Page 59 of Shadows and Flames (Twin Blades #2)

Chapter Thirty-Five

ELIáN

N one of us spoke, but the moment I pulled my queen and brother through the trunk of the tree, into our world, I felt Zoko’s breath.

Her touch, my direct line to her infinite power, and I staggered under the weight of it rushing in.

Sweat prickled at my temples, and the haze of steam formed around my eyes.

Meline moaned, back arching as she sucked in a ragged breath.

One filled with dark smoke entering her mouth and nose.

Once we and our packs were all through, Tana plunged her blade in the throat of the Folk who gave us access to pass, ensuring he was unable to race back to the other guards and give us chase.

As his blood, the same color as ours, spurted and spilled over her, the tree trunk solidified once again.

She kicked it to be sure before dropping the Folk guard to the ground.

None of us looked back.

We walked through the Vharan forest, dark and with a chill in the air, still six but with Blackwood left behind to receive the agreement he sought or to be eaten. Both?

Francie remained unconscious, and at some point along the remembered path, Meline began to squirm in my arms. I did not speak when I let her down, and neither did she as she walked with palpable space between us.

It was just before we reached the main road up ahead, visible through the balding trees, when Tom groaned and tripped over his feet. Immediately, I dropped, lowering him to sit, to catch his breath. He should have been healing— healed— enough to walk as slowly as we were.

“Fucker.” Then, I noticed his panting, the too-fast beating of his heart.

Black pumped around the hand he had clutched at his side, and my own pulse began to race. “Let me see, Tom.” I tried to pull his hand away, but he did not let me. “ Tom ,” I said more loudly, firmly.

His eyes were clenched in agony, his skin cool and drenched in sweat, and when I finally wrestled his hand away to see, a deep gash revealed itself.

Tana cursed and dropped to her knees, hands immediately hovering over my brother.

My vision swam, reaching uselessly, wanting to help, wanting to beg his body to heal .

Purple illuminated underneath Tana’s touch, and my brother hissed, kicking his feet in the dirt. I held his shoulders down as the witch worked, brow crumpled as she used her reawakened power to fix my brother.

“What’s wrong with him?” The Vyrkos asked quietly.

I could not find the words, running over the events on the bridge in my mind. Meline answered for me, whispering thickly over my head. “It bit him. The monster she was flying.” As he was helping me protect her. Jumping into the fray without a thought, as he’d done for me time and time again.

“Is he healing?” He had quieted, but the cut of Tana’s worried green stare told me everything. The shards of my heart pulverized even more. Tomás would survive this. He had to. “What can we do?”

Tana was whispering, pouring water from one of our skins over the wound to clean away the blackened blood. The light of her magic seeped inside the wound, sending him into another bout of weak convulsions.

“Fenix.”

The Vyrkos stepped up, still holding Francie. “I hate to ask, but do—would you allow him to feed from you?”

He did not answer, but I heard a shuffling, and raised my head to find him transferring an unconscious Francie into Meline’s arms. The Vyrkos crouched and rolled up his sleeve without hesitation, without thought. For my brother.

He dropped his fangs and punctured his own wrist, where the prominent vein flowed. A groaning sounded, this time followed by Francie stirring in Meline’s arms. At the first scent of blood she could consume.

I ignored the watering in my own mouth at the sweet aroma, the first source of live nutrition we had encountered in days. Fenix clamped his wrist to Tomás’s mouth, and through the pain, his thirst took over. I allowed his hands to move, to grab Fenix’s arm as he drank.

“I…I’m going to get Francie to feed. I won’t go far.” I did not take my eyes off of Tomás. Afraid he would drink too much from the Vyrkos. Afraid of what I would find if I were to meet my queen’s stare again.

“That’s good, Fenix. It’s slowing the spread of the toxin,” Tana encouraged while healing Tomás.

I watched as the wound slowly closed, flesh knitting against flesh, and once both sides of the wound met, it formed a long, jagged scar in his dark skin.

One that cleaved in half the tattoo of Sjatan towers on his side, turning the already deep-toned skin there completely black.

I had to pry Tom’s hands off of the Vyrkos, once he reached the line of almost taking too much, and it was my strength combined with the Vyrkos’s that kept Tom from fighting both of us to drain Fenix dry.

Fenix and Tana both pulled back while I remained close, touching and ensuring my brother was still here. Still alive. He breathed shallowly, still sweating, but he was no longer writhing. “What is it?”

Tana inspected Fenix’s wrist, needlessly healing it with a flash of her power before it could do so on its own.

She gave him a quick, friendly embrace and thanked him, to which he denied needing thanks.

When she turned to me, her expression had calmed.

But it was not happy. “That, I am not sure of. I…whatever ails him is still in there, but I’ve staunched its growth. For now.”

“For now?” I asked, touch on his pulse to remind myself it still beat.

“For now,” Tana confirmed.

I wordlessly shut us in our room. We’d barely spoken to one another as we crossed back into our realm. Aside from simple directions, noises of agreement or dissent, I’d been unable to get my thoughts to solidify.

Each time I blinked, even for that brief moment, I saw it. My queen standing in the line of the beast. The muted dregs of her power swirling around her, ready to fight, yes.

But the resignation on her face. The long, significant glance she gave me, as if committing my face to memory. As if saying goodbye.

The peace she had asked for, I could not help remembering the glimpse of it, then. When she gave herself over to die.

I fell onto the foot of the bed, not tracking how I’d gotten there. Though there were walls between us, I could hear Tana’s quiet steps. The soft pulls of my brother drinking from the Vyrkos who volunteered himself as source.

This was the third time they attempted this. The tandem healing and feeding, but the relief would only last for a few moments, hours at most. Though mortals were ideal, Fenix’s blood should have been sufficient nutrition.

My brother’s body should have been healing itself. And yet, the sickness came creeping back without fail. He could barely walk on his own.

With Mamá, Leandro, and Papá, each heartbreak came with a sudden explosion. The type to leech all air, all light. No matter how much experience I gleaned from the last, the pain of it never abated. The fall after the carpet was ripped violently beneath my feet.

And yet. Losing another brother, slowly, gruesomely. Loving someone whose despair was also decaying them from the inside out. This was a pain I’d never known. The trials of another world could not compare to this.

My hands were shaking.

“El…I…” she tried. Even that sounded like defeat.

A faint glow of light brightened my view of floorboards, my scuffed, muddy boots. Water swam in my vision as Meline’s feet stopped before mine.

“El, please.”

Please, what? What could I do anymore? What did she want from me? What did I need to promise her so that she would stay?

There was no reason for her to sacrifice herself on that bridge. No reason for her to offer herself as a diversion. And by her withdrawn glances when we returned to our world, she knew.

Meline’s knees thudded to the floor. Something else landed beside her, and then her bare fingers were pulling on mine. Reaching for me.

The contact ushered forth more tears, and I watched them pool onto our skin and seep between where she touched me.

“Elián,” her voice cracked, “you’re scaring me.”

To my ears connected to my fracturing heart, her words sounded like an accusation, and Zoko’s Fire used it as the kindling it was so begging for. Anything but this pain. “ You scared me .” Through my fangs, it sounded sharper than my heated sword.

Her flinch further fanned the flames attempting so much to weld the pieces of my soul back together. To prevent further damage until I was one mass of welded parts. “ You promised no running. No leaving. But you lied.”

Meline’s nails tightened into my flesh, a reflex to my own version of spitted venom. But the pain was good. Physical was far better than what was intangible.

“I—I’m not running?—”

“Na! You were not going to fight. You were going to use saving us as an excuse to end yourself. No. More. Lying. ”

I raised my gaze, now, but her mirrored sorrow made me regret it as soon as our gazes met. The despair was not just mine, it was hers, but she refused to make it ours .

I had tried so hard to talk , to communicate, and all this time, she would not do the same with me. Not with whatever weighed on her so.

We were both weeping, staring with blustering breaths as my brother struggled to heal in the next room. “El…I…I never wanted to hurt you. I would rather?—”

“Do not finish that sentence. You hurt me by hiding away. You hurt me with what you did in that stupid place!” We remained joined, my queen and me, but I had felt closer to her in my dreams. There was still something she was hiding, and she would not tell me .

“ Why ?” Smoke wafted from my nose, my mouth, but I could no longer control it.

I’d once thought distance, words were the obstacles between us.

This? I did not even know what this was.

But there was something. I could taste it in the air, could trace it around the trembling of her lips. “ Why , Meline?”

The bones in my fingers protested, and I could almost hear them creaking under the strain of how tightly she was holding onto me, now. My focus was on her face, searching for clues, for answers , but I could sense her power, too. The way it spilled into the air, confused and searching for a threat.

“El…” The trembling of my muscles were joined by the tremors in hers. Until it was an endless loop. “I can’t .”

“ Why? ”

Her cheeks were a mess of tears, her words garbled. “Because then you’ll truly hate me.”

The growl I gave came with more smoke. Meline cracked one of the bones in my fingers, like the snapping of a carrot.

We did not drop our hands.

“ Tell me ,” I begged, demanded, sobbed. “Tell me what would make you think it better for me that you were dead.”

Meline flinched again, as if my laying out exactly what she’d done was a strike to her face. Her cheeks darkened with a flush, and when she sucked in a breath, I did not know what to expect. Another denial? Placation?

Whatever I had in mind, I did not anticipate… a name.

It was unclear, through the watery fog of tears. But as if gazing at a figure through sheets of rain, I—I thought I could decipher what she said. What it meant, though, I had no idea.

My stomach turned in anticipation as she opened her mouth again, parting her lips to identify the valley that stood between us. Since she had been back in my arms, this was it.

“His name was Soleil.”

Another of my fingers snapped, but try as I could to focus on the physical pain, the mental was insistent. “You… have someone else?”

Meline’s fang ripped through the surface of her bottom lip as she shook her head. Violently. “No. I,” she gasped for a breath, “I have not been with anyone but you in three years. Since the first time you tasted me in Rhaestras. It has been you.”

Later, I would be able to examine her assertion. Years, and I would be able to access a sense of possessive satisfaction and also disappointment that I’d been unable to say the same.

But just as my Flames grasped for any spark to ignite and guide me through the labyrinth to my queen, the truth I suspected doused them in an instant.

Four heartbreaks.

“Soleil is the name of our son. Our boy.”