Page 39 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Melody

A prickle all over my skin makes me look over my shoulder. Caryan’s eyes rest on my naked shoulder blades. And for a second, I think I find hunger in them.

He leans in the doorframe, arms crossed in front of his chest.

I don’t know for how long he’s been standing here. Watching me. I shiver at the way he takes me in now. Me, in his bathtub, naked, a book in my hand.

He says, “You decided to stay.”

“‘Never run from anything immortal. It only attracts their attention,’” I quote, gently putting the book aside on a table. “That’s what the unicorn in the book says. Or maybe I’m just tired of running.”

He comes closer and I pray the bubble bath I found among an array of scented, gold-dusted soaps, and poured generously into the steaming water, covers most of me.

He frowns at the soaps as if he’s never seen them before, then takes the book and holds it up. I found it in his library, in the section of my world. It’s a used copy, well thumbed-through.

“ The Last Unicorn ,” he says, reading the title. I watch his eyes, slate gray again, embedded in black. Then I scan his aura, still tinted by shed violence.

When his eyes drift to mine, I glance down, putting my arms around my legs. “It was my favorite book. Someone read it to me when I was a child. Someone very close to me, I think,” I say, frowning at myself, because a part of me knows there had never been anyone taking care of me, while another part knows someone was there. “Maybe I just imagined him,” I whisper, suddenly unsure of my own mind.

“‘We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream,’” he quotes.

I look up. “You know that book?”

“Quite well,” he admits, still looking down at that title. Something flickers in his aura, but it turns into this indifferent gray before I can make out what it was.

He sinks onto a stool that has appeared out of nowhere, bracing his arms on his legs as he leans forward. I try not to look at the way the fabric of his black shirt clings to his body, vying with the whiteness of his skin. How his bluish veins shimmer beneath it like rivers under moonlit water. How the only color on him is in his lips, tinted like bruised plums in the little light.

Again, I wonder how I look in his eyes. Pale as him, my hair a touch lighter than his ink-black hair. Ordinary. Human.

I bite my lip and glance back down as heat flushes my cheeks. I cringe a little at my act of boldness, staying here. At the unwrittenness of the next chapter. Deep down, I feel too tender for it, like I’m falling apart. But I’ve always felt that way.

Rarely safe. Close to the edge. Close to losing myself. Anxious and agitated.

Tense.

And it always made me reckless. As it does now.

“I never intended to lock you in,” he says eventually, into the laden silence. It sounds like another confession. “When you ran out today, Melody, you could have died. You would have died had I not found you in time.”

His voice is so grave I look up again, startled by the sudden sapphire blue in his eyes, locked on me.

“Shame. You’d have lost your precious silver elf. ”

He looks like he wants to say something else but catches himself. “Do you want to die?” he asks instead, watching me very closely.

I wonder whether, if I said yes now, he would just end me. Drink me, all of me. Maybe I want him to.

I look away as he stands, towering over me. I think about his teeth on my skin.

“Answer me,” he demands, a wave of his magic swamping me when I ignore him. When I keep my head turned away.

I hold on to myself a little tighter. “Sometimes I’m so tired. I’m just so… broken. I lived so long expecting to die every day that I no longer know how to imagine anything else. Anything a week ahead, or even a month. I wonder whether that will ever change?”

I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know whether he, as a real immortal, can do anything but laugh about me. But it’s true. I feel stuck in this state, my whole body permanently expecting a threat. Danger.

“I didn’t want to hurt you, the other night in your room,” he says after a long while. He’s been so silent I didn’t even hear him breathing.

“I just thought…” He takes a deep breath but doesn’t finish his sentence.

It makes me look at him, the fierceness in his gaze burning a hole in me. I want to know what he would have said though.

“Was that—an apology?” I ask, half-disbelieving, half-joking. But curious all the same.

He frowns as if this irritates him, and I wonder whether I pushed too far. Again. I doubt that a man like him, an angel, a king, has ever apologized for anything.

But then he asks, “Would it change anything if it was?” It’s the raw tone of his voice that makes me flinch.

“I suppose. It’s not like anyone’s ever apologized to me,” I say quietly, wondering what it means. “But I guess all I want are truths.”

A muscle ticks in his jaw while he doesn’t look at me, but at a point behind me. I wish I could read his aura now. Get a sense of what he’s thinking. But it’s still veiled behind that grayish mist.

“If truth is what you want, you shall have it.”

He gets up and leaves without another word.

***

Later, when I slowly come out of the bathroom, I find Caryan with a glass of tawny liquid in one hand in his living room, right in front of the terrace. Now I understand the Fortress, the terraces, the way it was built. He could just walk out and plummet from the sky with his wings.

There’s no trace of them now. He’s changed into linen trousers and a linen shirt, the upper buttons opened to reveal more of his skin. I have the foolish thought that I’ve never seen him in ordinary clothes before.

A few candles burn in modern lanterns, the room soft with shadows. I shiver, but not from the cold. My hair is still damp, I’m wrapped in a towel since my clothes were gone when I got out of the bathtub. To find them gone filled me with something I don’t want to ponder too closely.

Caryan turns at the sound of my naked feet on the floor. I pause in the middle of the room, feeling small in its vastness. As if I’m drowning.

His eyes rove over me. His lips blackened by the liquid in his glass.

I try to find my voice but can’t. I just stand there, looking at him. A fawn before a lion.

I’m too tired to pretend. To bare, too naked after what I said to him in the bathroom. I wonder whether he, too, sheds his skin at the end of a day. Whether he wears the mask of the king, and if so, what he turns into when he takes it off? Who is he now?

His eyes darken, turning a glistening, tarry black, matching his lips as he saunters closer. Casually. So easily crossing the distance. So silently .

Darkness, treading light as a feather.

“I can hear your heartbeat,” he says as if this is a way of greeting. “I can feel the heat of you, the rush of your blood through your veins like a brook in a forest.”

He takes another step towards me. I don’t move. As I said, I’m tired of running.

“Truth. That’s what you want. Yet, when you asked whether that was an apology,” he starts again, looking down at me through feathery lashes. “Would you like me to lie to you?”

“I don’t know—can you?” My answer is a breath, not more.

Again, that smile on his lips. It’s a fascinating sight. Terrifying.

“My astute little girl. If I could tell you many lies, would you wish me to, rather than the truth?”

Briefly I wonder whether he can. Whether this is what he’s really trying to tell me. Because he promised to be honest.

Before I can answer, he says, “Do you wish me to tell you that I regret taking your blood so violently?”

My mouth goes dry. I forget where I am. Who I am. I don’t know what the hell makes me shake my head.

“Good. Because I do not. Shall I tell you, rather, that I would like to drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart?”

I’m unable to step back when he touches me. Unable to move at all. And I know I should. I should run. Should fight when he leans in and I feel his lips at my ear.

But all I do is close my eyes.

“Or that a part of me wishes to rip the flesh off your bones, bruise you all over, and leave you ravaged.”

My heartbeat stumbles, and I know he feels it by the way his breath changes over my skin. I know he means it because I can sense his anger, buried somewhere deep inside him, clawing against his ribcage. But underneath, something even deeper and darker simmers.

“Or should I tell you how many nights we were under the same moon, and I was sick to know it, but could not find you?”

His words blur, so do the boundaries of our bodies. I can no longer tell what is real and what is not real. What is true and what is a lie. Again, I feel swamped, drunk.

I’m not sure that he whispers, “Shall I tell you that I kissed your hair when you slept?”

Not sure that I imagine his teeth grazing my pulse. The vague realization hits me then, far away and blurry, that he could open me and let me bleed out in his arms.

Yet he chooses to press a light kiss on my throat along with the words “Shall I tell you that I’ll be careful with you? That I shall try to keep my horrors from you?”

A heavy darkness claims me, and I collapse into him. “Or shall I promise you that there is nowhere in existence you could run that I would not find you. That there is nothing I would not do to save you. That I would rip apart every world, every dream and every nightmare for you. I would even rip apart the hells.”

I know it’s magic, his magic, I recognize it even in sleep. Even in my dreams.

Because I always knew it.