I inch closer to the flames. I hold out my hands, palms facing outwards, and warm myself up on the heat that melts the air.
Silver sits beside me.
The path gives us such little space to spread out, but Silver marks his spot by kicking out his long legs and leaning back on his elbows.
“So,” I start and roll onto my side, hoisting up my head with my propped-up hand, “there will be more tests?”
Silver watches the flames dance. “Not like the one you just faced.”
“But more,” I insist. “Like my father’s voice whispered by the trees?”
In answer, he nods once.
Small tears ruin the expensive fabric of his shirt, and just underneath his arm, I catch sight of a gash down the stitching. Keepsakes of the fight.
“How long will this go on for?” I ask and pick at the mossy spots that bind the cobblestones together.
“Until the Never-ending Path takes us to the Three Sisters.”
“Why them?”
Silver slews his hooded gaze my way. He already looks tired of my questions. Still, he answers, “Without the Three Sisters, we won’t find the others. They will lead the way.”
He nods again, falling to silence.
My nostrils flare as I draw in a long breath, then let it out with a whoosh.
“Thank you, Silver.” My voice is as quiet as a house-mouse.
He looks at me, his lashes draped low over his shadowy eyes.
“I really couldn’t have done any of this without you. I don’t know why you helped me—” His mouth parts as if to cut me off, but I’m faster. “—I know you have your reasons, whatever they are, but that doesn't mean you haven’t saved me in more ways than one. If you didn't help me, I would be with him. Somewhere in the Underworld, in a cage or trapped between the walls.” Living a nightmare for all eternity. “You gave me a chance.”
Silver rinses me over with his distant gaze. Then he turns back to the fire. The flames flicker shadows over his sharp jaw.
I let my gaze fall to the crimson stone. Ever since I was forced to confess that wretched secret to him, he has kept an impenetrable wall between us. I wish I could take it all back, and hide my horrible truths from him. The best I can do is try and downplay what I confessed.
“I didn't mean it,” I murmur.
Silence is my answer for a few heartbeats before Silver finally says, “If you didn't mean it, it would not have turned the creature into its true form. It would not have attacked.”
So he is distant because of what I said.
More than the flames of the fire heat my cheeks. “It’s just a crush,” I mumble. “All the vilas have one at least once in their lives. I don’t fool myself into thinking there will ever be more between us than this.”
“There could be more,” he says, his tone cold, and his words don’t match the stony mask of his face as he still faces the fire. “I would have your body and your mouth, I would have you in the sheets, and if circumstances were different, I would perhaps keep you for years—” My face burns hotter than the fire and all the air is trapped in my frozen chest. “—But it would never be more than that.”
I deflate as he turns his glacier gaze to me. He adds, “I could never love you.”
It’s like he wants to stab me through the heart with his words.
I scrape my fingernails over the stones. “Haven’t you ever had a crush before?” I ask. “It means little, if anything at all. I did tell you, I don’t love you.”
He mimics me with an icy tone; “But I’m scared that you have the power to make me feel love one day, because what I feel for you now is stronger than anything I’ve ever felt before.”
Had no idea my confession struck so hard with him. I really repel him, then. The mere thought of me having any sort of care for him has ran a river of disgust between us.
“They are just words,” I say, breathless. “It is only a crush. You would know that if you were vilas.”
He turns his iceberg-eyes on me. “A crush is such a small thing that even I have had some over my life. To an aniel, it is anyone who makes us feel.”
Shame flushes me. “Did I make you feel? Is that why you bought me all of those things from the boutique?”
His smile is a small, taut line; it’s as cold as the morning grass in the Frost Season. He turns it on me and, at the sight of his frosty eyes, all the air is hit out of me. “I have been more than honest with you about how I feel.”
I look down at the stone.
Maybe I want him to confess more, in detail. Or lie and tell me that I mean the moon and the stars to him. Maybe I’m getting too close to the flames that are Silver, and I’m in real danger of falling in, because even as he shuns me, I feel the whispering tingles of his kiss still on my lips and taste his flavour on my warm tongue.
With a sigh, I fold my arm into a hard, bony pillow to rest my head on. I watch the orange hues of the fire lick up Silver’s stony face for a while.
Finally, I break the suffocating silence between us; “I made a deal with Fox,” I confess.
Silver’s eyes flash bright like shooting stars pistoning through the sky. He turns his dark, dangerous face on me. “Why?”
“To find you in Oskar’s,” I say. “I needed her pin to get inside, and I had no other choice but to find you. She promised to collect once my business with you is finished.”
I’m just unsure which business she was referring to now. Was it Silver’s help and my promise to him in return, or does it run a lot deeper than that?
Shadows lick along his jawline as he clenches his teeth. He looks away. “I saw her pin on your vest,” he says. “But I didn't realise a bargain was made.”
I shift on the path. “Is that a bad thing?”
Really, it doesn’t seem so terrible now that I’m facing the wrath of the Wild Woods.
“You will learn the answer to that when Fox comes to collect,” he says. “And she will.”
A loosened breath leaves my thick throat. Honestly, maybe I should be concerned about Fox and what harm she might mean for me, but I can’t summon the strength to be worried beyond my current circumstance. The wood is more terrifying and deadly than I ever could have imagined. Perhaps more so than Koal, the vicious Daemon. Maybe more so than Silver, the cruel aniel who seeks to spear my heart with his unkind words.
Fox seems a faraway trouble for another time.
I shift the arm folded under my head, but no matter the position, it feels just as firm and bony.
I turn my gaze on the tent, narrow and cosy, hardly enough space for two people unless they snuggle close together.
“Are you planning on sleeping?” I ask mildly, eyes on the tent.
He traces my gaze, then shakes his head. “Not tonight.”
The way he says it twists a knife in my heart. I don’t need to be one of Scocie’s most perceptive minds to know he means to hurt me with that line. He means to distance us.
“If you won’t, I will.” I push up from the path and all my bones ache at once. My muscles shiver under my skin, and the urge to crawl my way into the tent seizes me.
Silver says nothing more as I duck under the thick black material of the tent. He’s set it up nicely, though. Two thick blankets—that I know for a fine fact could not possibly fit into his small satchel, and so I wonder if it’s magickal like the dagger he carries, enchanted to fit more than what should be possible—are laid out on the floor, padding the hard stone from my body as I drape myself over them.
I lie there for a long while, hearing only the song of the fire as it crackles and pops the air, feeling its heat warming me even through the tent. But no matter how much I toss and turn and let my mind wander, sleep doesn’t claim me.
10.
I’m still awake when I hear the tent flap in a gentle, quiet breeze. Only, it’s followed by a dip in the blankets beneath me, and I realise it was no breeze that disturbed the tent. It’s Silver.
He slips into the tent. Beside me, his k
nees press into the padding, and the coolness of his body is quick to swallow up all the heat in the air.
He sinks down beside me.
I keep my head bowed, my face tucked away in the cross of my arms. I pretend, like a child, to be asleep.
He shifts beside me for a moment, then I feel the cold chill of his body nearing mine. He faces me; his cool breath tickles the tip of my nose.
I keep my eyes closed, my head buried, and focus on the steady rise and fall of my breathing. Still, I feel a tinge of heat crawl onto my cheeks. I’ve never lay down beside a man before—aniel or not—and it’s not something I ever thought would happen to me before marriage. And even then, I always pictured my life to be made of seperate bedrooms.
That now-familiar heat swells deep in my belly. It takes all my might to stop myself from curling up against him.
“Kee?” Silver’s voice is a gentle whisper, the kiss of a refreshing breeze on a Hot Season’s afternoon.
I stay still and silent, like a caught, suffocated fish aboard a ship. My face stays buried in my limp arms.
The gentle brush of a sigh disturbs the hair that falls over my face like a veil. Silver shifts closer to me. The heat in belly swells even greater and swallows up all of my insides. I clench my thighs, tight.
I can feel him inching closer, and closer, until his body moulds with mine on the blankets and, as he brings his face to mine, he plants a chaste kiss on my temple. My muscles jump under my skin.
My mind is a tangled mess from all this tugging and pulling he’s doing with my heart. One minute, he wants nothing more than perhaps a dalliance with my body, the next, he’s kissing me while I pretend to sleep and draping his arm over my body and holding me in a loose embrace.
He doesn't want me, yet he kisses me the way he does. He doesn't care for me, yet he feeds me his blood and fights off shape-shifting beasts to protect me. He doesn't ache for me the way I ache for him, yet he holds me in the tent, believing I am asleep.
I melt against him, knowing I shouldn’t. And his hold tightens.
With him beside me, sleep finds me much easier.
And when I open my eyes, I see that I am sprawled out over a bed.
With a few hazy blinks, the familiar high ceiling, with all of its faded blue paint and peeling edges, rings familiar to me like the vibrations of a bell being struck.
I am in my bedchamber. Only, the room is skewed. As I prop up on my elbows, I see that the corners are dark blurs and the canopy above my bed—usually draped and coiled with sheer curtains—is clung to by skittering shadows.
I know I am in my dream, and once again, Koal controls it.
Just as I think his name, his familiar voice snakes out from the corner of my room—
“I have been waiting,” he drawls coolly.
My gaze darts to the far corner of my room. There, Koal sits on the torn armchair, lounging on it as though it were a throne. Shadows skitter at the edges of my bedchamber. They cling to Koal as though he is their father, has birthed them, and they never want to leave.
Tarry black eyes gleam at me from the thickness of the dark. “Have you a need for less sleep wherever you are?”
Wrinkles embed into the pale skin of my face. I shove myself forward and throw my legs over the side of the bed to sit, facing him.
“How long have you been waiting?” I ask, despite the panic I should be losing myself in. To me, the time between my last dream and this one is about right, if not padded by an extra few hours. But I’ve hardly been gone so long that Koal decides I have fought the urge to sleep.
“Nights,” he says, and his voice is a frosty morning breeze that snakes over me and prickles my skin.
Time must move much, much slower in the Wild Woods.
A beige flicker catches my attention. I look at his hand, ungloved, as he curls and threads his fingers through a purple ribbon. My purple ribbon, the one I got from Margot in the Lost Square.
I cut my gaze to the winks on the side-table, perched next to the frayed armchair. There, rests a tangled lump of pearls and jewels—things I’ve recently pawned at Margot’s shop.
Panic swirls around me, like a distant echo in a cavern of the Underworld. My voice is a whisper; “What is this?”
Koal slides his gaze to the jewels on the table. “Oh, I have been busy,” he says, and his cold tone shivers my spine. “You have left quite an expensive trail all over the city. It’s only too easy to find the places you have visited, and discover what you have been up to.” He looks at me, the swirling darkness of his eyes sucking in my soul like vacuums. “Margot was a great help. Told me all I need to know about you and your ... activities.”
“My activities?” My breath catches in my voice.
“Selling your mother’s possessions to afford your remedy.” His fingers spindle the ribbon, a gesture that would be subconscious with anyone else, but with him, it is terribly menacing. “Boutique parties with your beloved aniel. For the daughter of a mayor, I must admit, I expected less.”
He’s lying. He must be. Margot knows little else other than that I pawn mother’s things to supply the remedies for us both. But she knows nothing of Silver or the gifts he bought for me.
I scowl. “How would Margot know anything about what I do?”
Koal lets the ribbon slip from his fingers. It flitters to the floor before it lands with the silence that swarms his eyes. “Word travels fast in this city. And how word of you has travelled. I hear many things, vilas.”
“Do you want a medal?” I snap with more bravery than I feel. “I’m known in the Capital. Of course you hear things about me. I would be surprised if no one told you anything.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t bait him. Last time I did, he slapped the sleep right out of me. But then again, it’s not real. Any of it. This dream is a fabrication, it’s all in my mind. Koal might control it, but he cannot hurt me.
“This—” he starts and plucks an oval bottle-green gem from the table. Only, the more I look at it, the more I realise it’s no gem. It’s a little phial, the kind that my remedies come in. “—is what interests me.”
I watch as he brings it closer to him and then, deliberately holding my gaze, inhales its scent.
“Aniel blood,” he determines and rolls the phial along his slender fingers. “A peculiar thing for a vilas to have. A rarity, only surpassed by the blood of my kind, and the blood of the Gods.”
And the Originals, I want to add. But of course, I can’t give any hint as to my whereabouts. Even if he can’t track me in the Wild Woods, he might still be able to work out a way to hunt me down once I’m free of them.
I shrug. “And I pay a pretty price for it.”
“I would expect no less,” he says, but his eyes have glossed over into something that echoes with faraway thoughts, and he watches the phial roll from finger to finger. “And still, this complicates matters.”
Abruptly, his fingers stop moving and, with a flick of the hand, he tosses the phial into the air. He catches it with a swipe and his menacing gaze pins me in place.
The armchair creaks as he leans forward, leaving the skittering shadows, and his sun-kissed face is exposed in the moonlight cascading in from the dusty window.
“An aniel’s blood courses through you,” he says, his tone taking a suddenly urgent turn. The intensity of his voice matches the ferocity of his stare. “You survive on it. This,” he adds, running his bleak gaze over me, “is starting to make sense.”
My frown speaks for me—I have no understanding at all of what he means.
Koal pushes up from the armchair. He strolls to the window in two sweeping steps that peel apart his inky black cloak and reveal the tight-fit of his dark grey breeches.
A ripple runs through me, every muscle in my body clamping tight, as he advances on me.
Some paces away, he pauses at the window. He looks out of the grimy glass panes. “Never before has a Daemon been mated with a dying creature,” he says, watching the moon be swallowed by wisps of
clouds. “Not even a sickly creature, for that matter. And so you must understand my reluctance to keep you as a mate.”
“It’s not like either of us have a choice,” I mumble.
His dark eyes fly to me. “That is the case, for the most part. But this—” he lifts his hand and, pinched between his long fingers, is the empty phial. “—means that we might have a choice where no others have before us.”
I eye the phial with a pinch to my face. “What can aniel blood do for us?”
He tosses it to me. I’m not quick enough and, as I grapple with empty air, the phial hits my skirt, then bounces off my lap onto the floor. It rolls to a stop just beneath my boots.
Koal’s lashes flutter and it takes me a moment to realise he fought the urge to roll his eyes at me. “I understand little of mateship,” he tells me, “but this gives me hope where I thought all hope was lost. You,” he adds, looking at me, “might not be the one I am bound to.”
I turn my gaze down at the phial on the floor. A frown still digs deep into my creased face. Then the taut line of my mouth slowly starts to part, and my lips take an ‘o’ shape.
“You mean the aniel could be your mate,” I whisper and bring my blank gaze up to him. “The one whose blood was in my remedy?”
“Precisely.”
He whips back his cloak, exposing the ashen breeches that cling to him, and the hem of a loosely worn grey shirt. He perches himself on the window sill. Even with such a relaxed stance, he seems to swallow up the entire bedchamber.
“The blood inside of you could well be the blood that called out to me in the Twisted Wood. And now that time has passed and the remedy has faded within you, I cannot feel your presence anymore. It is as though you have vanished from my senses completely.”
My heart sinks to my tummy.
He adds with a murmured voice I suspect is meant only for himself, “I should feel you in my bones. Your blood should still call out to me, no matter where you are.”
Shoulders slump as I sag on the bed and a grim line flattens my mouth.
So he’s pinning all these hopes on my disappearance from the city, that he can’t feel me anymore; a vanishing act facilitated by the Wild Woods. Of course, I can’t tell him that—I can’t do anything that will give away my position. But if he only knew that I was hidden by these magickal Woods, then he would know that he cannot sense me anymore because of the veil the Woods have draped over me, not because the aniel blood is out of my system.
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