I stared up at him, my heart so full, it felt too big to be contained in the confines of my body. “I love you too, Raidyn. With every—”
He cut off my words with his mouth, our lips crashing together. Where the first kiss had been soft and brief, a question more than anything, this kiss was the answer, and it was urgency and love and an all-too-painful awareness of the risk that it might be our last. His hands closed into fists around my shirt, his knuckles kneading my spine as his lips moved on mine. I pressed closer to him, my own hands roaming over his back, pulling his shirt until it tugged free of his pants, so I could run my fingers against his bare skin. He shivered beneath my touch, with a low groan deep in his throat. I felt at once powerful at my effect on him and weak from his on me.
Raidyn reached up with one hand, plunging it into my hair, to tilt my head back, his lips insistent on mine, parting them beneath his, so his tongue could sweep forward, claiming my mouth. I gasped, hot with a nameless ache that begged me to somehow get closer to him, to—
He broke away suddenly, breathing heavily, his eyes burning in the darkness. “If we do much more of that, I can’t make any promises that your parents won’t wake up and find us in a compromised position.”
There was a soft hoot nearby; I was almost certain it was Naiki, offering us her approval or a warning, I wasn’t sure. A soft giggle escaped my lips—a giggle. I hadn’t even realized I was capable of such a noise.
“Maybe I don’t care if they do.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Raidyn growled, bending forward to take my bottom lip between his teeth, with just enough pressure to turn my legs liquid and make my heart slam against my ribs.
I moaned, pressing into his body again, and he immediately pulled back.
“And no more noises like that either!”
I wanted to protest, but with the little bit of space between us—enough for the the night air to swoop in and cool my heated cheeks—a hint of reason returned, and with it, a rush of guilt that turned the languorous heat in my limbs to acid in my stomach.
“Is everyone healthy now?”
Raidyn blinked at the sudden change in topic.
“Healthy enough to fly?” I clarified.
“Yes.” He pushed up onto his forearm. “Halvor is healed, and everyone else has recovered. We haven’t moved—we didn’t dare with the condition you were in. But there haven’t been any more attacks.”
I nodded. “Then wake everyone up. We should go. Now.”
“Now?”
“I’ve rested long enough—we’ve wasted days because of me. And if there’s any chance my sister is still alive, we need to get to her as fast as possible.”
“Zuhra…”
I could hear the caution in his voice, but I ignored it with a sharp shake of my head. “A chance, Raidyn. That’s all I said. And I know it’s small. But I have to believe it still exists. As long as you’re breathing, there’s still hope, right?”
He winced at the reminder of his mother’s words.
“Well, here I am, breathing against all odds—again. Perhaps she is too.”
He reached up with his free hand to cup my cheek. There was no passion behind this touch, only a bone-deep sadness that transferred to me even more strongly through the press of his fingers against my jaw, and a regretful sigh. But he said, “You’re right. Of course we can hope there’s still a chance. For Loukas too.”
I nodded, fierce and desperate. “And no matter what, we have to stop Barloc,” I added. “Before he brings an army here and kills even more innocent people. Before he destroys this whole world.”
Raidyn’s eyes flashed in the darkness. “We will stop him. We will,” he repeated, a fierce promise under the distant stars.
THIRTY-FOUR
INARA
I trailed a foot or two behind Loukas. Ederra had asked him to take me to a room where I could lie down and rest. But my steps were heavy and slow, forcing him to glance over his shoulder more than once to see if I still followed.
“Are you all right?” He paused and turned to me after the third time looking back. “Is it happening again?”
“No, not yet.”
Loukas waited, his green-fire eyes even brighter than normal in the night-shadowed hallway. So different, so unique, marking him as other. Making fellow Paladin afraid of him. I’d noticed the way even the council—supposedly some of the most powerful Paladin in Visimperum—gave him a wide berth in that room, casting sidelong glances toward him with narrowed eyes and stiffened shoulders. He didn’t give any indication that he noticed or cared … but I wondered.
It struck me in that moment, standing alone in the hallway together, that the last person I’d ever expected to be able to understand me was the one staring at me, hands shoved into his pockets, broad shoulders thrown back in his usual self-assured stance. His comments near the river that I’d brushed off, tried to ignore, rose back up, forcing my heart into my throat.
Was that why he’d finally agreed to help me go after Barloc alone? Because he, of all people, could understand what it had been like to grow up with a mother who couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me? We both knew what it was like to have those who should have cared for us fear and avoid us. And perhaps he knew how the power he wielded, that caused that divide, had become his comfort—how, if it had been torn from him, he would have felt far more than just a hole inside. He would have felt as if he himself—what made him Loukas—had been ripped asunder, leaving him a husk.
“I don’t know if I dare go to sleep,” I finally admitted. “I’m afraid it’s going to happen again. And maybe this time I won’t wake up.”
He flinched.
There was a long pause of silence. And then, “Well, your grandmother wants you to rest.”
My faltering hope that maybe he did understand me, or even cared for me—at least a little—snuffed out. Of course I had been dreaming up a connection that didn’t exist; I’d assumed because the first boy I’d ever met had been kind, that maybe most people were kind, deep down. Or deep, deep down, in Loukas’s case. And maybe they didn’t show it the same way, leading me to ignore all the signs that Loukas didn’t—
“But I’m going to go check on Maddok, so if you want to follow me, I can’t really stop you,” he added, turning on his heel and heading back the way we’d come, leaving me standing in the same spot, baffled.
Why would he leave me there—with no idea where the room I didn’t even want to go to was located—and tell me he’d decided to do something else, and with such a strange warning about not being able to stop me if I—
Oh.
Loukas had already turned the corner when I lurched forward, stumbling in my effort to follow him. I caught sight of him heading down a flight of stairs and managed to catch up to him as he hit the bottom step.
He didn’t look over at me, but I swear one corner of his mouth twitched as I panted at his side, my hand pressed into the stitch below my lungs from having to nearly run. Even now, his long legs ate up the floor so I had to take two quick steps for every one of his.
“Why didn’t you just say I could come with you if I didn’t want to lie down? Are you afraid of upsetting my grandmother by going against her wishes?”
Loukas finally glanced over at me, his eyebrows lifted. “You’re very direct, aren’t you?”
“Is that bad?” My neck flushed. Of course it was. Yet another social mistake, because no one had ever had the time to teach me how to act or what to say or how not to make a fool of myself when I was only lucid for such brief periods of time.
“No,” he said. “It’s … different. Much like you, I suppose.”
The flush crept up higher, warming my cheeks. In my experience, different wasn’t a good thing. My mother had avoided me most of my life because of it; the townspeople in Gateskeep had tried to have me killed. Now the thing that had made me different in Vamala was gone, but I was here in the Paladin world, different once again. The only person who had always treated me the
same, no matter what, was Zuhra.
And not only had I lied to her and hidden the truth of what I was enduring from her, I’d lost her, yet again.
Regret, sharp as needles, barbed my heart. Grandmother had seemed surprised I hadn’t pushed to get back to Zuhra. I wanted to—oh, how I did. But I knew that I wasn’t the priority. Stopping Barloc was.
“Do you ever wish you weren’t different?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a Paladin … but not like the others. I’ve seen how they look at you. Have you ever wished you were the same as the rest of them?”
He didn’t answer, his strides growing even longer. I had to break into a jog to keep up.
Maybe I’d been wrong to think we had anything in common—or to dare ask him about it.
We came to a large, heavy door, and Loukas reached for the handle, but then paused and turned back to me.
“Yes,” he said at last, his green eyes unflinching on mine, fire-bright and intense, and for some reason my breath hitched in my throat.
Say something … anything … but I couldn’t make my mouth open. And he just looked and looked, fierce and haunted and exposed.
“I’m sorry,” I finally managed, my voice high and tight.
A shadow flickered over his face, there and gone again. “When your sister was here I heard her say that your mother was afraid of you, that she didn’t even want to be around you.”
I winced, his words digging into an old wound that I had buried over the last few weeks. She’d changed, even before I’d lost my power. She’d spoken to me, had been attentive—loving, even. But a lifetime of hurt still festered, underneath the hasty patch of her recent kindnesses I’d forced over it.
“My parents were both afraid of me,” he continued, his eyes still on mine. “When I was born with green eyes … when I could force them to do what I wanted as a child.” A muscle in his jaw clenched and unclenched. “I didn’t do it on purpose; it was before I learned how to control my ability. But they were so scared, they would try to lock me in my room—until I’d get upset and shout for them to let me out, inadvertently using my power on them to make them do it. I never had any friends. Not until I met Raidyn and Sharmaine. So, yes, I spent a lot of hours wishing I wasn’t different. But, you know what? It’s who I am, whether it means people are frightened of me or not. Even if I could, I wouldn’t change anything.” The fire in Loukas’s eyes burned even brighter. “And neither would you.”
I stared up at him, horrified to think of what his parents had done to him. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. Why else were you willing to risk so much to get your power back? Even though it made you different and caused you pain, without it, you don’t know who you are anymore.”
“It’s because I’ll die without it,” I insisted, not wanting to admit that he was right. This connection, this understanding, was exactly what I’d been searching for, but for some reason, I was frightened. Frightened of what it meant for him to read me so well, so quickly—and frightened of how his understanding made me feel. Exposed and raw and strangely out of control, as though we were back on Maddok, spinning, diving headlong through a blinding fog to a destination I couldn’t see.
He turned away as if he hadn’t heard me, opened the door, and stepped outside.
After a pause, I followed Loukas into the cool night air. A freezing wave crashed over me, as cold as the water trapped beneath a layer of ice in the winter, but it came from within. From the emptiness that grew stronger every hour.
I’d begged him to help me go after Barloc to save my life, to rescue Zuhra and Raidyn from that terrible day when they would use every ounce of power they both possessed and still watch me die.
But his words burrowed beneath my skin, itchy and insistent. How had he known the truth—that without my power, I wasn’t sure I wanted to fight against that emptiness?
I stayed half a step back from him as we crossed the dark field, the sky above an endless black expanse, the stars swallowed up by thick, heavy clouds.
Loukas glanced over his shoulder at me. “When we go in the stable, make sure you stay right by me. Gryphons can sense if you are a Paladin or not, and since your power is gone, they might think you’re an enemy and attack.”
“What?” I grabbed his arm, yanking him to a stop. “Why are you only telling me this now? After one of the gryphons I’ve been around for days could have attacked me at any time?”
He stared down at me solemnly. It was that same little twitch at the corner of his mouth that gave him away.
“Oh.” I released his arm, my stomach clenching, hot and angry. “You are disparaging my ignorance.”
He glanced down at the wrinkled sleeve my grip had left behind and then back up at me, with eyebrows lifted. “I’m not disparaging anything. I was teasing you.”
I glared at him. “I’m not certain I understand.”
“You don’t know what it means to tease?”
I shook my head, forcing down my embarrassment. I don’t care what you think. I didn’t dare say the words, but I did stand a little straighter.
“It’s usually an attempt to make someone laugh.”
“You thought to make me laugh by frightening me?”
Loukas’s mouth turned down. “I assumed you would know I wasn’t being serious, since you have been around Maddok for days without a problem.” He began walking toward the stables again, more slowly this time. “They won’t harm you—even if you aren’t a Paladin.”
“I don’t know if I should believe you or not.”
He shot me a wordless glance.
When we reached the stables, he pulled the door open and gestured for me to go in first. Inside, the wide walkways were dimly lit by glowing blue orbs hung in glass containers at even intervals on the walls. There was rustling and the occasional huff of air from the massive stalls we passed. I stayed in the center of the aisle, as far away from the openings on either side of me where the gryphons could push their heads out if they wanted to. They all stayed empty, their occupants most likely sleeping, except for down the row, where one gryphon stretched his neck out as far as it could go and let out a little caw.
“He’s happy to see you,” I remarked.
Loukas didn’t respond, but his strides lengthened again, so he reached Maddok in a matter of moments. I stayed back, afraid to interrupt their reunion. Loukas was so often aloof, gruff, or ill-tempered; but with his gryphon, he was softer, gentle even. He reached up and ruffled the dark feathers along Maddok’s neck. Maddok butted his beak into Loukas’s chest, eliciting a low laugh from him. He said something in Paladin to the gryphon, his tone similar to what he had explained as “teasing.”
Rider and gryphon shared a bond that was real. Watching them together twisted something inside me, knife-hot and painful.
It made me miss my sister.
She was the only one I knew who loved me for me, just as I was, whether I had Paladin power or not, with no magical bonds to influence her.
A soft, sad keen came from behind me, and I turned to see a gryphon two stalls away, looking at me with gentle umber eyes. I wasn’t sure why or how, but I knew, in some visceral way, that this creature was grieving. Sorrow clung to her, bowing her head low where it hung heavily over the doorway.
I moved toward her, hesitant and unsure; but something about her called me to her side. I wasn’t even certain why I knew it was a she—I just did. The closer I got, the harder my heart thrummed in my chest. But she merely lifted her head a bit, a spark of what I could only describe as hope gleaming in her eyes when I got close enough for her to stretch her neck out and gently bump her beak into my sternum, as I’d seen other gryphons do to their Riders. Somehow nervous and certain all at once, I reached up and ran my hand over her soft neck feathers that were the color of wheat. She hooted softly and lifted her head up to look straight into my eyes.
Then she bent forward and bit my shoulder, so hard it drew blood.
; “Ouch!” I cried, jumping back, shocked and dismayed. I grabbed my throbbing shoulder and glared at her accusingly. She hooted softly again, but she seemed excited, her feathers ruffled and her eyes twice as bright as when I’d first noticed her.
“Well, that’s unexpected.”
I jumped again and spun to see Loukas standing only a few feet away, hands back in his pockets, but his eyes wide, eyebrows raised.
“Why did she hurt me? I was just trying to comfort her.”
“She wasn’t hurting you,” Loukas said, continuing before I could show him the blood on my hand as proof, “she was marking you.”
My protest died on my lips. “Marking me?” I asked instead, baffled.
“Yes.” Loukas stared at the gryphon, not me. “She just chose you as her Rider.”
THIRTY-FIVE
ZUHRA
It only took a few minutes to wake everyone up and convince them I was healed enough to continue on. Though no one spoke of it, the ghosts of my sister and Loukas hovered over us all. Mother and Father both had dark circles beneath their eyes, visible even at night as they quietly rolled up their blankets and tied them on the back of Taavi’s saddle. Though Halvor was technically healed, he looked terrible as he climbed back on Keko, in front of Sharmaine. He’d always been thin, but now he looked hollowed out, his cheeks sunken in, his eyes lifeless, the color of dust. Even Sharmaine was worse for the wear, her normally porcelain skin sallow and her hair tied back in a limp braid.
Warriors of Wing and Flame Page 25