Chapter 10
Ten
ZAYA
The armoire is still open at the top of the spiral stairs in the library tower.
Just as I’d left it. Utterly selfishly, I’ve been hoping it would seal itself again, even if only for a few more days.
The healer Isaiah’s words from the diner — about taking respite when offered — linger at the back of my mind.
But I had wanted that respite to last a little longer than twelve hours, including the idyllic moment of sitting around a table sharing a meal and a conversation with my soul-bound mates.
Rath, at my heels and already collecting more books from the shelves along the staircase, steps over to add them to the piles already on the desk.
Though those piles have sat there for over three months — and no, I still haven’t come to terms with just how long the Cataclysm managed to hold me — there isn’t any dust on the books.
Protection spells that I can’t feel must still be active in the tower, even though I caught Bellamy rather frantically cleaning downstairs when I arrived.
Not as if the former dire awry needs to earn her keep, but more so that the months of dust was a personal affront to her.
So whatever spells Disa’s mage, Ingrid, might have had on the rest of the house are wearing thin.
It’s also possible that Bellamy has too much energy to burn and is worried about reverting to old habits.
That’s yet another thing I’ll have to deal with soon, since I’ve accepted responsibility for the awry. If Bellamy loses control, there are too many people on the estate who might be caught up in the aftermath.
I cross to the armoire. Rath gives me space, though I can sense how instantly drawn he is to the two iridescent glass-like objects that are the inert threads of our soul bonds.
I ignore the severed bonds for now. I’m still not quite certain why Disa kept them in the first place.
Except that perhaps having taken what she shouldn’t, she found she couldn’t allow them to dissipate into the aether.
Perhaps she thought she could somehow reattach them?
At least as some modified version of what they once were?
But now that I’ve held a soul bond in my hands, I know the future it held was overwritten the moment I became the Conduit.
I reach for Disa’s missing journals instead, finding them arranged in order of year and taking the oldest. Aware of Rath’s gaze on me, I set the black-and-white photographs in the deep windowsill to the side, resting each on the ground against the bookcases that frame the window.
Rath settles at the desk, sorting through his chosen tomes and retrieving the notebooks that have been locked in here for the entire time the Cataclysm had me cut off from the flow of essence that fuels the world. Our world.
Our world.
That thought flickers through my mind, the remembrance of having been trapped in the in-between of the Cataclysm’s portal running like a chill through me.
Having never come across the like, I’m still uncertain if that portal was anchored in another dimension.
Trapping me effortlessly … because without essence, I’m merely an empty, useless vessel —
A warm hand runs up my spine. I blink and find myself staring at the window, gazing sightlessly out at the bluff and the crashing surf. Disa’s journal dangles loosely from my hand. And … I’m shivering.
Rath reaches around me, not otherwise touching me, not caging me, but offering me his body, his presence.
He places his hand gently between my breasts, fingers splayed where I once had a tattoo etched into my skin.
A tattoo I have no memory of getting or having, but I’ve seen it — understood it — etched into my mates’ skin.
He breathes deeply, chest expanding to brush my back.
I breathe with him. The shaking eases, the chill slowly dissipating. “I guess being whole of body isn’t the same as being whole of mind,” I murmur.
“Zaya.” Rath’s gentle admonishment rumbles through his chest, further warming my back — though I know most of that is an emotional reaction, not physical.
I lean back into him, taking the moment of respite. I might be a slow learner, but I can be taught. If I think the lesson is worth learning.
The cu-sith is sitting on the bluff, facing back toward the house and looking up as if it can see me, me and Rath, through the tower window. And maybe it can. The wind churns through its dense green fur, but it doesn’t seem to mind.
“I used to perch in this window and read,” I say, still a little detached, my mind still trapped in that remembered nothingness of the in-between. “Didn’t I? The sill doesn’t seem deep enough now …”
Rath steps partly around me, opening the sash window. “You’d sit across the sill, one leg out. Used to scare the fuck out of me, but I convinced myself that if Disa let you do it, she must have thought it safe.”
He steps back and pulls a narrow, dense pillow out of the bottom of the armoire that I haven’t yet gotten around to noticing. Forest-green velvet. A match to Disa’s desk blotter.
“Now, I think …” He places the pillow on the sill. “I think she might not have even known you were up here with her most of the time.”
I meet his gaze, seeing the anger threaded through his words just as clear in his hazel eyes.
“Because she couldn’t protect you from her own fucking rejected mate, could she?” Rath says caustically. “Multiple times, correct?”
The drive to the estate gave Rath plenty of time to efficiently interrogate me — annoyingly, without even a hint of the tip of his cock — and quickly fill me in on how the last three months unfolded for him and the others.
That included Reck’s version of the events that ended in leaving me behind, and his recounting that their sperm donor had killed my mother.
I shoved Reck away with as much force, as much essence, as I could muster in that moment. But that doesn’t seem to have appeased his brothers, who still hold him responsible for my kidnapping.
I try playing peacemaker again, but for my dead aunt this time. “I’m not certain Disa had any control over either of those —”
Rath snorts. “What she had was a fuck-load of time to put the asshole in a dark grave, even if she couldn’t have been the one to kill him.”
I open my mouth to protest.
Rath stops up my words, literally, with a kiss.
That move should piss me off, but I don’t really want to be having this discussion — or be coming to these conclusions — in the first place. My feelings for my aunt are complicated, even as I want them to be clear and locked away in the past.
The moment before I allow myself to completely melt into the embrace, I pull slightly away, whispering huskily, “All I want is to have you fuck me on this desk, then through every room in this fucking house. You and Rought.”
Rath grunts like I’ve gutted him. His gaze is bright, almost feverish. “The Cataclysm is going to come after you.”
“Yes. And I need more of the holes in my past filled in before I can formulate a plan to deal with him.”
“With us, Zaya. You’ll deal with him with all of us.”
Just for a moment, before I push it away, I can feel the energy radiating from the severed soul bonds in the armoire.
“With you,” I murmur.
Rath nods, stepping back reluctantly.
I settle in the windowsill, pillow under my ass and one leg dangling out the window. There’s an exterior casing to rest my foot on, but it’s nowhere near deep enough to stand on or use to stop myself from falling.
Rath runs his hands over his face, then over his head. His gaze rests on the piles of books on the desk. Then he sits down and starts searching for more information — about intersection points, about soul bonds. Specifically, about severing those bonds.
And about other dimensions, even though I’m not quite certain he believes me regarding the possible other-dimensional aspect to what’s going on.
I open Disa’s first missing journal and start scanning.
When I’m done, I open the next one. I read each journal within the span of the thirteen years I’m still missing, scanning the pages for any mention of me.
I hand each to Rath after I’ve done my first pass.
He reads them as well, making meticulous notes, with dates and even numbered footnotes.
We don’t talk about any of it. Not yet.
I just need to fill this void — a void felt more in my mind than my soul now.
I get through those thirteen years, noting with a kind of detachment that Disa encompassed my first death in only two lines — a simple note about my being Everlasting.
Then she didn’t journal at all in the six months after.
When she did start noting things she deemed of interest once more — mostly areas of study and an almost-clinical distillment of the knowings that sent her all around the world — any mentions of me were kept brief and focused on my training.
Not once did Disa note anything about what she’d stripped from me, what her plans were for telling me about what she’d done — or rectifying it. Nothing about any of the other half-truths she’d spun.
“There’s nothing here,” I mutter to Rath, rubbing my eyes and resisting the urge to fling the last journal across the tower instead of placing it into his outstretched hand.
“There’s plenty here,” he says, admonishing me just a little. “If we read into her interactions with —”
“I don’t want to read into it,” I say mulishly, stretching my back and realizing my leg is weirdly cold.
I look out the window, blinking as I note that the sun has set, though the sky isn’t dark enough for the stars to make an appearance yet.
I glance around the tower, noting a tray set at the edge of the desk, holding grilled-cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, presumably all cold now.
I’ve missed Rought bringing us food. Rath hasn’t eaten either.