Chapter 31 #2
She was still silent. I had thought she was rejecting me when she first went still after watching the dragons fly. Now, as the last of the Selenite dragons disappeared into the horizon, I wondered if she had been rejecting me or if she had been teaching me.
“I tried to make the safe choice for my family, and it was the wrong choice. You won’t come while I’m safe.”
I closed my eyes and reached for Lightbringer, like extending a hand in the dark.
She was there. Warm and vast and waiting, banked heat in the center of my chest. “Please let us fly together.”
Suddenly I could see three Selenite shifters on the horizon. My vision had gone sharp as her eyes took over.
Power moved through me like a tide coming in. Tingling spread across my back, then through my arms, as if my wings were ready to rise.
They said maybe you’re not what he thinks you are.
She wouldn’t let you burn. She won’t let you die.
I stepped off the edge.
And felt a split-second flash of panic, too late.
Fear
I hadn’t slept well.
That was unusual. I had spent my entire life enduring, and somewhere along the way, I had stopped losing sleep over all the things that could go wrong.
But last night, knowing sleep would serve me better than worrying had done nothing to entice rest.
I didn’t want to examine what was different this time.
The Nightwalkers at the exits. The queen’s next move.
And Cara, asleep beside me, all night long.
She was gone now. Rees would follow her, so she would be unharmed.
I went to my window and opened it. The sea air felt like a slap, waking me up, and I leaned into it grimly. Hopefully it would chase away the bleak feeling of a sleepless night.
Then she appeared on the overlook.
Her long blond hair fluttered in the wind. She moved in the way that mortals did, not quite graceful at the best of times, jerky and angular now as she moved to the edge. My gaze sharpened, her face coming into clarity.
The deliberate set of her jaw. The terror behind her eyes.
The cold freezing my chest was not from the wind off the sea.
She was at the very edge. She closed her eyes, her lips moving as if in prayer.
Her hands curled into fists.
She opened her eyes.
I was already reaching for the shift when she stepped off the edge.
Cara
That split-second of panic shifted into elation as heat washed through my body. The sea was rising up to meet me, and I spread my arms, waiting for my wings to catch me.
“Look!” Lightbringer’s voice in my mind was sudden, triumphant. “He comes to protect you!”
The heat died. My vision shifted back, the sea suddenly distant but terribly closer with every heartbeat.
“No!” I screamed out to Lightbringer, but it didn’t matter.
My body turned in the wind, bandied about helplessly.
Fear
The world reduced to velocity and the shape of her falling.
I had shifted my wings alone a thousand times, the change as natural as breathing, Shadowbane’s body growing as familiar as my own.
The feeling of bones remaking themselves, of wings catching air, the cold rush of the wind against skin and scales.
But I had never moved quite like this, without thought, without strategy, driven by need.
There was a direct line between me and the only thing in the world that mattered now, and it drew me toward her like an arrow shot from a bow. Wind screamed past.
Below, she was falling. Her face was wild with terror, her body buffeted and bent by the wind, hair whipping across her face. One hand reached out, seeking Lightbringer.
Lightbringer wasn’t coming.
She wasn’t shifting.
Then her body turned, and her hand was extended toward me. Desperately reaching. For once, there was nothing guarded about her face.
I hit the currents below the cliff face and pulled hard, timing it against her trajectory, and my arm found her.
The impact shuddered through me from wrist to shoulder to chest as I caught her and pulled her against me.
Her weight, sudden. My grip closed on instinct, wrapping her with a force I knew was too much and would leave marks tomorrow.
She made a sound I’d never heard from her before, short and involuntary. Her eyes, wide and terrified and vivid as the ocean just below, met mine. The two of us skimmed over the waves, spray splashing over us both.
Her hand that had been reaching for Lightbringer found my shoulder instead, clinging to me with raw need that she rarely exposed. Her body pressed into mine, her face turning into my chest, and I pulled her close.
For one unguarded moment, there was nothing complicated between us. There was only her fear falling away, though her heart still pounded away like a rabbit’s.
“I’ve got you,” I told her.
Her eyes flashed up, searching mine, her red lips parting. I regretted the words immediately. They’d been as unguarded as her reaction.
I was still angry—nothing could defuse the anger she deserved so well—so why did I comfort her?
Why was it true?
There was no world in which my wife would fall and I wouldn’t leap to catch her, even if there was still a knife in her hand.
Above, on the overlook and the rooflines, the Nightwalkers had seen everything.
I landed on the cliff path below the barracks. Just for a moment. Here we were barely above the waves that broke against the stones at our feet, spraying salty and cold across our faces. No one could hear us.
“You should have let me fall.” Her face was closing again, shutting me out. The face I had seen when I carried her after she tried to kill me.
“No.” The word was flat, curt.
“I was trying to summon Lightbringer.” Her hand against my shoulder flattened. Her fingers had been gripping me so tightly that doubtless both of us would be decorated with the other’s bruises now. “I tried to stab you. Surely you can try to let me fall to my death. It seems fair.”
“Why did you jump?” If she was suicidal, I needed to know. I needed a partner that was as interested in surviving the queen as I was.
“You told me to jump.”
She pushed away from me, but I wasn’t going to set her down on the narrow path just above the sea. My wings extended to either side, giving us both balance and escape if a larger wave sought to break on, not just the rocks, but our bodies.
“After what I did, why not let me fall? Am I even any use to you without Lightbringer?”
She wanted me to have saved her for strategy, for politics, for the rebellion. I could’ve given her that, and it would have both soothed my ego and salved her guilt.
Today would have no rest for either of us.
“I will never let you fall when I can save you.” I brushed a salt-damp strand of hair from her face.
I would not shy away from what was between us, no matter how furious I felt.
That was her punishment.
Even if it felt just as much like mine.
“No.”
She had more words stacked up like weapons, but her voice cracked, and she hated it; she pressed her lips together and looked away from me at the water, despite the blinding reflections off the surface of the water.
The rabbit’s pulse was still wild in her throat, her breathing fluttering desperately. She could not guard herself as well as she could usually, despite the closing of her face.
She needed my arms around her to be a strategy, a trick.
I understood. I even, in some distant way, sympathized.
A new wave broke against the rocks below us, spraying cold across my hands, across her cheek. She didn’t flinch. Her gaze was still on mine, and she needed distance from me that I was not going to give her.
“Hold on,” I told her. My grip on her was gentle now.
She looked at me in misery but put her arms around my neck.
“Lightbringer only stopped because of you.” She blurted out the words as if she wanted to hold them back. “She said, ‘He comes to protect you.’”
I was suddenly too aware of her shoulder against my chest, of where my hand gripped her hip, of the press of her thighs against my forearm.
Watching her fall would have been the strategic response.
What use was she to me, without Lightbringer?
Why had I thrown myself to catch her without thinking?
“Speak to your mate,” Shadowbane told me impatiently. “You talk too much. Why can’t you speak now?”
We rose. The cliff path and the rocks dropped away. The sea shrank to a dark glitter far below. The wind was violent at this height, tearing at us both, and she pressed her face against my throat. My shoulders tensed, as if that rogue intimacy was something to brace myself against.
The overlook rose to meet us. I landed at the edge of it, folding my wings, and set her down on solid stone.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t quite sure what to do next.