Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

I wasn’t driftwood but an icicle, and the wrong words, Jesse’s next words, might shatter me to pieces.

Whatever they were, I didn’t want to hear them. Yet I couldn’t move.

Perhaps he understood. He watched me closely but didn’t try to approach.

“Think about it. Don’t lose your nerve now, just think. Where did you come from? Who is your family? You’ve known all your life you’re not like any of the creatures around you. You hear things, you sense things no one else does. You can do things that no one else can. Those weren’t the delusions or even the hopeful fantasies of a lonely child. It was the hidden part of you seizing the truth. Using it. An ancient magic created you, a powerful magic. It twines through you, growing stronger with every full moon. This is only the beginning. It’s going to consume you eventually. That voice inside you—”

“What?” I did lurch back a step then.

“The voice inside you,” Jesse repeated, gentle. “It’s not truly a voice, is it? It’s more feelings than that. Instinct. Animal. Bestial.”

“Are you—did you just call me—”

“A beast, yes. You are. Better than that, though. You’re better than all the other beasts in all the rest of the universe.” He paused, a smile breaking through at last. And it was a dazzling smile, one to melt hearts and lies and all manner of icy-cold things. He came to his feet and crossed to me, stopping a handbreadth away.

His eyes captured mine, summer green darkened to dusk. His voice became a whisper.

“Lora, beloved. Lora of the moon and sky. You are a dragon.”

Ah, sighed the fiend, swelling with delight inside me, filled with an awful, awful recognition. Ah, ah! AH!

“That is enough,” I shouted over them both; rather, I tried to shout, but my voice was so strangled it came more as a gasp. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I don’t appreciate your games. I—I came here to tell you to stop pestering me, and leaving me gifts, and smiling at me—”

“You dream of flying,” Jesse said, which cut me off mid-sentence.

“Aye.” He nodded, shadows and gold, tall and warm and much too near. “I know all about it. I know all about you. You have wings at night. You lift as smoke. And you come to me, don’t you? Always to me.”

I could not reply. I could barely take a breath.

This is a dream, this is all still a dream, it’s just a new part to the dream, that’s all—

“It’s why you’re here now, tonight. You’re drawn to me, as fiercely as I am to you. You didn’t even have to follow my song this time. I muted it, didn’t you notice? And you came anyway.”

For a long, long moment, I gave up on breathing. For a long, long moment, all I heard was my heartbeat and his, and a gull crying miles away, and the distant thunder of a German bomb exploding on innocent ground.

Jesse lifted a hand and placed it on my arm. His palm felt hot against the cotton of my sleeve, his fingers felt firm, and that rush of longing and pleasure that always overtook me at his touch began to build.

“Lora,” he whispered again, so quiet it was barely a sound. “Inhale.”

And when I did, he bent his head to kiss me.

...

He tried to be careful about it. He tried to limit himself to a barely there touch, just his mouth to hers, nothing alarming, nothing assumed. But her lips were even softer than he’d dreamed, and with their bodies this close her scent wrapped around him in a heady rush. Jesse felt like he was drowning in flowers and fever and delight.

He wanted to drown. This was so much better than he’d … ever …

It spun out longer than he’d planned. It was still a joining of near chastity; the as-yet-contained part of him was afraid to move, afraid to lift his hands to her face, as he desperately wanted, to discover the contours of her with his fingertips. To feel her bare skin.

But he didn’t want to frighten her, and he didn’t want the kiss to end.

When he pulled from her at last, they were both sleepy-eyed and breathing hard. She looked stunned, so flushed and so beautiful and so very much at the edge of what he knew her to be that he nearly smiled, which would have been a drastic mistake.

When her gaze met his, her irises were luminous, pooling bright silvery purple, a definitely inhuman glow.

He’d awoken the beast in her.

Good.

“What are you?” she whispered.

Jesse took a step back to clear his head, to free himself from the tendrils of her sorcery. It’d be easier for both of them if he could think straight.

Right. He needed to focus. He’d waited his lifetime for this moment, but, even so, the words came with difficulty.

It was never painless to bare a soul.

“I am both less than you and more,” he said. “An alchemist, an amalgamation of two opposite realms. I’m the fabric of the stars.”

There are certain moments in life when hard, hot truth shines at you like a spotlight from heaven, like the focused beam from a lighthouse on the shore of yourself, and you find yourself stripped naked in its light. You can’t hide from it. You can’t close your eyes and wish it away. It’s truth; easy truth or unbearable truth, either way, it won’t be vanquished. And there you are for all to see, stuck in its merciless glare.

One of those moments for me came that night with Jesse, there in his cottage in the island woods. I was caught in the glare of not one but three impossible truths:

I wasn’t human.

Neither was he.

And he had kissed me. On the lips.

One of those truths—I couldn’t even tell which—kept me standing in place before him with a hand pressed to my mouth, as if I could hold in the soft, lingering sensation of that kiss, the cinnamon-vanilla-rain taste of him. The last bit of heat from his body, which I was already growing cold without.

My eyes were wide as saucers as I stared up at him, so I shut them, opened them again.

I was a … what?

He was of the stars?

The candle flame continued its merry little dance, undaunted by anything but the breeze. A cricket hopped close to the door, right up close, and chirped a few bars before leaping back into the dark.

Jesse was looking down at me with that patient expression, a suggestion of worry now mixed in. This time he was clearly waiting for me to say something, so I said, “Oh.”

Brilliant. I still couldn’t bring myself to lower my hand, so I’d said it around my fingers.

“Are you breathing?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I can prove it,” he said. “My part, at least. Not yours.”

He didn’t need to prove it. I believed him. It was crazy, as wildly insane as anything I’d ever heard at Moor Gate—but I believed him.

Yet the words remained stuck behind my closed lips.

He walked to the piecrust table, threw a glance over his shoulder at me through the fall of his hair to make sure I was still paying attention. As if I’d be looking anywhere else.

He needs a haircut, I thought, my mind clinging to any sliver of rationality. He needs a haircut, but it looks so good like that.

“You don’t have to come closer,” Jesse said. “In fact, you shouldn’t. But watch.”

His arm stretched out. His hand reached down, index finger pointing, the others slightly tucked, a familiar contour both elegant and timeless, like that Michelangelo painting on the ceiling at the Vatican. He touched a single petal of one of the white flowers that he’d shaped in that half circle on the wood. Touched just the very tip of it.

And light poured out of him at the touch. Light, golden as he was but shimmering brilliant, a shower of sparkles, of glittering diamonds or gold-leaf confetti—I was processing what was happening but wasn’t; for heaven’s sake, he was shooting light. In an instant it engulfed not only the flowers but his hand, and then his arm, and then all of him, and Jesse Holms became the spotlight that I could not bear to see, and I had to turn my face away from his brilliance and truth.

Shadows cut crisp and black around me. The table, all the chairs, every tuft of the rug, every wooden plank of the floor, illuminated. I heard the air leave my lungs again. The thin whoooo of my breath, hollow as could be.

I sucked it back in, and the golden light faded.

His back was to me. His shoulders were bowed. He stood for a moment without moving, but there was something about him anyway that read pain. He stood as if he hurt, his body held smaller, tighter, than it’d been before. His face was a pale mask in the reflection of the window. His eyes were closed.

“Jesse?”

“Yes. I’m all right.”

I guess to confirm it he straightened and returned to me, graceful as ever, offering me the flat of his palm.

He had the braid of flowers balanced there, still in their half circle. But they were changed now. They weren’t white any longer or even alive.

They were made of gold.

Actual gold, because they sang to me, just like the circlet of roses had. Just like the regular rings and earrings and bracelets and stickpins of all the people I’d ever known.

Jesse had turned the living flowers into metal.

He lifted my arm and slipped them over my wrist. Rigid in their golden death, they hugged the bones of my arm snug like a cuff, like they’d been made specially for me.

Which, I supposed, they had.

I’m not proud of what happened next. In my defense, it had been a long, strange day followed by a sleepless night, and I was more than a little unnerved from—well, from everything. The tea, the duke’s ruby song, Armand and Chloe and the bombs and then Jesse and the night and the kiss and not being human. Not being human.