Darkness Falls

by Cate Tiernan

  “Go on,” said River.

  Reyn was just putting Titus back in his stall. He heard me come in and stood for a second, looking at me. When Titus was in, Reyn murmured something to him, then shut the stall gate. Titus whuffed at him.

  “You do have a way with horses,” I said, trying to be casual, but my voice cracked and I sounded like a scared little kid, so, crap.

  Reyn came closer, looking at me intently as if to make sure I was all right, or real, or something.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  I almost gave a nervous giggle. Because that’s how cool I am. “I’m… actually I don’t know,” I said. “I’m… glad to be here. But it’s hard.” I pushed some hair back behind one ear. “It’s hard being me. I guess. I know that surprises you.”

  Reyn nodded—he wasn’t even going to pretend to dispute that—then said, “It’s no picnic being me, either.”

  That was number 6,237 of the things that had never occurred to me. “Oh. No, I guess not.” I’d never considered how he might feel about himself, his past. I guess that goes with the whole “self-absorbed” territory. But yeah, it must be hard to be him, too. Or—here’s a thought—no doubt everyone has hard times, feels overwhelmed or filled with self-doubt. I’d spent more than four hundred years bemoaning the agony of being immortal, not taking a moment to realize that, immortal or no, life could be a real bitch.

  This was a mind-blowing breakthrough that I would examine in greater detail later. For right now, I had questions.

  “How did you and River know where I was?”

  Reyn pushed open a stall gate to reveal a clean, empty space with several fresh bales of hay in it. The hay reminded me of the night Reyn and I first kissed, up in the hayloft. The night we’d realized our horrible shared history. It seemed a decade ago. Reyn dropped his barn coat on the ground and sat down on the floor. I sat on a bale next to him so I would be taller. A pale shaft of late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the window onto him, throwing his cheekbones into sharper relief, making the lighter streaks in his hair shine. He looked tired. Still a handsome god of a twenty-year-old, maybe twenty-two, but tired.

  “We looked for you,” he said. “That night. But we felt there was something off, as if you were close by, but we couldn’t see you.”

  “I wasn’t actually that far away. I wonder if Incy put a glamour around me or something.” It was hard for me to say his name.

  Reyn nodded, his jaw tightening with anger at the thought of Incy. “I’m thinking he probably did. Anyway, you were gone, and eventually we couldn’t feel you anymore. River and the others, Anne and Solis and Asher, tried scrying spells to find you. With no luck.” Reyn let out a deep breath. I regretted again that I had put them all through that.

  “We tried every day. River contacted people she knew, but no one had seen you, no one had heard anything. Then, finally, a friend of River’s called. He’d seen Innocencio in Boston. River had met him, so she knew what he looked like, in general,” Reyn explained. Incy had been with me that night in France, in 1929, when I’d met River. “We figured you had to be with him.” Reyn had been sounding more and more distant, and now he looked up at me, his eyes cool. “Is he your lover?”

  “Incy? No,” I said, shaking my head. “Holy moly. Never.” Holy moly is something cool people say. Along with jeezum.

  “Is he gay?” Reyn’s gaze was very direct, and he just looked so… I don’t know—beautiful? He looked like home to me. Like my neighbors and friends that I’d known so long ago. I thought about him searching the woods the night I’d left, coming to Boston to find me.

  “Not really,” I said. “He… plays for both teams. But we’ve never had that between us.” And, everyone? This is an example of the old adage “dodging a bullet.” You can see how one might be thankful about dodging this particular bullet.

  “You’re just friends.”

  “Yes. Good friends. Best friends.” I sighed and felt very old, resting my head on one hand.

  “Anyway, so we went to Boston,” Reyn went on. “On the way there—it was already night—we suddenly felt you, felt you very alive. Just… big emotion. River was able to follow that.”

  That had probably been when I was at Miss Edna’s, or maybe right after, when I was arguing with Incy in his car.

  “Then you suddenly felt dead.” Reyn swallowed and picked at some threads on the worn knee of his jeans. What that man did for a pair of jeans should be bottled and sold. I blinked and focused on what he was saying. “We saw your scarf by the road, soaked with rain. I knew you would never have let it go, not while you were breathing. So we thought the worst. But River said, ‘Let’s go get her body at least.’ So we kept following whatever sense of you we could get.”

  “You went to all that trouble just for my body,” I said, amazed and so grateful.

  Reyn looked up, irritation on his face. “Yeah. We were going to have you stuffed, as an example to future students.”

  I grinned. “You could put me on wheels, move me from room to room.”

  Reyn nodded drily. “We ended up outside that warehouse—we’d driven past it a couple times. River thought it had probably been cloaked in a concealment spell. We finally saw flickering lights in the upstairs windows and started trying to open the loading-dock door. Then we felt this huge blast of magick, really strong, big power.” He shook his head, remembering. “We knew it was you. It felt like you. It was amazing.”

  My cheeks heated at the wonder and admiration in his voice. I remembered the mingled ecstasy and pain, the lightning-strike feeling of setting my white dove free. I wanted to feel that again. But with more training and less nosebleed.

  He shrugged. “And we went in to get you.”

  I swallowed. Getting the next words out would be like eating nails. “I… appreciate it so much, your coming to find me. To save me, if necessary. Or to retrieve what was left.”

  Reyn looked at me evenly. “Of course. We had no choice. You were one of River’s students.”

  “Ew,” I said, hurt. “That feels great. Thanks.”

  Reyn pushed his hand through his hair. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “No? Then what did you mean?” I decided to shine a flashlight on this skeleton. “Okay, River had to come after one of her students. Fine. But what about you? Why were you there? Just because you’re big and tough and could take someone out?” There. Pinned him like a bug.

  “No,” he said, frowning. “Quit being so prickly. I went because what there is between me and you is not finished yet.” The honesty that I’d demanded disarmed me. I looked into his eyes, so deeply golden and slightly slanted and so smart, so knowledgeable, so experienced.

  I nodded. I didn’t have time to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. I held my breath; this was where he would sweep me up into his arms and we would make out like crazed high schoolers. I started to feel a delicious Reyn + hay = happiness anticipation.

  “Wait here,” he said, and suddenly got up and left the stall. I stared after him. Was he chickening out now? But he was back in less than a minute with something in his hands. Something kind of white and larval. He knelt in the hay and showed me: It was the runt puppy from Molly’s litter.

  “Hmm,” I said unenthusiastically.

  The puppy moved in his hands, turning over and yawning, stretching its long, straight legs out. I hadn’t seen it since the night it had been born, and it was just as uncute and unchunky as before.

  “She’s mine,” Reyn said, and my eyes widened at his look of pride and love. I’d never seen that on him before, and it was incredible to see him seem younger and happier. It was like taking the perfect man and making him inexplicably even perfecter. Fine—more perfect. My jaw almost dropped open, and I sat there, mesmerized.

  He drew a gentle finger down the puppy’s skinny side. It yawned again, opening its small muzzle to show perfect tiny puppy teeth. Then it turned its head and blinked at me.

  “Its eyes are open.” And its ears were
bigger and floppier, I realized.

  “It’s a she,” Reyn corrected mildly. “Her name is Dúfa.”

  I stared at him.

  “Dove,” he said helpfully.

  “Yes, I speak Old Norse,” I said pointedly. I looked down at the puppy again, this ugly white runt that Reyn had adopted and loved and named Dove.

  “Huh,” I said, marveling at all the weird twists and turns my life had taken, especially in the last three months. “Well, she’s… quite something.”

  Reyn smiled at her. “Yes.” He extended his glowy smile to me, making me feel a little faint, and then rose to return the puppy to Molly, who had started whining. He was back before I had stopped reeling at the mysteries of life, and he sat down again, closer to me. Slowly he reached out and put his hand over mine. The touch was warm and electric, and I tried not to hyperventilate. “You can share her if you want.”

  That was what undid me. I didn’t want a dog; I never wanted to have another dog as long as I lived. Dúfa was only going to grow old and die, leaving us with yet another scar on our hearts.

  It was… so terrifying. I mean, not in the same way as Incy trying to suck my power out and kill me but still terrifying in its own way.

  I felt my fingers curl around Reyn’s.

  “Reyn?” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “What name were you born with?” Something intensely personal that not a lot of immortals ran around blabbing to each other. I knew he was the son of Erik the Bloodletter. He knew I was the daughter of Úlfur the Wolf. But who had he once been, before he’d been part of my family’s destruction?

  “Eileif,” he said. Ay-liff. “Eileif Eriksson.”

  It was Old Norse also, which made sense, of course. I recognized the roots of the name: The Ei part meant “alone.” The leif part meant “inheritance” or “legacy.” Yeah, that wasn’t a burden to hang on some kid. Jeez.

  “Eileif,” I said, trying to picture this fierce man as a laughing child with sunlit hair and a mischievous look.

  “Yeah.” He seemed bemused, maybe remembering himself back then as well. “What was your birth name?”

  “I… my name was Lilja.”

  “Leel-ya,” he repeated. “Lily.” He smiled.

  I nodded.

  “Kiss me, Lilja,” he said softly.

  “You kiss me, Eileif,” I whispered. And then our arms were around each other and we were kissing as if we’d been apart for centuries. To me he felt as solid as a cliff in Iceland. Before this I would have said I wasn’t a very physical person—not snuggly, not demonstrative, not affectionate. Not in centuries. But all I wanted at that moment was to be enveloped in Reyn’s warmth.

  I squirmed to get closer to him and he fell backward onto the hay, pulling me with him. He rolled, holding me in place with one hand, and then his weight was on me, comforting me, exciting me, welcoming me home. We kissed again and again, unable to get enough of each other, pressing ourselves together as tightly as we could, considering that we were still fully dressed in a relatively public barn. My hands tangled in his hair as he kissed my eyelids, my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, my nose. I laughed because it tickled, and opened my eyes to see him smiling down at me. I pulled his head back to me and found his mouth, remembering how much I had wanted to see him, to talk to him, while I was gone.

  This was a choice I was making. I thought it was a good choice. I wasn’t letting myself get swept away by what Reyn or anyone else wanted.

  “I want this,” I murmured against his lips. He drew back, breathing hard, his eyes glittering. “I want you.”

  “I want you, too,” he murmured, kissing me again, pushing one knee between mine. And then my mind whirled with sensations and emotions and the drunk feeling of being completely caught up in him, desperate to be with him, hungry for him, his touch. It was as if I had summoned magick with our kisses—that same intense white light filling my chest, the burst of almost painful joy, the feelings of both power and curiosity. This passion was very strong magick.

  Reyn pulled away again. His breathing was fast and shallow, lips red, amber-colored eyes focused like a laser on my face.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked. I felt flushed and heavy, weighted down by desire and emotion. I hadn’t thought I would ever feel this way. Hadn’t wanted to. But Reyn was obliterating my feelings of caution and reluctance.

  “I was thinking that this wasn’t going to be easy,” he said, wariness coming back into his eyes. He was waiting for me to push him away and change my mind, like I’d always done before. I put the palm of my hand flat against his jaw, memorizing the shape of his face, the way his bones felt, the slight bit of beard that was scratching my cheeks.

  “No,” I agreed. “Given how impossible you are.”

  His eyes flared. “Me? You’re the one who doesn’t—”

  I interrupted him. “But I want to try.”

  Surprise, residual caution, and possibly relief crossed his face in minuscule alterations of gorgeous Viking landscape.

  “You do?” His voice was rough and made the inside of my chest flutter.

  “I do.”

  He smiled, slowly and beautifully, then became solemn again. He rose up to his knees and reached for his coat, then fished around in one pocket and drew out a crumpled red bandanna.

  “I was going to give this to you before you left,” he said. “I’ve been holding it for you. But it’s yours.”

  I looked into his eyes but got no clues. He pushed the wad of cloth into my hand. As soon as I touched it, I frowned. No… surely not. It was impossible.

  Slowly I unwrapped the wrinkled bandanna. When I saw what was inside, my mouth opened, but I had no words. With a shaking hand I traced the ancient pattern that I hadn’t seen since the night my family had died, 449 years ago. The pattern on the other half of my mother’s amulet.

  I swallowed, my throat aching. “I thought—wasn’t it destroyed?” My voice came out as a reedy whisper.

  “No. Everything around it was destroyed. But not it, and not me.”

  I reached out my other hand and slowly unbuttoned the top buttons of Reyn’s flannel shirt, then pushed my fingers inside to touch his skin. On his chest, above his heart, I felt the raised scar that mirrored this half of the amulet.

  “It exploded and flew at me, burning through my shirt into my skin,” Reyn said. “The cloth was seared right into my flesh—I had to pick it out with a knife.”

  I winced.

  “Everything around me had turned to ash. My father. My two remaining brothers. My father’s men. The biggest thing I found was a bit of my father’s leg bone. I picked it up, and it crumbled into powder in my hand.”

  His father had been trying to use magick that wasn’t his.

  Reyn looked at the amulet. “It wasn’t ours to take or use. But afterward I looked for it, and I found it by the side of the peat field. I picked it up—didn’t even realize it was broken. I hadn’t seen it before. But I kept it. Always kept it with me.”

  “Why?” It seemed like it would just be a devastating reminder.

  Reyn’s smile was somewhat bitter. “To remind me—not to want too much.”

  I breathed in, tracing the symbols again with my fingers, flashing back to being a small child sitting on my mother’s lap, playing with her necklace. I would wrap her long blond braid around it, try to look through the moonstone, try to memorize the symbols, which I didn’t understand.

  “When I realized who you were, I knew I would give it back to you. It shouldn’t have been taken from your family in the first place. Somehow I hoped that returning it would help… restore the balance.”

  I was overwhelmed with this gift, the one thing I would have desired above all else, from the one person I had desired in… forever.

  “Of course, first I had to make sure you weren’t evil,” he said matter-of-factly. “But now—now I know you should have it.”

  “Because I made out with you?” My voice was shaking.
<
br />   “Yes. That’s why.” Reyn rolled his eyes.

  Quit hiding, Nastasya. Just—quit. “I can’t really believe it.”

  Reyn looked a bit like he couldn’t believe it either.

  “It’s a princely gift,” I said, knowing he would get the archaic reference. Handy that he was as old as I was—I wouldn’t have to explain things all the time.

  “I give it to you,” he said formally.

  Plus his heart. He had offered me that as well. I knew he had. And, apparently, part of a puppy.

  I cradled the amulet in my hand, hardly able to wait until I could fit it against the half River had returned to me. Then I thought of something. I should have realized it weeks and weeks ago, but then of course I’m fairly blind and stupid sometimes.

  I reached into my pants pocket. My moonstone was there, as always. It had helped me fight Incy in that warehouse, and I would never be without it. I pulled it out and held it up to the amulet. It wasn’t shaped and had been polished only by my hands. But… it would fit beautifully between the two halves. Just like when my mother had it.

  “My family’s tarak-sin will be whole again.” For the first time in four centuries, I would have both pieces of my shattered life, my broken childhood. And when the amulet was made whole and set with my moonstone, it would enable me to wield incredible power: the power of the House of Úlfur. I would be my mother’s daughter, my father’s heir. Lilja af Úlfur. Lilja, daughter of Úlfur.

  Reyn traced the rune othala on my leg. Birthright.

  “Thank you, Eileif,” I said. I felt almost unbearably happy, frighteningly happy. But I wasn’t going to run from it. Not this time.

  Reyn took my hand and kissed my knuckles. “It belongs to you, Lilja. I was only holding it for you.”

  It was a huge responsibility. I needed help learning what I needed to know, how to use it, how to make magick with it.

  I held it in one hand, that hand against my chest. Reyn clasped my other hand, and we sat close together, leaning against a bale of hay, quiet and full of thoughts and memories.

  I was Lilja af Úlfur: the Tähti daughter of Terävä parents. My legacy would be different.