Page 17 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

MISCHE

A sar’s blood tasted like—gods, what word could describe it? He tasted like life.

No. This was darker, richer, deeper.

He tasted like death.

The world narrowed to my mouth on his skin, his blood on my tongue, and the next swallow.

It was so intrinsically him . And every gulp made me hungrier, made me want to crawl over him and press my skin to his, wrap around him until we were a single form. Made me want to?—

Something tugged at my arm. I instinctively batted it away. But the grip didn’t let up.

Stop.

I became aware of frantic barking.

Stop!

I dragged myself away, letting Asar’s blood-slicked wrist fall limp to the floor.

I was briefly so disoriented that I couldn’t make sense of where I was, or what I was, or whether any of this was real. Surely, anything that exquisite was a dream.

The hand I’d used to hold Asar’s arm was covered with his blood. My skin was bare, and faintly translucent. I felt?.?.?.?not quite alive.

But I didn’t feel dead, either.

What was I just?—?

Then the events that brought me here crashed over me. I whirled to Asar. He slumped against the wall. Purple impressions of my fingertips, barely visible beneath the dark smear of his blood and the red ink of his Heir Mark, bloomed up his arm.

Dread clenched my heart.

I was a wraith. And Asar had not only let me touch him, but drink from him. Idiot.

“Bathtub,” I choked out. “The magical bathtub. Where?”

Asar was teetering so far over the edge of consciousness that he didn’t even have a snippy retort for that terminology, which terrified me.

Luce jabbed her snout toward the staircase.

I reached out to grab him, but Luce snapped at me, then bolted to the other side of the room, where she retrieved a tattered curtain.

Right.

“Smart girl.” I wrapped the curtain around Asar’s exposed skin, hoisted him against my shoulder, and with Luce’s help, we started up the stairs.

My body felt lighter than it had, though not quite in a pleasant way, like I met too little resistance with every movement.

Apparently, though, I was stronger now—or maybe that was just a side effect of the warmth of Asar’s blood suffusing my body.

Asar was barely conscious, and by the time we reached the top of the staircase, Luce and I were dragging limp weight.

We were on the main floor of Morthryn. The first time I’d walked this hall, the eerie beauty of it had stunned me.

Now, it was nearly unrecognizable. The floor had once been smooth as the surface of an untouched pond, but now it was tinted with cloudy dark green, cracks running across it like spiderwebs.

The bone-like rafters, once elegant and bronze, were rusted over and cracked, some broken at half their towering height.

The ivy and roses that had covered the wall had long withered.

Luce led me to a door at the end of the hall, past countless darkened arches.

My heart clenched when we nudged the door open and dragged Asar inside.

Despite all the decay, Asar’s room was still so painfully familiar.

Yes, deep cracks ran through the walls, faded brocade paper curling from them like old bandages.

But the furniture, homey and well-worn, had clearly been selected by someone who had decided long ago exactly what he liked and had no desire to change anything about it since.

A bed perfectly square to the wall, a faded green woven carpet, a small upright piano with ivory keys that, I knew, were worn with use.

I wanted to curl up in the imprint of his body on the bed. Press my fingertips to the scuffed piano keys. Roll myself in all these mundane marks of a life lived.

We dragged Asar through the bedchamber into the adjoining washroom. It was a near-identical twin to the one I’d brought him to the last time I had to save Asar’s life with a magical bathtub. The claw-footed tub was already waiting, full of shimmering silver liquid.

At this sight, a powerful wave of love overtook me. Morthryn. Bless her.

I managed to free one hand to caress the doorframe. “Thank you, old girl,” I murmured, and I was certain that Morthryn creaked in response.

With Luce’s help, I hoisted Asar over the rim. Flecks of the not-water splashed over me. I gasped and lurched back. The sensation reminded me of the burns from Atroxus’s flames.

But that made sense. It was a potion that washed away death.

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to pull too far away from Asar.

I drew my knees up and pressed my back against a dry section of the tub.

Asar was not moving at all, his face pressed to the copper edge, a furrow between his brows.

The urge to crawl in with him as I had that night, wrap myself in his arms, was so acute it actually hurt.

He groaned, fighting to open his eyes. His right hand, the unscarred one, hung over the rim, fingers twitching toward mine.

I so desperately wanted to close that space. Instead, I pressed my own fingertips to the tub, just beneath his dangling hand. Not quite touching, but creating the illusion of it.

It wasn’t enough.

Luce curled up beside me, and I kept my hand there, as near to Asar’s as I could get, as minutes, then hours, passed. I rested my other hand on Luce’s ears, grateful that I could, at least, touch her—she was just as dead as me.

“Mische.”

Asar’s voice was so weak that my name was little more than a groan. I jerked upright to see his profile against the rim as he slowly rearranged himself. A sliver of dark brown through his heavy-lidded right eye, and a sliver of glowing silver from his left.

I forced a smile. “This seem familiar?”

“This is nothing like that.” His voice was low and raspy. “I recall that you were in here with me that time. It was the most memorable part.”

My grin wavered. Something about the weak, barely there tilt at the corner of Asar’s mouth made my heart—or whatever was in my chest now—ache.

I scooted away from a cascade of liquid as Asar stood up. Luce whined an apprehensive warning, and Asar shot her an affectionate, reassuring glance.

He stepped out of the tub, then lowered in front of me.

For a moment, he stared.

We just stared at each other.

He looked?.?.?.?different. His left eye shone brighter now, pouring streaks of silver out into the shadows.

His scars seemed deeper, too, and their shade had changed a little, luminescent purple and blue and silver shifting within them as if to reveal glimpses of his divinity.

His Heir Marks flickered as they had in the Descent, the threads of red and white ink trembling like light through the trees—but I wasn’t sure if I imagined that they were bigger than they had been, now extending up past his elbows and disappearing beneath rolled-up sleeves.

His clothes were simple and dirty, and not the same ones he’d been wearing in the Descent.

His shirt was white, and so thin that the wet cling revealed the full expanse of his scars glowing beneath it.

It revealed, too, fresh wounds—three long, jagged burns clawing across his right shoulder and over his chest, a scabbing wound on his throat over his chin, a smattering of bruises, and countless others in various stages of healing.

He was thinner, and his eyes were hollower in a way that hinted at all the nauseating things he had endured at the hands of the gods.

Yet, despite all these marks of weakness, a strange power hummed its ethereal melody under the surface of his flesh. An undeniable reminder of his almost-divinity.

But the way he looked at me was the way my friend, my lover, had. His eyes were not those of a god or a king. They were Asar’s. My Asar’s.

My eyes burned. It felt a bit unfair that I didn’t breathe, but I still gods damn cried. All I wanted to do, actually, was cry. Happy tears. Sad tears. I wasn’t even sure anymore.

I wiped my eyes and held out my fingertips.

“Explain this! I’m dead and I still have to deal with this?”

He gave me a soft smile. “Fitting, isn’t it, that the messy parts of mortality are the last to go.” He unrolled his sleeve and carefully wiped my tears away with the fabric. “Let them come. And then we’ll talk.”

“We have so much to do,” I said, even as I kept crying and crying.

But Asar dabbed my tears one by one. “Let them come.”