Page 29

CHAPTER 29

You are the Moon

W hen the uilleann pipes began to resemble music, I knew I’d drunk too many pints.

“I thought they’d just spelled ‘man’ wrong,” I defended myself after entering the wrong washroom. “James was mortified.”

“Mná isn’t misspelled! It’s Irish for women.” Kazie snorted bubbles into her pint.

The bartender slid his beady eyes our way, then roamed to the brightly lit taps and poured the next stout.

Someone slung an arm over my shoulder.

“Jayzus, Mary, and Joseph, Roe,” James slurred in my ear. “Ye feckin’ want to warn me next time ye barge into the jax? Give me some time to do up me pants like.”

Too drunk to be embarrassed, I cast my eyes to the ceiling plastered with fiddles and fishing gear and passed him his drink. “Oh, now you’re sensitive. After months of moaning in the Gate with Essie.”

He barked a laugh, looking like a hiccuping turtle with the oversized sweater. “I think I prefer ye with a few pints. Now, where’s Bryn? Ah, for the love of…”

As he ambled away, Kazie slid a sly look my way. “ So , is sex with the Azekiel as great as I’m picturing?”

At least she’d called it sex this time and not feather dusting .

“Stop picturing it. It’s weird enough that I’m living it.” I glanced around the bar. “And where is Bryn?”

Kazie propped an elbow on the slippery counter, fist squishing her silky cheek. “Guy went to get food. You know how he can’t eat anything here.”

Yeah, but alone, and after what happened in Oslo?

When I started to rise off the stool, Kazie touched my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Roe. He specifically told me to stay with you because of the Inquitate.”

But didn’t bother to tell me why he was leaving? “You know what happened in Norway.”

She brushed that away, her seven rings glittering under the bar lights. “He knows how to avoid the Inquitate—saved himself, remember?”

“Saved? Kazie, he lost a leg.” I drained my pint. “I’m not leaving him alone,” I insisted over her protests, and turned, elbowing through the bar. What was he thinking? Bryn might have been Ruhaven’s golden child, but he was as susceptible as any triplet. Surviving one attack didn’t mean he’d be immune from the next.

I stepped on five different feet on my way outside and got half a pint dumped on my shoe, but eventually, I inhaled the smoke-free air of a blistery night.

I’d never get used to this weather. The cold seeped into my bones, settled under my skin, and the constant rain was about the only thing I could still be certain of.

Under a threatening sheet of that rain, a Gypsy horse clip-clopped home, partiers stumbled with curry chips, and a pharmacy’s cross blazed a monster green. Ripe vomit flowed toward the sewer in a stream of piss and rain.

I braced a hand on the wall as I searched for Bryn. Kazie was right about one thing—there was nothing around here for him to eat. He didn’t like chips, hot dogs, or hamburgers, and although he could stomach seafood, he wouldn’t want it fried in a vat of grease.

What was he thinking ?

Probably , “Oh, I’m Bryn, the glimmer-blessed Ruhaven who can do no wrong,” but I couldn’t bring myself to be properly upset as I aimed toward an Italian takeaway down the street.

He’d forced me to return to Naruka on the condition— condition! —that we stay together. But does he? No. I’d throw that in his pretty face—yes, I would. His pretty, gorgeous, beautiful face, with his hair like spun gold and his eyes like burning fire.

God, I was drunk.

“ Your eyes are gold ,” I mimicked my idiotic words under my breath. Gold. Rainbow. Fairy lights. Who cared? But no, I couldn’t just shut up and kiss the god in the shabby kitchen.

Rowan, you must return to the bar. Now.

Swaying on my feet, I paused on the sidewalk. Wow, I was so drunk I was hallucinating Bryn’s voice. I even got the accent right, and that faint touch of snobbery that was—

Rowan !

I pressed a hand to my forehead, except it was more of a slap that had me wincing. The streets crested in a sprawling mess, empty of everything but puddles, while the predicted storm hammered the roads, drenching my hair and plastering it to my cheeks.

“Hey!” someone shouted.

Bryn?

Blinking away the rain, I pivoted toward the voice. Through the dark, a man jogged toward me on the cobblestone road, his black hair a wet mass under the street lanterns, a smoke bobbing in his lips, his shoelaces untied and dragging in puddles.

James? I took a step toward him. Stopped.

Oh, hell.

“Wait!” Colm yelled as I threw up my hood and spun. The sidewalk wobbled like a river on a hammock, listing back and forth, the distant lights of restaurants turning into a messy blur.

Should have stayed in the pub. Should have stayed in the damn pub .

I pumped arms that felt numb. Why had I drank so much? How was I going to convince Bryn of anything when I was this drunk? I should have just talked to him, asked him about his mate and why he—

I swore as my toe snagged on the uneven sidewalk. This is why we don’t lay cobblestones anymore . My knee whacked off stones lit with red light from the flashing exit sign inside The Cod Father, the smell of fried fish still lingering. Distant footsteps pounded, their sharp cracks ratcheting up my growing headache.

I hauled myself up by a lamppost, started to run.

Something snagged my jacket.

I tumbled backward, splashing into a puddle with cold rain pelting my face. My hood fell away and my braid sprung loose. Above me, an oil lantern glowed yellow, blocking out the stars that freckled the blackened sky. The wind cracked a line of red triangles strung over the empty street. I had to get up, had to get back to the bar to warn James and Kazie.

Cradling my side, I pressed an elbow into what I hoped was just water.

Then Colm appeared.

He looked worse than I’d last seen him, like the months missing Lana had taken their toll. Or Tye had done a lot more damage than I’d thought when he’d thrown him out.

A scrawny mustache perched on an upper lip that was almost nonexistent, and his left eyebrow winked with a gold piercing. He reeked of the spilled beer that stained his fur-collared jean jacket and shoes. Kneeling beside me, he blew out a long stream of smoke that singed my nose. “Yer going to tell me where Lana is,” he said coolly, “and what they did to her.”

I struggled to hold back the fear fighting through the haze of whiskey and beer. There was no Tye this time, no Bryn to stand in front of me, and I didn’t have any of Nereida’s fighting talent.

I reached for my tool belt. Idiot, you’re not wearing on e. I curled my fingers into a fist instead. Aim for the throat , that’s what Willow had once taught me.

“Colm, I—I don’t know Lana. About Lana,” I tried.

He gripped the collar of my jacket, Willow’s jacket. His breath rolled over me, and I forgot my plan to punch him and grabbed at his hands instead. They were slick with rain, hot, sweaty.

“Ye know, I sent another lad up there once,” he said, baring uneven teeth. “No vacancies. That’s what James told him. Now ye tell me what that’s about.”

Even Kazie was saner than this man.

But instead of getting away from Colm, I was stuck trying to peel his sticky fingers off me when Nereida wouldn’t have allowed this. She could hit a moving target a hundred meters away, could stand toe to toe with an Azekiel who dwarfed her in size.

I wrestled with his hands, fighting to sit up in the puddle.

Colm’s face became a blur, his words even more distorted. Lana, and Naruka, and James … All my thoughts and movements were a second too late, like I was controlling them from afar.

James would be so embarrassed that a Ruhaven was getting beat up by Colm. Wasn’t I supposed to have some glimmer too?

I was so drunk, I screwed up my face as if I could summon the illusion like Bryn. Nothing.

Time stretched seconds into hours, but with the idea of James’s disappointment hovering over me, I wrenched Colm’s hands off me at last and started to rise.

In slow motion, he cocked back an arm to stop me and—

The blow connected with my jaw.

I heard it, felt it, but I didn’t feel the pain right away, like my body was too shocked to send the signal to my brain.

I started to sway, dry-eyed, as a slow, tingling numbness spread over the left side of my face. Capolinn’s squished townhouses tilted before I smacked into a lamppost, my left ear ringing. My face throbbed as awareness returned. With the ground wobbling, I wrapped my fingers around the pole’s cold metal, but my knees buckled and I slid squeakily to the ground. My knees crunched on broken glass.

Someone shouted. At me?

I couldn’t make sense of anything. But it was Colm who loomed above, framed by a backdrop of streetlights. My hands shook as his eyes darkened to twin threats, his words lost in the roaring pain in my left ear.

Was my eardrum broken? Had he hit me with a bottle? A hand couldn’t hurt this much.

I pressed my palm to my cheek, felt the heat build there despite the rain, the lump pushing against my skin. My jaw might have had a pulse of its own, but the skin wasn’t broken, and the pain wasn’t debilitating enough that I should be sitting here, waiting for more.

When I started to rise, Colm swatted at me in a way meant to be more humiliating than painful. I held out a hand, trying to ward off the next blow, but only hit myself when he didn’t stop. God, do something. Do something.

“Your demon boyfriend’s not here now,” Colm taunted. “What kind of voodoo are you guys doing up there? That’s why Lana ran, isn’t it?”

His words evaporated in the freezing downpour between us.

Cradling my jaw, I searched for a weapon within reach. A paper cup fought against the pull of rain gurgling into a drain. Ten feet away, a pint glass rested against a closed pub. I could grab that, maybe, or just run.

I crawled toward it, palms chafing on the rough stones and shattered beer bottles, my calves swimming in puddles.

Colm shoved me back with one careless push.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Nereida had never been this weak. She’d never lain on the pavement with ugly liquids leaking down the street. And I was supposed to be her? No, not a vein in my body could have run with the same blood, and certainly not my soul. I didn’t need a missing line in a Ledger to tell me I wasn’t Nereida.

Colm twisted his hold on my sister’s jacket. It tightened, a noose around my neck, until I stared at the whites of his eyes.

For a moment, I was in L’Ardoise again, in a puddle outside my parents’ house. They’d told me not to come back for a while, and didn’t need to say what I already knew—that I was only a poor reminder of what had been. They weren’t wrong. I was tired of myself too, of waking up and seeing no one and nothing but Willow in the mirror.

“Now, ye tell me what’s going on and—” Colm broke off on a choked cry.

A whirl of spun moonlight broke the night.

Blinding, brilliant, impossible. A comet falling from the asteroid belt, searing my eyes with its heat. I squeezed them shut. Sent a prayer to Ruhaven—to whatever god existed—that I didn’t melt into the pavement and die right here.

But the heat disappeared as quickly as it came, a cloud banking on an August day. I blinked through the cooling rain.

Colm stumbled away from me, his eyes wide and reflecting the sparking light of the man stalking toward him—a burning light of a man. Corded rivers carved his neck, his back heaved with strain. Gold pulsed from his skin like the boundaries of Earth were only a suggestion.

Some demon from the Gate.

I scrambled back just as his fist snapped out, grabbing Colm by the scruff of his jacket and crushing him against the storefront. Glass cracked in a spiderweb around Colm’s head. His face drained of all color like it had when Bryn showed him a glimmer—even the flush of alcohol fled.

A growl rumbled low in the demon’s chest as he bent, whispered something in Colm’s ear, then rapped him against the wall, again and again. Crack. The closed sign wobbled on the door. Crack . An advertisement jostled, plummeted, and joined the broken beer bottles at the demon’s boots.

Ignoring the pain in my jaw, I shoved to my feet with the aid of the post. I had to get to Bryn, to warn him. It couldn’t be an Inquitate, though, because Colm wouldn’t be able to see it. Something else then.

I wasn’t going to stay to find out.

The ground spun as I tried to locate the distant lights of the restaurants. I needed to get to James and Kazie before the demon descended upon them next, or it created such mayhem that we’d never be able to return to the Gate.

I started toward the pub as another growl sliced through the air.

Then the demon froze.

I stopped, worried it might hear my boots splashing drunkenly through the puddles. And it did.

Very slowly, it started to turn its head.

Holy god .

I staggered. The breath in my lungs simply dried up. My mouth opened on a ragged gasp despite the ache in my jaw.

Because standing before me, under the lamplights on a street in Capolinn, a monster gleamed—one with the haunting eyes of a Ruhaven.

This was no glimmer .

“ Bryn ?” I croaked.

Except it wasn’t him, not really. Planets spun in sockets that should have held his eyes, and his face shimmered with crackling moonlight. More light spread from his feet, pooling in thick, golden puddles until it blended with the rain. Even from here, I felt the heat of him as if I stood feet from a roaring fire.

No cane. He had no cane, stood fully for the first time.

I started to tremble before him, worse than I had when he’d confronted me in the hotel in Oslo. Somehow, here, it was even more real—a nightmare, a dream, all spread out before me in a hideously mocking reality.

Because this was Bryn. And it was truth. And it was terrifying.

“Stay there, Rowan,” he ordered.

I couldn’t move if I wanted to.

“Are you—are you okay?” I asked, my knees beginning to shake from the alcohol or the shock.

The light around him sputtered.

He stepped toward me, dropping Colm in a heap. Bryn’s left leg, the crippled leg, vibrated under him, the calf jerking as he tried to walk.

Whatever had caused this—whatever had turned him into a burning god—was gone.

I started toward him.

Wind whipped my hair into my face, blinding me as I saw Bryn stumble, fall.

Then I was there, awkwardly catching his weight, wrapping my arms around his waist as the light from him flickered out.

We stumbled backward together, trying to find our balance without his cane.

Bryn shot out an arm, grabbing on to a green telephone box and, wrapped around each other, we thumped into the corner of it and the wall.

Just then, I didn’t care that Colm was lying unconscious feet away, or that I’d seen Bryn blaze into a god, or that he’d lied about not running that day in Oslo.

I simply pressed my nose to Bryn’s neck, and breathed.

He cradled the back of my head, holding me against him, murmuring words I couldn’t yet process. But his voice, his warmth, his scent, it pushed away the cold ache inside.

I closed my eyes, letting the rain pummel me while he skimmed shaking fingers over my shoulders, up my neck, until he reached my jaw. Then they slowed, prodding the place that still ached, his cool touch as soft as O’Sahnazekiel’s feathers and ice on the throbbing heat.

He lowered his mouth to my cheek, inhaling much like I had, and suddenly, I was very aware of him. Of us. Of the shape of his body against mine. Of the rain dripping down his cheeks and lips. Of the slow pulse of his heart.

Distantly, a car’s tires splattered through the rain, a whiff of diesel following a few seconds behind.

When I opened my eyes again, I met his vivid Ruhaven blue. No trace of the spinning planets, no lightning crackling over his skin, no light pouring in puddles. Had it all been an illusion? His hair was soaked to a light brown, hanging in spirals over his cheeks. Under his jacket, his collar hung wide from where Colm had torn it, exposing a hint of tattoos.

But then I saw that he wasn’t fine, not at all. “Bryn, you need the hospital.”

He blinked rapidly, his lips nearly blue, his crippled leg shaking between us. “No, but I think, perhaps, that I have overexerted myself. I need James.”

I started to pull away. “I’ll get him.”

“No,” Bryn said quickly, tightening his hold. “He is close, nearly here.”

What? I squinted through the sheets of rain, where the murky streets glowed with the ochre haze of streetlamps. A lone figure barreled down the sidewalk. Rain forced his head down, and his jacket cracked behind him in sharp whips. “How did you know?”

But then James shouted, drowning out Bryn’s answer, and slid to a wet stop before us. He took one look at Bryn through his honey-brown eyes and said with little surprise, “Ah, for feck’s sake. I sure hope that bad Italian was worth it.”

So James had seen this before, this transformation. Not just a glimmer, a hint of something under the skin, but a living, breathing, walking god.

“I’ve got him,” I insisted when James started to take Bryn’s weight.

“He’s three stones on ye.”

“And you’re nearly the same weight as me,” I said, keeping my arm around Bryn.

But he disengaged himself when James reached for his elbow, and I felt the rejection like a blow. Because I was the reason he was like this, because I wasn’t Nereida. “We should leave,” Bryn said, “before Colm wakes up. And Rowan must ice her jaw.”

Both James and I glanced at the man I’d forgotten about, sprawled in front of a poster advertising a cod special.

“Jayzus, did ye feckin’ do that? He’s not dead, is he?”

“Unconscious,” Bryn coughed.

“Jayzus,” James said again, but with a touch of admiration. “Alright, out of the way, Roe, I’ll take him from here.”

Bryn stumbled forward, leg almost giving out, but James righted him with surprising strength. “Ye know this isn’t what I consider keeping a low profile in town, ye bollocks,” James berated him. “I’ve got Mary at the post office wondering why I’m sending feckin’ mail to Russia, and that nosy farmer next door who’s making our little neighbor wall shorter each day. Now suppose Colm brings the bloody Garda to me door?” James turned to me. “Kazie’s pulling the car around. Get in and I’ll get yer man here.”

Kazie. The car. Bar. Naruka.

“But I—”

“ Roe, get into the feckin’ car!” James shouted.