Thirty-Three Hours
—ASHáN
She’s gone. There is a screaming absence where she should be.
I claw up out of the dark toward consciousness, and the first sensation to greet me is her, or the lack of her.
I reach for the bond on instinct, the way I have a thousand times a day since I first felt her, and the living thread that ties her to the center of me is thin.
The wrongness of it shocks me awake so fast I almost fall from whatever I’m lying on.
Something cold and heavy pulls at my wrists, snapping taut the instant I surge upward.
Magic bites into my skin. I’m in chains.
Sage? I reach for my other half, and he’s there, thank the gods he’s there, surfacing groggily. We’re bound. Someone has chained us up. Where is she? Why can’t I feel her? Why is the bond—
Easy, he slurs. I’m here. I’m awake. Let me—
“He’s coming around,” a familiar voice says. “Therael. He’s waking.”
I wrench my head toward the sound, and the room swims. We’re inside the house, and sitting close, face riddled with grief, is Therael. And beyond him, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, is Damon.
“Where is she!” I scream, pulling against the chains. “Where is my mate? Why can’t I feel her? What did you do to the bond?”
“Ashán,” Therael murmurs, leaning in, his hands open, placating me the way you’d approach something wounded and dangerous. “She is safe. I swear to you on my own bond, she is safe. She is with Andrik and Lumi, in the forest. No harm will come to her there.”
The relief lasts a single breath before it’s swallowed whole by the agony underneath it.
“Then why can’t I feel her?” I whimper. “How long has she been gone? I can’t—I can’t remember. How long?!”
Therael and Damon exchange a look.
“Going on fourteen hours,” Damon murmurs.
Fourteen hours. The longest we have ever been apart is a handful of minutes. Fourteen hours without her is a kind of starvation I didn’t know a body could survive.
“I have to go to her.” I pull against the chains hard enough that the magic in them flares hot against my skin. “Take these off, Therael. I have to—”
“You can’t,” Damon says flatly. “Not yet.”
“Watch me—”
Ashán, Sage warns, his calm pouring into me like cool water.
Stop pulling. You’ll only hurt us, and we need to be whole to get to her.
Let them talk. Then we’ll go. He pauses, and underneath the calm, I feel his desperate need thrumming just as hard as mine.
I want her too. Gods, I want her too. But losing our mind won’t get us to her any faster.
“Talk,” I rasp. “Whatever it is. Talk fast. Because the second you’re done, I am going to her, chains or no chains. I’ll pull this whole house along with me.” I hold his gaze. “Why does the bond feel like it’s failing?”
Therael closes his eyes.
“Because that,” he says quietly, “is what the curse was always meant to do. And we do not have long before it’s done.”
“Explain,” Sage insists.
Therael draws in a long breath.
“What’s happening to you is not unique. It is not new.
It is not even rare.” His eyes move over us.
“It is the oldest wound in creation, and you are only the latest to bleed from it. Every god you have ever heard me name carries the same curse. Every one of us has a mate. And every one of us has spent eternity being torn from them—by distance, by forgetting, by a hundred cruelties you cannot even begin to imagine.” His jaw tightens.
“Andrik. Damon. Myself. All of us. And it does not stop with you. All of the hybrids carry a piece of it. Every soul-split creature we’ve ever set loose into the world inherits the same broken thing—a bond the world will spend its whole strength trying to break. ”
I stare at him, slack-jawed and uncomprehending. The words are too big. They don’t fit through the narrow, panicked channel of my mind, which has room for exactly one thing right now, and that thing is her.
“Thousands of years before your first soul was created,” Damon says quietly.
“That’s how long we’ve been fighting this thing.
” His gold charms clink softly in his hair.
“There’s a hand behind the curtain, pulling the strings of every cursed bond in creation.
We’ve never found it. Not in all this time. ”
Someone is doing this. That’s the only part that cuts through the chaos. Someone is doing this to us, on purpose.
“I don’t—” My voice cracks. The chains tug at my wrists.
“I don’t care who. I don’t care about the curtain or ten thousand years of history—I care that the woman I love is somewhere else and minute by minute I feel her less, and yet you have me chained to a table like an animal while the bond between us burns down like a wick.
So tell me the part that matters. Tell me how I get to her, and how I make it stop. ”
Therael and Damon exchange another of those looks. “We can’t tell you everything, Ashán,” Therael murmurs. “You know we are only able to tell you as much as you’ve figured it out for yourself.”
“So what we know,” I murmur sarcastically.
“Is that my first shift was triggered by something. And this curse we all carry was woven into my first shift, and it tried dragging me toward Eden with the sole mission of taking her soul with the scythe.” I study Therael’s face, and then Damon’s. Neither of them gives anything away.
“The scythe had their names engraved on it,” I press on. “Eden’s, and Vaelína’s. The pull was like nothing I have ever felt before. I couldn’t stop it. I held onto one of the trees outside, but my wings—”
The words hitch in my throat. A cold sweat breaks out across my forehead as I remember the sound of my own wings being hacked off. I try to twitch them. There is no response.
“They’re gone,” I breathe. “My wings. They aren’t coming back… are they?”
“We have no way of knowing for sure,” Therael whispers. “But the chance is vanishingly small that they would ever come back. Runak did the only thing that could be done. The flesh was so damaged, Ashán. He closed it for good. It was that, or watch the loop tear you apart for the next—”
Damon clamps his hand over Therael’s shoulder.
“The next what, Therael?”
He parts his lips to speak, but the words stall before they hit the air. The muscles in his throat visibly squeeze.
“He can’t, Little Reaper,” Damon says. “The spell has him by the throat. If he tries to force it past his teeth, it’ll choke him to death right in front of you—well… not death. He cannot die. But you understand what I’m trying to say.”
The next what? Sage says.
“Time is involved, isn’t it?” I pant. “The next—what? Century? Millennium?”
Damon’s eyes find mine. “There is a time constraint,” he says. “But we’re not talking about a century.”
“Less?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Fifty?”
He stays silent.
“Twenty-five?”
Nothing.
“Ten?” I yell, the chains rattling as I surge forward.
“Five?”
“A year?”
“Six months?”
“A month?”
“Two weeks?”
“Days?”
Damon’s eyes fall to the floor.
Horror slams into my chest. “How many days?”
“Four?”
“Two?”
Therael nods his head.
“Two days?” I whisper. “I have two days to fix this?”
“You have exactly thirty-three hours, forty-four minutes, and sixteen seconds left. You’re counting in hours now, Ashán,” Therael rasps.
“If you don’t break these vreshing chains, I will,” Sage growls.
“Easy, both of you.” Damon lifts a hand, and the spelled iron at my wrists hums, the golden runes along the links flaring crimson a single time before they go dark. “No need to break anything. They’ve done their work.”
The chains fall away.
I launch myself off the wood, the lack of balance from my missing wings sending me crashing heavily against Therael’s legs. My newly closed back wails at the sudden jarring movement.
Therael catches my wrist.
“Ashán, listen to me. The path will be hard. Harder than you know yet. The closer the clock gets to zero, the worse the curse will press on you, and there will be moments—” His throat works, the spell choking him again.
He changes course, saying only what it allows.
“There will be moments—when they come, remember who you are. Whatever happens, however far it drags you, you can make it through if you just steer true. Do you understand?”
I don’t. I don’t understand what moments he means, or why his face is gray. But I need to get to her, so I can think about it on the way.
“I’ll remember,” I tell him.
“Then go.” Therael releases my wrists. “Go, my son. Run like the world is ending.”
Because if I don’t reach her in time… it will be.
Hold on, ash’kaela. I throw it down the bond. Hold on. We’re coming.
… and this time, we’re going to tell you everything.