Page 23

Chapter 22

The Aftermath

Relief coursed through me, washing away everything before it and snatching the strength from my legs. I rested my forehead against the door, trying not to slide down it. Not only was Nier still in the citadel, but he was here .

“Alula.” The way he said my name—with a dark, husky edge—had my body responding as if it were a physical caress. Warmth bloomed along my back as long tendrils of sparks unfurled inside me, igniting a need I struggled to tame. “You can’t hide from me.”

“I wasn’t trying to.” I glanced up over my shoulder, and my breath hitched as I glimpsed his shadowed face beneath the hood. There was no mask between us tonight. Danger radiated from him, but it didn’t feel aimed at me. His face was strained, as if he was trying and failing to leash himself. “Was that alarm sounded for you?” I asked. “Did the boy from yesterday tell someone about you?”

Fear rose its sinister head, and my heart rate spiked again. Was Nier putting himself in danger to be here? His eyes remained fixed on me but seemed to look somewhere else, somewhere distant, as though he was searching through the shadows.

“No,” he answered, but hesitated on the word, drawing it out as the darkened amber of his eyes seared the side of my face. “The elders finally discovered your brother’s handiwork.”

A strangled gasp escaped as I pushed back and reached for the door handle. My brother had just walked out there alone, without his flight to back him up. “I have to help him.”

Nier’s hand slammed down against the door to keep it closed, making it rattle. The heat of his body pressed close as a leashed violence radiated from him. “You cannot go out there again, Alula. They don’t know it was your brother. A male turned up earlier badly beaten, but he wouldn’t talk. After what happened tonight, they’re using it as an excuse to lock the citadel down and distract everyone.”

Relief flared again, giving me emotional whiplash. Yet even if my brother was safe, it didn’t mean Nier was too. I spun around to face him, but he didn’t step back, giving me no room to move.

“My brother told me his flight has spotted strange shadows around the citadel. The guardians may still be onto you. You need to be careful.”

He shook his head roughly. “Your brother and his flight have been visited by Darkness himself at some point. That’s why they can sense me.”

“What? When? How do you know this?” I didn’t doubt the God of Darkness could penetrate the halo and enter the citadel if he chose, given that Nier was here, but I didn’t understand why he would.

“Fallen can sense his mark. I don’t know when or how—Darkness doesn’t share his plans. You’ll have to ask your brother.” He took a deep, shaking breath, trying to regulate himself, making me stop and look at him. “This is not what I want to talk about right now.”

The underlying rage in his tone didn’t match his words, which made no sense, unless there was something else causing this emotional response.

The way he was caging me in but not touching me felt protective rather than threatening, though it still suggested his rage had at least something to do with me.

“You know about tonight?” My stomach dropped to the floor, along with my gaze.

“About the thirteen males who are about to die for bidding to be your consort?” The words were bitten out, stark and deadly, arrows aflame in a night sky. “Or about how close you just came to being detained by a murderous elder? The answer to both is yes. I was there, watching from the shadows, unable to do a thing to help you without appearing and condemning us both to death, which I very nearly did.”

“Oh,” was all I could manage in response. My elder and my contested consorts were the focus of the rage he was struggling to contain. All thoughts of them fled as his other hand landed on the door alongside me, and his wings curled around me too. Still, he didn’t touch me.

“Alula—“

This time, my name came out broken and raw, tinged in pain as his head dropped alongside mine, thumping heavily against the door as he huddled over me. Even as close as we were, it wasn’t enough. Everything within me was straining toward him, and every inch of distance between us felt like the fathomless space between the earth and the stars.

He was spiraling as much as I was right now.

The need to touch him, to anchor us both, surged through me as my light rose unbidden, drawing me toward him, yearning for his darkness to wrap around me. Everything I felt tonight was too much, too raw, too close to shattering me with an intensity I couldn’t contain either.

My hand was moving before I even thought to reach out. He held perfectly still as I tugged his hood back until it slipped down around his neck. The moment my fingertips traced the edge of his cheekbone, he sighed. Closing his eyes and leaning in to my fingertips, rubbing his face against my brief touch until I was openly caressing his cheek.

“I thought you’d left. I couldn’t find you anywhere,” I whispered.

His eyes fluttered open, long, dark lashes framing the bright amber, making them stand out like a lighted window in the darkness. This was the true Nier; not the role of the Fallen. That was only a part he played, even if he played it well.

“I should have left. Taking you to the library was selfish of me. You were almost exposed, and it would have been my fault. I even went to the edge of the citadel and stood on the precipice under cover of darkness, but I couldn’t make myself leave. Not yet.” Need and frustration blazed in his eyes, tugging at me while his hands stayed firmly planted on the door. “I followed you all day at a distance, thinking it would be safer for you, but you took reckless risks anyway.”

The same need and frustration built within me. I didn’t like him keeping his distance. “It was my choice to go the library, and out through the gates. I get to make so few decisions about my life. Please don’t be someone who takes that away from me too.”

He swallowed hard before a small sigh escaped. “I live my life in shadows, Alula. Nobody sees me. Even in my world.”

“I see you.” My voice trembled as much as my hand as the words reverberated between us, impossible to take back, not that I wanted to.

We stood together for a moment, breathing the same air, caught by whatever invisible force kept pulling us back together.

“Tell me there’s a plan,” he begged. “Tell me you’re not going through with whatever that light-damned ceremony was back there.” His shadows thickened and swirled around us, cocooning us in darkness and banishing all the trials of the world outside.

Yet they couldn’t banish the storm within me. My emotions were too close to the surface, even while my hand still cradled his cheek. My fingers brushed over the coarse stubble. I couldn’t seem to make them stop. “There was a plan for after, but there weren’t supposed to be any consort offers. Nobody could have anticipated this. I don’t even understand why it happened.”

“Have you seen yourself in this dress, Alula? Did you think if they offered you up on that dais, no male would want you? You were a vision that drew every eye in that room, and it was only partly about your ability to wield light. Anyone who didn’t foresee it was fooling themselves.”

My face heated at his words, and the possibility I’d drawn his gaze too. “I don’t have much experience of males, or consorts. I don’t know what pleases them.”

His jaw clenched beneath my fingers, and I finally dropped my hand from his face as he shifted back. “What is a consort, Alula?”

My mouth wouldn’t form the word. It didn’t belong in this space. It was one of the things I’d banished outside the safety of his shadows, something to think about later.

But I couldn’t avoid the question, not while his eyes hovered so close, pinning me in place. I kept my answer purposely vague, as if I were reading it from the codex. “They guide their vessel and negotiate access to her so she can share her light with others. A potentiate cannot become a vessel without one.”

“Share her light how?”

The silence stretched between us, and I silently begged him not to make me explain it. I didn’t know how much he knew about light, or if he knew it required touch. Wielding shadow seemed to work differently.

His eyes widened before a thunderous scowl crossed his face, and his eyes narrowed. “How much time do you have?”

Unsure how much to say, I hesitated a moment. This was not his problem to solve. It was mine. He waited me out, though, not letting me dodge this one. “Two weeks. On the last night of the festival, I’ll become a vessel.”

Saying those words to him threatened the dam I’d held years of tears behind. I blinked a few times, stoically trying to hold them at bay.

He went so still, with his entire focus on me, that I wasn’t sure he was even still breathing, until a gentle hand on my chin raised my face so I couldn’t escape his probing gaze. “Do you want to be a vessel?”

“No.” The answer was out before I could decide whether to give it. There was no longer a path to becoming a vessel for me. I’d known that since my last day as an acolyte.

Still, it pained me to say that truth out loud. I had so desperately wanted to become a vessel, to be one of Nur’s lights in this world. For most of my life, it had been the path that drove me ever forward. The dream of that had been hard to give up, even knowing now it had been a lie. My mother had told me I’d have a new path to Nur, and I’d tried to find it, but the old one refused to let me go. What was left was a despair I refused to give in to.

“What do you need?” His question had my breath hitching. It wasn’t one anyone had ever asked me before. He wasn’t telling me what I should do or even demanding anything of me. He was simply asking me. When I didn’t answer, he tried a different tack. “Is there any way you know to get out of the citadel?”

He was still standing resolute over me, without shifting or fidgeting, as if he was afraid of spooking me. All while keeping himself and his shadows between me and the world that threatened. Yet his stance was also primed and ready to leap into battle at a moment’s notice, should I ask it of him. He was everything I thought a guardian should be, everything my brother strove to be, yet Nier was forbidden to me.

The elders had been so successful in twisting the narrative of our two peoples over the last few hundred years. Now, within Lumière, most Neven couldn’t see how perverted our concept of right and wrong had become.

“When I touched the halo, it gave me a shock that left my arm numb for hours. With the light within me, pushing through could not only kill me, I worry it could somehow strengthen the halo itself. How do you get through?”

“By shadow walking, but the Fallen have no light, so the halo doesn’t bother with us. It’s designed to keep light in, not darkness out.”

“Yeah. I figured that last bit out too.” My face fell as the small hope I’d been harboring that he could get me out with his shadows vanished.

He frowned at me, and his brow furrowed as he thought hard. “Do you know how the Apex Flight get out?”

“No. Nobody knows much about them at all.”

He didn’t push further, and I took a moment to think about all that my mother and brother had said of their plans. Things had taken a drastic turn now that I had offers, but it didn’t mean we were out of options. “I need to meet with my father. He lives in the town and has a network of allies. If my mother can’t get him here, or me to him, can you help?”

“Your father lives in the town? Not here with you in the towers?” His eyebrows nearly hit his hairline, and I wondered what about that surprised him so much. An unruly curl of hair had fallen over his face, across one eye, and I resisted the urge to tuck it back into place.

“No. My brother and I only found out about him today. My mother kept him hidden, for reasons of her own.”

His shadows shifted restlessly around us as he tensed, seeming to like the unknown as little as I did. “Do you have anything to identify your father? A name, or a description even?”

“I’ll ask my mother when she gets back. She should be here soon.” I looked at the door over my shoulder, half expecting my words to conjure her. “You should go.”

“I should go,” he agreed. Yet still he lingered, hovering over me, his hands clenched against the timber frame of the door.

We both fell silent. I knew he should leave, but I didn’t want him to. It was as simple, and as complicated, as that.

If we only had a few stolen minutes, I wanted to prolong them. There were only so many this world was going to give us. “Before you do, there are two things I need that you could help me with right now.”

“Name them.” He didn’t hesitate, not for a second.

“Can you untwine the orbs from my wings? I haven’t been able to stretch them out all night and I don’t want to sleep like this if, for some reason, my mother doesn’t return.”

“Turn around. Let me see.” I did as he asked, and he was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “I’m going to need to touch your wings.”

“That’s okay.” Few people had ever touched my wings, but I strangely had no qualms about letting Nier do it. I wasn’t sure if his culture considered it intimate in the same way mine did, but it seemed rude to ask after I’d already made the request.

“And they call us monsters,” he muttered as he worked.

His hands moved so gently I barely felt the contact. It still elicited a shiver whenever his fingers grazed the sensitive membrane underneath the feathers. When the string of tiny lights dropped to the floor, he kicked it away as if it offended him.

“Thank you.” I flexed my wings slightly, and Nier stepped back to give me room.

“I would have done it sooner if I’d realized it was harming you,” he said, a little gruffly. “What’s the second thing?”

As I turned slowly, his gaze was on the floor, which was unusual. He was usually watching my every move so intently. It made me hesitant to ask for more, but an insistent need I struggled to articulate was rising in me, making me bold.

“Something about your darkness comforts me. I don’t understand it, but after tonight, just for a moment, I need…”

“I know.” All the breath left my lungs as he immediately stepped into me, lowered his forehead to rest against mine, and closed his eyes. I hadn’t even known what I was asking for, but the simple touch had a sense of calm spreading through me. I lifted onto my toes to wrap my arms around him greedily, needing more—needing all that I could get right now.

“I’m scared,” I whispered, pouring all my fear, my uncertainty, and my heartbreak into the solidness of him. “Of what’s coming. Of the way everything’s changing around me. But most of all, I’m scared of me. I’ve connected to this light within me, but tonight, it felt like it was going to tear me apart. I hardly had enough strength to contain it, let alone control it.”

It was a shaky confession I couldn’t imagine telling anyone else. Maybe it was easier that he was so foreign to my world.

In a rush of movement, as if he’d finally given himself permission, he wrapped his arms around me too before pulling me hard into him. He cushioned my back and my wings with his arms as he held me against the door. Instinctively, I pulled my legs up around him, hugging him with my whole body. The shaking fear I’d held at bay as the nobles of the citadel watched finally burst free.

“I know. I’m here. You’re not alone.” The words were whispered into my ear as his touch anchored me, his hands stroking the back of my neck where he held me to him in a possessive grip.

“You know?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Tell me,” I begged. I needed to know something about him outside of what I could see, to know that I truly wasn’t alone in this.

“I wasn’t born with shadows.” His words were softly spoken, dredged from a deep memory—an offering on an altar for me alone. “They appeared after my brother and I almost died as teenagers. They were…hard to reconcile, at first.”

“How did you do it?” The idea that Nier, as solid and unflinching as he was underneath all his shadows, had once been like me gave me hope.

“It took me time to realize that I was still me. I hadn’t changed. Something had awoken within me that had always been there. My shadows are a part of me, not something separate that happened to me. They respond to my emotions and instincts as much as my command. I think your light is the same, from the way it tried to react when you were afraid tonight. It’s a part of you, of who you are.”

I sighed. My light didn’t feel like a part of me. At least, not yet. “I don’t know who I am, though.”

“Of course you do. Nobody knows you better.”

The confidence in his answer made me smile, a small crack of light in the darkness surrounding us, and my shaking began to ease.

“Thank you,” I said. Again.

“Don’t thank me. Not for this. This is more reckless than taking you to the library.”

I pulled back, trying to figure out what he meant by that, but he avoided my eyes, giving nothing away. My own dragged slowly down to fix on his lips as the proximity of his mouth to mine seemed to suck all the air from between us. A turn of his head and the slightest dip would have them brushing against each other. I couldn’t see anything else.

Every heaving breath I took pressed my corseted breasts against him, and I was achingly aware of how little clothing I was wearing. His hands tightened on me, and I knew in that moment, he felt it too—both my body against his, and the draw that made this feel as inevitable as it was impossible.

His head slowly bent toward mine, his eyes as fixated on my lips as mine had been on his a moment ago, yet giving me every opportunity to pull away. I didn’t. All I could see and feel was him, wrapped in the scent of apple flowers and a lingering tartness on his breath that betrayed where he’d been sleeping at night.

My eyes fell shut, and he let out an agonized groan a heartbeat before his shadows pulled away, tugging at his arms as they retreated. Nier dropped me back to my feet as light flooded back in and shimmers of lumis floated down between us. I blinked in a daze, watching the shimmers while trying to figure out what in the darkness had just happened. Nier looked as stunned as I felt as he stepped back further, his shadows swirling in agitation.

The sound of the handle turning and a push on the door had him slipping into a pool of darkness in the corner. Panicked, I leaned my weight on the door.

“Alula, are you okay? Open the door,” my mother demanded.

“I’m fine. Settle your feathers,” I called out shakily as I smoothed my dress and tried to get my breathing to slow while waiting for the last shimmers to fade. Had those come from me? I recalled the shimmer that had appeared when Nier and I had held hands in the dark.

The door handle jiggled under my hand again, and this time, I opened it. My mother barged straight through with an impatient frown, unused to being made to wait.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “I was trying to figure out how to do that ward again, but I’m too rattled to focus.”

She brushed her fingers over the door in a quick pattern, and light flared between them briefly before seeping into the wood.

She didn’t give me time to say another word, barely sparing me a glance as she started pacing. “Elder Welkin is incandescent with rage. That was too close. If he’d gotten you out of that room alone tonight, I’m not sure we’d have seen you again. Thankfully, the other elders have pulled him aside to deal with the alarm, so we’re safe for the moment. It won’t last, though. You may have narrowly escaped his very public wrath, but he’ll be plotting his next move. Darkness take them! Those offering males have ruined every plan I’ve spent years cultivating. Don’t they understand they’ve signed your death warrant?”

Her words chilled me to the bone. This was no time to be getting distracted. Kiran may have gotten me out of the Aedis unharmed, but mother and Nier were right. I wouldn’t be safe for long. My mother paced in front of the door while her hands tugged at her hair, putting me on edge. If she was this frazzled, I should be truly afraid. Nothing rattled my mother. I’d half hoped I’d imagined the look in Elder Welkin’s eyes, but if she and Nier had seen it too, there was no doubt.

“We need to meet with my father to see what we can do. Can you get a message to him?” With my mother unable to be calm right now, I had to be. If Elder Welkin truly now wanted me dead, both our lives were potentially on the line.

“Right. Yes. The thralls are still free to move about. The elders are too arrogant to think they would ever make a move against them. At some point over the centuries, the elders bought into the illusion of their own power. It will be their downfall in the end.” The high-pitched laugh that burst from her lips was unsettling and a little terrifying. When she looked at me, though, it was with genuine concern. “It will take some maneuvering, but I can do it. I just wanted to check on you first, to make sure you were okay.”

She straightened her dress and smoothed her hair as she spoke. Armor firmly back in place, she stepped over to the window and pulled the curtain aside. She nodded to someone as she looked out. “Kiran has sent some friends who aren’t on duty to guard your windows until he can get back. They won’t come in unless you call for them, but they’re out there, watching.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out as the shadows in the corner pulled my attention. They blended into the wall well enough to fool a casual perusal, yet if anyone had looked in and seen the door wreathed in shifting dark shadows, it would not have ended well.

It was a sobering thought. Nier was right. That had been even more reckless than our trip to the library. I couldn’t help but wonder how Nier would react given that he’d disappeared on me the last time we’d almost gotten caught.

Luckily, my mother didn’t require a response. Her focus had already shifted elsewhere as she stepped back toward the door. As she pulled it open, a billowing curtain had us both freezing, but it settled again within a moment, and nobody stepped through. My mother narrowed her eyes on the window, but her glare had no target.

Shaking her head, she stepped through the door. “I’ll be back, but it might not be until morning if the lockdown stays in place overnight. Stay safe, Alula. Don’t do anything reckless.”

I nodded uselessly, knowing her warning was too late. The reckless ship had already sailed. Now, I needed to suffer the consequences.

I looked to the corner again, but only the usual shadows remained.

Nier was gone.

Again.