I stood in a familiar little shed that smelled like animals and rustled with the sounds of tiny feet. Kira held a little
blue lizard in her palms. It skittered between her fingers and over the backs of her hands as she excitedly told me about everything that made it revolting and beautiful.
“—And after that is when it vomits up the carcasses to feed to its babies.”
I leaned against the wall and made a snort of disgust.
“That’s pleasant,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm, as if I wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be.
I had been listening to her go on for hours. Normally by now, I would be looking for excuses to leave. Today, for some reason, felt different. Something about this chilly afternoon seemed fleeting, like a ghost was about to slip through my fingers. I couldn’t pinpoint the sensation until Kira stopped talking and turned around to look at me, dark eyes that were a reflection of my own peering through sheets of black hair.
Her image flickered, as if for one brief moment it was made of smoke, then solidified so quickly that I thought I was going insane.
A lump rose in my throat. A distant reality began to encroach on the edge of my thoughts, but I willfully ignored
it.
“Show me the next one,” I said. “You don’t like this one.”
“Show me anyway.”
Don’t stop talking.
She knelt down and pulled out one final glass enclosure
from the bottom shelf, opening it and reaching inside with the gentle touch of a mother picking up their precious child.
When she turned around, she gave me a mischievous grin. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to scare you.”
She held out her hands. The green snake regarded me with a wary stare as it wound around her arms.
There it was again. A flicker of smoke.
No. Stay.
“If you’re feeling brave, you can even hold it,” she teased.
The sight of the creature did coax forth some unease in my stomach. But I wasn’t afraid of it. Not like I once was.
I extended my hands and let the serpent slide from her fingers into mine, coiling easily around my forearms.
“Huh. It likes you.”
Her voice sounded far away. But I lifted my eyes and she stood directly in front of me, looking at me with a twisted nose and a strange sort of pride. An expression that, like so many of hers, I recognized as my own.
My chest hurt. Reality banged on the door.
But I wanted to be here for one more minute. Even though she was starting to float away, layers of her dissolving into mist.
“Tell me what revolting things this one does,” I said, desperate to call her back.
“I don’t think this one is revolting at all.”
A wind blew, somehow, even though we were inside. It pulled her hair into puffs of dust. I reached out with my
free hand to grab her, only to pass straight through her skin.
The shed dissolved around us like shredded parchment, revealing a stormy sky.
“Stop,” I begged. My fingers closed around one solid handful of fabric at the edge of her sleeve.
She shrugged, a cheerful, ungraceful movement. “It’s fine. I’m sure there’s lots of interesting stuff out there.”
No. I wasn’t ready. There were still so many things I wanted to tell her — all of them, Atraclius, my parents, the twins…
I blurted out, “It wasn’t me. I need you to know—”
She let out a scoff. “Ascended above, shut up, Max. We always knew it wasn’t you.” She looked over her shoulder. “I’ve got to go. And so do you. Try not to be so scared of everything all the time, alright?”
I wasn’t ready.
But I opened my fingers anyway, and let her go.
 |
Max.
My dream relinquished me in slow, agonizing bites.
Maaay-ucks.
Shit. I was dead.
We were both dead. Tisaanah and I, burned up together.
There were worse ways to go, I supposed.
Maaaay-ucks-un-tar-ee-uuuusss—
First came the sound, my name in that melodic voice. Then came the pain, a faint buzz that sank into every inch of my skin, every muscle, every bone. And a faint tickling sensation across my cheeks.
I opened leaden eyelids.
Tisaanah’s face hovered over mine, her hair spilling against my face, backlighting forming a golden halo around
her contours. She was so beautiful that she could not be human.
Definitely dead.
Apparently I said that aloud, because Tisaanah replied, “You are not dead.”
As I settled further into consciousness, the pain grew more intense. Well, that confirmed the truth of what she was saying. A dead man would probably feel less. I groaned. “How did we manage that?”
“I know only some of that answer. Some, you will have to explain to me, mysterious snake man.”
I chuckled. The vibration of it ached. “Mysterious snake man. You shall now always address me by this title.”
That part of it still felt like a dream, not a memory, or a page stolen from someone else’s tale. I couldn’t believe that I did that. I had spent the last decade avoiding what Reshaye had created in me when it was pried from my soul, refusing to acknowledge that a piece of it had forever changed me. And I had not only acknowledged that power but used it.
I didn’t know whether that was terrifying, or freeing, or both. Maybe freedom was always a little bit terrifying.
Tisaanah let herself fall sideways, collapsing onto the bed next to me. I turned my head so that we stared directly into each other’s faces, our noses almost touching. With great effort, I lifted my hand and ran knuckles over the side of her face, tracing the line of her jaw and the soft warmth of her cheek.
Real. She was real.
For a while there, I didn’t think that this reality would exist again.
“So?” she said, expectantly. “So what?”
“So, mysterious snake man— “
“Ascended above, give me a minute, demanding rot goddess.”
“A minute for what?”
“A minute to be glad that we have one.”
The joking smile faded at the corners of her mouth, sinking into something gentler and more pensive. My own mind reassembled the blurry, scattered pieces of what had happened at the estate. The plan, the dinner, the kidnapping, Nura and the Syrizen and—
I bolted upright. “Sammerin—“
“He is fine.” Tisaanah stopped me, gently pushing me back to the pillow.
A breath of relief.
“And the others? The slaves? Serel?” She nodded.
“So we did it.” She nodded again.
I let out a long breath. That was mind-boggling. That six people in five days managed to free hundreds of slaves and take down one of the most powerful houses in Threll. Sure, even if it took a brief detour through hell.
But then, if anyone could do it…
I thought of Tisaanah’s contract with the Orders, of the war back in Ara, and a knot choked my throat. I could see a thousand machinations beginning to turn inside of her head. The wrinkle between her eyebrows told me that she was thinking about the same thing.
I smoothed it with my thumb, pushing away my own anxieties with the movement.
“Just one minute,” I murmured. “Only one.”
And our faces moved towards each other at the same time, my fingers curling around her cheeks, hers sliding over my shoulders. Our mouths met in a kiss that said everything we couldn’t quite put into words, one that started as a gentle whisper and quickly rose to a more passionate song. I reminded myself of the way her lips
moved, the way her tongue tasted, the mild scuff of her teeth over my skin.
The last time I kissed her, I thought I never would again.
And I was so damn happy to be wrong.
She pulled away, nose tickling mine, eyes smiling. And in that low, erotic voice, she whispered, “Your breath smells very, very bad.”
I scowled and blew a puff of air directly into her face, prompting her to let out a giggle that was possibly the most welcome sound I had ever heard. And apparently my breath couldn’t have been all that bad, because she stifled that laugh with another kiss, and another, and another.
And all I could think, through it all, was one thing: Ascended fucking above, I was alive.
|
I WOULD HAVE BEEN content to go on for at least a few more hours like that, but Tisaanah was, unfortunately, not as easily distracted.
I had no choice but to give her the whole story. The one final thing that I had not told her — told anyone. I knew I would have to eventually. But this was a secret that I had buried even deeper within myself than the truth of Sarlazai or the deaths of my family — perhaps because it was one that still stared back at me every time I looked in the mirror.
Now, though, I had opened a door that I couldn’t close again.
“It happened when Reshaye was removed,” I began.
“After my family, I needed to get it out of me. That was just non-negotiable. And the Orders were in serious disarray at that point, so there was no one left to give me too much of a hard time about it. Zeryth was all too eager,
since the war was over anyway and frankly, I think the bastard was mostly scared that I had all of that power.”
“He thought you would use it against him?” Tisaanah asked.
“I couldn’t, since I was blood bound to the Orders. As long as Zeryth acted on behalf of the Orders, I couldn’t harm him, at least not intentionally. But the title of Arch Commandant is fought and bled for, and he didn’t like how my having Reshaye affected him in that fight.” So fucking trivial. Zeryth Aldris, forever concerned with his own position even when real people were dying. “And Nura— she wasn’t about to argue.”
That, I would never fully understand. I’d known Nura since we were both children, but even then, I never saw her cry. Not until my family’s funeral, where I watched their pyres burn from a distance. She was the only one that saw me, the only other one hiding back in the shadows, her cheeks slick with tears.
I had pretended I didn’t see her and walked away before she could approach me. But the next day, when I had again showed up at the Towers borderline hysterical, demanding to have Reshaye ripped out of me, she didn’t so much as say a word.
“But, like everything, it wasn’t that easy,” I went on. “They had pulled Reshaye from many bodies before, but bodies that it rejected. It had wanted to leave just as much as they wanted it gone. In my case, Reshaye definitely did not want to leave. I spent hours bleeding on that slab while they worked on prying us apart, all while Reshaye and I were fighting these ridiculous battles within my head. It didn’t want to let me go. But I wasn’t about to let it keep me.”
I still shuddered when I thought about it, the way Reshaye had clung to me like a desperate lover.
Tisaanah had edged closer, her body pressed against mine and her hands wrapped around my arm. And for a
moment, I was struck by how much I deeply appreciated this alternative.
“Eventually, it got so bad that they told me that if they went any further, they would probably kill me. I told them that was just fine with me.”
I let out a breath, took a moment to ground myself in Tisaanah’s attentive eyes.
“And I did die. Just for a few minutes. Short enough that it wasn’t a done deal. And as Reshaye was being pried away from me, it’s like it dug all of its claws into me to pull me back.”
{You wish to be rid of me so badly?} it had hissed.
{You’d rather die than stay here with me?}
“Reshaye saved you?” Tisaanah whispered.
Well, “saved” made it sound so damned righteous. “It cursed me with a life I didn’t want out of spite. It dragged me back just as it was ripped from my veins. But it kept me alive by giving me a… gift.”
{Our stories are bound together forever, Maxantarius. Yours is not over yet, and you cannot discard the pages already written. It is burned into your soul, and now it will be burned into your body as well.}
The last thing I remembered, in those murky memories, was the agonizing pain of Reshaye being finally cleaved from me. And its final, fading whisper: {Enjoy the gift I have given you. You will always be followed by what you fear.}
“I was unconscious for days. Sammerin was the only one there when I opened my eyes for the first time. I almost burned the house down and I didn’t even have my wits about me enough to realize that I wasn’t dreaming until he was screaming at me to snap out of it.”
A wrinkle had formed between Tisaanah’s brows. One of her fingers brushed the corner of my eye, tracing the outline. “You have another eyelid.”
“Right.” I blinked, suddenly conscious of the thin membrane that covered my eyeballs. Closed. Always closed. “It took me way too long that day to realize that it was there, and that by closing it, I could close the well of magic that transformed me.” I let out a small scoff. “Did you know that snakes have eyelids like this? For a creature that fails to understand the nuance of human emotion, Reshaye does have a penchant for dramatic justice, doesn’t it?”
“So when it is open— “ “You saw.”
A hint of shame seeped into those two words.
I had spent nearly a decade aggressively ignoring that part of myself. It was a reminder that Reshaye had won — that it had changed me forever and turned me something that was no longer even fully human. When it lived in my mind, I could tell myself that it was the monster, not me. But it had made me one, too, in its final slight.
And there was a part of me that hated for her to see that.
“You never told me,” she murmured.
“I never told anyone. Only Sammerin knew, and I wouldn’t have told him either if I’d had the choice. It was clear from the beginning that I couldn’t control it. And anything from Reshaye is just… tainted. I wasn’t going to use or even think about it ever again.”
I chanced a glance at Tisaanah, cringing in anticipation of what expression might greet me. But she just looked thoughtful, sad. “But you did it this time.”
“You needed me.”
Her arms tightened around me, her face burying against my shoulder. “You controlled it.”
I had. That thought still boggled me. I wasn’t ready to address the possibility that I could use this thing.
“So did you,” I said. She had done what I never could: brought Reshaye back from the brink of a breakdown. And
thank the Ascended that she did.
Our fingers slid to each other and intertwined. “You were perfect,” she murmured.
And we lay there for another moment, allowing ourselves to ignore the looming shadows of vanquished monsters.
