Chapter Nineteen Arion
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ARION
Zephyra’s face falls. She tangles her hands in her hair, pulling roughly until my own scalp aches from it. Anger, shock, and despair poison the cord. “But—I’m tethered to you, warlock.”
“I know, mermaid.” I dim the surrounding lighting so the brightest thing in the room is once again her hair.
“Which is why we need that heart. I can absorb its magic. Undiluted, raw godly power. With it, I can sever our bond. You’ll be free.
” And so will I, I think desperately. Although I have no idea what freedom looks like anymore.
Back to the tower? To the elders who sent the cult after us? To the city I never fixed?
“We’re dying,” she repeats, the words a low gust of breath. Of damning realization. She stares at the space between us, tasting the words again and again before she says, “That’s why I feel this… exhaustion sometimes, isn’t it?” Her gaze snaps to mine. “It’s because of you. Because you’re… we’re…”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s why.”
Another breath. Sadder, this time. She slumps, a wavy tendril of pink falling over her left eye. “I should have known.”
No. “I should have told you.”
“Well, yeah.” She glances at me, glares at me, but there isn’t much fight left in her gaze. “That’s obvious.” Her lips purse, and she picks relentlessly at her nail beds. “So the more magic you use, the faster we die.”
I try not to flinch. “Yes.”
“Right.” She shakes her hair back behind her shoulders and sits up straight, and when her eyes flick to me now, they’re scorching.
“Then you need to stop decimating isles. What were you thinking, Arion?” Her hands fly into the air, and she kicks me in the shin.
Pain blooms between us both. “Have you lost all your wits? You can’t be…
exploding things like that with our lives on the line!
” She aims to kick me again, but I catch her ankle.
Yank it forward so she falls away from the wall and slides toward me.
The touch steals her breath. It steals mine too.
My thumb instinctually sweeps over her pulse. “This is what you’re upset over? Me using the magic to protect us? Not us dying?”
She glares harder at me, her voice sharp as barbs of venomous coral.
“I’ve been at death’s doorstep for the last eight years.
Fuck sake, we just had a bunch of masked cultists trying to eat us.
But now you are personally shortening our lifespans.
So—stop! Goddess. You’re not protecting us if you’re killing yourself.
” She combs harsh fingers through her hair.
“Besides, I wouldn’t have told you either.
I’m a merrow. You’re a warlock. Remember? ”
It’s hard to forget, but even still, the vocal reminder makes me clench my fists. Makes my knuckles whiten. “We were about to be murdered by trees. I had no other choice.”
“You spent the entire time there disguising us. You—you used so much magic that it failed.”
“It wasn’t easy to continuously mask our emotions,” I grit out.
I don’t want to share anything else with her, with a merrow.
Don’t want to tell her that every second on the isle felt like agony, that I tasted death on my tongue, that every breath smelled like scorched earth even before the isle exploded.
We had a mission. We had no choice but to succeed.
She pulls her foot free from my grasp, though she doesn’t move backward. Instead, she climbs onto her knees, snatches a piece of wax, and hurls it at me. “Don’t conjure food, you idiot. I won’t die over a brick of cheese. No more magic unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“You were starving. Food seems pretty necessary.”
“And the shirt? Drying my scales?”
She sounds pissed, but now I’m really not understanding. I have to use magic. The lack of it will kill us just as much as using it. And magic is supposed to be helpful. “You were uncomfortable.”
“I’ve been in worse situations than slightly wet.”
I can’t help the grin that suddenly splits my lips. “Have you, now?”
Her gaze narrows on mine. “Pull your mind out of the sandbar and stop killing us faster. I don’t need you to dry my shirt. I’m fine existing with my tail. I can refrain from eating for seven days without being sick.”
“How do you know—”
“Not important. Listen to me, Arion. You may have some magical suicide clause in your warlock contract, but you don’t need to trigger it for me. You don’t need to use magic to be helpful or productive. You’re eight hundred pounds of rippling muscles. You’re plenty helpful without it.”
“I am not eight hundred pounds.”
Determination wrinkles her brow as a vein throbs in her neck. She pushes her pink hair behind her ear and crawls forward to poke me in the chest. “You are more than your magic, Arion Stone, and our lives are worth more than a baguette and some moldy milk.”
“You ate most of the cheese yourself—”
“I’m being serious. Listen to me.” Her palm flattens over my heart. “Most people are born with some sense of self-preservation. What the fuck did they do to you in that tower? Scramble your brains and rip them out through your ears?”
The question irritates me. I don’t want to talk about this, least of all with a mermaid.
The ground trembles beneath me, unsteady.
Unstable. And I’m trying—I’m trying to breathe through it.
Trying to repress it, stuff it all back down in the dark crevices of my mind so I can continue on this fucking journey.
So I can keep hoping the heart is real and Abysses is close and I—we—won’t die in the next few days.
“I turned traitor to rescue you so I could find a fabled heart. I think that proves I have plenty of self-preservation.”
“Bullshit. You could have left anytime. You could have hunted Mortem’s stupid heart the first day one of those veins appeared. Why didn’t you? Why did you wait?”
Because, I think suddenly, warlocks aren’t meant to fear. Life or death or any of the pain in between. And the day I spotted one of the black veins, felt the agony of magic drying inside my chest, was the day my fucking fear cracked open.
I glare at the mermaid, eyes flaring at her sanctimonious psychoanalysis.
“Would you rather discuss your issues? I’d love to dive into the inner workings of a merrow’s mind.
Let’s talk about the library, Zephyra. Let’s talk about what happened last time.
” I capture her wrist, trapping her hand as she freezes.
Her eyes widen, and panic pulses through the cord. “Who died?”
She tries to tug her hand free. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No? How about your enemies? Why are you so afraid of the Syl? What’s out there that had you pulling grave robberies in Crestfall? You aren’t better than me, Zephyra. You don’t have all the answers.”
“I never said I did.” Her frustration, my frustration, throttle the cord now, as if the whole thing—the entire debt—might implode. “But you act like ‘warlock’ is some higher entity. You are a man. You may have magic, but you’re still human.”
“And that’s the worst thing I could be, right?”
“No. No. The worst thing you can be is hateful, cruel, obsessive—” Her voice breaks on the last. “I don’t care that you’re human.
I care that you are heinously wrong about merrow.
I care that you—you, not the whole of humanity—slaughtered mermaids and threw me in prison.
And now you’re putting our lives in jeopardy.
If you want to jump headfirst into a forest fire, fine. But don’t drag me with you.”
“I didn’t ask for the life debt.” I release her wrist, but it’s too fast. She can’t catch herself in time.
Collapsing against my chest, her hair splays over my skin, concealing my blackened veins.
Neither of us moves, at least not right away.
Without thinking better of it, I brush her hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear.
She peers up at me then, her gaze crashing into mine, and whatever she sees in my expression throws her backward. She sidles up against the other wall.
I wait for her to snap at me. To admonish me with her disdain. To tell me to eat shit and die. But she doesn’t do what I expect. She never fucking does.
“Why did you tell me to run?” she asks. “When the freaks—the cult—cornered us, and its leader was choking me, you told them to torture you instead. To kill you.” Her gaze snags on my chest, on those veins, before rising to meet mine.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re linked, Arion, and we’re in this together regardless of your hatred for me or my hatred for you.”
She’s right. I do hate her. Even when she’s lit up by the bioluminescence of an ancient cavern, awash in shades of purple and blue like an ethereal depiction of the sea, I have no other choice.
Not hating a merrow would feel like carving out the last bit of Mortem that resides in my veins.
The last parts of greatness. Not hating Zephyra would mean being irrevocably broken.
Still, the longer I look into her eyes, the longer I can parse out the truth there.
A facade of sunlight strung over a vivid moon.
Bright, but only because everything around it is so bleak. Dark and fathomless as the night sky.
I can’t tear my eyes away.
Neither can she.
“Cultus Mortis are secretly used to train warlocks,” I say, because it feels wrong to see part of her truth and not share my own.
“In order for warlocks to complete the Trials, they—we—have to learn to withstand pain. Magic shears our souls. It shreds us into something new. There is no room for weakness.”
She swallows hard. Her hands curl into fists. “How did they train you?”
“Torture.”