Page 23 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

ANA LAY DOWN on her back, hands folded over her stomach, eyes open as she listened to the sounds of the woods. Jasper had left a few moments ago to relieve Cal of his watch. There in the dark, she could hear Lethe sleeping soundly on the other side of the coals. She hadn’t changed out of her gear.

Evira had yet to return from her scouting mission. It was getting late into the night, and every passing minute intensified a sensation in Ana that something about their mission had gone awry.

Well, something else.

If Ares was in fact hiding in the Dragon’s Spine, then Evira could already be dead.

She tried not to entertain the worst of her paranoia.

Every time she closed her eyes, a memory surfaced, pressed to the forefront of her mind with so much force that she couldn’t help but question the meaning behind it.

The first time she had met Ares, they’d crossed paths on accident.

In Crackenger, holed up in the bell tower on the far border of the State and the Mystics.

She’d run for cover during the start of an ambush, but unlike the other soldiers who knew where Ares had gone, she’d ended up taking cover with him.

She’d heard the gunfire right as she’d entered the top of the tower, and though he couldn’t have been expecting her, he didn’t acknowledge her until the fighting calmed down.

When it had, he offered a formal salutation, and in the drawn-out silence, they started talking from opposite ends of the tower.

They exchanged simple facts and comments for hours, but communicating with Ares had an abruptness to it.

There was no natural rhythm, no affirmation of any real bond.

She wasn’t sure what was waiting for her in those mountains tomorrow, but if her survival was based on him somehow showing her mercy, she didn’t imagine her chances were good.

With Evira and Lethe involved now, she also found it hard to imagine sneaking off on her own and leaving Jasper like she’d planned.

For better or for worse, they were all in this now.

She closed her eyes again, trying to catch some inkling of sleep, but she couldn’t shake the sensation that she was in that bell tower again, listening to Ares.

He’d just finished cleaning his gun, more out of boredom than necessity. The enemy, he said, wouldn’t strike again that night. Ana had observed the mutation stretched along the barrel of the rifle, the cryptic text a rare sight in the State.

“Do you know the best way to peel an orange?” he asked, orange in hand, and then gestured to the edge of his thumb. “You don’t just try and peel the whole orange at once. You find the soft spot on the top. You take your thumb, like this, and you press into the middle. That will—”

She exhaled steadily, trying to push the scene from her head. It was so loud she couldn’t relax. She didn’t pace or stand to release the building nervousness in her. Staying completely still, she battled her uneasiness in her mind. It was often how she battled things, without expression.

Like a tombstone. Lethe’s remarks ricocheted through her body, filling her muscles with tension and making her bones ache.

She lay there as if she were in a coffin, but every time she closed her eyes, she saw that memory again with Ares’s intense interest in his own explanation. “You don’t peel the whole orange. You find the so—”

He sounded so loud in her head.

She opened her eyes and sat up, staring back up at the sky with her knees drawn to her chest, ankles crossed in front of her. She glanced back over at Lethe, replaying the evening’s events over in her mind.

Upon returning to camp, she’d returned Lethe’s knife to his things. The truth was, she knew Lethe had spotted it on their ride a few days ago and he’d left it alone. It hadn’t bothered her at first, but now it did. She didn’t know how to explain why.

When she’d put it back near his saddle, Jasper had asked about it, and when she didn’t offer a clear response, he asked about her and Lethe’s discussion up on the hill.

Jasper seemed skeptical of her explanations.

Granted, she wasn’t the most eloquent speaker and couldn’t quite find the words she needed.

Her body spoke for her more than anything else.

Through fighting and dance and training, she expressed herself in succinct, measured ways, but this was different.

She needed words.

She didn’t have them.

It had led to a brief argument between her and Jasper, who’d insulted Lethe by saying that she should be more careful and that all En Sanctans had done unspeakable things.

Before she could even register the comment, Jasper had recoiled at it, and in that second, she saw an apology in his eyes that told her what she was, not because of her blood, but because of her past.

In her earlier years, maybe she would have recoiled too, but she was tired and how angry could she be about the truth? Maybe people weren’t supposed to live with shame, maybe she should fight it, but she was almost dead—almost done with it all.

She tilted her head back, searching the stars.

They were vast and beautiful and she could only ever imagine the lightness and freedom of being one of them.

A conscience was heavy, but the damage of a life without that burden was a deeply destructive thing.

She’d done her damage and she’d seen it done.

She wasn’t afraid of persecution or derision.

In fact, she dreamed of consequences, hoped that behind the door to death was a judge who would deliver judgment on the life she’d lived.

There had to be justice paid for all of her wrongs, because if she could be released from this life without consequences, then so could anyone else—anyone worse.

Lethe had seen it; Jasper didn’t want to accept it.

She would give this mission everything she had, like the good soldier she was, but she was done with her life.

She didn’t resent the hand she had been dealt. Many people had been dealt worse, but every inch of it had been a struggle, and though she was grateful to have lived, she was ready to rest.

She was pleased with how the final act of her story seemed to be written so far, but then there was Lethe.

She was still struck by the image of him in the smoke of Evira’s tent, surrounded by all of those artifacts from The Ocean’s War.

He was just a man, but all she could see was this ghost from her past, this frightening, promising, terrible force that she realized for the first time she didn’t want to let go of.

It was a part of her, a part she didn’t like being reminded of, and as Lethe knocked on that door, there was something inside her knocking back.

It knocked still now, and she couldn’t drown out the sound.

The past was alive and well, haunting her because it still had something to say. She just wasn’t brave enough to ask the right questions.

It astounded her how afraid she still was.

She’d fought it all her life, but every new level of victory kept confronting her with new fears.

And it seemed Lethe could see that fear, smell it in the air as if it were something cooking.

She imagined he treated human emotion the same way he treated food, wanting to use his hands and make close contact no matter how inconvenient or strange. It was lust of an emotional kind.

She hadn’t said anything to him that evening, but she knew his vulnerabilities too.

The ravenous nature that drove him was born out of a deep and gnawing numbness.

Many men and women had sold their sensitives in the war.

Evira had a point. It was complete and utter peace that murdered men like Lethe, designed to live life at high volume.

No doubt it was why Lethe had seemed to gravitate toward her.

It wasn’t just that she was an En Sanctan.

Most En Sanctas shunned war heroes. Lethe was drawn to her because of her torment.

By the very look in his eyes, she could see the hunger for it, the desire to draw it out, have her collapse in his hands, and like a twisted kind of chemistry, she sensed herself resonating with the invitation.

It was a hassle for her to swim through emotions, and control felt like a burden. Lethe wanted to experience every emotion and seemed to love the tension of control.

She turned her head and watched him as he slept across the fire. His sandy-brown hair framed his tanned face in the darkness. He was a giant of a man, imposing in every way, and yet he rested like a stone, oddly harmless under the slumber of night.

The last thing she wanted was to get drawn into Lethe’s twister of fiery chaos, all roaring winds and heat, pulling everything apart just to relish the sensation of having it burn.

Yet even as she ached to get out of this life, another part of her imagined what it would be like to be on fire.

In the heat and windy roar of his energy, she imagined that she wouldn’t hear anything else.

The entire world would fall away, and the static his touch left on her skin wouldn’t be a memory.

Ana took a deep breath, centering herself back in reality. She didn’t like what was happening to her, finding comfort, at least, in the fact that Lethe was oblivious to it. Ana was a tombstone, Lethe had said so himself, and the wind couldn’t throw stones.

Stone didn’t burn.

The thought gave her some sense of peace, and at last, she lay back down and closed her eyes. For a moment, she savored the silence, the commotion in her mind growing quiet.

This time, her memory of Ares returned, but she was comfortable sitting in it. She imagined the air that day, brisk through the bell tower. Even with the death in the fields, the sunrise had still been beautiful.