The Sweetest Dark

by Shana Abe

  I looked up, blinking at the sting of the shower. I took in the clouds and the black crowns of trees encircling me, so much taller than I was. Branches shivered; water plopped to peat. Drenched bark gave off the scent of pungent wet wood. Mud and grass squelched soft between my toes.

  I stretched my arms above my head. I tipped back my face to the elements and opened my mouth to drink in the storm.

  Now, I thought, washed clean and cold. I’m ready now.

  Since it was true, it happened.

  Smoke came first, but only for a wink of a second, too quick for me to register anything like disappointment. Then smoke transformed into solid shape, and it was not my human one.

  I was still standing in the clearing in the grass-threaded mud. Yet I was on four legs, not two. I blinked again at the rain beginning to bead upon my lashes, which had gone thick and were faintly shining. Looking around the clearing, I could tell that I stood higher up than before. Much higher. My neck was slender and long and I could bend it nearly all the way about to take in my body: also slender, also shining.

  I was a dragon of gold, as if Jesse had touched me and transmuted me but not taken my life. I was sinuous and covered in lustrous golden scales, all the way almost to the tip of my tail, until they faded into purple.

  I had a mane, too, mapping a line down my back. It looked like a ruff of silk or cut velvet. I folded my neck around almost double so that I could rub my chin on it. Silken, yes, but also jagged. Combing my chin through it sent quivers of pleasure down my spine.

  Then I saw my wings. They were folded against my back, metallic. Without knowing how I did it, I opened them, using muscles I didn’t even have as a person. The ache of moving them for the first time felt delicious; I did it again to fully bask in it.

  I had wings.

  I don’t know how to describe what I felt then. I was amazed and afraid and boiling feral inside. I slashed my tail through the rain and realized that it was barbed when it hit an oak tree and I got stuck.

  No problem. I pulled it out and danced around, delighted at the fresh, gaping hole in the trunk.

  My new body came with a weapon. That pleased me.

  I recalled my worry about my tongue splitting—which seemed beyond funny now; I mean, my tongue was the least visible part of me—and flicked it out to see if that had happened, but I couldn’t tell. I could taste the air, though. I could taste everything in it, minerals and salt and fat, fresh rain. Houses miles out. Horses and sheep, dogs and cows and foxes. People.

  It was then that I realized that Rue had been wrong about this Turn, too. There was no suffering. There was only wonder.

  If I was a monster, then by the stars, I was a glorious one. Jesse had told me once that I was a beast better than any other, and now I knew it to be true. If the shark-hunters or lance-bearers came for me, I’d chew them to chum. Maybe I’d do it, anyway.

  I slitted my eyes at the clouds. Just looking at them made me hungry in a way I’d never felt before. Ravenous, but not for food.

  For flight.

  I crouched down, got ready to spring, and beat my wings.

  I made it as far as the treetops before losing control and crashing back to the ground, taking out another oak and a grove of ferns.

  I tried it again.

  Again.

  All right. Flying was turning out to be stickier than the Turn, but that was fine, too, because I had the rest of my life to practice.

  I settled into the mud and examined my talons. Shiny gold, sharp as razors, and I could dig them as deep as I wanted into the flesh of the earth.

  I smiled, or tried to. I laughed, but no sound came out.

  I flipped around and rolled in the mess of the clearing, ripping out what was left of the grass, getting filthy, feeling as gleeful as I’d ever been. When I decided to stop, I was panting, sated somehow, so I stretched out my neck and rested my chin in the mire and let my eyelids sink not-quite closed.

  Only then did they emerge. Two boys, their faces sketched ashen in the dark, both of them in slickers. They approached me from opposite sides of the clearing with oddly identical gaits: halting, cautious, moving sort of crablike sideways with a palm held out in front of them—as if to ward off my temper, which to my mind was a very good thing.

  The blond one reached me first. He touched me carefully on the neck. His hand felt like cool fire.

  I opened my eyes all the way again, studying him.

  Then the brown-haired one, still mimicking the other. Another hand on me, higher up, though, and his palm felt like pure heat.

  “Lora.” Jesse smiled. “Lora-of-the-moon.”

  “Good God,” whispered Armand.

  And with that, I Turned back into the schoolgirl they both knew, only one standing nude in the mud.

  • • •

  I thought I’d at least have the filth of my roll left covering me, but apparently when I Turned, I went stark clean.

  Jesse got his slicker off first. The sleeves flopped past my hands and the hood obscured half my face.

  “How did you know?” I asked, pushing back the hood.

  Jesse only smiled again.

  Armand said, “You—you called me.”

  He sounded bewildered. Even wearing his raincoat, he looked like he’d gone for a swim in a sea of debris. I brushed a soggy clump of leaves from his shoulder.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I heard you. I heard you clear as anything.”

  “Yes,” agreed Jesse, as the rain flattened his hair and turned his shirt translucent. “I heard you, too.”

  “I didn’t call either of you,” I insisted. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Armand scowled. “I was in bed, and I heard you say my name. Like you were right there in the room with me. And then I …”

  “What?”

  “He was pulled,” Jesse finished when Armand didn’t. “Just as I was. Pulled out here by instinct to this place to be with you. To witness what you had become.”

  What I had become. I was a what now. I pressed both my hands over my heart, feeling its reassuring beat. Humanlike.

  Jesse touched his lips to my cheek. “I told you I would be with you when it happened,” he said softly. “Well done.”

  “Yes,” said Armand, hollow. “Congratulations.”

  I went to my knees. I didn’t want to, and as soon as I started to buckle, they each had me by an arm, but I still went down. Slowly, irrevocably, into the squishy suck of mud that didn’t seem nearly as wonderful now as it had a few minutes past.

  “Did you eat?” Jesse asked, just as Armand said, “Are you going to faint?”

  “No, and no.” I pulled until both my arms were released, then lay back on the ground. Rain on my face, pooling in the corners of my eyes. If there were a few hot tears mingled in there, the pair of shadows leaning over me wouldn’t be able to tell.

  “Jesse,” I said. “Are there any more dragons left on the planet besides me?”

  “There’s bloody me,” Armand interjected. But he knew that wasn’t what I meant and shot a look at Jesse, as well, expectant.

  Jesse came down into a squat at my side. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. Sorry to both of you. But I honestly don’t. If there are … I don’t feel them. Not like I did you.”

  I swiped at my eyes and asked the question I’d never allowed past my lips before. “What about my parents?”

  “No,” he answered, a single word with oceans of meaning.

  No. Of course not. Because if they’d been alive, they would have found me by now, wouldn’t they? If Jesse could summon me, if Armand could awaken to his powers through me, then certainly the two beings who had given me life would have figured out how to claim me before now. They would not have left me in Blisshaven, abandoned me to Moor Gate, on purpose.

  The logical side of me realized I wasn’t truly alone. But, oh, right then in the storm and the sludge, logic was useless. Lodged in my heart was a splinter, one that I knew was the death of my paren
ts. The death of my hope for them. So alone wasn’t even the best word for how I felt.

  Left behind. That was more like it.

  My gaze landed on Armand. Like Jesse, he had given up standing to squat beside me. His hood had fallen away. His face dripped with rain.

  “Remember that shark?” My lips barely moved. “From the boat?”

  I didn’t have to explain what I meant. He looked down and away. Nodded.

  “Don’t do this in front of anyone. Ever,” I said to him. “Don’t let them see.”

  “For God’s sake, Eleanore, I seriously doubt that’s going to be an issue. I have no clue how you did … that. I don’t know how you spoke to me in my room at Tranquility. I don’t know how you go to smoke, or flash your eyes like that—”

  “Flash my eyes?”

  “When you’re angry sometimes,” Jesse jumped in. “Or emotional, if you’ll forgive the word. Your eyes luminesce. It’s very beautiful.”

  “I just hear the songs,” Armand said quietly, silvery black raindrops spattering his head and back and shoulders. “And I feel things. That’s all.”

  “That’s how it begins,” I countered. I struggled to get upright again, and once again both of them helped. We stood linked in a row awhile longer, none of us speaking, until Armand dropped my hand and turned away.

  “I’ve got to get the motorcar back before anyone notices. Bribery only goes so far, and I’ve already used up this quarter’s allowance.”

  Before either Jesse or I could say anything, he gave a hard shake of his shoulders, like a dog trying to dry its coat, pulled up his hood, and walked back into the blind of the trees.

  “He’s good at that,” I said.

  “Lonely.” Jesse raised his brows at my look. “I can’t help it. I feel him now, too.”

  I didn’t know why Armand would feel lonely. At least he had his father, and a brother. And a real home. And probably uncles and aunts and cousins, not to mention all of high society eager to befriend him.

  Except for the ones who thought him mad, I supposed. The ones his father had turned against him.

  “You should go, too.” Jesse ran a hand down my arm; his palm came away covered with mud. “You’ll sleep well tonight, dragon-girl.”

  As soon as he said it, I knew it’d be true, because the exhaustion hit me, drained what heat was left from my muscles, and sent me swaying again. But I held my ground.

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll sleep,” he said, coming close, shining with water. He was really, really drenched.

  “No. I meant, what about if I sleep with you?”

  It was already a night of firsts for me. Why not add another one to the pile? Actually, two: This was the first moment I’d acknowledged to myself that Jesse had been gradually putting a distance between us. Not physically, but in every other way, and I knew I wasn’t imagining it. He’d mentored me, he’d fed me, he’d encouraged me and shone the only true light upon my soul that anyone ever had. I belonged to him. Dark wine, dark longings. I’d been his since the moment his fingers had brushed mine that amethyst night by the carriage. Since I’d eaten the orange. Since I’d followed him into the grotto and listened, enraptured, to the legends he’d spun around us both.

  But I’d never spent the whole night at his house. I’d never done more than dream of us in his bed together.

  He gazed at me, his expression veiled, though there might have been pain in the shadows behind his eyes. His mouth opened on a reply, but before he could say what I knew he was going to—no, not tonight, which could all too easily become not ever—I added quickly, “For an hour or so. That’s all. Then I’ll go back.”

  The veil lifted; he changed course without warning. “Yes. All right.”

  I was a very skilled liar. You had to be if you hoped to live by your wits. It was no wonder he couldn’t tell.

  Or maybe he could, and had decided not to care.

  • • •

  That was how I discovered a sweeter darkness than even the one from our stitched-together dreams. I drowsed in his arms in his bed with my head cradled to his bare shoulder, one leg thrown over him. I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t stop smiling, so I was glad that with the curtains closed it was pitch-black and he couldn’t see.

  I let his body seep new warmth into mine. I listened to the sleepy, delicate songs of gold that lilted through his cottage, that lilted through him and me together, binding us in a net of notes, and thought, Now you are mine, as well.

  • • •

  “You seem different today, Eleanore.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes.”

  Sophia had caught up with me as I walked to French class. With her books hugged to her chest, she matched her pace to mine and gave me a leisurely perusal.

  “Rather less glum than before. Rather more … content, I’d say. Glowing. Oh! Was it the yacht trip? Having Mandy all to yourself for a change? Do tell me all about it.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Did he kiss you finally? Is that it?”

  “No, Sophia.”

  “Zut alors! He did! He did, didn’t he? You’re blushing.”

  “I am not. I’m warm. That’s all.”

  “It’s an icehouse in this part of the castle. You’re not warm.”

  We slowed to a stop. Students joggled by us, a few of them tossing us dirty looks for blocking the narrow hallway.

  “I don’t blush over kissing boys,” I said to her, holding her eyes.

  Her lips curled. “Well. That’s worthy of note. Bold little Eleanore. What is bringing out that wholesome glow, I wonder?”

  “We’re going to be late,” I said, but before I could push on, Beatrice rushed up to us both.

  “Did you hear?” she gasped. She had a hand pressed to her side as if she’d actually been running.

  “No, what?” Sophia was curious but was acting as if she mostly wasn’t. Beatrice in general annoyed her; Beatrice being dramatic annoyed her even more. Interesting how I could tell that about her now.

  Beatrice threw a pent-up glance at me. Whatever it was, she was dying to spill it but didn’t want me to hear, too, in case it brought me further into their forbidden circle.

  “What?” snapped Sophia again, aggravated.

  Beatrice decided her news outweighed my insignificance.

  “The Marquess of Sherborne is dead!”

  I frowned. Why was that title familiar?

  All of Sophia’s cool pretense vanished. Her mouth made an O and her books slid down to her stomach. “Where did you hear such a thing?”

  “Westcliffe was discussing it with some of the professors in her office with the door open, and I was passing by. The duke received the telegram this morning, and it’s all the talk of the village. His aeroplane was shot down by the Huns!”

  The Marquess of Sherborne. Of course. Aubrey, Armand’s older brother.

  Chapter 26

  So it became that my third visit to Tranquility was not for a party but a wake.

  Fittingly, the sky was overcast with storm clouds again, although the wind wasn’t perfumed with impending rain. It was a tepid, muggy day, made muggier by the fact that I was dressed entirely in black, which seemed to repel the breeze but soak up the moisture.

  We all wore black, we Iverson girls. It had taken Almeda and the castle staff nearly four days to dye all the formal uniforms.

  I reeked of dye. Tranquility reeked of grief.

  The manor house would be open to the public all week. Tradition dictated that the locals would come by to pay their respects in stages: fishermen, farmers, merchants. Today was our day, and a line of ebony-clad girls marched up the grand curving driveway—pinkish grit from the crushed shells speckling our shoes—without anyone speaking a word.

  Mrs. Westcliffe led the way, carrying an offering of white lilies. Lady Chloe was just behind her, carrying nothing but her fine looks, which seemed even more heightened in black. I had tried to hang behind at the
end of the line, but all the youngest girls were there, and the three teachers at the very back gestured for me to get ahead and move to the front with my own class.

  That’s how we entered the mansion. That’s how we greeted Armand, because the duke wasn’t even there. I heard people whispering from the corners of the black-and-white parlor that he was upstairs, locked in his quarters.

  By the time I reached Armand, the strain was clear on his face. Most of the girls had just curtsied and gabbled a few words. Chloe, on the other hand, had thrown her arms around him and held her lips to his cheek, a few seconds too long for anyone to mistake it as a mere token between friends.

  My turn. I gave no kisses. No embrace. I held out my right hand and he accepted it, his gaze drifting down, unanchored, to stare blankly at where we connected. His fingers were cold, barely curved around mine.

  “Remember the shark,” I said, the first thing that came into my mind.

  Armand looked up again. A little of the focus returned to his eyes.

  Be strong, I was telling him. You are more than this moment, I was trying to say.

  He understood me, I think. His fingers regained their life, clasping mine hard.

  Tonight, I mouthed to him, another something that just popped into my head.

  He nodded, I moved away, and the girl behind me took my place.

  Eventually, the duke did come down to make his greetings, and if it had been quiet in the room before, now you could hear a mouse squeak.

  The best word to describe Armand’s father was ghoulish. His suit hung off him—he’d lost even more weight since the day on the yacht—and his face reminded me of the jack-o’-lanterns we used to carve on All Hallows’ Eve, all sunken red eyes and bony outline and uneven teeth. The Iverson girls shrank back from him en masse; his starving, jittery desolation looked actually contagious. Only Mrs. Westcliffe approached in her assured clip across the marble tiles. She’d already passed the lilies to a footman, so she was able to take up both of his hands and keep them in hers as she murmured something to him none of the rest of us could make out.

  None of the rest of the people, I mean. Maybe I had dragon hearing since my transformation, because I heard her as if she had spoken just to me.