by Melissa Grey
The silence that surrounded him now held none of the promise of malice to which he had become accustomed. There was a softness to this silence. Not to say that it was free of pain; it wasn’t. A steady ache lingered in his bones, the kind so deeply rooted it felt as though it would be there forever, and his throat felt raw and shredded from screaming. His memory of the hours after his rescue was a patchwork mess of images and sensations, but he remembered the most salient points: Dorian bursting through the door, Echo and Jasper hot on his heels, all of them looking more than a little worse for wear; the feeling of hands on him, not the phantom touches his dreams tormented him with, but hands made of flesh and bone; the searing flare of Echo’s magic burning the tainted blood from his body.
There was a safety to the silence. The quiet was not complete. Caius could hear branches scraping against glass—there was a window in the room. That alone was enough to make him want to succumb to a paroxysm of joy; more than anything else it signaled his freedom from the wretched ruin in which Tanith had ensconced him. Outside, little nocturnal animals chittered among themselves. In the distance, an owl hooted, followed by the flap of wings, as if the bird had spotted a succulent mouse upon which to descend.
Within the room, the silence was punctuated by the soft sound of someone breathing. Caius turned his head to the side as far as he was able, which was not very far considering the violent protest of pain that sang through his muscles. Even in the dim moonlight that came through that blessed window, Caius was able to make out a familiar head of messy brown hair. Echo’s chest rose and fell with steady breaths; she was asleep. Her heroics had probably exhausted her as much as they had him. A blanket was tucked up under her chin, held close in a white-knuckled grip. She was curled in on herself, and her limbs twitched under the covers. An unintelligible noise escaped her lips. Caius couldn’t understand the words she spoke in her slumber, but he didn’t need to. Her distress was clear enough. She was in the thrall of some nightmare, held captive by her own desperate need for rest.
He tried to speak her name, to call out to her, but his voice was little more than a suggestion of a whisper. The metallic taste of blood lingered at the back of his throat. He’d screamed himself hoarse enough to make himself bleed. There was a glass of water on the nightstand, but the thought of reaching for it and holding it steady enough to drink from was laughable. Despite his body’s vociferous protests, Caius rolled onto his side, his muscles spasming in pain. An alarm clock also sat on the nightstand; with one clumsy hand, he knocked it over, the little bell on top clattering as the clock hit the floor.
Echo awoke with a start. She pushed away the blankets, untangling herself from her cocoon in a blind panic. Her gaze darted around the room, looking for the source of the noise. When her eyes alighted on Caius, his hand still dangling limply off the edge of the bed, she froze.
“Wake up,” he managed to croak.
It took Echo a few moments to gather her wits. Caius watched as she shook off the remnants of her dream like a fly-stung horse. She attempted to sort out the tangle of her hair but gave up after a few aborted strokes of her fingers through it. It seemed to dawn on her that Caius being conscious was nothing short of a minor miracle. Echo got to her feet and approached his bed slowly, as though wary of spooking him.
Caius attempted to sit up—to greet her while horizontal seemed astonishingly rude considering he owed her his life—but his head barely made it an inch off the pillow before he collapsed, driven back to the mattress by a racking cough and a wave of pain. Echo hurried to him, taking the glass of water from his bedside table and holding it to his lips. Caius felt ridiculous, like a helpless child, but the moment the water touched his dry lips, the relief was great enough to wash away his feelings of inadequacy.
Echo brushed hair off his forehead, her skin cool against his. He desperately wanted to pretend that he hadn’t arched into it like a touch-starved cat, but he had. Shameful, he thought, not feeling an ounce of shame.
“Are you all right?” Echo’s voice was a welcome change to the silence. He’d heard it in his head countless times during his captivity, but now he was appalled that he had ever mistaken those fever dreams for anything but. There was a roundness to her voice, a softness, that no hallucination could replicate. This was real. She was real.
He had to try twice before the words came out, but eventually he managed to say, “I’m fine.”
Echo frowned. “You don’t look fine.”
Now that his throat had been marginally soothed, words came easier to Caius, even if they did scratch on the way out. “Couldn’t even let me have that small lie to spare my dignity?”
Echo offered him a smile. “Someone’s got to keep you honest.”
She sank to her knees beside the bed, her chin coming to rest on the coverlet. One hand returned the glass of water to the nightstand, while the other splayed on the mattress beside her face. Caius remembered with sudden clarity a night that felt so long ago, when Echo had been ensconced in a pile of blankets, and he had been the one to watch over her fitful sleep. Then, her slumber had been haunted by the memory of blood freshly spilled, of a life taken in defense of his. The Avicen girl, Ruby, had been a gifted warrior, even at such a young age, but her worthiness as an adversary made her death no less tragic. One more life snuffed out before its time. One more death added to a sea of losses.
The distance between them became unbearable to Caius in that moment. Without giving himself time to consider why, exactly, what he was about to do was a bad idea, he did it.
“Come here,” he whispered, so quietly that if Echo had been any farther away she would not have heard him.
She did not move, not at first. Those soft brown eyes bored into his, searching for something he could not name. Perhaps trying to determine if this was some kind of a trick or the mumblings of an addled mind. The fingers of her left hand tightened on the coverlet, as though she were bracing herself to either walk away or heed his plea.
He would not beg. Though a small, fragmented part of him wanted to. In all his life, Caius had never, ever felt quite so wretched. His eyes drifted shut, and he told himself it was because he was terribly, viciously tired, and not because he could not bear to watch Echo retreat to her side of the room.
The mattress dipped as she sat on it.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” said Echo, wise beyond her years.
“Oh, I’m certain it’s a terrible idea,” Caius said. As if that had ever stopped them before.
The comforting silence returned, warmer now that she was next to him. Caius kept his eyes closed and drifted on the border between wakefulness and sleep. He was halfway gone when Echo spoke again, her voice pulling him back from the cliff’s edge of slumber.
“Is it me you want? Or her?”
The her required no specification.
For so long he had kept memories of Rose at a distance, as though careful avoidance could blunt their sharpened points. Only in dreams had her specter visited him, and even then, the event of her death—her murder at the hands of Tanith—loomed larger than any other memory. It eclipsed everything else. Decades had passed since that awful day, and Caius had rarely allowed himself to remember Rose as anything but the victim of his sister’s wrath.
Now, with his eyes closed and Echo beside him, he let himself remember.
The scent of her hair-feathers. Pears, it had always reminded him of. Rose had detested pears, and yet the smell of them clung to her like a stubborn perfume. He wondered how that had come about. Maybe it was an ingredient in the cleansing oil she used. He hadn’t let a single pear pass through the kitchens of Wyvern’s Keep during his reign. No one had questioned it. Every Dragon Prince had his or her peculiar quirks, and if the worst of Caius’s was an aversion to pears, well, the nobility saw fit to offer no complaints.
He remembered the way those feathers had felt slipping through his fingers, as soft as silk and surprisingly smooth. He’d expected them to feel coarser. He had touch
ed Avicen before Rose, but only in the heat of battle. Never with tenderness. Never with a desire to touch more.
He remembered her voice, as clear as a bell and as lovely. She’d liked to sing. He would often tell her that she should have become a singer instead of a spy, and she would chuckle and claim to have no great talent for the former and an abundance for the latter. He’d found this a dubious claim, considering how terribly awry her final mission had gone. Although, since her final mission had involved seducing him, perhaps it had gone better than he’d given her credit for at the time, though he was sure that falling in love with him negated her success on that front.
Is it me you want? Or her?
Echo’s question had been laced through with insecurity that she hadn’t bothered to mask. Rose’s ghost may have visited Caius in his dreams for the better part of a century. But Echo had to live with it every day, with no reprieve on the horizon. He could understand her worry. He wondered if he would be as magnanimous if he were in her position. Probably not. But then, Echo had always been the best of them. He had known that almost immediately. Divine providence, perhaps. Or a fool’s penchant for loving impossible women.
“You,” Caius said simply. “Just you.”
He knew the words were true as he spoke them. He hadn’t been sure, not entirely, but once the proclamation had been made, it was as clear to him as a simple fact of the universe, like the sky being blue or the sun setting in the west. He had loved Rose, that was undeniable. But he had lost her. And then he had mourned her. And now, finally, after all these long years, he gave himself permission to lay her to rest.
A hand gently prodded him in the side. He opened his eyes and saw Echo gazing down at him. Her eyes shone with telltale wetness that he was too kind to point out, though he did reach up to cup her cheek, his thumb rubbing the slope of her cheekbone. She angled her head so that her lips rested on his palm. It wasn’t a kiss, but the contact sent a shiver through him.
“Scooch,” she said, lips dragging over his palm, the sensation unspeakably intimate.
Caius didn’t know what the word “scooch” meant, but he gathered that she wanted him to make room for her. And so he did, in more ways than one. Echo slid under the sheets, her legs brushing against Caius’s. Her arm wrapped around his stomach, gently, without too much pressure put on his bruises. The pain was nothing compared with the comfort of having her near. Caius drifted off to sleep, only half hearing Echo hum the melody of a lullaby he’d fallen in love with long ago.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dorian was no blushing innocent.
Though he had never been one to participate in the bawdy gossip that ran rampant in the barracks, he was no stranger to the physical intimacies that the other soldiers discussed with such careless abandon. He had simply kept his exploits to himself. He saw no reason to brag about filling a basic biological need any more than he would have gloated about satisfying his hunger with a hearty meal.
That was part of it. There was another dimension to Dorian’s silence that had nothing to do with modesty, one that he never discussed with another soul, much less the men and women of the guard who had long since grown accustomed to his stony silence when conversation turned to topics more salacious than drills and weaponry.
He had never been with the person his heart desired. Sex and love were unrelated as far as Dorian was concerned. Every encounter he’d had, from his first clumsy tumble with a stable boy in a hayloft in the barn outside the keep to the more sophisticated experiences he’d shared with men who valued discretion as much as he did, had been marked by disappointment.
Until now.
He turned over, slowly, carefully. He didn’t want to disturb the person next to him, but he wanted to look. To remind himself that this was real, that this had happened.
Jasper was enchanting, even in sleep. The early-dawn light subdued the riotous color of his feathers into softer shades of indigo and gold. Dorian felt—insanely, he thought—bereft of the sight of Jasper’s amber gaze. He quelled the urge to reach out and gently wake Jasper just so he could watch him blink the sleep from his eyes. It was a deeply selfish impulse, but Dorian couldn’t find it in himself to be ashamed of it.
Shame had haunted him for years, but not the same kind of shame that plagued humans who desired partners of the same sex. Among the Drakharin—and, he assumed, the Avicen—there was nothing deviant about love between two men or two women. They were a long-lived race, and it made little sense for them to frame sex as useful only for procreation as so many humans did. If Drakharin reproduced at the same rate as humans did, they’d overrun the planet in short order.
Dorian’s shame was of a different sort. It was the shame of someone who had yearned for something he could not have with someone out of his reach. Caius had known, perhaps longer than even Dorian himself, that the love Dorian had harbored for him extended far beyond the loyalty and affection common between guard and prince. Caius had known and, out of kindness, had not mentioned it. He could have sent Dorian away, assuming that such a love would cloud Dorian’s judgment and impair his ability to perform his duties, but he hadn’t. He had kept Dorian by his side, as a guard and as a friend. For Dorian, it had been a special kind of torture, to feel so close and yet so far from the one person in the world he wanted most.
He had grown so accustomed to never getting what he wanted that he was afraid to close his eye and surrender to sleep the way Jasper had so readily. He feared that if he did, he would awake later to find that it had all been an elaborate dream, coaxed from his subconscious by decades of loneliness. Though if he were honest with himself, he couldn’t quite imagine that his own mind would have conjured up an Avicen to heal the wounds of his fractured heart.
But Dorian had been so scared. Scared of losing Caius. Scared of losing Jasper. Scared of losing himself if he lost all of his people. There was only one thing to do that made sense. He would love the people he had while he had them.
And so he had kissed Jasper downstairs, and it hadn’t taken long for that kiss to evolve into something more. Jasper had kissed Dorian like he had something to prove. Maybe he did. Maybe they both did.
The wall Dorian had carefully constructed between them in the wake of Caius’s abduction came crashing down. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Dorian let himself want with abandon. Gone was the not-so-secret shame of unrequited love. Gone was the oppressive guilt that had hounded him in the weeks after Caius had been taken. In place of those things was a feeling so strange that Dorian had trouble naming it at first. The last bastion of resistance in him put up a fight against verbalizing the one fact he knew was completely and thoroughly undeniable. He wanted to say it. He ached to say it. But he couldn’t. Not yet.
Instead, he spoke with his lips and his hands, returning Jasper’s insistent kisses with equal fervor. Those feathers were softer than they looked. He had forgotten how soft they were, and once he’d sunk his hands into them, he couldn’t stop touching them. Jasper hadn’t seemed to mind.
They’d moved to the second bedroom eventually. Dorian would never live it down if Echo caught him kissing Jasper on the sofa like an overeager adolescent. He still had his pride, after all.
What followed was quite possibly the most transcendent experience of Dorian’s life.
After, Jasper had fallen asleep with a smile gracing his kiss-bruised lips. Dorian had tried to stay awake as long as he could, determined to etch every detail of Jasper’s sleeping form into his memory. But inevitably, sleep had claimed him. He’d awoken to the sound of the forest coming alive outside the cabin. Birds sang as the sun inched upward, and Dorian found himself watching Jasper once more. It felt deliciously indulgent.
A knock pulled him from his thoughts. Jasper grumbled something in his sleep and wound his arm tighter around Dorian’s torso. Getting up was evidently not an option. The person who’d knocked didn’t wait for an answer before opening the door. Dorian sighed. They were all going to need to sit down and
have a very frank discussion about boundaries.
Echo poked her head through the open door. A single eyebrow quirked upward at the sight of one perfectly made, undisturbed bed. Dorian flushed scarlet. The embarrassment he felt at being caught in bed, hair likely a mess, a slumbering Avicen tucked under his arm, was multiplied by the feeling of Jasper burrowing closer, burying his nose in Dorian’s pectoral muscle as if he were seeking out every bit of heat he could find. With as much dignity as he could muster, Dorian said, “May I help you?”
Echo wisely did not comment on the position in which she found Dorian, a kindness for which he was absurdly grateful. He wasn’t ashamed of what he felt for Jasper or of what they had shared, but he preferred not to be caught with his pants down. Literally and metaphorically.
“Caius is awake,” Echo said. “And you’re gonna want to hear what he has to say.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ivy slid the empty vial into her bag, its glass stained red from the bloodweed she’d just administered to the man in the hospital bed before her. The machines that kept him alive and breathing continued their steady beating, tracking his vital signs. She couldn’t afford to dally, but she stayed by his bedside as long as she dared to see if the elixir took. It was the last dosage she had. Already, she had given it to a dozen patients in the restricted ward, and all of them had responded favorably. If the man on the bed showed signs of pulling through, Ivy’s day would be a rousing success.
“Is it working?” Helios asked in a hushed whisper. He stood by the door, keeping watch. If anyone came through the doors at the end of the hallway, he would see them and they would hide. So far, the day had graced them with a fantastic run of luck. Not even a close call. Yet.