Shana Abe - The Deepest Night

I snorted. “Have you actually read any fairy tales? Orphans fare the worst of anyone. We were lucky they didn’t decide to roast us and eat us for dinner, come to think of it.”

“Ah, dinner,” Mandy said, closing his eyes.

Of course. One more task before I could rest. I hoped Mr. Hunter kept his larder well stocked. One couldn’t live off chopped-up woodlands creatures alone, surely.

“There’s something I forgot to tell you,” Mandy said, eyes still closed.

“What?”

“Well, I didn’t forget, precisely. But I … I wonder if it really happened.”

“What?” I said again, impatient, tucking in a corner of sheet.

“Back there this morning, back in the woods with the villagers, before everything went so wrong … there was this moment. This girl, I mean.”

I glanced up.

“And she … I could swear that as soon as I told everyone that we were dragons—hardly, I don’t know, an instant before it all blew to hell …”

“What?” I demanded, crossing to stand before him.

“I said that we were dragons, and she said, ‘Drákon.’”

I stared at him, speechless. His eyes opened. He looked up at me soberly.

“She was fourteen. Fifteen. Reddish hair. Different from the other villagers, you know? Different. Like us. And I … I couldn’t see all of her, but I don’t think she was wearing any clothing.”

“Are you saying—”

“Then she vanished. Right in front of my eyes, she vanished. Without smoke, without anyone else even noticing.”

I sank into a squat before him, my hands light atop his knees.

“Sounds like a hallucination,” I said carefully.

“I know.”

“But you don’t think it was?”

“I was struck on the head after that, Eleanore.”

“Then perhaps you heard her wrong.”

He eased back again, evading my gaze. “Perhaps.”

“And perhaps she seemed to vanish but was merely caught up in the crowd. They were rushing you then, weren’t they?”

“No.”

“Armand!” I dropped all the way down to the floor. “I’m sorry, but you’re asking me to believe that this girl, this villager in the middle of bloody Belgium nowhere, knew what you were, what we are, that she herself may have been one of us, and then, poof, she’s gone? No smoke or anything?”

“I told you I wasn’t certain that it really happened,” he grumbled.

I regarded him without speaking. It had to be close to dusk, because the room around us was dimming from greeny gray to greeny charcoal, and Armand was dimming with it, a wraith in the big dark chair.

Outside, a water bird began a low, piping warble that bounced off the lake before fading into nothing.

“Suppose it was real,” I said finally, quiet. “I don’t see what we’re supposed to do about it now.”

“No,” he agreed, and closed his eyes again.

I moved through the night shadows. I didn’t want to risk any sort of light, even though I’d found candles and matches stashed inside a cupboard. The lodge had plenty of windows, and the woods were plenty dark. A single flame would be all it’d take to reveal us to anyone, anything, out there.

I’d located the pump for the well and gotten us buckets of fresh water, which was handy, but I’d figured the lake would be a good enough source even if I hadn’t discovered the well.

The larder was the problem.

Most of its shelves were bare, but for four sealed canisters and a great many mouse droppings. The canisters contained four different things: sugar, noodles, something fetid that might once have been powdered eggs, and strips of dried meat.

That was it.

The meat was a welcome find (I thought maybe it was venison), but I couldn’t imagine what to do with the rest of it. I might soak the noodles in cold water and wait until they softened, then sprinkle them with sugar …

That sounded disgusting, even to me.

We still had some tins left in the knapsack, plus the apples, but we’d decided to save them if we could; neither of us knew what lay ahead.

I devoured a couple of pieces of venison as I rooted around to make certain there wasn’t anything else hidden anywhere else (there wasn’t, only more droppings), then carried the canister upstairs with me to check on Armand.

I walked slowly, my feet feeling the way step by step, the wooden banister smooth and warm beneath my hand. The bedroom was slightly less dark than downstairs had been, probably because of the series of windows meant to take advantage of the view. I was able to pick out the contours of the bed, the silhouette of Armand within it.

“Hullo,” he said, and even though he’d spoken softly, it rang abnormally loud in my ears.

“Hullo.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve brought back some strudel?”

“Even better.” I held up the canister. “Desiccated meat.”

His voice held a smile. “My favorite.”

“It will be.”

I sat upon the edge of the bed and opened the lid. I had to admit, the strips tasted better than they looked. I reached in, took a few, and passed them to him.

Our fingers touched. His felt like fire.

“Mandy!”

“Beloved.”

“Stop it.” I reached for him blindly. “Come here. I need to feel your forehead.”

Obediently he leaned forward. My hands found his neck, his jaw. The firm shape of his nose and then that welt on his forehead, which I’d cleaned and rebandaged, so what I really felt there was padding. I’d given him some aspirin then, too, but it didn’t seem to be working.

I brought my face to his and touched my lips to a bare spot above the bandage.

I felt him go very, very still.

“Eleanore,” he said, and if his voice had been soft before, now it was barely a sound at all.

I pulled back, unnerved.

“It’s how you check for a fever,” I explained, glad he couldn’t tell that I was blushing. “My mo—”

My what? My mother? My mother did that? I shook my head, and the tickle of memory was gone.

“I think my mother taught me that,” I finished. “Or someone. I don’t know.”

He bowed his head, seemed to be examining the venison in his hands that I knew he couldn’t really see.

“Do I? Have a fever, that is?”

“I don’t know,” I said again. “Honest to God, Armand, I don’t know how anything works anymore.”

Likely it was the darkness freeing me, freeing my tongue. Likely it was that I didn’t have to look into his eyes and acknowledge what I’d find in them, the constant hunger, the unwavering focus that made me feel both huge and tiny at once: selfishly pleased to be the recipient of his desire, inwardly terrified because I didn’t know if I’d ever be worthy of it, or even able to return it.

I’d loved Jesse. I had. And it had been easy.

But now, with Armand … everything was topsy-turvy. Jesse was the star I couldn’t hear. Mandy was the dragon at my fingertips, right here, right now, and he wanted me.

I’d never have to wonder what he thought. Where he’d gone. I’d never have to wonder how he truly felt.

Only how I felt.

Which was … confused.

not alone, sang the stars, a refrain that shimmered through the cool, dark air, chasing shadows.

“I think I need to sleep now,” I said.

“I know,” he answered, and moved over in the bed to make room. “Come on, Lora. It’s soft, just like you’d hoped.”

“I should get you some more aspirin first.”

“Later.”

“But—”

“It can wait. Everything can wait until tomorrow, waif. When there’ll be sun.”

I was too knackered to argue. I placed the canister upon the floor and crawled toward him, not even bothering to remove my boots. I let myself slump into the bedding, a pillow downy beneath my cheek. Armand didn’t try to get closer, only lay there beside me, but eventually, after counting out more than two minutes silently in my head, I felt his hand clasp mine.

Fire, still.

Weary as I was, it was a long while before I fell asleep.

Shed this skin.

He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t. He felt wrapped in flames, tortured by the simplest sensations: the weave of the sheets. The revolting smell of the dried meat. The dampness of the night.

His heart, too large in his chest now, too large and too desperate to get out, because it hammered and hammered against his bones with such violence it would splinter him into a million pieces. Every bit of him smashed, right down to his cells.

Only her touch was still right. Only Lora’s hand, lax around his, felt like the anchor he so greatly needed.

Armand remembered what Rue had written about the first Turn of the drákon as if he’d composed the words himself: It’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt so very much that you will wish you could die.

But he couldn’t die yet. He hadn’t saved his brother yet. He hadn’t confronted his father. He’d never even kissed the girl he loved, not really, and if he died here, tonight, she’d be the only one who’d ever truly know what happened.

It would ruin her, the burden of that secret. Somehow he knew that it would.

Finish this life.

The Turn was building inside him, a tidal wave of smoke and disintegration so colossal it blotted out everything but his fear.

He dug his fingers into the sheets and stared up at the black timbered ceiling.

Shed this skin. Finish this life. In the twinkling of an … 

The dam of his willpower crumbled, spent.

The air went to syrup, too thick to breathe.