Page 31 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)

Chapter 31

Kit

“Not a kitten,” Aubrey mumbled, and what?

I leaned in, patting his cheek. “Aubrey? You still there?”

“Not a kitten,” he reiterated. “She called me kitten, but I’m not. You. You’re a kitten. Kit kitten.”

Then he giggled. Full on giggled.

I checked his temperature as best I could, and this time, the skin of his forehead was hot to the touch.

Fuck.

But what was the fever from? The injury on his ankle hadn’t broken the skin, so there’d been no way for that to cause an infection. I didn’t remember seeing any broken skin the night before, or during my perusal that morning.

Lots of beautiful, golden skin, yes. No cuts or scrapes, certainly none that had looked infected.

But there he was, feverish and talking about women calling him kitten. Slate wasn’t a woman. Both he and Nikka had clearly used masculine pronouns to refer to the mountain, and I doubted that Slate was genderfluid, at least not on such a short timeline. Mountains existed for eons, after all, so change made sense, but slow change, not instant.

Shit.

How bad was this fever? Was Aubrey completely delusional? How had he gone from not feverish to completely out of his mind in under an hour?

He didn’t feel that hot, it was only just noticeable, but maybe he was one of those people who was affected more by fevers than average. Sometimes it was the big tough guys who had the most delicate health.

I just hadn’t expected it from him, especially not after walking most of a mile with a broken ankle, to say nothing of all the miles before, when it had almost certainly been fractured from that initial fall. Aubrey wasn’t weak, not in any way.

But now, here, with disaster looming and Aubrey giggling like a schoolchild about kitten Kit, I couldn’t hold down the panic working its way through me. This was it. We’d gotten all this way, worked so hard, slogged through pain and broken bones and bent psyches and we were going to fail. The world would end, because I’d failed.

Clumsily, a hand reached out and petted my face. “Hey now. Calm down. Everything’s okay.”

I jerked hard, looking back up at Aubrey, who’d gone from giggly kid to concerned grownup in an instant, his blue eyes sober and serious.

How did he know I’d been panicking? I’d spent decades training my face to betray nothing. Most people I met called me a robot, cold and distant even in the face of disaster. Maybe a little smug, even at inappropriate times.

No one had ever thought they caught me panicking before, except maybe Frost.

But also, he was right, and I was.

Had been.

Just looking into his eyes was calming somehow. Those striking blue eyes, like bright bachelor’s buttons, staring right into my soul and seeing the terror there.

Duskbringer , Nikka reminded me. They’re always good with sapphires.

But he’s not bonding a sapphire , I gritted back. He’s bonding the fucking mountain. Because he has to .

But Kit. There are sapphires in the mountain. And emeralds and amethysts and...the mountain is where we were born. We were a part of it, until we came down and bonded to humans .

For a moment, my whole world froze. She couldn’t be saying that Aubrey was bonding all the stones inside the mountain. That would surely kill a person. Or drive them completely bonkers.

“How did you know how I felt?” I asked, hoping for an easy answer. Maybe it had been obvious. I’d been breathing hard and sweating and?—

Aubrey cocked his head and squinted his eyes, seeming as confused as I’d been earlier. “I don’t know. I just...felt it. Like I couldn’t think straight, and there was a band around my chest making it hard to breathe, but then I realized it wasn’t me, it was you. Is that weird?”

His tone said that he already knew the answer to that, so I didn’t bother to tell him that yes it was fucking weird.

It was impossible.

Aubrey wasn’t allowed to bond a sapphire, or...all the stones inside the mountain. That wasn’t possible, was it? At some point, with all those cacophonous voices, he’d lose himself. He would stop being Aubrey, and I was...getting sort of attached to Aubrey.

Shut up , I preemptively said to Nikka, and she didn’t let out so much as a peep.

Aubrey smiled at me like he’d heard my thoughts and fuck, had he? Were not even my thoughts private anymore?

He leaned forward, pressing our foreheads together like he had the night before. “It’ll be okay, I promise. We just have to keep going. We can do this.”

He turned back to the trail, like he was the seasoned hiker and I the green newb who’d never been on this path before, leaned into me, and started out again.

How was I the one failing in the clutch, and he, feverish and delirious, the one who was still moving forward? Never before had I felt like such an utter failure.

Except when he leaned into me and smiled, putting his weight on me, it was hard to feel like this was failing.