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Chapter thirty-six

A week passed before I healed enough to get out of bed.

Whatever power had kept me alive left nothing for healing of the supernatural kind, so it was slow.

It turned out being gutted and thrown a great distance into a rocky ravine really took it out of a person.

Even a person blessed with the power of the gods.

The icy month of Nevelin arrived, and a new year began.

Gavin never came back, which hurt more than it should have, and I let my self-loathing fuel my rage rather than my gloom.

I grasped the bitterness well in the days after he left.

Let the anger simmer long enough, and it began to char the good parts of me.

It made the days easier, though my fury wasn’t directed at a single person. It just was. With all I’d learned, I couldn’t decide who to blame, if not everyone.

Though I was angry with Damond for being complicit, I let him take care of me in silence.

In turn, he let me be angry. The cabin was one bedroom, but there was a light-blue sofa by the hearth where he slept, as well as a small bathroom and a kitchenette where he cooked for us.

He accompanied me on my slow, uncomfortable walks along the beaches of the Windcrest Sound.

The nastiest glares I could muster didn’t deter him from staying by my side, and for that I was secretly grateful.

I feared how far into myself I might retreat if left alone.

The cabin was hidden south of Brinnea between a thick line of trees at its back within a small inlet off the sound.

The cliffs were tall enough, and we were far enough away that I couldn’t see a single part of the city.

I was grateful for that. All of it was easier to process when half the time, I could pretend I had no responsibilities outside this cabin.

Given how I’d been deceived by so many others, I couldn’t find it within myself to feel guilty about lying to myself in order to cope. Just for a little while.

If Simeon himself deemed it necessary to keep me from my people, life, and duty for over four hundred years, I decided they could wait a little longer for their puppet queen.

I thought of Gavin far more than I wanted to, but his lingering effect on me was too intrusive to ignore.

I saw, felt, and heard him everywhere. In the warmth and safety of my bed.

In the frigid breeze off the sea. In the soothing whoosh of ocean waves.

In the gloom of the sky when it was gray and the heat of the sun when it shined.

Sometimes feeling him made me scream and cry.

Other times, memories of his protective warmth beside me were the only remedy for a restless night.

Damond told me that between the time he brought me to this cabin and I woke, Gavin didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, just drank the water Damond forced upon him and did nothing but sit at my bedside and wait.

Only when I began to wake did Damond convince him to briefly leave the room to spare me the initial shock of him being the first thing I saw.

Neither Damond nor I spoke of him after that, until, three weeks later, Gavin sent me a little gift. Damond had advised me earlier that morning he needed to run into Brinnea and would return before dinnertime.

When he called my name from out front, I rose from the afternoon nap my healing body still required and paused to glance at the two silver rings on my side table. I’d become accustomed to pretending they weren’t there. This afternoon was no different.

I made my way outside, unenthused. Shoulders and neck wrapped in a plush olive-green blanket, I stopped when I saw Damond holding a rope. At the end of it was some sort of silver-furred—nearly iridescent —wildcat cub.

My mouth fell open.

“Are you serious?” I grumbled, knowing exactly who this gift was from. “Is he serious?”

I could tell by the way she clumsily stumbled in the sand over her disproportionately large paws that she was far from full-grown.

I’d only seen drawings of large cats in books.

Lions, tigers, jaguars—she looked a bit like all of them, and also…

not. She was long and lithe—or was going to be—with a head and jaw thick and strong like a tiger’s.

Her eyes glowed a deep, entrancing violet.

Traces of a mane thickened the spots between and behind her ears.

The longer I looked at her, the more I became transfixed by the shimmer of her fur.

Almost like it was sentient and moving, flowing, shifting like molten silver, catching and refracting every color of the world around her.

“What is she?”

“She’s called an umbra,” Damond answered. “Incredibly rare breed. Frankly, I thought they were extinct.” He cocked his head down at her. “They’re supposedly unnaturally smart and fiercely loyal. Protective too. And aggressive, but… she’s small enough that she can’t do too much damage. For now.”

“Who told you that?” I mumbled, entranced by thickly tufted, silver paws that I would’ve sworn were larger than my face.

Damond handed me a note and shot me a pointed look.

I snatched the paper from his hands but refused to back down from our mutual glare .

He nodded to the silver cub. “You should be able to figure out a way to communicate with her in a way no one else can.”

I shifted where I stood. Soltum, the eighth of our gods. God of Animals. He was one to which I’d hardly given any thought. Only two of my twelve powers had shown themselves, and I knew it would be a while before I had the strength to find any more.

Damond bent down and picked the silver cub off the ground by the scruff, but she wriggled to be set free.

I cringed at her struggle. Felt it, somewhere deep. “Put her down.”

He gestured to the note in my hand. “Then read his note.”

With a reluctant grumble and roll of my eyes, I obeyed.

Aryella,

She was barely alive when she found me in northeast Warrich a month before I came to you.

A friend of Damond’s has cared for her these past few months in my absence.

She can’t be more than three or four months old now—still young enough to be impressionable.

You must be strict with her in training.

She’s a weapon when you need her to be. She’s a survivor, Ella, like you.

I named her Shera, after the cat you used to have. I know you don’t remember, but I remember everything.

The silver fur is unique, of course, but I think the both of you together just feel… right.

- Gavin

“Shera,” I repeated aloud, hoping it might summon a lost memory. Nothing came. I dropped the note and my hands into my lap. “I don’t want anything from him.”

She let out a high-pitched growl in rejection to Damond’s grip, kicking all four legs and contorting her strong torso back and forth in an attempt to escape.

The third swipe of her paws behind her head caught Damond on the wrist. He cursed at the cut of her claw and lowered her to the ground.

Then, she ran to me, her massive paws sticking and sliding in the cold sand.

I met her bright and hopeful violet eyes with a furrowed brow. She brushed against my legs, then between, and looked up. There was trust in her gaze as she looked at me, when for Damond, there was none. Through an instinct similar to how I imagined a mother might know her child, I felt… love.

“I guess it doesn’t matter how she got here,” I sighed, tilting my head as she batted around a rock, pretending it was her prey.

“Like a kitten… Small, adorable, fearless, and born to be lethal.”

I cracked a smile at the memory of his words, despite my best efforts. How he made me feel had never felt like a lie.

“If I’m keeping her, she’s coming inside.”

Damond sighed and tossed me the rope that constrained her. “Whatever you say.”

I knelt in the sand and let her sniff and nuzzle my hand before removing the rope from around her neck.

“There.” I tossed the empty leash into the ocean. “You can stay or go. Your choice.”

When she brushed against my knee and rolled onto her back, her silver fur refracting rainbows in the winter sun, I laughed for the first time in quite a while. For the first time since that world-altering night in Brinnea, my smile was too big to contain. She would stay, then.

***

At night, my terrors were no longer finding Phillip and Oliver.

Or of being stuck in golden caskets or shredded into a mess of confused pieces I couldn’t find, which I now suspected were memories trying to break through.

I had one nightmare now: Molochai’s cold, taloned fingers on my skin, his shadows inside my veins, that evil ripping apart my mind before taking his blade and cutting my body wide open.

Most nights, I dreamt it over and over and over again.

Damond checked on me when I woke up screaming, but there was nothing he could do—nothing I wanted him to do—save for mixing me a sleep tonic.

Sometimes the drink helped. Other times, it only made it more difficult for me to wake myself from the terror when it returned.

But those first nights with Shera, I slept restfully and dreamlessly.

For a three-month-old wild animal, she was incredibly calm.

She had no accidents inside the cabin and scratched at the door every morning to ask to relieve herself.

In the books I’d read in Tovick, Soltum’s abilities weren’t detailed like the other gods’ had been.

But Shera was relaxed when I was relaxed.

For her sake, I forced myself to stop and breathe.

With her, my mood seemed to be my power.

Another uneventful week passed with the three of us in the seaside cabin.

Another week of peaceful, dreamless sleep.

Another week of walking—faster and longer, now—and growing stronger, but I still had a long way to go.

My stomach still hurt when I moved, but it was a dull ache rather than a sharp wrench of muscle and skin that made my eyes burn.