Page 10 of Until the Heart Stops (The Oylen City #1)
W e walked in silence for a time, but Callum did not appear impatient with my wandering, not even when I paused at a stall that sold beautiful stone altar bowls.
The vendor selling the wares possessed a powerful magic no longer found in my generation—I could sense it humming in the air around him.
His gaze was sorrowful as I traced a finger across one.
“Who for?” the old man asked in a gnarled voice.
I rocked my jaw back and forth to stem the tide of grief. “My mother.”
He looked at the bowl for a long moment and a shimmer of magic slipped through the air. “She would like this one.”
The bridge of my nose burned and I nodded. “I think she would too.”
I sighed, knowing it was far beyond my means in any case to buy this particular bowl, regardless of how beautiful it was and how much she would have liked it. The man gave me a sad smile and offered another kindness. “Another day, lass. ”
I wondered what my mother’s spirit had told him.
We set off down the cobblestones once more, Callum a little closer than he had been when we first began. “How long has it been?”
I tugged the shawl tighter around my shoulders. “Eleven months and seven days.”
The altar within the apartment I shared with Adrienne and Noah was set beneath our one large window that looked out toward the river.
It was filled with offerings for all those we had lost. Though it had been long enough since my mother passed that I should have set her a bowl upon the altar, I still could not bear the thought of such a final gesture of loss.
Callum gave a small noise of acknowledgment. “And she was the one who you inherited Risqeu lan Serang from?”
Tension prickled across my shoulders. “Yes, she was.”
The tip of his walking stick clicked against the stones and I watched its progress rather than his face as we slipped through the crowd. The tension slid to the back of my neck, curling up over my temples.
“And she from your grandmère?” he clarified.
“Yes,” I answered carefully.
A brush of his cloak made me shiver and I resisted the urge to touch the warm gem against my heart.
“Why?”
I frowned, ducking beneath a low awning strung with dried citrus. “I don’t understand the question, my lord.”
He stopped and it took me a moment to realize.
The furrow returned between his brows, stretching the silvery scar.
Around us people bustled from one stall to the other, a few calling out to friends or companions, but it was as if we were in the eye of a storm for all the notice he gave it.
“Why keep it open when there is now so much competition? Last I entered the Souzterain I counted two separate blood dens bursting with clients, and yours…”
Heat flared across my cheeks. He did not need to finish his thought.
I stared at him, the tension now spreading across my face until a pain throbbed behind my right eye.
But when I did not speak, he took a step closer, gray eyes searching mine.
“You work yourself to the bone, and to what end? I know much of duty, Mademoiselle Searah, and I cannot understand?—”
“It is not duty,” I cut across him.
His jaw shut with a snap, next words squeezed out as if from stone. “I am trying to understand.”
My brows ticked up. “And where does this need for understanding come from, my lord?”
“Do not call me that,” he rasped.
My heartbeat tapped behind my eye, pain spreading across my brow. “Is it a strange fascination as to how those who your maker spurns live? Or is it for your maker himself that you ask such things?”
His hand snapped out, fingers wrapping around my throat.
In half a breath he was closer than he had ever been, towering over me while his cool palm tensed.
But the grip was not punishing, merely the pressure of his presence.
The warmth in my cheeks slid lower, curling down my spine and settling in my belly.
“You do not understand the first thing about my relationship with my maker,” he growled. “And you misunderstand even more than you could possibly dream.”
Instinctually I tilted my head, offering my neck in submission, but his fingers rose to hold my jaw in place.
I waited for the pain but it did not come.
His eyes turned silver in their proximity, as if lit from within, a lock of his hair falling to obscure the scar running across his brow.
I had the strangest urge to push it back, to learn the texture of it between my fingers.
“I make no excuses for the monster who sired me,” he continued. “But I have not spent the last eight hundred years sliding from beneath his boot only for you to assume I am just as monstrous as him.”
As quickly as the heat had pooled in my belly, it cooled beneath the weight of his pain. It was clear in the set of his mouth, the rose tint pooling at the corners of his eyes. But the thumb that held my jaw loosened, giving just the barest ghost of a brush against my skin.
“It is the only thing that connects me to them,” I offered.
Again, that soft furrow appeared. “What?”
“Risqeu lan Serang … I have kept it because it is the only thing which connects me to my family. Each night my grandmère greets me with her magic, my mother teaches me in her ledger, and generations upon generations sat on the stool I now own. Without it I am nothing.”
Callum shook his head imperceptibly, but I caught it all the same as he tucked his walking stick beneath his arm. “That is where you’re wrong, Mademoiselle Searah.”
I licked my lips and froze when his eyes dipped to track the movement. “Wrong?”
“Risqeu lan Serang is not the only thing that connects you to them. It is something, yes, but it is not the only thing. They will never be lost from you because they live on, here”—he pressed two fingers to my chest, right above the ruby, and I wondered if he could feel the thundering of my heart—“and here.” The two fingers rose to press between my brow.
“They are the blood in your veins, the magic in your soul, and your grief—for I know you feel it—is a reminder of the love you carry for them, of which you can never let go. And you will carry that love with you until your heart stops beating…perhaps even longer.”
With each word he spoke, the facade of stone cracked until blood pooled in the corners of his eyes. And I knew I must have worn a similar expression on my face when his free hand rose to brush away the tear that had broken free down my cheek.
As if waking from a dream, his eyes widened and his hands flew away from me. All at once he straightened and took a step back with a dip of his chin. “Please accept my sincerest apologies, Mademoiselle Searah, it was thoughtless of me.”
But all I could think was of the grief of losing his touch now mingling with the rest until I was truly bereft. He took another step back and I fought the urge to reach for him.
“Lilith,” I rasped. “Call me Lilith.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, but it was no longer the impression of joy or amusement. If anything, it made the tears burn hotter in the corners of my eyes. He took a deep breath and bowed. “It is best if I do not.”
I did not need to ask why. Though he claimed to have escaped from his maker’s grasp, he still lay within his clutches. It would be unwise to be so familiar with a human, especially one who had not been chosen to be changed, and even worse one who worked in the Souzterain.
Yet his words burned as if acid coursed through my veins. I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat at the small rejection, curtseying as I had when I’d first seen him. “Of course, please forgive me.”
He looked as if he might have been burning too. His mouth opened, then closed, a soft clicking coming from his throat. His free hand spread wide before clenching into a fist, the silver ring I’d seen that night at Eamon’s catching in the light.
Suddenly all my weariness crashed around me until I was sagging beneath its weight.
I pressed three fingers to my lips and rose to standing once more.
I didn’t think I could endure another moment here in the light of his beauty which had grown so bright it hurt my eyes.
So I murmured an approximation of a goodbye, turning on my heel so I could for once be the first to vanish.
But I could have sworn I’d heard his voice before the crowd swallowed me, so full of sorrow I turned back to him, only to find the space where he’d stood empty.
“Forgive me, Lilith.”