Page 18 of The Night Is Defying (Nytefall Trilogy #2)

18

A straea

Falling at the complete mercy of gravity was the true test of one’s state of mind. The first time I’d been here, I was terrified, but also liberated. I’d wanted to hit the ground and have every burden silenced in the impact. At that time it had felt like winning, when the world would no longer be able to hurt me anymore.

Freedom had a different meaning to me now. It was accepting that life was going to hit me down time and time again, but I wanted to get back up. It was full of challenges and choices and I would make many mistakes, I would be selfish, but nothing worth anything was without strain on the heart, soul, or mind.

So long as I kept wanting to get back up, it was not the end.

I caught myself.

The wings that expanded from my shoulder blades arched my back, and I was not afraid anymore.

They spread wide and I twisted, defying gravity’s claim, and I could almost reach down to touch the snow before I swept high.

I was flying.

The exhilaration made me beat my wings harder, faster, uncaring of the burn and the strain it took to keep climbing. Bursting through the cloud bank expanded the stars above me and I became awestruck, floating in their palace.

I gasped when an arm hooked around me, pulling me a little higher and my back curved at his touch. The dark angel catching the light.

“You are absolutely exquisite,” Nyte said, barely a whisper. “There will still be days that you fall, but it can’t be forever so long as your will to stand, to fly, is greater than your demons.”

Pulling me, it felt like floating and our lips met with a burst of freedom and longing up here. I kissed him harder. More desperately. The air was sharp and icy and my hair had turned damp. My legs almost circled his waist until a blast of lightning struck from nowhere, tearing us apart. A second strike of blue illuminated the sky and pain scorched through me.

Not mine. Nyte’s.

I watched in horror as he fell, swallowed so fast by clouds that my heart tore from my chest. I followed my instinct to dive after him. It wasn’t fast enough to catch him. My wings beat harder and faster, closing the distance, but now we were both plummeting at a speed that would shatter us on the ground. But I was desperate to reach him despite the ground closing in.

My relief at hooking my arms under his was short lived when I tried with all my might to slow us. A cry ripped from my throat at the powerful strain on my wings, but i didn’t stop trying to prevent our plummet.

Nyte came around enough so that his arm circled around me. Then his dark wings closed around us, tucking mine in tightly, and I wanted to scream at his submission to take the impact of the fall I was trying to stop. We both knew I wasn’t strong enough. His magick grew around us next and all I could do was hug him tightly.

The impact came like the world exploded around a sphere that kept us safe. At least from broken bones but the moment we landed it was like Nyte used the last dregs of his strength. His wings fell away, opening our cloak of darkness, and he was so still under me.

So deathly still.

My face pulled back from where I had buried it in his neck and I straddled him. He was still breathing but it was faint. I laid my palms over his chest and they glowed. My eyes slipped closed and I didn’t know what I was doing, only that I reached for him and I felt him more deeply than I ever had before.

His pain and anger and heartache. My eyes pricked being wrapped by so much loss and loneliness from within him which I tried to heal with parts of me. Filling myself into the voids, the splits in his soul, but it wasn’t enough. Without Bonding it would never be enough to heal the fractures inside him but for now I could soothe some of the pain.

Nyte’s heart came back stronger each minute my magick infused him. The darkness was tamed by the light until we were an entanglement of peace.

“Nyte,” I whispered, utterly terrified by the silence. “Please wake up.”

“Astraea!” A voice called down to me.

I looked up, blinking my blurry vision to find Elliot at the top of the crater. Then several more forms—the Golden Guard—were around us too.

“He’s still not moving,” I sobbed.

“He’ll be okay,” Kerrah said, trying to be assuring.

“Are you injured too?” Zeik asked.

“No.”

At least I didn’t think so. I could hardly feel anything in my rush of panic.

“What the fuck happened?” Nadia asked.

“There was lightning and it—it happened so fast.” I sniffed. Pull yourself together.

“Well how are we supposed to pull him out?” Zeik grumbled.

“It’s steep. None of us can,” Elliot said.

None of them had wings. I did but Nyte was too heavy.

I thought of the void but I’d never tried going through it with another person by my command.

When I felt a weak squeeze on my thigh my sight snapped down, finding a flicker of gold through fluttering, tired eyes.

Relief washed over me to see it.

“Thank fuck,” Zeik muttered.

“Are you hurt?” Nyte asked, barely a croak.

He was the one lying against the cold ground, dark wings splayed but I hoped they weren’t broken. He’d been the one who had been struck twice by lightning and had taken the worse of our impact.

“I’m fine,” I said, brushing a lock of hair from his eyes. “I don’t know how the weather turned so fast.”

Nyte’s eyes cast to the sky, but he didn’t voice his thoughts. He looked so tired—it was frightening to see him like this.

“I don’t know if I can take us through the void. Are you strong enough?”

Nyte took a long inhale, but it was slow enough that I knew he was trying to mask his pain from me. He sat up and I helped with a hand around his nape.

“I think so,” he whispered.

“We’ll head back to the castle after we scope the area,” Elliot informed.

Nyte held my other hand at his chest. “Can you do that again?” he asked.

“What?”

“Give your magick to me.”

I didn’t realize that was what I’d done, but when I remembered how it felt to reach into the depths of his being, my palm warmed with a violet glow, and Nyte sighed like it offered him some reprieve.

Then I shifted closer, tighter, as he pulled us through the Starlight Void.

Beneath my knees was cushioned now and I looked over the black silk sheets. I didn’t know this room, but the fact that he’d brought us here made me think that it had to be his bedroom. Nyte’s wings fell over the side of the bed and I’d used the void to alleviate mine for now. The broken feathers pinched my brow.

“Does it hurt?” I asked quietly.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Take my blood.”

“No.”

“Nyte—”

“Can you just lie with me, please?”

How was I to resist that weak and vulnerable plea? Shifting, I tucked into his side and monitored the rise and fall of his chest, riddled with the anxiety of it stopping still.

“What did my brother say to you?” Nyte asked.

“Not a lot,” I said honestly. “He showed me how my past skills can come back—I beat him at chess.”

In the small pause of silence, it was like I could feel Nyte’s smile. His hand idly traced up and down my arm.

“Then why the anger?”

“I just needed… to let it out.”

“You did so beautifully,” he said in quiet admiration. “But do you want to talk about it?”

“I feel like I’m being torn apart,” I admitted. The confession tightened my throat. “Between who I am and who people expect me to be. Even back then. The hero would have let you go… but I didn’t.”

“The hero would have left this realm… but I couldn’t.”

“So we’re both villains, then?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “If you ask me, there are no heroes. For everyone’s wrong deeds are justified by their own means. I don’t care what you are, how you came to be here; you are a person, Astraea. One who loves deeply and as much as you try to give it to the world, your heart deserves to be selfish just like everyone else’s.”

I absorbed his words in the silence, fighting my mind that wanted to rebel against what felt like permission.

“This world will try to make you. What I do know is it can take many good things to make them believe in you, but only one bad one to make them condemn you. That’s why there is no single version of you that can exist. What matters are the ones you have that live in your mind with everyday.”

I leaned my chin on my hands over his chest. “Is that how you accepted what people made you out to be?” I whispered. “You stopped trying to change their minds?”

“I wanted to be better once. Seen as good, ” he admitted. “When I thought there was some hope we might break the curse, I didn’t want you to live with being shunned by your people for choosing me when I was only a monster in their eyes. It’s all I knew how to portray and I didn’t care before. For you, I did.”

“They never would have let you be good,” I said quietly.

“I don’t think so. I’ve done cruel and heinous things in my life and I don’t ever want you to forget that part of me exists. In my past, and my capabilities now.”

“It’s in my capabilities too, isn’t it?” I asked carefully.

Nyte tucked a strand of my hair, his expression thoughtful.

“Yes. But you wouldn’t harm someone without great reason. You are fair, and just, and precious. So very precious, love.”

He weaved a lock of silver between his fingers, watching it while he seemed lost in his own mind.

“You were a child of war, Rainyte,” I said gently.

That brought his amber gaze to me with a twitch of his brow.

I added, “You were given a dark power without a choice so young, and made into a soldier without ever knowing what it meant to be just a son.”

“Don’t excuse what I am. All I’ve done. It’s in your nature to do so but every innocent life I’ve taken I knew what I was doing, I just didn’t care. About anything. I looked around and I saw life after life in cycles of love, violence, greed, anger… so much anger in every mind and it made me resent carrying my own existence yet I was cursed to eternity here. So all I could do to make some of the demons clawing my mind apart relent was to inflict this pain on others. My father ordered me, but I can’t say I put up much resistance for a very long time. That is why they call me Nightsdeath. That is why there is no amount of good that could atone for all I’ve done. It was a delusional dream to believe otherwise.”

“I still believe,” I whispered. All he told tore me apart, but I didn’t know what it made me to be mourning for him above all.

“Your heart is the only one I’ve come across in my long and torturous existence that allowed me to come close enough to touch it. It’s possibly the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done.”

I pushed up on one hand, my mouth curving in challenge. “You don’t scare me, Nightsdeath.”

That broke a tired smile on his face. “I never have. It’s been my life’s torment.”

My fingers traced over the burned material where the lightning had struck his chest, close to his heart. I began to undo the buttons of his jacket.

“You don’t have to—”

“Just let me. If you’re not going to take my blood I’ll have to patch you up the mundane way. Can you sit up?”

I pushed off him, letting him take off his jacket and shirt as I went to collect what I needed in the washroom. Coming back with a basin of cold water some cloths, and a salve I found, I felt my chest ache as I watched him shift on the bed with gritted teeth.

“Shouldn’t you be healing faster?”

When I got closer, the wound was far worse than I thought. I thought only the second strike had hit him, but that was the one to make him fall after the first hit him to break us apart.

“I should be,” he said with a disgruntled huff.

“You didn’t warn me flying could be dangerous with unpredictable weather,” I said lightheartedly, sitting on the bed. I couldn’t help reaching my hand out to his feathered wings. Nyte’s eyes closed with a soft sigh to my touch.

“There’s a lot to learn about flying,” he said. “But you’ll pick it up naturally.”

I laid the first cold cloth to his burnt skin and Nyte hissed.

“I didn’t expect you to be so… fussy,” I mused.

“This isn’t a typical wound,” he grumbled in defense.

I fought amusement even though I hated the pain he was in.

“I need to go to the temple in Vesitire—the one I almost opened until…”

“Until you chose me. Your first incriminating act of villainy if you ask the gods you wish to see.”

That shook me with dread. Perhaps I shouldn’t see them if all I would face was their wrath and disappointment, but Auster had made me believe it was important.

Nyte’s eyes slipped open lazily at my silence as I wrung out the next cold cloth.

“I can’t keep cowering away from it,” I muttered.

As I laid the wet material on the rest of the scorch mark on his chest, the veins in Nyte’s neck protruded with the sting but he didn’t make a sound this time.

“You’re not. You’re taking steps as you need to for you. They can wait their turn.”

“The only reason you’re a bad influence on me is because of how easy you let me off with everything.”

“Did I go too easy in the woods?” He lifted a brow. “I’ll have to do better next time.”

No—he hadn’t. At one point I feared he would keep attacking until he struck me down. But it was what I needed, and what ultimately made me take that chance to find my wings.

I scooted deeper on the bed and leaned over him. My fingers gathered some of the salve for the smaller wound across his side. Then I couldn’t help tracing fingers along his scars, near lost in a trance over his skin.

“We can go to the temple tomorrow,” he said gently.

My eyes flicked up to his. “When do we need to make the Bond?”

“When you’re ready.”

“They must be getting impatient—Tarran and the vampires.”

“I can handle them.”

Somehow I didn’t think that was true, but he didn’t want to concern me. Telling Nyte about my small interaction with Tarran would only serve to make him angry, so I kept it to myself. It had just been hollow words to scare me, and in some delusional part of his mind, plant the ludicrous idea I’d ever side with him over Nyte and Auster.

I wasn’t siding with anyone. Not before I had the chance to ally with myself.

“Can I have a memory?” I asked.

“I don’t think I have the strength tonight.”

Disappointment dropped in my stomach though I understood. I couldn’t stop thinking about gaining whatever it was Drystan was anticipating I would see, and I didn’t know how much longer before it came in the story Nyte was writing.

“Feeling your magick tonight, bold and unleashed, was the most fun I’ve had in centuries,” he mumbled sleepily.

I laid down again gently, mindful of his wing. “Fun? I guess I need to do better.”

He huffed, a barely there sound of amusement. “No. You are progressing exactly as you should be. Faster than I expected, in fact.”

Hearing that lightened me, when it felt like the world was spinning so fast and I was too slow to keep up.

“I’ll be able to best you soon.”

“I’m counting on it.”

I smiled, laying my cheek on his shoulder and tuning into his heartbeat. It filled me with serenity. And fear, I realized, when today it had become so shallow right under my palm and I didn’t want it to ever come close to that again.