Chapter 31
Absence of Fear
E
There’s a pull between my shoulders, faint at first. Not pain—pressure. A memory bubbling up from inside my skin. Wind in my hair. The clean, sharp rush of clouds past my face. The vast drop beneath me, riddled with broken stones, the kind that shatters bone.
The fear of falling. The thrill of flying.
Wings.
The word doesn’t feel foreign. It bleeds and aches. From the moment it leaves her mouth, I know she’s right.
I don’t argue with Nick’s claim that Max is probably too groggy. I don’t hear Max insisting that she’s not in her right mind. Their voices reach my ears, but they don’t take hold. I’m already heading for the edge.
The slope falls away into a steep descent of rock and churning water, the river far below smashing itself against stone in a constant, grinding roar. Mist rises in thin veils at the base of the rapids.
The fall is lethal, especially since I’m not sure I can swim.
I step closer and unbutton what’s left of my shirt, shrugging it off, the fabric already half-burnt from Max’s magic.
Muscles and sinew shift as the pull in my back deepens. A slow, insistent itch crawls along my spine, like blood returning to a numb limb after it’s been unused for too long. My fingers flex at my sides, the dauntless need to jump eclipsing everything else.
Max calls my name, and there’s a thread of fear in her voice. A plea.
But if I hesitate, if I let myself doubt for one second, I might lose the fragile, undeniable certainty humming just beneath my skin.
And so, without looking back, I step off the edge.
A violent wind surges up to meet me as the water rushes closer, the river’s roar rising to meet me. For a heartbeat, there is only the fall—the weight of it, the speed, the inevitability.
My back draws tight, that buried ache snapping into something stronger, wider, as if space is being carved out of me from the inside. The air shifts again, catching in my wings, lifting me up, up, up.
I rise high in the sky, above the rivers and cliffs, higher and higher.
The fear is still there, bright and clean as the rocks rush up to meet me—but there’s joy in it, too.
Yesterday, I couldn’t even touch Max, and now I can fly.
I circle back to find Max, and it’s easier. Not effortless, not yet, but the wings hold as they should, and bend when I ask them to.
Max and Nick are half-hidden in that shallow nook of roots and pine needles, way below, and for the first time. They look so different from above. So small and fragile.
Max tilts her head up. Even from here, I can feel her lock onto me—not my body, not something she can see clearly, but the shape of me in the air. The outline of my wings carving through the light.
They’re not fully there. Not solid. But they catch enough of the world to be seen—translucent spans stretching wide on either side of me, bending the sunlight, scattering it in faint, shifting prisms. More visible than the rest of me.
Nick just stares as I soar closer. “Well… I’ll be damned.”
Max doesn’t speak right away. There’s something haunted in her gaze.
I lower carefully, the steep slope threatening to throw off my balance the second my feet touch down. The wings twitch behind me—too large for the space, brushing against branches that snap and bend in response.
Max’s eyes track the movement.
“By the Dark One—” Nick chokes.
Max attempts to push herself up and fails. The effort drains her fast, and I’m at her side before she can try again.
“I’ve got you, little fox.”
Her breath stutters the second my hands find her—one bracing her back, the other sliding beneath her knees. Her fingers curl instinctively over my bare shoulder, gripping like she expects me to vanish if she doesn’t hold tight enough.
I lift her slowly, careful of the slope, careful of her, and she comes up into my arms without resistance, her weight easy to manage even on the incline.
My wings shift behind me in response, and something clicks deeper into place. They’re not new, not borrowed, but undeniably mine—just like the woman I’m holding.
Max adjusts herself instinctively in my embrace, one arm sliding around my shoulders.
“Comfortable?” I murmur.
Her lips part like she’s about to say something back, but her breath falters. Her gaze flicks up to my eyes and lingers there a second too long.
“Don’t get used to me being the damsel in distress,” she says, softer than she probably intended.
“Too late,” I reply, tightening my hold.
Nick groans loudly. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I glance his way. “Problem?”
He gestures wildly between us. “This. All of this. You’re invisible, you just grew wings out of nowhere, and now you’re—what—sweeping her off her feet?”
Max huffs a weak laugh against me. “You’re just jealous.”
“I am not jealous,” he shoots back immediately, which tells me he absolutely is. “I just think maybe—maybe—we should take five seconds to question the ghost and his brand new mystery appendages before we trust him not to drop you off into a ravine.”
“Hand Lady over, will you?” Max asks, a touch of humor playing at the corner of her mouth.
Nick passes her the pet carrier and grimaces. “What about your backpack?”
“You’re going to have to carry it,” she says flatly.
Nick’s eyebrows flatten into one perfect, skeptical line. “What am I? A mule?”
“E is already carrying Lady and me, and there’s no room for a backpack when you’ve got wings,” she adds before I can speak.
Nick shakes his head. “You know what? Fine. Great. Love this for you. Truly.”
Max moves nervously in my arms. “Don’t drop us, alright?”
She looks torn between mocking Nick for his outburst and screaming in fear at what we’re about to do.
“Are you afraid of heights, little fox?”
“It’s a perfectly reasonable phobia,” she mutters.
I huff a quiet laugh, the sound carried off by the breeze gathering around us. “I won’t drop you,” I say, more certain than I’ve been about anything since waking up without a past.
She nods quietly at that, and Nick curses under his breath.
“Unbelievable,” he grumbles. “Absolutely unbelievable.”
I walk to the edge again, my wings spreading wider behind me.
“Try and keep up, Bloodsinger,” I quip before taking flight.
Below us, the world drops away.
The wings don’t feel like an appendage. They feel like truth, like the missing piece to the puzzle of me, and now that it’s fallen into place, the rest of me finally makes sense.
I’ve got Max with me, and everything else is irrelevant.
There is only the pull of the sky, the steady rhythm of my wings, and her.
I should focus on the path ahead, on everything that still stands between her and safety. Instead, I notice the way she breathes harder as we rise—but not out of fear. Her head lolls into the dip between my arm and chest, like we’ve done this many times before.
Like she belongs in the heavens. With me.
I don’t want to think about what happens when we land, when gravity takes her back, and I have to let her go. If it were up to me, I’d carry her into some secluded tower in the clouds, and worship her until the sun itself forgot our names.