Ashla didn’t know how to respond at first. She had been second-guessing and fearing his every action since the moment she had first laid eyes on him, and nothing about him had prepared her for the potential of his concern. For her, no less.
Trace watched her blink dumbly at him from those big blue eyes, the frosted blond of her lashes seemingly dusted in sparkles the way his eyesight interpreted the lightness of them. His tongue was still flooded with the vile taste of his self-disgust as he realized he had been so preoccupied with himself and the damage being done to his own world that he had easily dismissed any potential damage that had been done to her. He had given up the search for her earlier far too quickly and with far too little effort. It had been wrong and thankless, and he despised himself for it the more his gaze tracked over her torn skin.
“I can, but…but I…”
She hesitated heavily, peeking up at him through the glistening veil of lashes, her shoulder hitched up in a prepared cringe as if she expected the worst of everything from him. And why shouldn’t she? What had he shown her of himself, besides thoughtlessness and cruel disregard for anything not important to his own selfish needs?
“Stop,” she whispered suddenly, a trembling hand rising to lay gentle fingers over his mouth. “I can’t bear it!”
Trace didn’t understand what she was talking about, the action, for a moment, as confusing as every other thing about her. Then, all in a rush, he realized that she wanted him to stop berating himself so harshly for his failures. As though she could hear him and it hurt her heart, she was begging him to cease.
“By the blessed Dark, you can read my thoughts!” he whispered fiercely, not even able to conceive of what to feel about that. Trepidation and anxiety were natural, given the vulnerability it left him at, and the people whose deepest secrets he had a hand in protecting, but…
“I cannot! What a ridiculous thing to say!”
“Then explain that remark!”
“Explain yours first!” she spat back, tears burning hot across her eyes and infuriating her even more. “T-the ‘human girl’ the…the ‘monarchy’…t-the strange…” She was making no sense, and they both realized that, but Ashla was too upset to clarify her garble of thoughts.
“Why haven’t you healed yourself?” he demanded of her, the tattered condition of her body winning out over all the issues that pressed down on him.
She covered her mouth and shook her head, as if she needed to physically repress her feelings and to speak would shatter the last shreds of her control. Trace had never before felt so many emotions jumbled all together inside himself. He hardly blamed her for being overwhelmed when he was wishing he himself could give in to the urge to shout that was racing through him again and again. There was something stirring deeply within him, like a part of himself he had never really met before, and the near savagery of the sensation made him want to send it back where it had come from, banishing it to the oblivion of the place where he could continue being unaware of it.
“Dark and Light, this is crazy,” he rasped as he ran a hand back through his hair, his other palm curling in reflexive possession around the back of her calf. For a moment he considered he might be feeling the beginnings of Shadowscape euphoria, but quickly dismissed the idea because he knew he had only been there a short time and that effect took at least two days to settle in.
That left only one variable that had changed between this time and all the times before.
Ashla.
“My name is Trace,” he said as he moved closer to her, hovering over her half-prone body. She quickly tried to put distance back between them, but the only way to do it was to lie down completely. Ashla’s heart thundered beneath her breast as he came so close she could feel his body heat everywhere against her. “I tell you this because I believe I have failed to do so before,” he informed her, his words coming as though he were choosing them very carefully. But in spite of his politeness, and contrary to his efforts at a neutral, explanatory tone, Ashla could hear that quality caressing the lower register of his voice that sounded a great deal like the animalistic sound he had made before. “I am a man of importance, intellect, and reason. Do you understand me?”
She nodded quickly, but her gesture only darkened his expression into a storm of annoyance.
“I mean that I am not prone to emotional whims! I don’t chase ghosts and engage in fruitless behavior, because I know better! I create my world around me. I shape the progress of my life and the lives of many, many others!”
“Please,” she squeaked as he loomed brusque and intense over her. Instinct put her hands to his chest, pushing at him as if her twiggy arms could make any kind of impression on that wall of muscle and masculinity.
“Tell me why you do not heal yourself!”
“Because I can’t!” she shouted back at him in response to his demanding growl. “I burned myself out healing you and I won’t recover for days! I’m exhausted. Weak. Weaker, I mean. I’ve always been weak. Always! Too delicate and fragile to give a big jerk like you a decent black eye without breaking my damn wrist! And here! Try this on for size!”
She reached for the buttons lining the front of her dress and, without bothering to free the antique silver shells, she tore it open in two violent jerks that sent silver flying in wild scatters everywhere. This act instantly revealed the chemise she wore beneath, as well as the shimmy of the breasts beneath the silky fabric. She gathered the hem of it and yanked it up, making Trace’s entire body stiffen in shock and, undoubtedly, a rapid-fire response of eager anticipation that he had absolutely no hope of controlling, never mind expecting it in the first place. Trace watched as she swept the midnight blue fabric up between her breasts, keeping her modesty somewhat intact even as she bared her entire midriff from the bottom of her sternum to the low line of her panties where they crossed her hips just barely above her pubic bone.
And while that tempting little flash of feminine decadence snared his attention almost instantly, it was quickly disrupted with a scream of subconscious denial in his own brain as information glimpsed from the corner of his dark-sharpened eye roared for notice.
Trace held himself still as a statue as he let his gaze creep up the amazing light and pale plane of her belly, raw emotion roiling to a head the moment he saw the first angry furrow of a wound marring the delicate canvas. Then there was another and another; jagged evil things, fresh and wildly cut as though without rhyme or reason.
And yet…
Trace knew the pattern far too well.
He had hold of her in an instant, lurching back onto his knees as he drew her up off the ground. He heard her suck in a single breath and then there was just the fierce grinding of her teeth as she clenched her jaw. She stoically bore him reaching for the back of her dress and stripping it down, her eyes tightly closed and her cheek resting against his biceps where, unknown to her, dual metal bands tried to contain the swell of muscle he was using to support her weight against himself. Ashla let him do these things to her because she knew what he was looking for.
They both knew what he would find.
There, as sure as sunlight, was the exact same dagger wound that had once been in Trace’s flesh.
Chapter 5
“Aiya.” Trace whispered the exclamation in horror and in the hope that his eyes and thoughts were deceiving him. Was this really happening? Was any of this truly existent? His entire psyche’s first instinct was to reject every single morsel of information. She wasn’t real, therefore the injuries could not be valid, and therefore he should feel no guilt because there was no actual pain inflicted.
The logic should have been a comfort, but it simply was not.
Not while he could feel the smooth, bare warmth of the skin of her back beneath his fingertips and against the whole of his palm. Not while the drip of her tears stained and wet the fabric of his coat. And, he would swear by both the blessed Dark and the burning Light, never could that logic survive when her sweet scent, so laden with
the aroma of spring lilacs, drifted up to embed itself into his sensory memory so deeply he knew he would never be able to forget it.
“Why?” he demanded hoarsely. “You had to know this would happen! Why would you do something so stupid? Why would…” Trace’s voice broke along with the last vestiges of any attempted bravado and composure. He sat down hard on the pavement, his legs sliding beneath her as he drew her up tighter against his chest. He hugged her to himself far too strongly, but he couldn’t seem to curb the need or the impulse. His heart was racing until his blood hissed like steam being forced through metal piping. The sound of it all thundered in his ears.
“The wound was mortal. You could have died,” he managed at last, his words spurting out between hard, harsh breaths. “And you so small…so…”
“Weak,” she finished for him, the word muffled against his shoulder.
“No! By the life of my liege, no! Who that is weak would do such a thing? Who, if they are so weak, would survive the doing? How can that logic stand?” Trace’s hand curved up over the back of her head, his fingertips lost amongst roots of gilding and glitter, the possessiveness of the hold wholly intentional this time. “You saved my life, and now I know it was at risk of your own.”
Yes. He was sure of it. Even if nothing else was true in this realm for her, the fact that she had intentionally put her life on the line, while believing the whole while that she could die, meant everything. That she had succeeded and survived meant everything to him. Now, at last, he understood the wild rip and ebb in the tides of his emotions…as well as hers.
In Trace’s faith, it was believed that to willingly risk one’s life to save another was the ultimate in sacrifice. If, by some chance, they survived the circumstances of the event, the sacrifice and the saved would be forever bonded to one another. Trace had been witness to several ’Dwellers who had formed bonds like this during the clan wars. Like the ethereal force of connected spirits that accompanied twin-born children, the bonded became a rhythm in specific tune with each other. They always became fast friends, no matter if they had been beforehand or not. They always knew when the other was in need.
Magnus and the other priests called them the Sainted.
But all of this applied to the Shadowdwellers only, as far as Trace understood it. What did that make of his undeniable connection to the spirit of a human woman? And even if he stretched this explanation to define that much, what explained the wholeness and dimension she presented in Shadowscape when no other human could?
There was also one other thing about the injuries she had sustained Trace needed to consider, but he closed his mind off to it for the moment.
He was afraid of all he didn’t know about what it meant to be Sainted. For all he had been raised in Sanctuary with a priest for his foster father, the topic of the Sainted was one of the mysteries of his religion. Magnus would know. As always, his father would have answers where Trace did not. But at the same time, Trace knew what he was feeling, and the surety in his mind that he was on the right track was undeniable.
“I couldn’t watch you die,” she whispered softly. “I could never be that cold.”
She shuddered against him, and he immediately understood that she believed that he was that cold. After all, she had watched him murder a man with deliberateness, even while verbally flouting the laws of his own society. It took no imagination for him to understand what she must think of him.
“But even you must have a sense of self-preservation, Ashla,” he said quietly. “Where does the risk outweigh the value you place on your own life? If not in the saving of a stranger you consider no better than a common murderer, then where?”
Her reply took time in coming.
“I learned a long time ago not to judge anyone too quickly or too thoroughly, Trace. What I saw as murder, you saw as justifiable homicide…at least from what I heard.” She lifted her head with a little sniffle and met his gaze, displaying the deep carving of wisdom within her eyes that he had somehow overlooked. “I know nothing about you or the life you come from. I am hardly qualified to pass sentence on you at a whim just because I stumbled into a five-minute cross-section of it. Can’t you see how wrong that would be?”
“Yes,” he said softly, his hand sliding around the side of her head until he cupped her ear against his palm and stroked his thumb along her distinctive cheekbone. “Especially when your sense of fair play saved my life. Others would not have done what you did. I’m not certain I would have done what you did, and I like to consider myself a man who is well versed in seeing all sides of an issue.”
Trace set her back a few inches so he could gently revisit the ugly wounds on her body that matched the ones still healing on his own. He inspected each unsightly place with feather-soft probes of his fingertips. None of them bled, none of them were swollen with infection, but all of them were tender enough to make her flinch in spite of his extraordinary care.
“They are just sore,” she explained with a placating touch on his hand. “It’s nothing like they felt when you received them.”
Now.
The addendum of that single word floated insidiously through his mind, and Trace knew instantly that she was editing the truth to ease his conscience. Trace was fiercely thankful for whatever it was between them that was tattling on her omission. He reached around her slim body to splay his fingers over her entire back, her smallness making him feel as though he were cupping a fragile butterfly in a single hand. He drew her close even as he lowered his lips against her ear.
“But at the moment you take them on, the wounds feel every bit as real as the moment of their inception when you absorb them into your body, don’t they?”
Her response was only a short nod, but it was enough. Trace’s eyes slid closed as regret trickled through him. He had watched hundreds of lives come and go, hundreds of ’Dwellers willing to accept pain and worse for the sake of their beliefs and their Chancellors, but never had it been like this for him. He knew he should feel gratitude, but it was almost impossible in that moment. Wounds he had barely felt in the heat of the battle, and had paid little mind to since, came back to him with a force and power he could hardly stand. Now he remembered every detail of them. Now he felt the flaying of flesh under the speed of sharp instruments. Now he truly felt a mortal blow to his body.
He at least had had his breed’s strength and supernatural power at his beckoning. Ashla had not. She still did not have them.
“Where are you sleeping?” he asked her softly.
Her reaction to the question scraped harshly against him. She suddenly scrabbled with clutches of slim fingers to gather her torn dress back over her body. Trace’s hands caught hers with quick gentleness and he drew her back to the warmth and protection of his body.
“It’s okay,” he tried to reassure her as she refused to look up at him. “In this place, we have only ourselves to count on. No doubt, you have done a fine job for quite some time. But jei li, you are injured and in pain, and these wounds could turn wicked before you recuperate enough to heal them on your own. You need help.”
“I took ibuprofen,” she argued. “I cleaned out all of the glass. I didn’t need help.”
I didn’t need your help. The stubborn implication was clear, but Trace wasn’t insulted at all. Her pluck came in spurts, and he knew she was afraid of the loneliness echoing in vast quantities all around them, but it was more than fear and bullheadedness that fueled her. He had no idea what she was trying to prove to herself and why, but he wasn’t going to let her go off by herself again.
“Look, I have two days before I have to go—”
“Go!” she gasped, her eyes darting up now and widening with her true feelings at the prospect of being left alone again. “But there is nowhere to go! I’ve been everywhere, and there’s nothing! Except…Well, I went to LaGuardia, and…it was just…all those planes, taking off and landing empty, with no pilots that I could see! I wanted to try it, but it was just too creepy. They were like t
hese great big mechanical ghosts. Everything is like that. Everything works without explanation or even logic. The things I see are impossible. I tried staring at these tomatoes in a bodega, so I could watch what happens to them. I guess I expected them to float away or something crazy like that. I mean, I knew things were being changed constantly. But you have to blink, you know? And when I did, it was suddenly different and I had no better explanation.” She stopped suddenly, seemingly realizing that she was rambling in her anxiety. “Where will you go?” she asked at last, her shoulders slumping and her breath decompressing out of her in dejection.
Ah. The million-dollar question. Trace still didn’t know how he should answer it. She was under more than enough duress at the moment, and he couldn’t see his way clear to telling her that she was no doubt lying just about dead somewhere in the real world. He could also empathize with the way she struggled for understanding and knew he could provide answers that would resolve all of her questions. His urges to be honest with her warred with his fierce new need to protect her.
“I will explain what I can…but later. Right now we need to get you into fresh clothing and somewhere comfortable where you can rest. If you won’t tell me where you are living, then we will find another place for the time being.”
“No, I…” She fell quiet for a very long moment, searching herself quite deeply by the look of it. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m at the Plaza.”
That made him smile at her.
“The Plaza?” he echoed. Then he shrugged with his grin. “You know what, if it were me, that’s probably where I would stay, too.”
“They have big windows,” she argued a bit petulantly.
“Yeah. Wouldn’t want to miss those Manhattan sunrises,” he teased her as he gathered her comfortably to himself and rose smoothly to his feet. He hesitated just long enough to glance down at his weapons. He hated to do anything that would disturb her further, but the fact was it wasn’t safe for either of them to walk around Shadowscape unarmed. By herself she would be completely dismissed, but because of his presence she would be in danger. Just looking at her proved she could be harmed physically.
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