His light flickers, leaning a fraction of a degree toward my shadow. And for tonight, that’s enough.