The Fire thinks I’m a monster.
No, it knows I am.
It’s all just a coincidence. None of this means anything. Not the fire crackling and splitting us apart. Not the blood on my finger when it was Leora who scratched herself on that pin.
“Come on,” Leora says. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t know about you, Altar Boy, but this place is giving me the creeps.”
I couldn’t agree more, but as I glance into the fireplace one last time, at the dead ash and the glowing embers with their angry red light, I feel naked and cold. Like the coals can see everything about me, looking right through my clothes, my skin, down to where it matters.
Like the Fire itself can see straight into my heart.
And then there’s a burning feeling in my head. And an image of Leora, drenched in blood. Sobbing into her hands. It’s more than just an image—it feels like a vision. A vision hot and searing in my brain, like the Fire itself put it there.
I blink and they’re gone, both the burning feeling and the image. And I know it wasn’t a memory this time. No.
It was a warning.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Leora takes me to her room. We could have gone to mine—it was closer, in the church dorms, instead of all the way across the grounds at the school—but she brings me here. A second chance at the other night, a chance to accept what’s offered to me and not run from it. I won’t get caught leaving the girls’ dorms tonight, because I’m not going anywhere.
She lights the three-wicked candle on her nightstand with one of the torches from the hall.
“We don’t need light,” I murmur, moving her hair out of the way to kiss her ear and then her cheek. If the light isn’t strong enough to chase away my shadows, I’ll hide them in darkness.
I feel her smile, the muscles in her face twitching beneath my lips. She lights more candles and places the stolen torch on a sconce in her wall, ignoring me. “I’ve spent enough time in the dark,” she says, and I know she’s remembering the black drapes hanging from the walls, waiting to bury her. “I want to feel alive.”
I see the image of her drenched in blood. It lasts for the space of one pounding heartbeat, and then I push it away. I don’t care about the Fire’s warning. I would never hurt her.
“You don’t have to stay here, where it happened,” I tell her. “We can go to my room.”
“No. I’m okay. I’m okay while you’re here.”
Because I’m a monster dark enough to scare away all the others. But no. I look into her eyes, and I see only trust and warmth and love. If she feels safe with me, it’s not because I can protect her. It’s because I’m another candle, adding light and heat to chase away the dark and the cold. The warmth of the Fire conquering the darkness of the Chasm. And I know there’s no way I could ever leave her.
She leans into me. I can feel her heart beating against my chest, her breath soft and warm on my neck. She smells faintly of lavender. It conjures up memories of the summers we’ve spent together. Lying in fresh grass, eating strawberries hot from the sun. The sweetness of the apples from the tree I climbed.
She remembers the scar on my ankle from when I fell. I remember the way her fingertips brushed against my leg, inspecting my injury. I did have tears in my eyes, because it stung so bad and I was trying so hard to act like it didn’t, so she wouldn’t take her hand away.
Now I press my lips to her neck, kissing her softly. She sighs with pleasure, sending thrills all through me that start in my stomach and race to the tips of my fingers and down to my toes. I can’t believe I came so close to losing her, to never looking over during morning candle service again and seeing her in the lines of students, making faces at me, trying to get me to laugh when we’re supposed to be quiet and solemn.
I came so close to missing out on ever being with her. Of feeling her heart beating warm and alive against mine. Maybe we were never two separate people to begin with, and that’s why it hurts so much to be away from her, and why it feels like no matter how close we get, it will never be enough.
She kisses me, slowly at first, and then it’s like all our years of holding back catch up to us, and our kissing becomes urgent, frantic, as if we might never get the chance to be so close to each other again. I feel like I’m drowning, like I might die if we stop, and yet I’ve never felt more alive.
She slides her hands down my sides and traces the edge of my belt with her fingertips, avoiding my obsidian. Her hand brushes against my stomach through the fabric of my robes and thrills race all along my nerves again. Then she starts to undo my belt buckle.
I pull away, panting, before I can stop myself.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, her face flushed, searching mine for an explanation. “I thought you wanted—”
“I do.” More than anything. But going any further means getting rid of my obsidian. It means being weaponless and vulnerable—just a normal person. A boy alone with a girl. A boy, not a monster, and that’s what I want, so why do I have this wild, panicky feeling?
“You’re sure about this?” I ask her, slipping my arms around her and pulling her close, aching to kiss her again. To tear her clothes off. Or maybe to undress her, agonizingly slowly, until neither of us can take it anymore. “I mean, you’re sure you don’t care who I was?”
“Az, there’s nothing that could make me change my mind about you. I love you. I . . . I always have. I always will.”
She reaches for my belt again, and this time I let her unbuckle it. I let it and my knife fall to the floor, forcing away the panicky feeling that doesn’t belong here.
My hands shake as I fumble with the buttons on her gray school vest. Hands that have killed people without ever wavering, now clumsy and practically useless. And I don’t know if it’s desperation or nerves that makes them tremble—probably both—but I only get two of the buttons undone before she gets impatient and undoes the other two herself, tossing the vest away.
She presses against me and my mouth finds hers and we’re kissing again. Drinking each other in. Burning alive. I reach around and undo the laces on the back of her shirt. A quick pull on a knot is all that separates me from the bare skin underneath. And yet it’s more complicated than that. The barrier between us—separating the closeness of friends from the closeness of this—has never been just a string. Now suddenly it is. Just threads and fabric rustling as I take off her shirt. As we break apart long enough for her to pull my robes over my head.
My hands slip down to her hips, tugging at her skirt. Wanting to just rip it off of her.
She steps out of it, still in her underwear. Not quite naked, but so, so close. Then she takes those off, too, and climbs onto the bed. I do the same and follow her, lying down beside her. Both of us completely naked. I watch the glow of the candlelight play across her shoulder and down her breasts. Part of me can’t believe we’re really here, that this is really happening. And part of me feels like this was always going to happen, that it was inevitable, because the two of us have always belonged to each other.
She studies my bare skin, running a hand over my chest and down across my stomach. Her face looks so intense, I wonder if it’s not only my skin that’s exposed, but all my secrets, as if they were written all over me, as plain as my scars.
But then she sighs and kisses me, wrapping her arms around my neck and drawing me closer to her. I’m feverish and burning, my mouth desperate against hers, my hands taking in the softness of her skin. Tracing the shapes of her body, memorizing every inch of her. I’ve waited so long to tell her I love her. To kiss her. To be here, with her, in her bed. Not as her friend but as someone more. Someone who can forget himself, who can be whole, unbroken.
She doesn’t care who I was. Maybe I don’t, either.
There’s a knock on the door. A pounding fist, shattering the moment and the illusion that it was just us in the world, that nothing else ever mattered.
The door opens. Leora screams. I’m torn between shielding her from whate
ver threat just walked in and reaching to the floor for my knife. But reaching for the knife means leaving her alone, even just for a moment, and so I hesitate.
“I came as soon as I heard— Oh, Chasm take me!” I can’t quite see his face, the light’s too dim in the doorway, but his voice is familiar. He shields his eyes and turns away, and I almost don’t recognize him without his blue robes. He’s changed clothes to come onto the church grounds. He’d have to. But I still recognize him.
And I could never forget that voice. The same one that ordered another wizard to torture me and swore he’d never hurt me again.
Hadrin.
Leora grabs a blanket to cover herself, sitting up and glaring at him. “What are you doing here?”
Any fear is gone from her voice, replaced with anger. I slide off the bed and slip on my robes, feeling around on the cold floor for my belt and the knife.
“What am I doing here?!” he shouts. “I came because I got an urgent letter that said my daughter was dying!”
His daughter.
Leora’s father’s a wizard. But I knew that already. I just didn’t know his name.
He waves his arms around like a madman, not focusing on me yet, too busy yelling at her. “And now I find you perfectly fine, and . . . and in bed with some . . .” He can’t even finish his sentence, he’s so angry.
“I’m not perfectly fine! But I’m healed, I’m not dead, and you don’t have to sound so disappointed about it!”
“You’re obviously all right if you’re all right enough for this.” His lip curls in disgust. “Get dressed. And you—” He turns his attention to me.
Our eyes lock. I see the exact second recognition hits.
“No. No.” He presses his hands to his forehead in disbelief. In revulsion. Then he storms over to me and grabs my wrist.
I jerk it away. “Don’t touch me!”
“You stay away from her!”
“Leave him alone,” Leora says. “You have no right to come in here like this. We haven’t spoken in years, and now you think you can just—”
“You didn’t tell me it was for her! To save her!”
“You would have been willing to hurt me if you knew? You would have broken your promise? I know what you did to me! When I was in that chair and you wanted me to be afraid! I know what you—”
He hits me across the mouth. To shut me up, like he did in my memory. It’s not anger on his face this time, but fear. Pure terror of what I might reveal to his daughter, of what he might have to remember.
I taste blood. Just like in my memory.
Leora puts her hand to her mouth and gapes, horrified, as her fingers come away bloody. She makes a strangled yelp in the back of her throat.
“What have you done to her?” Hadrin asks, his voice shaking. “You said you were with the Church, but I didn’t . . . I didn’t make the connection with the school. You were never supposed to meet. You were never supposed to touch her!”
I shut my eyes. I think of the blood on my finger when it was Leora who’d pricked hers. It started when I kissed her. But was that really so wrong? How could kissing the girl I love be wrong?
I see the image of her drenched in blood.
Hadrin looks me over, at the blood on my lips from where he hit me, and winces. He tries to put a hand on my arm, lightly, but I step out of his reach.
“You broke your promise,” I tell him. “Be careful or I’ll keep mine.”
“Az,” Leora says, “what’s going on?”
Her father was working on an experiment. A live one, an . . . abomination. Whatever that means. Her father, Hadrin. The wizard who haunts my memories.
“Your father and I have met before,” I tell her. “I don’t remember when exactly, but the experiment he was working on, the one you—” The one she hated so much. “I didn’t know, but now I do, and . . . it was me, wasn’t it?” I look to Hadrin for confirmation, but he just bows his head in shame.
Leora’s face crumples, her mouth making movements like she’s going to speak, but her jaw is shaking too hard. Like she’s frozen and shivering. Like all the warmth just got sucked out of the room. She bursts into tears. Into heart-wrenching sobs. I recognize the sound from when I was crying at her deathbed. It’s the sound of having someone’s life so closely bound with yours, and then having them ripped away. And I feel the pain all over again, the pain of the world tearing her from me, leaving me hollow and raw. Only there’s no one left to sell my soul to this time. There’s no way to fix this.
She said my past didn’t matter, but it turns out it does. She said who I was could never change how she felt, but if that were true, would she be crying her eyes out right now? Would she sound like someone just told her the boy she loves is dead, like he never existed in the first place?
All I want to do is comfort her, but there’s nothing I can say. It’s obvious she doesn’t want me here right now. And so I do the one thing I said I wouldn’t.
I turn away and I leave.
Hadrin follows me, catching up to me in the empty stairwell at the end of the hall. “Azeril, wait.”
I don’t stop. “I’m not supposed to be here.” Not in the girls’ dorms, not in the church, not . . . not anywhere.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” I spin around to face him. “Sorry for hitting me? Sorry that you made me a monster? Or are you sorry that you didn’t do what I asked, because you didn’t know it was for her?” He would have sacrificed me for her. I get it. I do. But it still hurts.
“I don’t know what I would have done.”
“You had no problem breaking your promise just now.” I fold my arms, tucking them around myself. Keeping all the broken pieces from falling away. “Tell me one thing. Am I . . . Tell me Leora and I aren’t related.” I can’t bring myself to ask if he’s my father.
“You really don’t remember, do you?”
“Just tell me.”
He sighs and shakes his head. “No. But there are other reasons why I can’t approve of this. Why you have to stay away from her.”
“Because of the blood.”
“I made a mistake once.”
“Once?” I laugh, bitter and mocking, wanting to hurt him like he’s hurt me.
“I cast a spell I shouldn’t have, though I didn’t realize it at the time, not until . . . I needed the hair of a young maiden, and I used hers, thinking nothing of it. I didn’t know it mattered, that you’d be linked. Not until I came home that night to find my ten-year-old daughter, my little girl, covered in blood.” There’s a hitch in his voice when he says it. A note of true regret.
“Let me guess. The wounds she bled from matched all the horrible things you’d done to me.”
“Yes,” he says, and at least he has the decency to sound ashamed.
My hands ball into fists. It’s not fair. None of it. He cared that she was bleeding, but I was the one he’d hurt. And yet . . . it’s Leora we’re talking about. And I can’t begrudge her own father regretting that he’d done something awful to her. Even if he couldn’t have cared less about what he did to me.
“So I cast a second spell. One to keep her safe. One that it appears you’ve now broken.”
“The damage is done then. I don’t see how me staying away from her helps anyone but you.”
“And if it were to get worse? If the bleeding is just the beginning? The two of you are linked in a way no two people ever should be.”
“Cast the spell again.”
“Why? So you can break it?” He waves that thought away. “It doesn’t matter. I no longer have the right energy to draw from, now that her mother is . . . You don’t know what it cost before. She was never the same after.”
“Leora?”
“No. You don’t know the price that was paid, and now here you are, ruining the work I’ve done to protect my daughter, all so you can weasel your way into her bed.”
“That’s not—” I swallow back the words. He’s got it all wrong, but I don’t
have to explain myself to him. “I would never hurt her. You have to know that.”
“And yet you already have.” He tilts his head, challenging me to think about that.
“I saved her, didn’t I? No thanks to you.”
“You did, and . . . I’m sorry, for what happened in there.” He gestures in the direction of Leora’s room. “For what I did to you. I know you don’t believe me, but I am. I didn’t want my daughter to know what a horrible person her father has been, but showing her was not the answer. You didn’t deserve that.”
She doesn’t know what a horrible person I’ve been, either. I guess we have that in common. “I’m not going to forgive you.”
“No, I expect you’re not. I expect you’d rather not see me again, in fact. But you’re forgetting. I still need your help.”
All I want is for him to go away. I want to go back in time to before he walked in on us. To have her all to myself, for her not to be sobbing because the boy she loves isn’t who or what she thought he was.
“You want me to be a weapon. You already know my answer. You had your chance, and you threw it away. Now you really expect me to help you?”
“It’s not me who needs your help. Not just me. The Church isn’t the sanctuary you think it is. And the High Priest—”
“Is crazy.”
“He’s planning something. Our greatest augurs have read the signs—I’ve read them myself—and something terrible is about to happen. Something we won’t be able to stop without your help.”
I give him an incredulous look. “You want me to help the wizards? You’re just as deluded as Endeil.”
“And you’re not nearly as powerful as you could be if you had your memories back.”
“Good thing for you I don’t have them then.”
“And if there was a way you could? Azeril, there’s a war coming. You don’t need to cast divination spells or read the bones to know that. And I’m telling you that you’re our only hope to stop the High Priest. If you had your memories back, you would decide who won the war.”
He means it. A war between the wizards and the Church. And he expects me to side with the wizards? To help them win, so they can do what, exactly? Destroy the Church and keep everyone as powerless as possible, living in a state of constant fear? So they can steal everyone’s energy for their spells? The High Priest might be crazy, but I’m not. “And if I got my memories back, who would that make me? There’s more than spells buried in my head. You know that better than anyone, so how can you even ask me?”
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