I tossed him my makeshift key, bemused. I was also hopeful, nervous, and flat-out scared of what might be waiting for me in the clearing. I took a deep breath and wandered away from the car, leaving Tu and Pavati peering into the trunk. Tu was holding Pie, maybe to keep her from going after me, and maybe because once you picked her up you didn’t really want to put her down.
“Dude, you have so much food … and cash!” Tu cried as I moved out into the field. I eventually lost sight of the car behind a stand of trees.
It was an ocean of green out here. Bushes, trees, and snow-peaked mountains ringed the clearing, all of it radiant in the sunlight. I didn’t think the view could get much more beautiful until I saw someone step out of the shadows at the other end of the field.
I couldn’t help it. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of her, and I suddenly had to swallow and blink a lot.
Khaya’s eyes were huge in her face, as if she couldn’t believe she was seeing me. She wore a yellow tank top and jeans, her rich brown hair wild and free around her face. She looked so warm, shining brighter than anything else out here.
My voice was locked in my throat.
“Tav—” Khaya began. She was the girl who hardly ever cried, and yet her voice broke and her face crumpled. And then she was running toward me through the grass.
But my feet were rooted.
I stopped her just before she reached me, holding up my hands to keep her from hugging me. Gods, she was so achingly beautiful, even with tears—and hurt—streaking her face.
“I’ve killed people,” I said as soon as possible, so she would know why I was stopping her. “A lot of people. I won’t hurt you—I would never hurt you—but you should know what I’ve done before I let you hug me like everything is still the same … like I’m still the same.”
She wiped her eyes almost angrily. “I don’t care. I mean, I do, but it’s not your fault. I knew they would make you.” She stared at me, taking me in, and then her lip quivered again. “I’m so sorry I left you. I never should have. And I’m so sorry I couldn’t come get you out of there. That was exactly what the City Council wanted me to try to do. I knew that, but every day, Pavati and Tu still had to talk me out of trying to help you escape—”
My heart was twisting in my chest in a way I didn’t think was possible, not anymore. “You did help me escape,” I said, my voice tight. “Every day. I just … pictured your face.”
Khaya threw her arms around me before I could try to stop her again. Her skin was so warm and fragrant. She smelled like spices and spring.
“I know I’m Death,” I said, suddenly babbling into her hair, holding her as hard as I could without crushing her. “And that you hate Death, but I’m Shaping too, and maybe I can make something else out of myself that you won’t hate … ”
“Tavin, you idiot,” she gasped. “I love you. I love you. The Words aren’t you; they’re only passengers. And honestly, I would rather you only carried the Word of Death.” I almost wanted to smile over her analytical side kicking in, if not about what she was saying. “If it were just that one, maybe they’d let you go in peace. But now that you’re Shaping too … ” She shook her head against my chest and then pulled away to look at me. “They’ll never let you just walk away.”
“I’ll die before I go back.” My breath came faster. “I’ll wipe Eden City off the map before I go back, not just the Athenaeum. I’ll—”
“Shh, Tavin, it’s okay.” She touched her fingertips to my lips.
I wanted to kiss her fingers. But then I wanted to punch myself in the face, because I wasn’t sure how I could think about kissing her after I’d thought about destroying an entire city.
She stared into my eyes, grounding me, bringing me back to her in the here and now. She gave her head a tiny shake. “I won’t let them have you.”
Somehow it was the sweetest thing she could have possibly said.
I remembered her using the Word of Life as a weapon, once, to keep me from going for a gun; it felt like a lifetime ago. But it was no longer about having a gun, or even being a gun in someone else’s hand. I was—and held—the key to an entire arsenal. And the frightening thing was, I was ready to use it. How far could Khaya follow me and still see me as someone worth saving?
What would people feel when they looked at me now? I heard Drey’s words echoing in my mind: Admiration or fear ?
I looked at Khaya. Neither was in her brown eyes, which were so deep I wanted to fall into them. Or else maybe the love in them was overpowering everything else.
Before I knew it, my fingers were interwoven in her hair and I was kissing with a desperation I had never felt before. Her lips and mouth were sweet and hot, like sun-filled honey, and my head was buzzing like a hive of bees on a summer day. Gods, she tasted like nectar, ambrosia, everything divine and wonderful that humans weren’t supposed to have. My knees suddenly felt so weak her kiss should have knocked me over. But instead it kept drawing me in, lips and tongue moving in a beckoning dance against mine. I kissed her like my life depended on it.
It did depend on it, in a sense. Because my humanity did. If I could still feel the good in this—and it was so, so good—maybe I could feel it in the world. And in myself.
I didn’t notice the tears on my face until Khaya felt them and pulled away to blink up at me in surprise. Letting go of her, I half-turned away to wipe my eyes.
“Sorry,” I said.
She seized my ears to pull my head down and laid a solid, almost chastising kiss on my cheek. “Never, ever apologize for showing me how you really feel.”
I grimaced. “You might want to retract those words soon … especially if you ever have to sleep next to me.”
“Have to? I want to. And what do you mean?”
Before I let myself get excited about what she’d said, I clarified, to the extent that I could. “What I’m feeling inside tends to show itself more when I’m asleep. Let’s just say that I hope you like screaming.”
She put her fingers over her mouth when she realized I meant my screaming.
“Sorry,” I said again, without quite knowing why. And then my hands were involuntarily covering my face and I sat down hard in the grass. “Gods, Khaya, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She was quiet for a few moments as I shuddered and tried to breathe. Then I heard her footsteps rustling in the grass and I felt her sit down behind me. She leaned against my back, her warm arms threading around my waist.
“You don’t need me to forgive you,” she murmured, her cheek pressed against my shirt. “You need to forgive yourself.”
“I … I can’t.” I shook my head and dropped my hands. And then I told her. I told her everything I’d done in one long grisly list, leaving out none of the gory details. Facing away was easier, so I didn’t have to look at her expression while I did.
Afterward, I expected silence, for her to stand up and walk out of this sunny clearing … and maybe out of my life forever.
Instead, she waited only long enough to make sure I was done talking, and then said, “None of that was you. You were always acting under the influence of someone, or something, else: Drey, Swanson, Ryse, those drugs they pumped into you. Maybe you killed Ryse, but she pushed you so far, and honestly, I think I would have done the same in your position. If she wasn’t already dead, I would want to kill her, and I haven’t even experienced the things you have.” She sounded like she meant it. “Look how hard you tried to fight it, Tavin! That was you.”
These were the words I’d wanted so desperately to hear her say, but now that she was saying them, I found them hard to believe. Maybe because I’d wanted it so badly, and I wasn’t used to getting what I wanted.
“But I lost,” I said. “They broke me. I did everything they wanted and more … and there’s some part of me that might be willing to do it all again.” I tried to laugh, but it came ou
t as more of a gasp. “Can you heal a broken mind?”
She pulled on me suddenly, and I lost my seated balance and toppled back onto the grass with her. She slid onto her side and propped her head up on her elbow, looking down at me. With the sunlight in her hair, she was definitely the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“You’re not broken, Tavin,” she said. She ran her hand down my chest, and I was pretty sure every cell in my body lit up at her touch. Like the sunlight was now inside of me. But she was brighter than the sun, her brown eyes molten.
I covered my face again. “I can’t even look at you.”
“Why?” To her credit, she didn’t sound hurt, even though what I’d said probably sounded rude.
“You’re too … good. You’re too good for me.”
She gently took my hands and pulled them down. “Now for that,” she said with a smile, “I want an apology. Of my choosing,” she added, before I could open my mouth.
Her hand toyed with the hem of my shirt, and then slid up underneath it and rested on my stomach. I was suddenly dizzy. There definitely wasn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere anymore.
“Khaya, you don’t have to … ” I cleared my throat as my voice came out strained.
Her eyes narrowed and her hand went higher up my shirt, skimming over my bare chest. “Oh, you think I’m doing this because I feel sorry for you?” She swung her leg over my waist, and then she was sitting on top of me, straddling me, with both of her hands up under my shirt, the wide blue sky haloing her. “What if I missed you?”
With her weight on my hips and her warm hands wandering over my skin, my entire body grew so bright and humming it threatened to dissolve right there into the sunshine.
Dissolve. Like I’d dissolved Ryse’s body, making it run away into the drain set into the floor of the Death Factory …
Suddenly, I was holding Khaya’s wrists to keep them from going any farther. The panic and darkness in the back of my mind threatened to swallow me.
Khaya pulled her hands away from mine, long enough to cup my cheeks. “Tavin. Tavin, look at me.”
I glanced at her, breathing too hard. The last time I’d been this close to someone, it had been Drey, his hands on my face, and he’d been silently begging me to kill him. “I can’t, I’m sorry, I’m—”
“Look at me,” she interrupted, leaning over me so I was forced to stare right into her eyes. “I know how you can apologize to me. Kiss me, right now. I want you to kiss me. I mean, if you want to … ”
Her eyes swallowed me instead of the darkness.
I wanted to.
I kissed her, and with the flood of warmth and goodness, the memories stopped. Rational thought threatened to cease all together when Khaya eventually sat up and pulled her shirt off over her head. Her dark wavy hair tumbled down around her bare shoulders. Her chest was bare save for a lacy cream bra that was mostly see-through anyway.
My hands hovered over the curve of her hips. I wanted to kiss her there. And maybe everywhere else. But something was holding me back.
“Touch me,” she said.
I glanced up at her. “If I do, I don’t think I’ll want to stop.”
She wore a nearly wicked grin. “That’s the idea.”
I wondered if I could pass out from lack of blood in the brain while already lying down. I tried to focus. “I don’t know about this.”
“Why not?” She didn’t sound impatient, sitting on top of me in her bra. She sounded assured that I would soon quit being an idiot.
“We’re … uh … in a field?”
She leaned over me again, planting her hands on either side of me, and said a few Words. Twigs and leaves rose around us, braiding together, until we had our own little bower shading us. Soft, pillowy flowers bloomed underneath my back.
“And?” she whispered, her lips grazing my earlobe. Her breasts were brushing against my chest.
I couldn’t use the fact that I wasn’t carrying protection as an excuse, since, as the Word of Death, I was nearly positive I could neutralize my “genetic material” pretty easily. It took me longer to think of another reason, but I managed. “Pavati and Tu could still come knocking. They probably don’t think we’d do this during my first meeting with you after, oh, I don’t know, months of—”
She kissed my nose, cutting me off. “I told them to stay away. And?”
I trusted her. Which meant I’d run out of excuses, leaving only the real reason for my hesitation. “I just don’t see how you could possibly want to do this with m—”
This time, her lips cut me off. That was all I needed. I surged into her, sitting up with her legs still straddling my waist. I wasn’t sure whose hands went for my shirt faster: mine or hers. In any case, it practically flew off of my back. And then my hands couldn’t get enough of her. They skimmed her shoulders, her rib cage, her hips. Her skin was as silky smooth as warm water. Between feeling her with my hands and feeling her everywhere else—against my lips, my tongue, my chest—she was liquid light, enfolding me.
Her own hands skated over my collar bones and down my sides to my waist. They paused only long enough to unbuckle my belt before dancing over my back.
I froze for a second, my fingers now on the clasp of her bra, my lips on hers, as I remembered a flash of someone unwelcome touching my back to get at the Words. But in a blink, the memory was gone. I hadn’t even pictured a face. And luckily Khaya must have only thought I was having trouble with the clasp, because her hands joined mine and her bra parted.
Rationality ceased, then. And it ceased for some time.
Another coherent thought didn’t enter my brain until we were lying side by side, still naked. My arm was around Khaya, under her head, and she was tracing the skin over my ribs where the Words were just visible, beginning to curve around my back.
“Can I see?” she asked softly.
I tensed when I realized she meant the Words. Somehow I felt more exposed in showing her my back than … well, everything in front. But I remembered being in another leafy shelter with her, where we were hiding from the Athenaeum’s forces trying to hunt us down. I’d accidentally used her to godspeak, and yet she let me hug her afterward, never mind stay in the same tent with her, in spite of how vulnerable she probably felt. It was my turn to feel as vulnerable—and still let her in.
I slid my arm out from under her neck and rolled over. I closed my eyes, as if that would somehow help me feel more covered.
I felt her finger touch my back … and then it just continued its tracing motions. It felt so good that I kind of forgot about being freaked out. I even started to doze until her voice brought me back.
“They’re beautiful, the Words,” Khaya said.
I blinked. “That’s … not possible.”
“They are. I can hardly tell what they say. This is amazing, Tavin. It’s like they’re not two separate Words anymore, but blended together. I don’t know how anyone would even use you to godspeak.” She rolled me back over, as if she knew talking about godspeaking was best done face-to-face rather than while staring at my back. “Is this … do you think this is why Andre—Drey—wanted you to go to Cruithear?”
I shrugged against the soft ground. “I assumed he wanted me to kill her.”
Khaya bit her lip in thought, which was pretty sexy. The fact that she was naked and leaning on my chest didn’t hurt. “I wonder. This is so huge … it feels like there’s more going on here.”
I didn’t quite know what she meant, and I didn’t have time to ask. A sudden gust rattled our leafy bower. Then a shout cut across the clearing, high and scared.
My first thought was that it was a helicopter or something because of the wind, but I couldn’t hear anything like that. Only the shouting.
Khaya and I were up and moving in the time that it took to exchange a look. We threw on our clothes as fast as possible, and
then Khaya unraveled our shelter around our feet.
The sky outside was like nothing I had ever seen before. Darkness was bleeding over the blue, like black clouds blowing in on a storm. Just as we started watching, the darkness hit the sun and devoured it.
twenty-six
The world grew drastically darker.
Pavati and Tu were running across the field toward us, yelling, Pie barking at their heels. Khaya and I met them at a run.
“What the hell is happening?” I cried, gesturing at the sky.
Pavati was wild-eyed. “We don’t know … but come on, we’re picking up all kinds of chatter on the radio!”
We all dashed back to the car, me scooping up Pie as I went. I was barefoot, I realized. I’d left my shoes in the field. But it didn’t matter. This … this mattered. The sky was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen. I glanced up to see the darkness continuing to seep across the blue.
It looked like the end of the world.
When we reached the car, Tu threw himself into the driver’s seat and cranked up the volume. The radio stations were practically screaming:
“—encore rien de neuf à propos de ce qui cause ce phénomène—”
“—assure people that this is not caused by nuclear winter. I repeat, there are no reports of any nuclear detonations anywhere—”
“—rien à voir avec le temps—”
“—nothing man-made, and yet representatives of Eden City’s government remain unresponsive—”
Even where we were, at the edge of an abandoned field in the mountains, I could feel the panic rising around us like an apocalyptic flood. Fitting, since the sky looked about ready to deliver one. I didn’t need the speculation to tell me who was behind this.
This was Eden City’s doing. This was …
“Mørke,” Pavati breathed. “But this is impossible. There’s no way she would do this. There’s no way she’s powerful enough to do this, not even with Angelina controlling her. I’ve seen everything she can do, and this isn’t … ”
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