Chapter Twenty-One #2
That she was making amends.
That she was powerless against her fate.
With a gasp of recognition, Solana stepped one foot into a vast well of her gift.
In it, she felt the fate that tethered them to Supay by their very souls, and through that tether, she felt the unending despair.
No longer was she afraid of the dark that would come to claim her.
No longer would she allow it to control her choices.
There was a team at her back, a well of power at her fingertips, and endless possibility reaching far ahead of her.
Solana began to hum a soft lullaby Lucia had sung to her on their loneliest nights. When the pain of missing Masimu would become more than she could bear. When Solana was inconsolable with hunger those first months in a new city. When there seemed no end to their loss.
It was an old song about the power of love and the importance of dreaming, with low notes that made her throat tickle from disuse.
Solana let the notes crack and sway and slid ever closer to Nikolas and the dark, to its tether in her mind, to the well of power in the depths of her soul.
She waded and waded until there was nowhere left to go, and she slowly extended one gentle hand.
Nikolas’s chest rose and fell like that of a feverish bird’s beneath her palm, fighting to stay even as Solana scrambled for wisps of death.
A flash of light, of life, seared her eyes.
The tether yanked her down into the pits of the dark, to the place where caves of black stone pulsed with the curse.
A scream tore through her mind and shattered the images she saw.
Hands pressed to stone. Mists of blood and shadow swirling in the emptiness.
The same words said over and over like a chant, a plea, in a voice both familiar and unfamiliar at once.
Don’t do this, they screamed.
It yanked her deeper into her gift, beneath the waters of her well until she was drowning in it, clawing for the surface for breath, for life, powerless against the breadth and depth of the curse and its ties below the earth.
The words rose into an indiscernible screech and then morphed into the howl of a monster.
Solana’s throat burned with the force of it.
It was her screaming, and it was her body that was shoved into the present by an arm wrapped around her waist, dragging her backward.
Nikolas’s body was arched off the ground, Reyes’s hands both cause and comfort.
Oskar’s hands were on Reyes’s shoulders from behind, giving him that boost of longevity he so desperately needed.
It was Cora holding her down, whispering something over and over that Solana couldn’t hear over the frantic beat of her blood and the panic churning in her gut as she watched Nikolas’s body bend to near breaking.
A roar filled the quiet of the room. The veins in Reyes’s neck strained to the point of danger. The muscles of his arms and back jumped and shifted. The cooling waves of his magic lessened until there was nothing left but an icy prick that dissipated like muki in the light.
A ghostly breeze blew through the room, and then Reyes fell back into Oskar. Suri caught Nikolas’s body before it hit the ground, and they all stilled. She placed her ear to his chest and closed her dark eyes.
One second passed, then three, then five. “Alive,” Suri finally said, the tension exhaling into relief.
They lingered there for a moment, in a place of loss and victory. Everyone was alive, but Solana was no closer to an answer than before. The curse had been as slippery as the bloody dagger in her hand, the dark inviting until it had felt the touch of her gift and spit her back out.
“I’m okay,” she heard Reyes murmur. Through a sheen of tears, Solana watched as he extricated himself from Oskar and crawled toward her, eyes searching, hands reaching. They pressed into her legs, her hips, her shoulders until they came to rest on either side of her neck.
Nothing needed to be said to explain that their theory had been tested and failed. The proof of that was in Solana’s eyes and in Reyes’s defeated exhale. He dropped his forehead to hers and she breathed him in. The room faded away. The whispers of the dark dissolved.
Solana was left with the profound knowledge that she had failed. If there was a way to save them all, she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to accomplish it.
Every time Solana closed her eyes, she saw a dark world and a shadowed man, her hands covered in the blood of those she loved, faceless forms and whispered words and impressions of a haunted life.
And she heard the same words, a melody on the breeze, a never-ending whisper in her ear.
Daughter, come closer.
It forced her out of bed to pace in front of the window. It lingered in the racing of her pulse and the shaking of her hands. She was filled with wariness, with restless energy, with the need to run or fight or both.
Her feet were carrying her away before she made the decision to move. The thin material of her nightgown was no barrier against the cold, and by the time she made it to his door, her teeth were chattering.
It opened before she could knock, and there he was, bare chested and barefooted, his silvery hair loose around his face, his eyes locked on hers.
Reyes didn’t say a word as he stepped back and made space for her to slip in.
She didn’t explain or ask questions. Simply padded past him, aware of every sound, every intake of breath, the air between them thick with anticipation.
It was exactly as it had been several nights ago: warm, and messy, the smell of smoke and wood lingering in every inhale. Solana turned to face him. She swallowed at the weight of his patience. She knew he was going to make her say it, and she was terrified that he would refuse.
How many times had he made it clear that she was everything he couldn’t stand? Solana wasn’t sure what it said about her that still she felt the deep and burning desire to feel his skin pressed against hers, to know what his mouth tasted like, if only this one time.
She licked her lips and was satisfied when Reyes’s eyes flickered toward them. “I can’t sleep.”
Reyes took a slow step forward. His hands were in his pockets, but she could feel his eyes like fingers on her skin as they traced her collarbones, her breasts, her hips and thighs. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice husky, making her stomach dance with desire.
It felt dreamlike, seeing him like this, hearing his words just for her. She couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a dream, but she worked up the courage to say, “You. I know that we aren’t anything more than reluctant allies, but we don’t have to like each other to enjoy each other’s bodies. I just need—”
“To forget?” Reyes interrupted, taking another step closer on silent feet, his eyes penetrating as they held hers. “To feel good?”
“Yes.” Solana sighed. “It doesn’t have to be anything—”
“More?” Again, he finished her sentence.
He was close enough to Solana that she had to crane her neck to meet his gaze, but it was tracing the line of her shoulder.
One of his fingers hooked underneath the thin strap of her nightgown and brushed it aside, sending a blaze of chills along her skin. “Is that all you want?”
No, Solana wanted to say, but she bit her tongue. It was too vulnerable to admit that she ached for him. For his fingers pressed against flesh, pressed against her soul, tethering her to the mortal world that felt unfamiliar and cold.
Reyes’s finger burned a path down the top of her breast, over the sensitive peak of her nipple through her gown, down her belly that quivered with anticipation and heated all the places she thought might be unreachable.
Then his touch disappeared. “Is that all you want, Solana?” he repeated, voice firm, the question demanding an answer.
“Yes,” she hissed. She would have said it a thousand times more if it meant earning his touch once again, to find out exactly what it might feel like to squirm beneath him.
Finally, they slid into her hair and cradled her head, and despite their past, the fear of him she had once carried close to her heart, she relaxed into his grip with a sigh.
“Look at me,” he demanded, and she readily obeyed.
“I am going to give you exactly what you ask for and nothing more. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” she whispered.
And then there was no more room for words as Reyes pressed his mouth to hers, commanding every nerve in her body with the lick of his tongue against her lips and the grip of his hands in her hair.
Those lips burned a path from her mouth to her cheek to her neck to her bare shoulder, where he grazed the tip of his nose along her collarbone.
His other hand slipped her other strap off her shoulder, and then her nightgown was sliding down her body agonizingly slow, brushing against her hardened nipples, until it was a puddle at her feet and she stood entirely bare before him.
“Do you want this?” he asked, the weight of his gaze pressing against every part of her.
“Yes,” Solana answered eagerly.
Reyes dropped to his knees, his mouth just a hairsbreadth from her nipple. “Tell me what you want,” he breathed over her sensitive skin.
Solana arched into him like a flower toward the sun—helpless to do anything else—but he pulled back to wait for an answer. “Your mouth on me. Please,” she begged.
And he obliged. Like a man starving, Reyes knelt before her and worshipped every part of her with his tongue, and Solana finally, finally, got to slip her hands into his silvery, silky hair. She gripped it as he slid lower and breathed over the apex between her thighs.
“What about this, Solana? Do you want my mouth here?”
“Yes, gods yes.”