Chapter 27 Astraea
Astraea
I hadn’t been able to get out of bed when Nyte brought me back to Nadir’s home. I was told a few days had passed since. It wasn’t the wounds on my body that weighed me down, it was those that were still raw on my soul after my battle with Auster.
You were my everything.
Auster’s final words tormented me. Because my heart squeezed at them, but my mind knew that every one of his actions heinously contradicted what those words should have meant.
He hurt me more than anyone. Yet he loved me more than anything.
No, that wasn’t true. He loved what I could have given him, or he wouldn’t have betrayed me.
At least that was the war raging on in my mind.
Lilith helped with my wounds, and my side was almost healed from being impaled by wood.
As for the smaller puncture I’d sustained from the blade that had Nyte’s blood on it …
the skin around it had become gray with dark veins, and we all knew my life was on a countdown if it continued to climb toward my heart.
Someone entered my room. I didn’t turn from my position on my side, staring out the window. I knew I couldn’t lie here for much longer in my grief.
“Hey, Stray,” Zath said gently.
My brow crumpled when I heard his voice, and when the bed dipped I rolled over to face him, wincing from my tender wounds. He cast a warm smile at me and sat against the headboard. Zath reached to brush a lock of my hair from my cheek.
“I’ve missed you,” I croaked with my voice hoarse from days of silence.
“Of course you have; I’m far more delightful company than Nyte,” he teased. Then asked, “How you holding up?”
There was something about that kind of question that broke the straining dam holding back my emotions. When I sniffed, his face fell knowingly, and I shuffled closer until my head was partially on him.
“I’m angry that I’m sad,” I confessed.
“I understand.”
“Auster doesn’t deserve my grief after all he did.”
“Then why do you cry?”
“Because I miss the person he was.” I broke. Ugly sobs wracked through my body, but Zath’s gentle strokes along my spine helped soothe the pain. “I wish he didn’t have to become that.”
“You can’t long for the past, or you’ll always be stuck there.”
“What if it was my fault? It’s because of me he ruined himself.”
“We cannot shoulder blame for someone else’s actions, even someone we love.
You’re thinking you could have fixed him, but people are not mechanical.
You would have always chosen Nyte; nothing would have changed Auster’s reception to it in the end.
Unless you regret that choice, you have to find peace and let go of anyone else’s feelings or actions. ”
“I would never regret choosing him. Never.”
While I’d lain here for days I’d been reliving memories of the past, as if I might find the moment I should have known Auster loathed me enough to want me dead. The vision of the day I told him about Nyte kept replaying, like new details would unveil something then …
I pushed up suddenly, wincing at the sharp pain around my ribs.
“Where’s Nyte?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. He only said to tell you he’ll be back soon if you asked.”
I swung my legs off the bed.
“You need to rest,” Zath reprimanded.
I was already dressing, too flustered to care that Zath was in the room, but to his credit, he turned his back as I did. Stuffing my feet into boots, I headed out.
My instincts took me through the surrounding woodland until I emerged on a cliff ledge. The same one where I’d found Nyte right before he fell under his curse.
I looked up and I remembered …
Burdens are heavy on the ground.
I didn’t unglamour my wings before I ran through the snow, pushing with all I had for the best momentum, and then I leapt off the side.
I made sure not to dive in my free fall, instead letting my body fall in a weightless cradle.
Arms caught me, and my anticipation of it had me clamping my arms around his neck.
Nyte was so beautiful my words stalled for a second to take in his subdued pale gold eyes and the wind whipping his midnight hair across them.
“There you are,” I whispered.
“That was very bold of you,” he said.
“If you hadn’t caught me, I do have wings.”
He helped me maneuver on Eltanin’s saddle to sit facing him, half straddling his legs. Before I could tell him what I suspected from the past, his desolate expression distracted me.
He wasn’t looking at me. Instead his fingers lifted the hem of my shirt to examine Auster’s stab wound.
“I don’t know what to do, and I’m fucking terrified to lose you.”
“It might heal. We don’t know that it will continue to spread.”
It was a grasp of hope in the dark we both knew was weak, but it was all I had.
I said, “Do you remember when I was dying from being ambushed and struck by the key, and I came to you?”
“This is a kind of terror I’ll never forget,” he answered grimly.
My heart skipped, then squeezed.
“I think the attack was ordered by Auster, that he knew I would have to go to one of you to save me with the bond, and it had been a test.”
Nyte frowned. “I thought Auster didn’t know about us at that time?”
“So did I … but, looking back, it makes sense. Your father must have told him to goad him about us and perhaps to have a new potential ally in his pocket should he need it. To confirm if it was true, Auster staged my ambush by a group of vampires, hoping I would go to him to save me, and he would get what he always want … to forge our bond and have access to the key and my power.”
Nyte’s eyes closed for a moment. Collecting his wrath when the culprit was no longer alive for him to unleash it upon.
“You came to me,” he murmured. “Your intuition has never led you astray, even when people you trusted tried to make you doubt yourself.”
I held his face in my hands. “You have never led me astray, Rainyte.”