Page 9 of Sidhe (The Incubus Saga #3)

What a lie. The time they might have had together, that might have lasted longer than a human lifetime, was just a passing dream now.

Once again their love had a time limit. Nathan was something of Malak’s making now, and it was because of choice.

They had made so many choices that led them right to where they were.

“Nathan, I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Sasha began more carefully, eyes on the floor and hands fidgeting, “but I…I don’t understand.

Down there before, you…” When he looked up to meet Nathan’s gaze again, his eyes were almost fearful.

“When you were still lost, still thinking you were in the Veil…why did you say for Jim to stop?”

Nathan stiffened.

“I was wondering that myself,” came Jim’s voice from the open doorway.

No. They weren’t supposed to know. He couldn’t let them know.

Nathan struggled for something to say. “I…I was just…confused, and…Jim was the one I was looking at. I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did,” Jim cut him off, coming into the room fully. “I saw the way you were looking at me, Nate. You were saying that to me. You weren’t confused. You knew you were saying it to me. Malak…used us . Didn’t he? Like in your dreams. The bastard was giving you a preview.”

“What?” Sasha gaped.

“ No .” Nathan started scrambling up from the floor.

“Malak used us?” Sasha repeated, horror dawning on his face.

Jim remained standing off the foot of the bed. “When you came back, you said you hadn’t gone to the Veil. You didn’t think you had been there, Nathan. Malak…he made you think you were still here.”

“And that… we …” Sasha finished, shuddering, looking up at Nathan from where he was slouched so bonelessly on the bed. “And you thought it was all real…”

Nathan stared wildly at both of them: Sasha on the bed, Jim standing in front of him, both of them filled with pity .

He started to shake again. Jim and Sasha’s voices drifted around him with soothing words and concern but he didn’t want to hear it.

He flinched when Sasha reached out to him, his skin burning at the contact when the incubus managed to grab his arm anyway.

That touch, that fierce and insistent touch nearly brought Nathan back into his visions again.

He saw it in flashes that overlapped the real Jim and Sasha that were with him.

Dead land. Barren. Burnt. Buildings and streets in shambles as if a rain of napalm had decimated everything. Jim would make him go along. He didn’t want to. Never wanted to. He’d plead. He’d beg. He’d scream and curse. No tactic ever saved him.

Sasha, monstrous and large like he had been in the cave, was always there, too. Smiling. Laughing with Jim. Laughing when they brought people before Nathan and made him choose who died. How they died. It was always worse if he stayed silent. Worse yet when it was people he knew.

Save one. Kill the other. Choose, Nathan. Choose. Choose or they both die. Choose how or it will be slow. It made him active even when he wanted to stay out of it. It made him an accomplice even if he never said a word.

“Nathan! Help us!”

Nathan howled at the ceiling as the memories flickered over the truth before his eyes.

Rage. Hatred. None of it was as strong as his grief, his guilt.

Those emotions were powerful enough to rival any fury.

Powerful enough that even though he saw Jim, his real brother before him, he saw the monster too.

Nathan rushed Jim like he had downstairs, slamming him back into the wall beside the door.

“Why can’t I hate you?!” he cried, voice cracking on the final word.

“I…wanted to. I tried every day. But I never could. So I gave in. Do you understand me, I gave in! I gave in…so you’d stop.

You promised you’d take the pain away if I just did what you wanted… ”

Jim wasn’t even attempting to struggle as Nathan held him firmly to the wall. “It wasn’t me, Nathan, it was Malak,” he said mournfully.

“Malak,” Nathan huffed, grimacing at the name, “I barely even remembered Malak.”

“How could you forget Malak?” Sasha asked breathless from behind him.

The grounding of their voices, their calm tones and patience, stilled the overlaps little by little until finally it was Jim in front of him again. Just Jim. Just Sasha. The ones he wished he could forget wanting to hate.

Nathan released Jim and stepped back. He turned, saw Sasha so close, his eyes gone liquid blue. He looked back and forth between them and softly admitted, “Because. You were worse.”

He stumbled away from them, once more a failure because he had failed to keep that awful secret from them.

“I can’t…shake it,” he said, eyes clenched tight as he backed right into the closet door, seeing the cruel versions of Jim and Sasha in the darkness behind his eyes.

He opened them but like before that false image overlapped the true Jim and Sasha.

“Everywhere I look…even seeing things how they’re supposed to be… it just makes me remember how it was.”

He might have been crying, or maybe it was just that he was shaking so hard his vision seemed blurred. It nearly broke him when Sasha swooped in to gather him in his arms. Nathan choked, felt the dam about to burst, but he couldn’t let it. He tried to push Sasha away.

“Don’t…treat me like I’m…” He shook his head fiercely.

“Hurt?” Sasha finished, refusing to let go and instead holding tighter, enveloping him.

Nathan shook his head again, straining against the embrace. “Like I’m…w-weak,” he stuttered, hating the word, hating that that’s exactly what he was.

“You’re hurt , Nathan,” Sasha said, “you’re hurt and pained and…and everyone deserves to be a little weak sometimes. It doesn’t change anything about you. Not to me. I still love you. I want to figure this out with you and…and make it better. We can make it better.”

It was like a mother comforting a child that would die too young and the lie was worse than soothing words.

Nathan couldn’t hate Sasha for it, but he still resented it.

“Don’t…” Don’t try to save me, don’t try to fix me, don’t hold me like I’m breaking…

even when I am. “Don’t tell the others,” he said instead.

If he kept denying that he could be helped they’d only worry more and insist even harder that he could be.

“Nathan,” filtered over Jim’s voice around Sasha’s encompassing body, “whatever Malak did to you, I swear, you’re still the same Nathan you’ve always been.

I feel it. There’s just something else there too.

Why do you think the Gatehouse wards stopped working for you?

You’re just more like me. If you still have faith in me, Nate, than you have to believe you’ll be okay too. Do you? Still have faith in me?”

Nathan had seen what Jim was capable of—what he believed for a whole year Jim was capable of.

He couldn’t just turn that off, and that was the problem.

He couldn’t think of either of them separate from the way things had been.

And that was why he was still a Shadow Immortal, because a part of him was still in the Veil.

He suddenly felt sick having Sasha hold him. He tried harder to push from his arms.

“Nathan…” Sasha tried even though he finally relinquished his grip.

“Not right now. Okay? Can we…not do the group therapy thing, please?” Nathan moved swiftly out of reaching distance.

He almost sat right back down on the floor beneath the window before he thought better of it.

He sat on the bed, raked his hands through his hair.

“Now you know. Okay, you know, and you get why I keep…freaking. But this isn’t a ‘let’s make Nathan better with hugs and optimism’ kind of thing, okay? I don’t know how to get…better.”

Sasha and Jim advanced on him, and Nathan had to hold back a flinch.

“It will get better,” Jim said, “and we will figure this out. You’re home now. What happened, whatever Malak made you believe about us or see, it wasn’t real. This is. You’ll remember that. You will.”

He remembered now. It just didn’t help.

“And we won’t tell the others,” Sasha promised. “They don’t need to know what happened in the Veil. But Nathan,” he dropped to his knees in front of him, “you have to believe us that you’re home, you’re safe. This is us, the real us, and you’re you. I love you.”

Those words were a knife to Nathan’s chest. He couldn’t say them back.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had said them and meant it.

So he didn’t say anything. He just looked up, saw those blue eyes glittering at him, and tried to remember the relief and joy he had felt when he first woke up and realized he was back where he belonged, tried to remember the feelings that had swelled in his chest when he kissed his incubus again for the first time, tried to remember that their dancing downstairs had felt so right before it all went wrong.

But he couldn’t hold onto it all. Because it couldn’t be the way it was. Sasha wasn’t fully his anymore. Part of Sasha belonged to Malak now. And part of Nathan would always belong to him too.