They’re What I Kept
they’re what i kept
—THERAEL
Iam standing at the edge of Andrik’s forest, where Damon and I have waited out these last unbearable hours, watching the snow for any sign of them.
“You have to stop doing that,” Damon murmurs.
I pull my burning foot back from the boundary line. “I cannot stand here and do nothing.”
Damon doesn’t bother looking at me. “The curse is destroying your flesh. How much help will you be if you’ve turned to ash before you reach him?”
I stare back into the forest. “I was supposed to protect him.”
Damon sighs. “You did.”
“Did I?”
“Have you forgotten what you sacrificed to bring him back?”
I shake my head. “There has not been a sunrise I have not felt it.”
“You didn’t save him so he would never suffer.” He pauses. “You saved him so he could choose what to do with the life you gave back.”
Pressure I have mistaken for part of my own heartbeat simply… lifts.
My foot crosses the boundary, and I wait for the familiar agony, but it never comes. My head snaps to Damon. He arches a brow.
“Well…” A smirk tugs at the corner of his lips. “What are you waiting for? Go get your boy.”
I sprint into the dark, my boots tearing through the snow.
I focus on the soft clink of the gold charms in Damon’s hair.
I cannot let my wings return before theirs do.
As we push deeper into the heart of the forest, a familiar scent catches on the wind.
I stop so abruptly Damon nearly collides with my back.
“Do you smell that?”
He lifts his head. “The blood?”
“No.” I breathe. “The clovers.”
The clearing opens before us, and the sight of what’s waiting in the middle steals the breath from my lungs. My son. Kneeling in the snow, with Eden gathered safely against him. Alive. All three of them—alive.
I crash into them at full speed, wrapping them all in my arms. I nearly send the whole tangle of us sprawling into the snow.
“My son,” I whisper, my fingers following the fractures in his flaming skull. “You did it.” I laugh through my tears. “After three thousand years… you actually did it.”
I press my forehead against his, and I weep for the first time in ages.
“Therael,” he laughs. “I hoped you would come.”
“There is nothing that could have kept me away.”
When I glance back, the smoothest, suavest god of us all is standing at the edge of our entanglement, jaw clenched, his golden eyes bright with tears.
“Not,” he says thickly, “a single word.”
“Would not dream of it, brother,” I whisper.
“At least he’s not hitting on me this time,” Ashán laughs, his blue fire dancing with amusement.
Damon sighs. “I can hear you.”
Andrik’s soulfox, Savael shows up first, a streak of silver through the pines, and riding between his ears, balanced on his tiny hind legs with one paw braced against the fox’s skull like a herald on the prow of a ship, is a bunny-sprite whose light is cycling so rapidly through every color imaginable that, for one heartbeat, he appears to be on fire.
Droot is screaming. He launches himself from Savael’s head, sailing a distance no creature his size should be able to, landing square on Ashán’s shoulder. He immediately purrs, rubbing his face against Ashán’s flaming skull.
“Chirp!”
“CHIRPET.”
“Chir—”
Ashán laughs. “I missed you too, Droot.” He reaches into his ribcage and carefully withdraws a cluster of tiny crimson berries. “Look at what I found for you.”
Droot pauses his grooming.
“Robinberries.”
Droot gasps, snatching the cluster with both paws, and proceeds to shove four too many in his mouth.
“Droot.” Ashán’s shoulders shake with laughter. “Buddy.” He taps one tiny overstuffed cheek. “You have absolutely no self-control.”
Droot blinks up at him with bulging cheeks. Then shoves another one in.
Ashán scratches behind Droot’s ears while he happily demolishes the rest of his cluster.
“I do not think he will want to leave your side anytime soon,” I murmur.
Droot shakes his head so hard the berries fly everywhere. “CHIRP.”
Eden giggles. “He says absolutely not.”
Damon clears his throat. Everyone turns. The God of the Afterlife is standing with his hands politely behind his back. “... If,” he says with exaggerated casualness, “His Majesty finds himself… temporarily without suitable accommodations…”
I groan. “No.”
“I haven’t finished.”
“I know exactly where this is going.”
“I merely wished to state…” Damon smoothes a nonexistent wrinkle from his sleeve. “... that the Kingdom of the Afterlife remains open to diplomatic visits.”
Droot freezes, one tiny ear perking.
Damon reaches into his coat with ceremonial gravity, producing one of his infamous strawberry-cream-cheese danishes. “... There may also be tribute.”
Droot’s head swivels toward Ash, then toward Damon, down toward the danish, and back to Ashán. He’s having the moral crisis of a lifetime.
Ashán laughs. “Go on.” Droot blinks slowly, letting out tiny hopeful chirps. “You’ve earned a vacation.”
Droot launches straight toward Damon’s chest. Damon catches him as if he were receiving the greatest honor imaginable. An elegant hand resting over his harness. “Your Majesty.”
Droot stuffs his face into Damon’s hair.
I sigh. “I will see you in six hours.”
An offended look spreads over Damon’s face. “... I was thinking twelve. I’m sure Ashán has plans to… break in his new form.” He looks over toward Ashán and gives a slow wink.
“You are not corrupting the bunny,” I murmur.
“I have absolutely no idea what you mean.”
Droot steals one of Damon’s earrings.
“Let’s go, nephew,” Damon whispers. “Uncle Damon will even pierce your ears. Our secret.”
Droot flinches slightly.
“On that thought… let’s do clip-ons. There is no shame in accessible fashion.” He tilts his head, a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. “My Little Bird is here.”
Damien emerges from the treeline, his gait uneven, left leg dragging through the snow with every step.
He stops at the edge of the clearing, a dark hood covering his face.
He stares at Ashán kneeling in the middle of it with his mate gathered against his chest. His shoulders drop an inch and he lets out a shaky breath, something in his milky eyes cracks wide open.
He crosses the clearing as quickly as his bad leg will allow. He’s smiling. I have never seen him do that before. It changes his entire face—it takes the grave off him. He drops into the snow in front of Ashán and grips him by the back of the neck like a brother. “Ashán, you did it!”
“I did it,” Ashán smiles.
“Eden—” Damien’s head snaps to her belly. “She’s—”
“She’s fine,” Eden says, crying and laughing at the same time. “She’s just fine, Damien.”
He drops his forehead against my son’s, and lets out a raspy laugh. Neither of them lets go of the other.
“I thought I’d killed you,” he says quietly.
“You didn’t.”
Damien’s hand slides from the back of Ashán’s neck, over his shoulder. And he goes very still. His eyes lock onto the twin masses of scar rising from either side of his spine. They’re layered, ring inside ring inside ring, the shadow scarred so many times it has gone hard and dense as knotted wood.
Twelve. You can count them.
Damien’s thumb passes over the outermost ring, very slowly, his smile long gone.
“Damien,” Ashán says.
“I did this.”
“No.”
“I can count them.” His voice has gone hollow, hand trembling where it rests on his back. “There are twelve, Ashán. I can feel every one of them. I did—”
“Look at me,” Ashán says.
Damien is entranced, staring at that scarred, empty place until his breathing starts to stutter.
“I said I couldn’t cut,” he whispers. “I told you I couldn’t cut. And then I did it twelve times, and I got good at it.” His throat bobs. “By the ninth time I wasn’t even shaking anymore. What kind of man stops shaking?”
“Damien.” Ashán reaches back, closing an enormous clawed hand around Damien’s forearm and pulls until Damien is looking at him. “Do you want to know what those scars are?”
Damien doesn’t answer.
Ashán turns him until he is looking at Eden—at the flushed, freckled, breathing woman curled against his chest.
“Look.”
Damien finally lifts his eyes.
“That,” Ashán says, his voice cracking, “is what those scars bought.”
Damien’s bottom lip wobbles.
“Every one of them is another hour she got to keep breathing,” Ashán says. “Every one of them is another hour my daughter kept growing. Twelve scars because the only thing that stood between my mate and my own hands was a man who couldn’t cut—” his grip tightens, “—and picked up the blade anyway.”
Tears run down Damien’s face. “I maimed you—”
“You saved me.” Ashán corrects. “They’re not what I lost. Do you understand me, Dam? “They’re what I kept.”
Damien sobs. It is the quietest thing that has happened in this clearing all night, it is also the loudest. His shoulders collapse, and he presses his face into my son’s shoulder.
This enormous, silver-threaded creature folds down onto the snow, crying like a boy, and Ashán holds him, one hand cradling the back of his skull, and lets him.
Damon’s claws have dug burrows so deep into his chest that gold drips down his midnight skin.
I look away, because some things are not mine to watch.
When Damien finally lifts his head, he drags the heel of a stitched hand down his face and clears his throat.
“Jack says you look like hell,” he rasps.
“Tell Jack he’s welcome to come say it himself.”
“He heard you. He says big words for someone who cried on him.”
“I did not.”
“Big guy.” Damien wipes his face again. “You wept.”
Ashán scoffs.
“... Luci would like it noted that he found the display very moving.”
The forest parts for them all at once. Four riders come out of the darkness on the north side of the clearing. The Horsemen have arrived.
Famine is off his mount before it’s stopped. He hits the snow at a sprint, his hood thrown back, robes dragging through the drifts. He does not stop for me or Ashán. He drops to his knees in front of Eden.
“May I?” he asks.
Eden nods.