Page 34

Wonder

She catapults out of bed. Bursting from the room, Wonder sprints toward his lair, her bare feet slapping the floor. Dammit, he has barred himself inside. This wouldn’t be a problem if she were dealing with a human latch.

Wrenching on the knob is fruitless, the door’s framework refusing to budge. Wonder tries twice, using enough vigor to rip a mortal barrier from its foundation. Still, the bolt resists her. Other than a key or the Asterra Flora, there’s no way to breach the dorm.

The howls escalate, sawing from his throat. Wonder slams her palms on the facade. “Malice!” she screeches. “Malice, wake up! Wake up!”

Whatever horror he faces, it’s causing the bed frame to rattle. His wails shrivel into whimpers and then grate back into hollers. Wonder rams her shoulder against the door, but the craftsmanship is too solid.

She cannot leave him like this. She will not.

Wonder reels back, then dashes to her room to retrieve the quartz archery.

Skidding in front of his cursed door, she nocks an arrow.

At the right angle, with the right force, hitting the keyhole dead-center, it could work.

If her wits have gotten her into this building, they can get her into this forsaken room.

She lets it fly. In a spectrum of light, the knob convulses.

She strikes again, and again, and again. The lock collapses in its frame, and the door jolts loose. Dropping her weapons, Wonder blows through the partition, which dents the opposite wall as it swings inward. She freezes, plugging her mouth with her fist to contain a gasp.

In the round central bed, Malice thrashes under the sheets, the chaos bringing exorcisms to mind.

He spasms with his arms pinned to his chest, crossed as if they’re stapled that way, scars that she never noticed appearing in stark relief.

Stab wounds. Serrated cuts. Deities scar only under particular circumstances, and Malice was banished early in his existence.

Some of the wounds must have come from The Celestial City. But others are mortal scars, replicas of the ones from his past. Wonder had spied on his shirtless body enough times during that century to remember.

One knife wound in particular. Across his stomach, hidden all this time by the open leather jacket flaps. Even the sheer shirt he’d worn earlier hadn’t exhibited this.

His bare torso writhes atop the mattress like a cobra desperate to break free of its cage. “It’s true!” he screams at the ceiling. “It’s true! She’s real, she’s real, she’s real! Keep away, let me go! She’s real!”

The serration of his voice tears Wonder from her stupor. Slamming across the dorm, she drops onto the mattress’s edge and grapples his shoulders, yanking him upright. His hair is in disarray, and his cheekbones are strung tight. He seethes, and his claws bat the air, wrestling with apparitions.

He whips Wonder sideways onto the bed. She yelps, then lunges at him, using adrenaline to dominate his movements. Seizing his elbows, she shakes the demon, and when that accomplishes nothing, she resorts to the same tactic from the vault. Whipping her arm out, she slaps Malice.

His head twists, but nothing more. He bucks against her hold, growling as though restrained by something other than the blankets.

Instead of another blow, perhaps he needs something else. Wonder swerves one leg over his lap and straddles him, leaning over and gentling her tone. “Shh. Malice, shh.” Astride his flailing body, she clasps his tense face. “It’s a dream, just a dream. You’re free.”

The word free accomplishes the rest. His weight gives out, the muscles quivering, and his wheezing subsides.

The precarious moment reminds her of legends floating to the top of a page, requiring delicacy.

He holds on to himself, those arms crossing once more, either for protection or to ward off a threat.

The haunting vision of him as a mortal imprisoned within a cell stings her eyes.

That’s what he’s dreaming of. Now that she has confirmed who he used to be, it’s unmistakable.

All her fault. All her fault. All her fault.

Wonder drags her fingers from his jaw. It requires a steely grip to pry his arms from his naked chest, but he lets her.

“It’s all right,” she soothes. “Wake up, Malice.”

“Untie me,” he slurs. “Let me go.”

“No one’s tying you down. Not anymore. Wake up, now.”

“I’m… I’m a wayward… I’m a wayward star.”

Wonder sucks in a breath. Did he just recite… did he just say…

His face slides toward hers, his eyes splitting open and leaping all over her.

Wild irises flash like honed blades, then dull.

The atmosphere calms, the earlier noise dissolving into the walls, replaced by depleted gusts of air from Malice’s lungs.

His glazed eyes roam over Wonder like a blank slate, sedated but lost, so that she cannot tell if he recognizes her.

He’s unconscious of his ramblings, only partially aware of anything.

Malice focuses on her eyes, his gaze dashing across her features. “Wildflowers,” he says in a hoarse tone. “I see wildflowers.”

The freesias embroidering her nightgown. That’s what he means.

Wonder nods. “Yes. You’re home.”

Is that true? Where is home for him? Where is home for her?

The answers feel irrelevant outside this chamber.

Starlight from the window, paired with the animated constellation mural spanning the curved wall, illuminates the room and drenches them in indigo.

She scans him for remnants of the nightmare and finds none.

His naked abdomen flexes with his inhalations, a thin line of hair disappearing into the low waistband of his pants, the vision stumping her.

Wonder gulps. Beneath her spread thighs, sculpted muscles contract with oxygen, so very alive and close.

Despite what happened earlier when he made her bleed and come around fingers, the unforgivable hunger has only been stoked higher.

Her flesh aches with millennia of longing, hands itching to rake across his skin, to make him growl for reasons other than rage, and then to turn that growl into something pliable. And savage.

If they were mated, and if this nightmare had been random, and if their history were different, Wonder would be rushing her lips across his face, his throat, his torso, his hips until he snapped out of the chaos.

She would supplement his anguish with a new type, her fingers rustling down the loose pants, exposing his cock and sealing her mouth around its girth, bobbing her head until he roared.

Then she would sit on that cock, clamp her pussy around him, and ride Malice hard until they forgot right and wrong, until she was screaming herself raw as she’d done in the Lunar Cartography branch, fucking the traumatic visions from his mind, fucking the remorse from her conscience, fucking the strength back into them.

Then she would slow down, make love, consummate this bond, grant herself the wishes she has kept hidden for an eternity, grant him the peace he’s never been given.

Her blood thickens, the flux rushing through her limbs. Desire clashes with heartache and guilt. If only life were that kind, that forgiving.

But that’s not what he needs.

It’s either suicide or survival, but Wonder broaches the distance. With Malice’s gaze pinned to her, she steals out to tuck a lock behind his ear. He doesn’t recoil, so her index finger grows bolder, sliding into the trench behind his lobe.

Malice’s chin tilts, his eyes darting toward the contact. Tension radiates from his shoulders, caught between a protest and permission.

Then he resumes studying her. “You’re tired,” he mumbles, the words drowsy, as if injected with a tranquilizer.

Wonder nods. “And you’re awake.”

His hand snatches her wrist, bringing her with him as he pours himself beneath the blankets.

She allows it, too stunned to withdraw. It’s natural, the way he curls into a fetal position and faces her, watching as she draws on the linens, cocooning them inside.

It’s as if he’s never seen anyone do that, the notion fascinating him.

The demon is not wholly present. If he were, Wonder cannot fathom he would appreciate being seen in this state, nor being coddled.

A terrible, gut-wrenching relief flows through her.

It’s the fuzzy texture of safety and the coarseness of loss.

She has dreamed of sleeping with him like this, of feeling his weight drag down the mattress, his shadow hugging hers after hours of climaxing.

In her fantasies, they make each other come to the point of impassioned agony, then fall into exhaustion.

In those imaginations, she isn’t scarred, and he isn’t traumatized. Nightmares cannot infest him, and regret cannot plague her. In that other life, they’re just like this. Passionate, with the free will to love each other, not the destiny to hate one another.

It’s true! She’s real, she’s real, she’s real!

This must come from his past, which is also her past. He must have been venting about her.

I’m a wayward star.

That had been the most excruciating part. She knows that recitation, had penned it ages ago, and had reread it in the letter she’d stolen.

The truth floods Wonder’s senses, tugging her into oblivion. Life blurs until all that’s left is a set of rogue eyes, wide open and riveted on her.