Page 26

CHAPTER 26

No Other Love

I tried not to think about Bryn. I failed, but I tried. And I kept trying until Kazie eventually insisted we all visit the Gate together for Yizoumithou— or, as she called it, Ruhaven’s birthday . I might have insisted that Bryn and I visit alone, but he hadn’t spoken to me since Tye left last week. Bryn had offered to anchor, but not from inside the Gate, as he needed to anchor a group. Or maybe that’d been an excuse.

Over the hillside of Ruhaven, thousands of glittery balloons drifted into the liquid night. They swayed with the call of drums that boomed from somewhere deep in the distant mountains. I could just make out the dragons stretching their wings under moons glowing like purple lava.

Whatever the reason for the color, nothing had ever been so beautiful.

In the memory, Nereida danced toward Sahn, whose wild mane of gold fell in loose waves today and threaded into a circlet so that he looked like a dark, golden prince. As he swirled, his loose robe spun in a wide, colorful arc, revealing dusty-rose nipples and tattoos of gears crawling up his abs.

My body hummed at the sight. Or, Nereida’s did. But I’d probably have a similar reaction if I wasn’t thinking about Bryn.

I couldn’t stop replaying the look on his face when he’d stepped from the washroom.

Should I talk to him? He’d barely said two words on the hike here. Tell him I regretted kissing Tye? He didn’t care. How I felt every pulsing inch of him, even across the room? That was fanciful at best. Idiotic at worse. And embarrassing to hear it even in my own thoughts.

No, I had nothing to say, nothing to apologize for.

But I should talk to him about his mate—which I would have if he hadn’t been ignoring me for the better part of a week. All the more reason to get over my embarrassment of visiting the Gate with James and Kazie.

But did I have to enter the memories in the middle of them dancing?

Sahn’s wing brushed my shoulder as he caught me, talons circling my waist. All his movements were familiar now, comforting. Loving. We spun in circles, laughing, screaming, as the violet fires scorching up the tree trunks became a swirling blaze—a sign of midnight in Ruhaven.

Jamellian and Essie danced beside us, her face glowing with life. Did James imagine it was real, that he was holding her here? Or was this memory everything he needed?

It couldn’t be, as much as James tried to pretend otherwise. He’d wanted Essie to be born in the Ledger .

And what about Sahn?

When Nereida leapt into his arms, he caught me with a sideways smile that had my heart somersaulting.

Was Sahn in the Ledger ?

Was I supposed to ask James? Surely, he would have told me if the Azekiel existed, if they’d met.

And what then?

He wouldn’t be the male in this dream, twirling me through hot pebbled sand, kissing my neck and lips—he’d be someone else. Someone new and different and not the winged demon I’d grown to know.

I smiled inside Nereida, wishing I could pause the memory a little bit, just to taste the wet snow in the air, to dance with Sahn until I could forget who I was—or who I wasn’t.

And it was kind of nice, holding him like this, feeling my body move in ways I knew would never be possible with my muscles on Earth.

But everything passed too quickly. The memory moved at its own pace, and Nereida darted to look at the next thing before I’d even glanced at it. It was both annoying and exhilarating, being out of control on a merry-go-round.

But at the moment, her attention was all for Sahn.

When he gazed at her—at me —the power beneath it buckled my knees. He looked at her like he felt everything she could, like he saw right through her to me. Like I existed entirely separate from Nereida, from Ruhaven, from anything else. Like he knew exactly who I was, even if I didn’t.

Then his muscles bunched, his back rippled, and he launched us into the air.

It would have been nice to see more of James and Essie, but Sahn swept us up with the indigo sparks, his wings billowing and glowing with the radiance of the fires below as we climbed. When we peaked above the trees, they caught the wind with a thunderous boom louder than the drums.

Flying .

My heart wanted to burst. It was miraculous, my favorite part of the memories, this impossible freedom—feeling the air whip by my ears, the world a mesmerizing blur below. Dodging the gears that cranked in the sky, peeking at their intricate designs a moment before clouds covered them, seeing our shadows drape across the tops of trees when we slowed to a glide. Even the taste of the sky up here. Almost like Bryn, that cold wildness, no— escape . That’s what it was. The taste of escape.

Sahn’s voice rumbled low in my ear. His hand curled around my waist to stroke my stomach’s silver skin. Nereida practically purred under his touch, a sound that would have made me burn crimson if anyone heard.

But what if Bryn had? He was anchoring right now. He would hear every moan she made—through me.

No, no, I wouldn’t be embarrassed. Not in this world, because I wasn’t Roe right now, I was Nereida.

Flying. Living. Escaping.

And Nereida was never embarrassed.

Sahn billowed his wings so the steep angle of them brought us to a sudden descent. I hitched forward in his arms, but he held me to his chest. Even as we drifted on stuttering currents thicker than water, he never let go.

The tops of the burning trees came into view again.

Purple smoke drifted upward like the northern lights, a sight so beautiful it twisted something in my chest—to know I’d never see this on Earth, to know that eventually, someday, the memory would end.

But Nereida stretched out a hand, letting the burning indigo leaves tickle our fingertips—furry, warm, and soft. Nothing like the prickly vines back home.

With a low laugh, Sahn flipped us in midair. I glimpsed the sky and the gears licking purple dust before we landed amidst the blossoms with a soft whoosh , slipping from tree to tree.

His wings cocooned us, wonderfully soft and comforting. Beautiful too. As gray as the twisted storms of Ireland and blackened at the ends.

The descent felt like a decadent carnival ride, like sliding down a rollercoaster on a bed of feathers.

Too soon, Sahn unraveled his wings, dropping me into a silk netting strung between the trees. Nereida stretched like a cat, enjoying the feel of her flexing muscles while I watched the moths flutter around us, their glow flickering off Sahn’s golden skin.

He smiled, slow and wide, revealing glistening fangs. I knew that look—that hunger.

And I didn’t need the book James gave me to figure out what would come next. It wasn’t supposed to be too unlike humans. Still, no man from L’Ardoise had burning planets for eyes.

Slowly, Sahn ran his clawed hands up my bare legs, watched as Nereida arched at his touch, as she smiled at him. Then he lifted my silvery hand to his mouth, sucked each finger between his lips until desire filled me to bursting.

I waited for the anchor to yank me home as it always did, but none came.

Where was Bryn? He always had some instinct to anchor me before things went too far, and now he could see me, hear me. But maybe I didn’t care—not today.

I’d danced, laughed, and ate with Sahn for months in the Gate. The angel had swam with me in milk lakes under thundering ivory waterfalls. He’d slept with Nereida beneath the smoked-vanilla skies with his wing over her shoulder. I’d watched them live their romance on a planet light-years away.

That’s why James waited for Essie. He wanted a love experienced in the soul rather than in things. Experienced right here , in this space that used to be hollow under my heart.

I didn’t want to wake up this time.

As Sahn pressed my palm to his face, a trail of gold encircled us. Something from the forest? Another creature? Nereida barely glanced at it, her eyes completely focused on the male leveraging himself above.

Arousal quivered in my gut when his fangs slowly extended and firelight glittered off their smooth bone.

Because I couldn’t distance myself anymore, couldn’t keep Nereida and me apart, when Sahn’s breath caressed her neck, I felt every hot whisper of it as if it were me under him and not her.

I sucked in a breath when he bit down softly—a mating ritual, the book explained.

He groaned against my skin, the humming vibration skittering in my bones, in my soul. She writhed, clasping him harder, urging him to take more.

It was weird and wonderful and horrifyingly arousing.

And I wanted it all. Wanted to forget everything but this. Wanted to be no one but her .

With a growl, Sahn tore off whatever I’d been wearing, the scrap of material landing in a broken spiderweb. His dappled wings whipped wide, knocking into the rose-blooming trees and tiny firelights. Our legs tangled in the vine netting.

I never took my eyes off his—the longing in them, the desire, the hope, a blue flame at the center of a fire. And something else, too, a tempered sadness that didn’t quite fit the moment.

But Nereida didn’t notice as she threaded her fingers into his golden hair, urging him to her breasts with a soft exhale. He bent, nuzzling the translucent peaks with his eyes on me, the clouds spinning under her skin like they were as thrilled as I was to be touched like this again. Not quick floundering in the tack room or the rough, quick hands of men back home, but tenderly loved, where each touch was deliberate, teasing, arousing, like every piece of him was focused on her . Like only Nereida existed.

I wanted that. Even if it was a memory, even if it wasn’t me he wanted.

His tongue flicked my hardened nipple, wrenching a moan from my lips as my world darkened to the twin golden lights in his eyes, watching me with an uncomplicated adoration, in a way no man in L’Ardoise ever had.

He stroked my breasts, talons scraping down my torso until I would’ve refused to leave Ruhaven. Not by Bryn. Not by anyone.

I tore at his heavy clothing.

Sensuous tattoos rippled along his muscled body, disappearing under the pants he still wore.

She tugged at the rope over his groin.

My heart pounded in a wild, erratic rhythm, too fast to be mistaken as Nereida’s. The air around us glittered, vibrated with the new gravity forming in the hammock of silk leaves.

Sahn’s burning eyes locked on mine. Held.

Rowan .

Then he drove into her.

Into me .

S omewhere in their rolling, mating, biting, and thrusting, I’d been reborn.

My bones were melted and reshaped from diamonds, my blood drained and replaced with the liquid gold of Sahn’s eyes, and my heart restarted by Ruhaven.

I wanted to feel his dew-dampened feathers over my skin again, the caress of his hands—talons.

Why had I been so afraid of him?

I’d missed months of being worshipped by an angel and spent my days bitter and half-aroused instead.

Sleepy and sated, I breathed in the damp soil, my body as boneless as the chicken I couldn’t stomach anymore. Rain thundered on the roof of—

I pried open an eye. An umbrella ?

When had I been pulled from the Gate?

The rough weave of the blanket itched my overly sensitive skin. My entire body tingled with awareness, like each pore I didn’t know I had was singing “Hallelujah.”

Groggily, I rubbed at my eyelids, squeezed my eyes, then blinked them open again.

Someone was kneeling over me with skin as light and milky as the river that ran through Ruhaven.

His eyes were twin pools of gold, molten metal.

Desire punched through me.

Bryn’s lips parted on a shaky exhale, cold and crisp and wild.

Drops of rain clung to his eyelashes, dripped off his upper lip and glistened in his faint beard. One caught the light, trickling a line down his smooth throat before disappearing under his collar. His high cheekbones were no longer ghostly pale, but pink with flushed color.

But his gaze, that burning gold fire, held on to mine more fiercely than the storm prowling above.

When he didn’t move, I whispered, “Bryn?”

Slowly, very slowly, he reached toward me. I went completely still as he cupped my face, my heart speeding up like I was in the Gate again. His lips curved in time with the thumb he stroked over my cheek—the first smile I’d seen since that night after the game.

“Hello, Rowan,” he said, voice rough.

I’d missed him this last week. Missed the teasing and the walks to the Gate and the fullness of being with him.

Too soon, Bryn pulled away, shifting the umbrella and nestling it into the crook of my elbow. He waited until my fumbling hand replaced his own.

When he started to get up, I caught the sleeve of his rain jacket. “Bryn. Did you—did you see me here?” With the Azekiel, moaning in the Gate as my heart threatened to burst from my ribs? I had to know. Had to know if he…

Bryn’s golden eyes softened as he lifted my hand from his jacket, his fingers calloused and tender as he raised mine to his mouth.

Warm breath whispered over my skin. What was…oh.

He kissed my knuckles. Gently, softly. Each and every one.

I said his name cluelessly, a bird chirping for its mate in the woods. This was Bryn. Bryn ! He didn’t kiss knuckles, and he didn’t smile like that, and he never looked at me like that.

But after each knuckle tingled from his lips, Bryn lifted his head and curled my hand around the umbrella. “Do not be embarrassed, Rowan. You are very lovely,” he murmured. “I must wake the others now.”

Yet seeing him here, crouched above me, the rain smoothing his silky hair to his cheeks, it brought back the story Tye had told, of when Bryn had come up here to the Gate another night.

It was irrational and stupid the fear that gripped me—to know I’d been that close to missing him.

“Bryn,” I said, almost begged, “don’t leave.”

He frowned slightly. “Of course not, Rowan.” Then slipped out from under the umbrella, the rain gluing his cashmere sweater to the firm body beneath. He knelt carefully beside Kazie, gently rousing her from Ruhaven.

I angled my watch once my heart rate had leveled.

One hour.

It was the only time I’d been allowed to remain in the Gate as long as everyone else.

L ast night, in my pale room at Naruka, I dreamed of Sahn. But it hadn’t been his face watching me as he’d plunged into me over and over. It’d been Bryn’s.

Bryn, with his golden eyes and crooked smile. Bryn, murmuring soft words in my ear, whose fangs grazed my pulse. Bryn, who loved me as Sahn did Nereida. Waking up had been a slow, dawning disappointment, because none of that was possible. Not for a Ruhaven with a mate—that much had been clear from the book James lent me.

I blinked away the memory when Kazie yawned loudly. She lay sprawled on the chesterfield across from me in the lounge and scratched at a cat-eared hat. A tray of tea and biscuits sat between us, courtesy of James, who’d taken pity on Kazie after I’d forced her to read another journal.

October had disappeared overnight, replaced by its eager sister, November. Like a new boss, she’d made some immediate changes—dropping four degrees, adding buckets of rain, and throwing in a bit of hail to assert her dominance.

Even with the woodstove, the wind tore through Naruka, rattling her ancient pipes into a chorus of ghostly songs. The storm circling over the west of Ireland would hit late tonight.

I sipped my over-steeped tea to ward off the cold and scrawled a few hesitant notes into my journal. I’d been steadily reviewing the journals from the triplets, searching for any pattern between them, anything that might point to why the Inquitate targeted those born in threes—and, ultimately, maybe why they’d gone after Willow.

But it was hard to concentrate.

In the week since Yizomithou, I’d been with Sahn twice more, and each time was better than the last. Bryn continued to anchor me, but if he noticed anything, he hadn’t said so, and he hadn’t kissed my hand again either.

I shoved that away and reread the same paragraph in Levi’s journal for the fifth time. He was one of the triplets born with Patrick and Lana. Had that meant anything to Levi? Had he felt some obligation, like Tye had, to show Lana the Gate?

“Kaz, it’s the feckin’ Garda. Colm must have been on to them,” James said, sticking his head through the doorway with a phone pressed to his chest.

Kazie examined her nails. “Human men,” she huffed. “They can’t keep away. It’s the perfume.”

I lifted a brow. She might have been joking. Though, the bubblegum scent she wore was unforgettable. I’d tried.

“Sure look,” James said, “I’m telling them Lana went to Spain. Is that right?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? Not Ruhaven.”

James just rolled his eyes and disappeared into the kitchen.

What would happen if the Garda raided Naruka? Could that happen in Ireland? Would they show up with a warrant to search our library?

The journals spread on my lap suddenly felt like bricks.

“Speaking of men,” Kazie said, crunching on a biscuit. “Having fun at the Gate?”

I gulped my scalding tea. “Uh, what?”

Kazie fluffed her hair. “Like, did you ruffle any feathers?” She wiggled her eyebrows as I scowled. “Twist any tails? Bite any—”

I cut her off. “I really don’t want to discuss this.” Think, dream, fantasize—apparently, yes. But not discuss. “Is there anything in Lana’s journal?”

She stretched out her cotton-striped legs, the bells on her toes jingling. “The only feathers Lana ruffled were Colm’s.”

Yes, it’d been a very good idea not to ask Kaz to anchor me. “I’m serious.”

“Lana was, too, before she abandoned Naruka. Though I think she could have done a lot better in the Gate.”

I folded my book. “What exactly happened between her and Colm? They were dating here, I take it, before Levi showed Lana the Gate.”

“Yeah, but Levi thought James was dragging it out too long,” Kazie supplied, already growing bored. “Maybe he felt some connection to her, you know, because she was his triplet. So when James was at the market, Levi took Lana up to see the Gate. She freaked out—kinda like you!” Kazie giggled and mimed a woman barreling out the front doors. “Think she wanted to just forget everything.”

“And Levi?” He could be dead right now, or sipping pina coladas on a beach while his old address enjoyed increasingly worried mail from James.

“Maybe the experience with Lana freaked him out, ‘cause he left a few months later to Mexico, like you know.” An address that had never responded to a single letter from James.

As I thought about it, opening his journal again, Kazie chatted about Ruhaven—Kazmira was still adjusting the Florissant for us to travel to Drachaut—but actually, she might able to help me on something.

“Kazie,” I interrupted, “Levi did see Ruhaven, right?”

She tilted her head at me, cheek bulging with a cookie. “Yeah, sure, a few times. But you know how it takes so long to stay in for any real length of time.”

So he hadn’t seen much. That could explain it, but…

“Listen to this.” I flattened the page and read the English translation. “‘Today, we walked for miles under Ruhaven’s beautiful blue skies.’” I paused and looked up. “But they’re not blue. They’re indigo.”

“So? All that means is his writing is dull. ‘Beautiful skies’? I mean, there’s about four hundred gears spinning up there and the dude can’t think of anything else? But you know how guys are.” She took care of the entire male species with a wave of one glittery hand. “And that dude was really into sports—football,” she said, like it was a sad illness she was sorry to tell me of. “What’s the original language?”

“Spanish.”

Kazie nodded sagely. “Probably mistranslated. Even Levi wasn’t that much of a dud. Check with Bryn, I think he speaks it.”

Norwegian, English, Spanish, Ruhaven—Bryn made my one language feel like a sin.

So, Levi was here for years before Willow’s death. Then why did nothing in these words remind me of Ruhaven? Of the smoked-vanilla nights, or the velvet trees’ soft fur?

Maybe Levi had been as dull as Kazie predicted.

Or maybe he hadn’t been in Ruhaven at all.