Chapter 12
RHIANNON
For nearly three weeks, Eryx and I made meals, visited the empty shops on Eighth Ave and continued to explore what we could of the house.
There was a kind of pregnant stillness in the house after his confession about Francesca’s death.
It wouldn’t last. I knew it wouldn’t, but the way he’d given me his pain had changed something.
It was as though the house was waiting. Or maybe, maybe it was pondering.
Pondering on who the two of us were. Sizing us up.
If it was going to punish someone for whatever wrongs had occurred within its walls, I hoped it would be me.
I was eternal, and I could take it. Eryx Necroline had been through enough.
We didn’t talk about Francesca again, but he seemed a little lighter.
I’d catch him staring at me, occasionally, a soft look in his eyes.
But he didn’t touch me at night. We did nothing more than sleep in bed together, and I wondered how well either of us were sleeping, trying as hard as we both were not to touch one another. I was glad he’d told me about Frannie, but now I was hesitant to make a move.
It was so obvious that he’d cared deeply about her and I wasn’t brave enough to ask him if he’d gotten over her.
It had been a while since her death, but I never underestimated how serious things could be for those of us with these long lives.
Parapsychs tended to work on one of two modes: completely casual or deeply committed.
It took one or the other to make things work when you could live for hundreds, or even thousands of years.
I had only a vague recollection of Francesca Lyon.
If I recalled correctly, she’d been a sweet-faced little necromancer with the power to help restless spirits cross over to whatever waited after death, beyond even the netherworld.
I tried not to let my fury take me under for what had happened to her, and subsequently him.
I’d never known they were even together, but I hadn’t been that interested in what Roman Necroline’s adopted children were up to at the time.
There were times when this horrible world was too much to bear.
Times I wished I could die. It would do no good to tell Eryx that I was made of sturdier stuff than Francesca had been—that I could withstand anything his enemies wanted to throw at me, and probably end them myself.
That wasn’t the point. He knew who I was and what I was capable of.
He had to believe he was allowed something better.
Something more. And frankly, I did too. So I let things settle between us.
Let us get into a routine that was safe enough, despite the way the cottage seemed to grow hungrier by the day, even in its stillness.
By the start of the fourth week in the cottage, the spirit in corpse garb hadn’t showed up again, but Eryx and I found bloody evidence of Magnus’ harm against Cassandra every day.
Sometimes it was nothing more than a stained handkerchief, but it was enough to chill the blood.
I could kill thousands of people that needed killing.
I was almost numb to the violence now. But there was something about knowing that the person who was supposed to love Cassandra Necroline the most had hurt her instead that disturbed me.
And knowing what had happened to Francesca made it all the worse. I didn’t know how Eryx could stand it.
Today had dawned gray and gloomy, the stagnant heat broken by a torrential downpour.
When I woke, he was already downstairs. The faint hiss of bacon sizzling floated up to me, the smell of coffee not far behind.
I crawled out of bed, still feeling exhausted, stiffness and a hint of pain lacing my every muscle.
I stumbled to the bathroom and did the bare minimum of hygiene before making my way downstairs.
Eryx stood in the kitchen, tending to the bacon.
That thick feeling was in the air, and I wondered if it was the house, or us.
Tension had been mounting between us again for the past few days.
Long looks, clenched muscles. I was starting to know Eryx’s tells, and they were driving me wild with anticipation.
I leaned against the counter, stealing a piece of bacon from the cooling rack. It occurred to me that the grief he’d let out for Francesca was old, and I had no idea what was appropriate now. He’d been brave to share it though, and I wanted to offer him something of myself in return.
“Do you remember the night we met?” I hesitated, realizing the question was a little confusing. We’d actually known one another loosely for centuries. “I mean, the night we met for real.”
He pushed his hair out of his eyes before looking up. The angles in his face were sharp, but sensual. His full lips twisted, just slightly, as though he was having trouble dragging himself out of his thoughts.
“Yes,” he said, after a long moment and a turn of the bacon while I poured myself coffee.
He gestured to the toast he’d already buttered.
I took a piece and ate it as he talked. “One moment Av and I were fighting and the next, you’d killed all of Fairchild’s guard.
” He paused again, his eyes distant, as though he remembered every move I’d made.
I licked a crumb from my upper lip and his eyes met mine, intensity building behind his cool gaze. “It was beautiful.”
My heart thumped hard. “I murdered them,” I said, my voice cracking a little as the words came out.
“Yes,” he agreed. His eyes were steady as he watched me. The sizzle of the bacon went soft in my ears, his voice the only thing I could focus on. “With utter grace and efficiency.”
He said it as though it were an easily acceptable fact.
I stared down at my nails as I put my coffee cup down on the counter.
I’d found a bottle of Cassandra’s nail polish in the medicine cabinet a few days ago and painted them.
It was a soapy pink shade with a bit of pearl in it. Something I’d have chosen myself.
“I had never killed another person before we came to Orphium as the Maere,” I admitted. I had never told anyone that. Not in thousands of years. I don’t even know if Ember or Lara knew. It wasn’t what he’d offered me when he told me about Francesca, but it was a deeply vulnerable point for me.
A deep urge for something real to happen between us thrummed through me, urgent and hot. He’d told me the truth of him, or at least one truth, and I wanted to give it back. To keep exchanging truths until we knew each other inside out.
I’d never wanted that with a lover, other than Lara. But then, she’d been my friend first, in two lifetimes. And I wanted Eryx to be more to me than a good lay. I wanted him to be a real friend, and more, though I didn’t know how much more yet.
So I opened up my heart, dangerous as that seemed. “The first time I killed someone, I wanted to die myself… but of course, I can’t. When I agreed to do this job, I didn’t know what that would be like, but it festers inside me. I’ve never gotten used to it… I feel like a monster.”
He put down the tongs he held and reached for me, his fingers unfurling with a gentleness that elicited a dull, painful ache in my chest. I waited for several beats too long to move my own hand, but Eryx didn’t draw back.
My fingers stretched towards his before sliding into his much larger palm.
He let me rest them there for a few heartbeats, his pulse throbbing through his fingertips, before his hand closed around mine.
It was nothing like the frenzied way we’d touched one another after the discovery at Triomphe. Somehow, this was more intimate. More real.
“I vomit nearly every time I murder someone,” I admitted. “Later, in private. It just comes out of me.”
“And after you puke?” he asked, still not letting go of my hand.
Would the bacon burn?
I shook my head. “I never think about them again. I don’t feel guilty. I react, and then I just… don’t care anymore. That’s what makes me a monster.”
“Probably,” he replied, then paused, seeming to consider his words carefully.
When he spoke, his voice shook a bit, but it was clear he’d been thinking this over.
“But if you are, then so am I. I don’t even puke anymore.
I just shut it out. I kill them because I have to.
Because this is our lives, this is what we’ve been pushed to.
We are the monsters so someone else doesn’t have to be. ”
His words cracked me open, laying me bare.
The bacon was definitely going to burn; I nodded towards it and he moved quickly, letting go of my hand.
I didn’t want to be the monster for others anymore.
Working for the Consulate had been horrible.
The years I’d been in Aradios were some of the worst of my too-long life, but coming back to Orphium, to the place where I’d wreaked so much havoc over the years—it was breaking me.
I couldn’t tell the others. Lara would offer to take over for me.
To become Orphium’s assassin. She’d already hinted as much while she’d been working as the Angel; before we’d found out that her missions had all been orchestrated by the island.
I knew she’d take this on now, if I asked her.
But she deserved better than to feel this way.
She deserved better after all the years she put up with you.
I tried to push the thought away, but it wouldn’t go.
No part of me missed Lara that way, not really, but old wounds opened too easily in stressful circumstances and I was already feeling much too sorry for myself.
Contemplating all the ways Lara and I hadn’t worked out might just break me.
Besides, that felt like another lifetime now.