Page 27

Chapter twenty-seven

A Wound That Heals

L ark and Rook left the very next morning. He had looked at me in a way that made my heart go out to him. I knew he wanted to talk to me, to ask questions, but I wasn’t ready to answer them and he knew that. So he took Rook and they left to continue their hunt for the gorgon with the key to Hellscape and Cass stayed home with me. But that monstrous orange apartment was too small to hold everything I was feeling so I took my chance to get out of it once a day when the market opened and Cass had made a list of what we would need to nourish ourselves for the next few hours.

On the first day, I had only retrieved a quarter of the list before all the stares had gotten to me and I had rushed back to the apartment in a full-blown panic attack leaving Cass to finish the list herself. It was the gray, I knew it. I had opted for the gray color scheme that signaled I did not belong to any court. Ever since Lark had told me what had really happened with my mother, I couldn’t stomach the thought of wearing brown. But the gray stuck out even more in a sea of orange and that first day I had let that sense of unbelonging get to me.

The second day I returned, it was with my head held high. I was determined to finish the list, to not let the stares get to me. They did but I finished the list anyway and rushed home as soon as I did.

By now, three days since I’d begun, I was browsing the market stalls at my own pace, feeling the discomfort of the stares and letting it pass on through me like a warm breeze on a summer day. I enjoyed the few precious moments of the day in which I escaped that apartment. It wasn’t Cass. She was doing well to treat me normally, not to hover over me too much or give me too many pitying glances. It was the feeling of freedom, no matter how small.

I was aware now, more than ever before, of the threats I faced. Both from my mother and from external sources as well. The Court of Friends had tried to abduct me. The King of the Bone Court had held me hostage for weeks. I needed to be careful about where I went and who I spoke to. But I also needed to get out into the world. I needed not to feel like I was a captive anymore. I needed to make my own decisions.

I didn’t necessarily want to go to the market. I just wanted to be able to say I was going to the market and have no one stop me. And Cass hadn’t. I was grateful to her for that, more grateful than she would ever know.

We were unpacking the produce that I had purchased late that morning when the door to the apartment burst open and Lark came through carrying an injured Rook. Cass threw down the vegetables and ran to assist him as he lowered Rook onto the couch and the warrior let out a yelp of pain.

“I’ve summoned a healer we can trust,” Lark was saying, rapidly, as he pulled away from Rook who was bleeding from a long gash in his left leg. Cass had fashioned a strip of fabric from thin air and was replacing the blood-soaked tourniquet Lark had placed around Rook’s thigh with a new one of her own.

“What happened?” Cass snapped, not daring to look away from the wound as she pulled the knot tight.

“We found the gorgon,” Lark said.

Cass’ eyes snapped up to her brother’s but Lark just kept his jaw clenched, gaze firmly on his injured friend. Rook was pale, his breaths becoming shallower.

“Move,” I snapped, stepping forward to examine the wound. I wasn’t an expert by any means but I had spent a few years following around a med student I had a bit of a crush on in my early twenties and had learned proper field protocol from the soldiers I spent time with at the camps under the rifts.

“A healer is coming,” Lark repeated.

“We have to stop the bleeding or he won’t make it that long,” I snapped. I jerked my head in the direction of the fireplace behind us. “Light that fire. Cass, get me the cooking weight from the kitchen.”

Sensing where I was going with this, Rook began to whimper and writhe beneath my fingers.

“Stop that or you might puncture an artery,” I snapped and he fell still. “Cass!”

She was at my side a moment later, handing me the flat metal press used to weigh down meats and vegetables in grilling. Lark snapped his fingers and flames roared to life in the grate. I turned and set the press inside, letting it heat.

“Rook,” I said then, turning my attention back to the patient. “I need you to take some deep breaths for me, okay? Can you do that? Close your eyes and focus on my words. Breathe in for five seconds, okay? One, two, three, four, five. Good. Now breathe out for five. One, two, three, four—”

I reached for the press and grabbed it from the fire, pinching his wound closed with my fingers and pushing the hot press against his skin a moment later. He howled in agony, kicking his uninjured leg wildly. Cass muttered a curse and turned away as the stench of burning flesh filled the room.

“Okay,” I said, examining my work. “One more time, okay? Just one more. Breathe in for me. One, two, three—”

Rook screamed again as I clamped the press down a second time, holding it still as he writhed. But when I pulled away, the bleeding had stopped. I exhaled, wiping the back of my hand against my forehead as I fell back and let Cass fill the space I had occupied, holding him close and cradling his head against her chest.

It took another ten minutes for the healer to arrive. He never would have made it that long. Lark seemed to sense the same thing when the woman burst into the apartment, the skirts of her yellow dress flowing behind her as she ran to the patient, examined the cauterization wounds, and gave us a grim nod of understanding before getting to work with her magic. I let my shoulders slump then, breathing easily now that a professional was on the scene, and left to find the bathroom so that I could wash the blood from my hands and from where I’d rubbed it against my forehead.

I felt his presence as I leaned over the basin, scrubbing the blood from my skin.

“You should be in there with him,” I said without looking up.

“He has enough support for the moment,” Lark answered, his voice that intoxicating low drawl I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed. “Are you ready to talk about it?”

I turned off the faucet, dried my hand on the hanging towel, and turned to face him, leaning back against the sink as I did.

“Do I have to be?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

We stood there in the silence for a moment, watching each other.

“I know we didn’t come back in the best way,” Lark said, gesturing toward the living room where an injured Rook was recovering with the help of healing magic. “But I was relieved to see that you had stayed.”

I didn’t answer right away because I wasn’t sure what to say. I had stayed and I wasn’t even sure why myself. I could have left, could have taken that portal home and never looked back. He had said as much. But I hadn’t.

“You told me the truth,” I said, simply, with a shrug as though it didn’t matter.

“Ren,” he said my name sweetly, like a prayer, and took a step toward me.

“I watched you die,” I blurted and he stopped short. “I watched you hang for the crime of stealing me from my mother and then daring to return with me again. I grieved for you. I spent days coming to terms with the fact that I would never see you again, hating myself for even wanting to after what I believed you had done to me. Finding out that you were going to be executed, it was the first time I ever used magic, the first time I felt connected to what I was. And your father spent time that he didn’t have, time that he could have spent on anyone else, training me to use that magic. So he may not have known the truth of what happened and he may have been wrong about your intentions. But he didn’t have the audacity to claim he was keeping anything from me to protect me. He was honest with me. Even honest about the fact that I was a hostage.”

“You’re right.”

“It wasn’t your call, Lark. It wasn’t your decision to determine what I did and didn’t know.”

“You’re right. It wasn’t.”

“Because you wanted to protect me? All of this to protect me? You lost your reputation, you got exiled from your home and then, when you returned, you got caught because you were saving me. Always saving me. Why? Why am I worth it to you?”

“You know why,” he growled, taking another step toward me. I faltered, reaching back to brace myself against the sink. “I know you feel it too, Ren. This connection between us. Like there’s a part of you firmly embedded into me and a part of me within you.”

I blinked, chest heaving as I thought of that dark fragment, unidentifiable but with a mind of its own, pulling at me, feeling.

“What is it?” I whispered in awe.

“I have my theories. But none of them matter as much as yours. When did you find it?”

“After you died. Or after I thought you died. I was… sorting through myself and I found it. I didn’t know what it was so I gave it a tug and it, you, tugged back.”

“I felt you then but I knew before.”

“When?”

“When I broke that man’s arms for touching you.”

A shiver went through me but I held his gaze as I asked again, “What is it?”

“They call it a soul bond,” he told me, that intense gaze of his boring into me as he did. “It’s incredibly rare and no one really knows how it’s formed. Some people think you’re born with it, that it draws you to the other person, some people think it’s formed when you meet. There are only a handful of them in recorded history. It’s a connection between two people like no other. Part of your soul is within me and part of mine is in you. The mortals have a version of it that isn’t so mysterious. Soul mates.”

My breath hitched as I stared back at him, the angular lines of his beautiful face, those pronounced cheekbones, deep, dark eyes, full lips. He was staring at me as well and I felt his desire coursing through him, heightening my own with its presence.

“You—you think we’re soul mates? Or, um, soul bonded?” I asked, trying my best to focus on the conversation and not how close he was to me now.

“I think there’s a part of me that calls to you,” he answered. “And a part of you that calls back.”

I stopped breathing.

“But this,” he said then, gesturing between us, “like everything else, is your choice. I know you don’t trust me yet. And I know I’ve done damage to what little trust I had managed to build before. I’m willing to do everything in my power to rebuild that trust, to make you comfortable around me again and, maybe then, we can… revisit this, whatever this is between us.”

Because I didn’t trust myself to speak, I clamped my lips shut and nodded.

“For now,” he drawled, looking down at my hands and taking them in his own, running one thumb over the backs of them and hesitating, holding himself back, “I’m going to check on my friend, the one you saved. When you’re ready, I’d like for you to join us. We have much to discuss.”

He gently let go of me, turning away and striding toward the door.

“At some point,” he called out as he reached the threshold, “I look forward to hearing what sort of training my sister gave you.”

“At some point,” I called back, able to breathe again because of the distance between us, “I’d like to hear how you survived your own execution.”

He grinned that broad, dazzling smirk back at me once before striding through the door and leaving me alone in the washroom, knees weak and heart heavy.