Chapter 6
"Or what, warden?" Kage repeats the question.
Kage says it lazy, still half against me, like the thing is of no concern to him at all.
He peels off the wall and turns. He never seems to move at the speed a body should—there's a beat of stillness and then he's simply facing a new direction, a half-step in front of me, between me and Aamon without appearing to have crossed the distance.
"Go on," he says. "You've got the speech loaded. Step away, hands where I can see them, respect the parameters." The grin bares too many teeth. "You want to read me the rules, or you want to say the thing that's got your jaw wired that tight?"
"You put your hands on a council prisoner.
" Aamon hasn't moved at all. That's his tell, the one I learned in a month of training rooms—the stiller he goes, the closer he is to something.
His voice drops low and even, which from him is worse than a shout.
"You put down a council enforcer. You don’t belong down here. Any one of those ends you."
"That's the rulebook." Kage takes a step closer to Aamon. The air pulls tight. "I want the part you're not reading off the card. You're shaking, warden. Look at your hand." A slow grin. "All this over a prisoner. Must be a hell of a job."
A muscle beneath Aamon’s left eye jumps. I swear he seems to swell in size as he sucks in a sharp breath.
"Both of you knock it off," I say. Neither of them so much as looks at me.
"Hmm, struck a nerve, didn’t I?" Kage asks, soft, delighted, cruel. "You don't get to have her. She’s not yours. That's the leash they put on you. I bet you stand at her wall every night close enough to breathe her in and you call it the job—"
Aamon moves.
I don't see the start of it. Vampires move too damn fast for my eyes to keep up.
I get the after—Kage and Aamon surging into the little common room and then Kage slamming into the shelving hard enough to split the old wood.
An iron rack comes down in a shriek, and then Kage laughs, breathless, thrilled, because this is what he wanted.
Then they blur.
I've seen Kage fight in the ring during class. Half-cocked, loose, grinning at Professor Midus while he dodges, the whole thing a show he's putting on to be a pain in someone's ass. This is nothing like that. There's no audience in it now.
He means every bit of it.
And Aamon—I've never seen Aamon fight at all.
A month of him standing perfectly still on the far side of a training room, correcting my guard in that flat even voice, and I had no idea this was under there.
He snarls. I suck in a sharp breath as I hear it—a low, ugly sound I didn't know he could make, teeth bared, the careful mask he always wears completely torn off his face.
It turns my stomach, the sound of them. Bodies cracking together too fast to track.
Stone splitting. A grunt punched out of someone.
The slate slab going over with a boom that sifts grit from the ceiling.
Zeva’s unconscious form is completely forgotten in the corner.
Kage takes a hit that folds him at the middle and comes up with his teeth gone pink, still grinning, because he must have known this was coming.
Hell, he must have been ready to fight his way out of here with me in tow.
I can’t watch this. My stomach lurches as I hear another crack–marble against marble. Two hard bodies punishing each other in absolute hatred and not one of them is holding back.
"Stop!" I'm off the wall, into the doorway. Neither of them registers me. "Both of you—stop—"
They don't stop. They can't hear me, or I can't make the words loud enough, and the two of them slam together again and someone's blood goes across the wall.
I feel the whole thing crest in me at once—the fear, the noise, the picture of one of them not getting up—and it pours down into the place the light lives with nowhere to go.
I feel it churning inside me–my magic. As if the floor tilts a half-second before you fall, and there's nothing under my feet, too much of me rising too fast—
"STOP—"
They don’t. Suddenly, I can’t breathe. My magic is swirling, heating up inside me and surging down my arms, legs, trying to get out of me. I can’t let them continue to fight like this because what if Kage hurts Aamon… What if Aamon hurts Kage…
I’m gulping in breaths, stepping toward the fight hoping one of them might see me and slow down but nothing gives. And my magic, it’s–
I can’t–
The current ripping through me from my sternum burns the rest of it’s way out until I can’t stop it, I can’t hold it in…
Boom.
The spark inside me detonates—white, floor to ceiling, the way a struck match fills a dark house—all at once, no shape to it, a wave slamming out in every direction. My body's only answer to danger… more danger.
The energy blast of my magic sends me flying.
My feet leave the floor. Half a second of nothing. Then the back of my skull finds the wall, and the sound of it is inside my teeth. The room slides sideways and the light dies and I'm down. Everything slows down until my heartbeat is like a gunshot going off in my ears.
Something warm spreads through my hair. Nothing down here is warm.
"—lypso. Calypso." A voice at the wrong speed, stretched long. Hands on my face—cool, dry, precise. "Open your eyes. Look at me."
I get them open. The room won't hold still.
Two shapes over me, both gone rigid in the way that means something's badly wrong, and I understand from a long way off that the wet in my hair is mine. It must be blood. I must have hit the wall too hard and now there’s grey creeping in at the edges of my vision.
"Her head." Kage, and I've never heard him like this—everything stripped off it. "There's too much. That's too much, she needs—"
"I know what she needs." Aamon lifts his hand to his mouth. He tears open his flesh and then his wrist is at my lips. "Drink. Now. Don't argue, just drink—"
And I'm too far gone for sense. What surfaces instead is want, the oldest part of me, the part with no guard left on the door. It turns my head away from the wrist. It says, slurred and certain:
"No. Not you." My eyes drag to the other shape. To the storm. "Him."
Silence.
I'll think about that silence later, when I have a skull that works. Aamon goes still, his wrist an inch from my mouth, still bleeding. Something crosses his face that I'm in no shape to read and won't forget anyway.
He pulls his arm back.
"Do it," he says. Flat. It costs him something I can hear go.
Then Kage's bleeding wrist is at my mouth. His other hand comes under the broken back of my head, and he's careful with me. I blink slowly, open my mouth, and his blood hits my tongue. Bright. Hot. Alive.
The grey around my vision clears and things speed up to their normal cadence.
The sharp pain in my skull pulls back, folds, closes.
The bone knits. The cold goes out of my hair.
The room sharpens one edge at a time. And under it, through the place I'm drinking him down, something catches—a tether, a low hum, the rope he told me about, gone taut again.
Except this time I feel my own end of it.
For the first time I understand what he's been holding by himself.
I come back to myself with my fist in his collar and his blood on my mouth and his eyes six inches from mine, and neither of us bothers pretending we’re not deeply entwined in each other.
He knows now. I watch it land—that I wanted him, in the one second I had nothing left to lie with, that when it came to a wrist at my mouth I picked his. Whatever was held back in him a week ago is gone. What's left has decided something.
"There she is," he says, low, just for me.
I sit up too fast and the world holds. Healed. Whole. The blood in my hair going tacky, and not one wound under it as I reach back to rub.
Aamon's right here, still crouched where he offered me his wrist and got turned down for it.
His head's lowered. His eyes are down—on the floor, on his own hands, anywhere but me—like a wounded thing that's decided the safest thing to do is not move.
The bite on his wrist has already closed; all that's left is the dark smear of the blood I wouldn't take, drying on his skin.
His shirt's torn at the shoulder. He holds himself so still it looks like it hurts.
"He's leaving," Aamon says.
"No," says Kage. "I'm not."
"You're not authorized to be within a mile of her.
" Aamon's voice is flat, back under control, and that's almost worse than the snarl.
"She is under council sentence. There is no visitation.
None. You broke in and put down a council enforcer to get to a prisoner a week out from her inquest, and if the wrong person hears about it, that's not a headache for me—that's evidence.
That's the thing they hang her with. You want to help her?
Walk up those stairs and never come back down them. "
"That's rich." Kage's grin is gone. "You're going to lecture me about what put her in danger tonight?
You. The one who came down those stairs already spoiling for it.
" He rolls his neck, slow, and steps off the wall.
"I didn't throw the first punch, warden.
You did. She cracked her head because you couldn't stand the sight of me near her and you lost your legendary composure over it.
So don't stand in the wreckage you made and tell me I'm the liability. "
The air pulls tight again. Aamon goes still—that still—and for a second I think they’re about to start trading blows again.
But the inquest part landed for Kage. I watch it get through where nothing else did. Kage's jaw works, and he doesn't argue, because there's no arguing it.
He knows he wasn’t supposed to be down here. He has no real defense.
I can't let him leave like this, though. Not without getting him alone again for a second.
"Aamon," I murmur low. He turns, and the full weight of his look lands on me and I nearly lose my nerve. "Let me talk to him. Two minutes. Alone."
"No."
"Aamon…"
"Absolutely not."
"I'm asking you." I hold his eyes, which I can never do, and I do it now. "Two minutes, and then he goes. I'll send him up those stairs myself, you have my word. I do need to say something to him before he goes. Please."
Aamon looks like he wants to grab me, shake me, and scream in my face. But his shoulders drop, along with his gaze. I know he’ll give me what I want–even if I have to pay for it later.
"Two minutes." His jaw barely moves. "You send him up. If he's not vanished when I come back, I’ll send him to the afterlife." One more look at Kage—flat murder—and he steps back over the threshold. I hear him climb into the dark. Not far. Never far. Just far enough.
Kage waits until he’s sure Aamon can’t hear us.
"Cal—"
"Listen. Fast." I get a hand around his forearm.
"The rune on my old door. The tracking anchor?
It was Leopold. Weeks before the Revel. He marked me, gave himself a key to my house, and he had my sealed file—the council one, the one nobody outside the council touches.
" I don’t have time to beat around the bush.
"He wants something from me. I don't know what.
And I can't do a damn thing about it from down here. "
The cold rolls off him fast. "Then I'll kill him."
"No!"
It cracks out of me too hard, too fast, and it startles us both. Kage goes still.
All the way down and with no idea why, the picture of Kage going after Leopold drives a cold spike straight through me.
"No," I say again, steadier, papering over it.
"Dead men don't answer questions. I need what he's doing, who he's talking to, how he got that file.
Tail him. Be a shadow, not a knife." My grip tightens.
"And the inquest's in a week. Whatever you can get me—who's testifying, who Balcour answers to, what they've already decided—I'm walking in blind and I'd rather not. "
He studies me a beat. Then the grin comes back, and this time something under it stays put. "You're giving me a job."
"I'm giving you a job."
"So you can keep me." Like he's just worked it out. "Out there. Useful. Coming back with things you need. You don't want me gone, Hex. You want me pointed."
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late." Then his hand's in my hair, careful of the place that isn’t tender anymore, and he kisses me.
This one's different. The desperation's burned off. What's left is surer—slow, total, a man who just found out the wanting runs both ways and means to take his time about it. The tether hums between us. He feels me feel it. It pulls a low sound out of him against my mouth.
"There." He pulls back an inch. "Now you feel it. Finally." His forehead drops to mine. "It's not whole, though. Won't be. Not till I've had you too—till I've tasted you the way you just tasted me." His thumb drags down my throat, and something low in me clenches at a picture I didn't ask for.
For one traitorous second, a shiver goes all the way down my body at the idea. His eyes go dark, so I know he felt it too—
"Time," Aamon says from the stairs. Wire-tight.
—and when I blink, Kage is gone. A gust of cold, the ghost of him, a wrecked room, and his blood still bright on my mouth.
I press the back of my hand to my lips.
I get maybe four seconds to fix my face. Then the footsteps approach–even, unhurried—and Aamon is standing right in front of me. His mask is gone. Wiped off. What's under it is dark and jealous and barely on its leash.