Tranquility surrounds her, like an aura fashioned from the sands of a quiet beach. Her little life here in the Wild Woods doesn’t seem so terrible. Maybe she faces off with no shape-shifting creatures, or treks near magickal (and deadly) waterfalls. Perhaps just keeping to herself in her little cabin and vegetable garden makes for a nice, quiet life.
Slowly, I raise my hand. Hesitation clings to me as I wiggle my fingers back at her.
Her smile breaks out into a wide ear-to-ear grin, and I know I am looking at a version of myself that will never come to be. This other me is truly happy. Something that isn't afforded to people like me—born in the station I hold, and made from sickness and death, mated by a Daemon.
Silver snatches my wrist, tight. The pressure of his grip cuts off my hesitant wave instantly and he forces my arm down to my side.
Suspicion narrows his eyes on the clearing beyond the trees but, as he cuts his gaze around, I know he doesn't see what I do.
“It isn’t real,” he warns me. “It is a lure.”
I look up at him, at the sharpness of his set jaw, and the pinch of his mouth. “A lure for what?”
“To trick you off-path,” he answers, tone low and dark, gravelly almost.
I glance at the crimson cobble-stone path beneath my boots. It looks darker now that the trees block out most of the sky’s natural dusky light. The stones have turned a muddy brown, like old blood dried out on cloth.
“What happens if I do step off the path?” I wonder aloud and look back at the other me. She’s gone back to watering the vegetable bed and, faintly, I’m aware of the melody she hums to herself.
“The Wild Woods will trap you,” he says. “You could wind up in the way of other creatures, or be struck in a time loop, never able to find your way out. What I know for certain is, whatever you are seeing, it isn’t real—and it never will be.”
The cool touch of his hand still holds my wrist. His grip has loosened, but it’s still firm enough that I know I won’t be able to tug away from him if I tried. He doesn't trust I won’t cave to the temptation that the Woods are trying to lure me off-path with. That, or he just wants to hold my wrist, which I seriously doubt.
His voice drops; “What is it the Woods are showing you?”
I pause for a heartbeat.
Knowing what the Woods have thrown at me so far, and how the shape-shifting creature promised to love and care for me, I’ve learned that there is a shred of my desires in their tricks. It shows me what I want—or at least what I think I want, but that’s another matter for another day—and tries to seduce me with it.
Silver already knows too much about me. The Woods revealed my secrets and desires for me, and so telling him more than that seems a dangerous thing. Just another weapon to add to his arsenal against me.
“Mikhael.” The lie comes to me as suddenly as a shooting star cross the sky. “I see Mikhael. He’s by a cabin, and he picks flowers. He waved at me.”
Silver’s mouth turns down at the corners. “How ordinary.”
Still gripping my wrist, Silver takes off down the path and forces me alongside him. He doesn’t let me go until the clearing is far behind us and there’s no chance of me running off-path to join a fantasy world that will never be.
And that’s perhaps the cruellest part of these woods. Not that they tempt me with hidden, secret desires that I should be ashamed of since they are so utterly ordinary, like Silver said—but that they seem to be mocking me, taunting me with the glaring fact that these dreams will never become my life.
12.
It is a long, tedious walk before my legs decide I can’t go any farther. Even with the taste of Silver’s blood still fresh in my mouth, my sickness can only be appeased for a short while.
Silver sets up camp for us on the crimson cobblestones; pitches the tent, lies down the thick blankets and, as I sit on the path and watch him, he starts to build a fire with the twigs and branches looted from the edges of the path.
I drag his satchel to the wrinkled skirt on my lap. “Do you mind?” I ask and gesture to the bag. “I’m hungry.”
He throws me a short glance before he returns to stacking the wood just right. “Help yourself.”
A bud of excitement appears in my chest. Since Silver pulled out a folded tent and thick blankets from the satchel that’s far too small to carry all that he has with him, I’ve been keen to sneak a look inside of it. I’m absolutely certain it is enchanted somehow, like his dagger that throbbed with power in my hand when I picked it up off the trail.
Already unbuckled, I flip the satchel flap open and peel apart the sides. I peer inside and it’s like gazing into a yawning chasm. Bottomless, and stuffed full. I see more inside the satchel than what should be possible.
Earlier, when I took the flask from the bag, I didn’t look inside—and the flask was perched at the top of the pile, so I didn’t have much need to rummage through the abyss that now stares back at me.
A frown knits my brows together.
I experiment with the satchel. I shake it and hear a distant rumbling sound, quieter than a whispered morning breeze. I lift it an inch off the path and it’s as light as a feather that escapes a thick duvet after a restless night.
It can’t be possible. And yet, I see more in the satchel than what fills my wardrobe at home.
Stacked high is a pile of cigarette cases, all black-leather and white-gold edges, engraved with the same foreign letters that mark Silver’s body in black ink. How many cigarettes does he plan on smoking here?
To the side of the cigarette stack, is a pyramid of white-parchment-wrapped parcels. With a warm flutter in my belly, I realise the parcels are all food for me. Silver doesn’t eat—I haven’t seen him take a bite since we left the Capital. He had the good mind to pack sustenance for me, when I only thought about mother’s jewels to pawn, a dress and some undergarments.
Packed neatly in the satchel, there is a healthy mound of books and parchment scrolls, some cubes of flint, packets of matches, a change of clothes—though he still wears the ragged, dirtied shirt, vest and breeches as he did when we escaped his townhouse—and some cloths that I imagine are for washing our faces when we have access to clean water.
I reach for the nearest squared parcel in the satchel. As I unwrap it and peel apart the sandwich’s corners, I learn that it’s not a favourite of mine—corned ham with a healthy spread of tomato chutney.
My nose crinkles and I swap the sandwich for another, and another, until I find just what my growling stomach craves. Almond-flavoured chocolate spread with a sliver of jam.
“You packed a lot,” I observe before I bite into the sandwich. Surgery sweetness explodes on my tongue.
Silver has the fire burning now. As he falls back to sit on the path and spreads out his legs, one hiked up, he lights a black cigarette on the flames.
“Better supplies than I see you brought,” he says and cuts a withering glance to my bag. A bag so useless that I haven’t so much as opened it twice since we stepped into the Wild Woods.
My mouth flattens. Breadcrumbs are stuck to my lips. “I didn’t know what I would need. I thought more about the jewels.” I bite another too-big chunk from the sandwich and speak through a mouthful (something my father would definitely cane me for!), “I thought I might need to buy more remedy before we left, and I didn’t know what to expect when we got here—that I might have to buy my way to the Originals.”
Smoke licks up his face, like grey wispy shadows. As he brings the cigarette to his parted pink mouth, he eyes my bag that’s deposited at the edge of the path. “Those are fine jewels,” he decides, smoke exhaling from his nostrils like the vapours of cloud. “Finer than anything I have seen you wear—” He pauses to run my ruined dress over with a detached gaze. “—until I stepped in to aid your wardrobe.”
I look down at the blue skirt. All the crystal embellishments at the hem have been lost to the foliage of the woods, and fine ivory-lace stitch-up has peeled off and now dangles
like limp spaghetti.
“If you had them all along, why did you not wear those fine jewels in all the times I have seen you?” Silver draws an inhale from the cigarette, and I can hear the black paper crinkle under the heat, and turn to ash. “So many balls and temple visits dressed always in drab.”
“Those aren’t mine,” I admit and pick at the crumbs left in the parchment wrapper. I’ve completely devoured the sweet sandwich. “They belong to my mother.”
His eyebrow arches. “And you stole them?”
Heat creeps onto my cheeks. I nod, looking down at the wrinkled skirt covering my folded legs. “Sometimes I have to steal from her. My father doesn't always give me the right amount of coins for our remedies, so I pawn what I take from my mother’s bedchamber.” Tossing the parchment wrapper onto the fire, I flicker a look at the bag. “Some of it, my father gave her during their courtship. Other pieces were gifted to her before she met my father. From sailors passing through the city and the like.”
Silver flicks cigarette ash onto the fire. “That man is not your father.”
I lift a frown to him. “Even if Koal is right about that,” I start, uncertain, “Arthur is the man who raised me.”
“Rather poorly, as I understand it.”
My cutting glare swipes up to him.
From behind a veil of smoke, moonlight eyes watch me. “His favouritism for your sister is no secret in the Capital. It shows in the way he treats you both in the temple, the new dresses and fine accessories your sister wears, and the hand-me-downs that adorn you.”
My face spasms and I’m quick to hide it with a bowed head. “That’s my sickness,” I tell him. “Father doesn't see the point in spending on me, when I could die at any given moment, really. I might live to be as poorly as Mother, confined to my bed with only servants to look after me, but what use would fine dresses and jewels do for me then?”
Silver tosses the cigarette into the fire then, slowly, leans back to rest on his elbows. One of his knees is hiked up, the other leg draped out over the path, and it’s as though he lounges over a plush chaise.
His glinting gaze still watches me closely. “And if your sister was poorly? Would Arthur treat her as he treats you?”
My hands ball up in the skirt of my dress. I don’t answer.
“Koal has every reason to lie,” Silver says. “With the intention of having you return to the Capital. But what use would a lie about this man not being your father have? If Koal tells you that Arthur’s blood does not match yours,” he adds and lowers his lashes over swimming pearlescent eyes, “then I suspect it to be true.”
I scoot closer to the warmth of the fire. “Say it is the truth,” I start, and my tone is sharper than a seamstress’s belt of needles, “what good does it do me now? He raised me, and my mother is in no state to tell me the truth about who my true father might be.”
“Vilas are so short-sighted,” he sighs. “I would wonder less about what it means for your true father, and more about what it could mean for your sickness.”
My brows furrow.
“As I have already said,” he begins and runs his gaze over me. “Healers cannot determine what is the matter with you, and they can offer no medicine to help you. All that keeps you—and your mother—well is aniel blood. That,” he adds darkly, “speaks to poison.”
Déjà vu sweeps me back to the shore, before we ventured into the wicked Wild Woods, and Silver insisted on Arthur poisoning my pregnant mother to kill me out of the womb—me, a possible bastard. A stain on Arthur’s clean record.
I pick at a loose thread in my skirt. “If it was truly poison that caused this, wouldn't the healers be able to recognise it?”
His shoulders lift with an uncaring shrug. “It depends on the type. There are so many.”
If what Silver determines is true, and Arthur is not only my father but a man who poisoned both myself and my mother in an act of revenge for her infidelity, then that cements the glaring realisation that, since the moment I was within my mother’s womb, I was resigned to the Underworld. And maybe—if Koal is wrong about the aniel blood and I truly am his mate—it is because of my early resignation to the Underworld that I was sewn as his mate by fate.
Waste not, want not, as the saying goes.
To fate, I was a goner from before I was born, and so what would the harm be in tying my destiny with a Daemon’s?
I shake my head. “Even if that’s true ...” I trail off and turn my gaze on the fire. I throw the fine piece of string into the flames. “It doesn’t matter. The damage is done.” And perhaps by my supposed father, no less.
I shatter the moment and all talk of poison and false fathers as I draw the flask-cord from over my head, then rest it on my lap. Attached with a leather string, I unscrew the lid and it falls against the container.
In silence, I drink until the flask is half-empty.
Silver watches the flames devour the stack of twigs and branches.
I set the flask down on the path, then push up. Silver’s eyes snap up to me as I swat off dirt and dust from my dress.
“I need to lie down,” I mumble. All this talk of fathers and poison has me yearning for the privacy of the tent, where I can curl up and forget the world.
He watches me as I step over his legs for the tent pitched behind him.
As I drape myself over the padded blankets, the comforting crackles of the fire embrace me as the only sound to penetrate the wood. I have just a moment to tuck my folded hands under my head as a hard, bony pillow before quiet bootsteps advance on the tent.
A heartbeat later, Silver slides in beside me. He lies down, facing me. Liquid metal eyes watch me from beneath long lashes.
I turn my gaze down to his collarbone, protruding just above the unbuttoned collar of his shirt. “I think you are right,” I whisper, my voice carrying away on the shifting air of the wood. “I believe that Arthur is not my father and that he poisoned my mother and I. He is that man. He is wretched.”
A breath catches in my throat. Silver lifts his fingers to my face and, lingering just a touch away from my cheek, pauses.
After a long, frozen moment, he cups my face in his cold hand. He brushes his thumb over a tear that escapes me. “You are more than you know,” he whispers, and my insides twist with a bittersweet agony.
“It’s all so hard.” My voice is a shiver of quiet tears and sweet aches that ignite in my belly. “There is so much out there that wishes to cause me harm, yet all I’ve ever wanted is to be safe, and have a quiet life.”
I look up at him, the tears turning him watery in my gaze. “That’s what I saw.”
He simply watches me with eyes that stir like melted silver in pots.
“At the cabin in the clearing,” I explain, and despite my fears of what he could do to me, how easily he could break me like a twig over the knee, I reveal myself to him. “I saw myself, not Mikhael. I was tending to the garden. And, I wasn’t happy, but I was at peace. I think that’s more important than happiness sometimes.”
His palm turns light against my cheek. He dances his fingertips over my face, drawing away the tears that wet me, and his eyes drift over my face.
“Some are destined for greater things than the ordinary,” he says, tone low like a deep whisper, a husky sound that twists my belly. “I believe you are one of them.”
A small smile softens my mouth. His gaze slides down to my lips and I press them together tightly. Silver’s lashes flicker as he flings his gaze back up to mine and, slowly, he leans closer to me.
All the air traps in my lungs as he brings his mouth to mine. Closer and closer, until the icy chill of his breath brushes over my lips.
At first, our kiss is slow—gentle, even, as though laziness has its hooks in us and we can only manage a soft, methodical rhythm. And then, Silver runs his hand down my side before he grips my waist and shoots icy thrills through my chest. I lean into his kiss, my lashes fluttering shut, and let my hand graze over the muscles defined under his sleev
e.
His mouth is cold against mine, his tongue delicious frost, like ice-cones, and he shifts his weight over me. Slowly, he guides me onto my back and drapes his body over mine. He props up on his elbows that flank my head and deepens the kiss.
I shiver beneath him.
He wanders his hand down the length of my side, all the way to the narrow curve of my hip. My breath catches and he swallows it whole with a sudden urgency to the kiss.
My core swells between my legs. I shift underneath him, which earns a gravelly moan that vibrates through him; a sound that explodes heat deep inside of me.
Silver’s hand bunches up my skirt and, slowly, he drags it higher and higher up my legs.
My heart is hammering in my chest.
He pauses and, after a beat, peels back to look down at me, doubt in his fiery eyes. “Tell me when to stop.”
I nod and tentatively reach my mouth up to meet his. I steal away a kiss. That’s all the invitation he needs before his mouth is crushing mine with a deep kiss.
He brings up the skirt to bunch at my hips. His hand delves under the layers and finds the meat of my slender thigh. Fire sparks on my skin as he dances his fingertips under the strap of my stocking.
I shouldn’t let this happen, I shouldn’t allow it to go any further, but I’m powerless to stop it. With every brush of his lips over mine, I’m aching for a deeper kiss, and each graze of his hand over my body, I’m desperate to feel him push tighter against me.
And—at the core of it all—I know my options. Silver will stop if I say the word, and though I don’t want him to stop, I also don’t want it to not happen and then wind up dead on this journey without ever having been with a man, felt the adoration and care in the caresses of Silver’s hand running over my thigh. Not to mention, what if I do stop him and somehow Koal catches up with me? I can’t let my first time be with that monster.
No, this is just perfect. As best as I can ever hope for, and much more than the thought of laying with a husband who I care little for on a wedding night that is essentially a bargain to me, not love.
Among Monsters Page 10
