21. The Secrets We Bury #2
“How?” Lazaros muttered, and my eyes flicked to him as he crossed to it and lifted it again. Turning the undamaged box in his hands once more.
Again, I had no attention to spare for it, turning back to Alexandra and laying her down once more, but that was when I saw something that chilled me to the bone.
“Avert your eyes,” I growled to the others, and eased the robe back from her chest, just enough to discover what I feared.
The steady, shallow rise and fall of her breathing gave me precious little comfort.
Because I knew, deep in my soul, that this was no ordinary sickness.
No mundane affliction a healer’s tincture could mend.
This was of my world. Or worse, far worse… it was of the dark.
And looking at her, I could see it.
Beneath the pale skin above her heart, thin black lines had begun to spread.
Veins, but wrong, darkened as though her very blood had turned to ink.
Shadows that marred the skin, branching outward from her heart in slow, creeping tendrils.
Like frost crawling across a windowpane.
Like the roots of some black tree, sinking deeper with every beat.
I could see it move. Slowly though, thank every god there was.
But still, it spread.
Her skin was cold beneath my palms, cold enough that I had to swallow against the sickness it raised in me.
She wasn’t meant to feel like this. She was meant to be warm, and soft, and alive. A beacon I could find in any dark. Her skin should have glowed beneath my touch. Those marks of ours lighting like dawn, her heart drumming out the promise of every bright tomorrow we were owed.
I sent my power into her again. Straight into her heart this time, a flood of golden warmth poured from my hands and into her chest.
And something inside her recoiled.
An inky, frozen force surged up to meet it, slamming against my healing with a violent, unnatural resistance.
Then a darkness burst beneath my palms, so cold it scorched, and hurled my own power back into me with force enough to throw me clear.
It struck me back before ricocheting from my chest and into the wall behind me, shattering the stone.
Lazaros and Aster swore as stone crashed down, but I had no eyes for any of it.
Only for Alexandra. For the shadows I could see writhing now beneath her skin, throwing off every scrap of light I tried to give her, slamming every door against me.
Whatever had taken root in her heart refused to let me in!
A choked sound left me as I watched those black veins above her heart darken further, and the longer I stared, the more of them I saw, the slow and patient spread of the thing.
“This is dark magic,” Lazaros said, sinking down beside us, and I drew my jacket back across her at once.
“I’d stake my life on it. I have seen its like before.
” His jaw worked. “When I had wits enough left to see anything at all. When Demetrios wore my body like a borrowed skin, and I watched the world from somewhere far behind my own eyes. The rare moments he would allow me to see my own hand become a weapon of his making.” His voice dropped, haunted.
“This is the same. The same cold. The same hunger. It doesn’t want to harm her, Atlas.
Not exactly. It wants to take her. To hollow her out and climb inside, the way he did with me. ”
The words turned my blood to ice.
“No!” I commanded venomously.
I would not let it. Whatever it cost. Whatever I had to burn down. I would not let that thing have her!
“We are not staying down here,” I said, and my voice came out flat and certain, the King’s voice, the one that did not invite argument. “Not in the dark that did this to her.”
I slid one arm beneath her shoulders and the other beneath her knees and lifted her, and she weighed nothing at all.
A terrible, fragile breath of air against my chest. I carried her back up out of that black artery beneath my castle.
Carried her up the endless stairs, through the old prison tunnels and the cellars, and out into the light.
My brother and Aster falling in around me like a guard.
Servants pressed themselves to the walls as we passed, eyes wide at the sight of their king striding through his own halls with his unconscious queen cradled bloodless in his arms, and not one of them dared to speak.
I didn’t stop until I reached our chambers.
I laid her on the bed, in the center of it, on the cool, clean sheets that still held the shape of where we had slept, and drew the coverlet over her.
Then, for a moment, I simply stood and looked at her.
So small in that great bed. So grey against the white linen.
And I felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, the cold and helpless terror of a man who didn’t know how to save the only thing he couldn’t live without.
In the end, it was Aster who broke the silence.