by Cari Z
Nailah kept herself and Rafael busy, almost too busy for him to worry. She had patients coming at all hours, looking for treatment of a variety of aches and pains and illnesses. Occasionally she was called away to a patient’s home to treat them, and she always immediately appropriated Sled for the task. Rafael didn’t really mind. He had given the care of the animal over to the boy Malcolm, who despite his inability to speak without making it sound like a question wasn’t all that shy, and had plenty he wanted to ask Rafael about whenever a moment presented itself.
“You’ve been to the great city of Clare?” he said one afternoon as they were mucking out the stalls. The day was warmer than usual and the snow had turned to slush on the ground.
“I came from there,” Rafael replied.
“I hear it’s the most fantastic place in the world. I hear you can find anything there, or at least you could, before it fell down. Is it true?”
“Where did you hear about that?”
“The peddlers bring news through, even this far into the Sisters. They say it’s a ruin now! They say ten thousand souls died in a single night! They say the High Ones fought among themselves and set fire to the entire city with their magic. They say—”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Rafael said, a trifle too harshly, because Malcolm started and pulled away from him, his face taking on a half-scared and half-apologetic expression it was clearly accustomed to. Rafael didn’t feel sorry enough about it to soothe him, and they worked in silence until the barn was clean. It was only as he was preparing to enter the house that Malcolm spoke again.
“The man who arrived with you? Is he…well?”
Rafael froze for a moment, then forced a shrug. “He’s getting there.”
“Is he a-a High One?”
Rafael didn’t say anything, just stared at Malcolm, who started to squirm under the scrutiny. “Only I know that Mistress Nailah was, everyone knows even though they don’t say. Her husband was as well, he was Gran’s great-great-granduncle, and, even though he didn’t live for long once they got here, Gran always said he was family and that that made Mistress Nailah family, and none of us would ever tell, you know, not like they have in those other places.”
Other places. Places like Byerton and Carlisle and a dozen other small towns along the coast and farther inland, places where the crippled aristocracy of Clare had fled to and tried to dominate with all the desperate strength and ruthlessness of the dying. According to rumor whole towns had been destroyed, their populaces slaughtered for reasons ranging from their disobedience to a desire to invoke terror.
Such stories were probably exaggerated, but Rafael knew that much of it was true. It was the kind of thing that Myrtea would do. Myrtea… She still haunted his dreams at night, now more than ever since he couldn’t rely on Xian to soothe him. He hoped she was dead, prayed she was dead, but there was no way to know. And if she wasn’t…
“I’m sure Mistress Nailah will save him,” Malcolm said softly, breaking Rafael’s uncomfortable reverie. “She’s the best healer there is. She came from Clare when Gran was a girl, and she brought magic with her.”
“Skill is more powerful than magic,” Rafael said, “and Nailah is highly skilled.”
When he mentioned her supposed magical abilities to Nailah later that evening, she scoffed. “Only the young and gullible believe in that sort of magic. Because it’s beyond their breadth of knowledge, it must be mystical. Most of what went on in Clare was purely human, even among High Ones. Our wizards were mystics, and learning to manipulate the magic in Erran’s blood was a natural step for them. For the rest of us, the gifts of the blood never went further than enhanced speed and strength. For me it never even went that far. I was satisfied with youth and beauty for many years.”
“Why did you decide to leave?” Rafael asked.
“Heran decided,” she replied, her voice a little softer now. “He wasn’t one of our tribe originally. He was more than three centuries younger than me, in fact. He arrived in Clare and he was very impressive, for a normal human. A great orator and statesman. I convinced him to marry me and to ascend, but he left family in these mountains. Heran never felt right about leaving them behind, and when the source first began to show signs of failure—gods, it was nearly a century before your time—he was one of the first of us to advocate renouncing Erran’s blood and leaving the city.” She grimaced. “It took him another fifty years to convince me to do it. We left with Xian, but I always knew that my brother wasn’t going to stay with us, not until he found what he was looking for.
“It upset me at the time, but after the change I understood how hard this would be alone. How unbearable. I had my husband and he had me, and after Xian left we were still together, and had each other to rely on.” She paused then said, “He died a short while after that, left me alone. And now here I still am, fifty years on, lasting long enough for my fool of a brother to finally return.” Nailah shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” Rafael offered gently.
“It’s long past now,” she sighed. “More of a cautionary tale than anything, I suppose. You never know how long you’ll have the ones you love.” Rafael said nothing, just handed her the mortar when she motioned for it. They worked silently for the rest of the afternoon.
Chapter Twenty-One
Three months after they first arrived at Nailah’s house, Xian truly lost his mind. Everything else had been happening incrementally and Rafael had expected this aspect of his detoxification to be the same, but instead it was shockingly abrupt. One day he was speaking, albeit slowly, and was able to follow a conversation and recognize his caretakers, and the next he was catatonic. At this new stage Xian gave no indication of being able to see, he barely reacted to voices or sounds and only after hours did he respond to loving torture. He was skeletally thin, and Nailah had warned Rafael for several weeks that Xian was reaching a critical point in his descent.
“His body may not make it past the low point without our intervention,” she warned him.
“What kind of intervention?”
“The uncomfortable kind.” That was all she would say on the matter, and all Rafael could do was more of the same, tugging the lighter and frailer body of his lover into position and carving new lines into his flesh, or tracing over old ones that were barely healing faster than a normal human’s now.
Every wound brought the blackness welling to the surface of his skin, and that skin was like paper, thin and easy to tear. Rafael had to bind Xian tighter now to keep him from injuring himself, if not with his hands then with his own teeth. When he did react to stimuli it was the reaction of an animal, wary and raw. The white orbs of his eyes were shot with purple veins, and more than once he tried to attack his lover.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Nailah said after one such attack. Xian had drawn blood with his teeth before Rafael had pulled back, and watching the pallid, bruised nightmare lick at his crimson lips and whine gutturally was almost more than Rafael could stand. “It’s not as easy to be strong when he bears almost no resemblance to your beloved, is it?” There was nothing mocking in her tone, just compassion, so rare from her that Rafael could barely believe it.
“There’s nothing I can do right now. I feel…useless,” Rafael confessed.
“You do plenty for him. You clean him, you care for him and you watch him. This is almost as bad as it gets, boy.”
“How could it be worse?” he demanded.
“It can always be worse,” Nailah said darkly.
And she was right. The following dawn, not a minute after Rafael had entered the dark, stuffy room and Nailah had left it, Xian stopped breathing. The absence of the low, rasping wheezes was so surprising that it took Rafael a moment to realize what that signified. “Nailah!” he cried, laying his hands on Xian’s sunken chest. The bones flexed easily beneath his touch, far too soft. “Nailah!”
“What?” she demanded from the door.
“He’s not—he’s not bre
athing.” Rather than coming in, Nailah turned and thumped rapidly through the other room. Rafael heard the ceramic lids of jars being slammed onto the nearest surface.
“Is his heart beating?” she demanded.
Rafael bent his ear to his lover’s chest and listened. There was nothing. “No.”
“Of course not,” she said angrily, “why would he make this easy for us?” A moment later she hurried back into the room. “Move,” she ordered, and Rafael crawled reluctantly back from Xian’s side.
“Fool of a man,” Nailah muttered as she opened the folded white rag in her hand. There were thorns inside, not long but incredibly sharp. “Fool. Idiot.” She picked up a thorn and pushed it to the root directly above his heart. “Selfish. Selfish.” She pressed two more thorns in just below the junction between collarbone and shoulder, and another into the base of his throat. “Impossible man.” Another went beneath his navel, and without ceremony she swept aside the loincloth that covered his groin and pressed a final thorn just behind his testicles.
Rafael winced reflexively watching it but he didn’t do anything to interrupt her. His own heart was trying to race out of his chest, all the latent fear and worry that had died down with the monotony of caring for his nonresponsive lover surging back full force. He watched as Nailah massaged Xian’s chest, pressing down firmly over his rib cage, muttering curses to herself even as worry crept into her face. She rubbed harder, stroking lines between the thorns, unashamedly handling her brother’s body as she scowled.
“What are you doing?” Rafael asked hoarsely.
“The thorns are placed in energy centers in his body. With enough stimulation those centers should reanimate him. The thorns themselves are coated with stimulants that ought to be working.” She scowled down at Xian’s still body. “It should have worked already. The stimulant is also a poison, and I can’t risk giving him any more of it than is already inside of him.”
Rafael could hardly process what he was hearing. “You mean he could die… Now.”
“He’s been one step away from death for days, boy, you know that,” she said harshly.
“But we were waiting for the turning point!” Rafael shouted, losing his tenuous handle on his emotions. “This isn’t a turn, it’s an ending!”
“Sometimes things end!”
“Not like this!” He pushed off of his knees and raced to his bedroom, clawed through his long-forgotten saddlebag until he found the sealed vial of Erran’s blood, then raced back into the room. “Use this.”
“Get that out of here!” Nailah exclaimed. “How can that help—it’s what’s killing him now!”
“You said the poison is in the dose.”
“For the uninitiated. For someone like Xian, or myself, the barest hint of that blood in our bodies again will bring the craving back.” Nailah actually looked frightened. “If I had known you had it with you, I would have forced you to destroy it the first night you arrived.”
“Xian is dying,” Rafael said, forcing his mouth to speak those words and not the ones that hammered in the back of his throat, far less hopeful. If he spoke the other words he would be screaming in moments. “Move.”
“Would you torment him longer?” Nailah asked, her warm brown eyes welling with tears. “Would you bring him back only to put him through hell again before he goes? How can you bear to do more?” All of a sudden she collapsed back, away from the bench, covering her face with withered hands. “So long…too long, too many years, I’m too old, I cannot… I cannot…” She crawled a few feet back. “Do what you must. I lack the will for it.”
Rafael had been hoping for more guidance than that, but he took her place at Xian’s side and laid his hand on his lover’s unresponsive chest. “You’re coming back to me,” he said firmly. Taking infinite care, Rafael broke the seal on the lead vial, letting the sweet scent of the lifeblood of heaven permeate the room. Nailah groaned with exquisite pain, her breath catching in her throat, and after another moment she began to sob.
“I’m sorry,” Rafael said. He didn’t know who he was apologizing to, or for what. Possibly his words were for the demigod himself, trapped in his pit and harvested for his immortality. “I’m sorry. I have to.” Picking up one of the remaining thorns sitting on the rag, he dipped the very point of it into the vial, reclosed it and set it behind him, and raised the thorn to Xian’s forehead.
Rafael touched the thorn to his lover’s third eye, then began tracing a line down his face, not breaking the skin, not really, simply tracing its lines. He went over Xian’s septum and lips, down his chin and throat until he connected with the thorn in his throat. He continued the network, branching from Xian’s heart to his shoulders, down to his belly and beneath, delicately over lax organs and down onto the tender skin behind them. A moment later, Rafael heard Xian’s heart start beating again. A second after that he began to breathe, and a bare instant later Xian was clutching at him with a savage, unexpected strength, his unused voice cracking and breaking as he began to scream with need. He lunged past Rafael for the vial but Rafael held him firm.
“Not that, you don’t need that,” he panted. “You need something else.” Before he could rethink it Rafael scratched himself with the thorn, gouging a line just below the crease of his thumb. “Me,” he said, raising his bleeding hand to Xian’s mouth just as impossible bliss overtook him. “You need me.”
Erran’s blood had never entered Rafael’s body before, not directly. There was hardly any left on the thorn after he finished rubbing it over Xian, but what trace amount there was more potent than any drug he had ever experienced. Even the lightning-strike feeling of magic in his blood after feeding from Xian couldn’t compare to the nirvana that coursed through him now. Just a scratch and it was already almost more than he could handle. Almost, but not quite enough to make him turn and lunge for the vial behind him and drain its contents.
Instead Rafael kept his hands on Xian, always on Xian, and focused on the steady suck-suck of his lover’s mouth worrying his flesh. It hurt, but that was fine, because for the first time in far too long Xian was holding him, was clinging to him, and it hardly mattered in the moment whether the creature in his arms was the Xian he knew or something else entirely. Whatever he was, he belonged to Rafael. “Mine,” Rafael whispered, his vision gone fuzzy with blood loss, fatigue and pure pleasure. “Mine.”
After what felt like an eternity, the sharp teeth left his hand. By the time he was able to focus again, Rafael’s vision had coalesced into a pair of large eyes standing out in a chalk-white face. The eyes, though…they weren’t seamless white from edge to edge, or riddled with midnight veins. The eyes were brown, golden brown, like dark honey under sunlight, and their centers were perfect black circles. Thin lips were stained red again, but beneath the blood was a hint of native color. Their eyes met, and Rafael felt like he was staring into the face of a god.
“Yours,” Xian breathed at last, and in that moment he was more precious to Rafael than any deity ever could be.
Chapter Twenty-Two
For Xian, becoming a man again wasn’t accomplished simply by living through the crisis of his body’s remaking. The personal indignities that had to be relearned, eating and drinking, bathing and shitting, and of a certainty being sick as he struggled to cope with it all, would have made anyone short-tempered. For the most part Xian managed with remarkable presence of mind however, and with enough humility to allow him to be helped in ways that went beyond anything Rafael had ever imagined from him. Hurting Xian had been almost unsupportable. Caring for him, with his blessing, was a balm that touched parts of his soul that Rafael hadn’t even realized were wounded.
At times, when the craving came back so strongly it brought the tremors with it, instead of cutting Xian, Rafael cut himself, and let his lover drink. Nailah pointed out to both of them on several occasions that simply substituting one addiction for another wasn’t the point, but in this case they were willing to ignore her. Her knowledge and skills, as deep as the
y went, weren’t deep enough for what existed between the pair of them.
Simply smelling the blood had brought on a relapse in Nailah, and for a week after the crisis Rafael had his hands full tending to the pair of them. He was worried about her, truly worried, up until the moment when she whacked him with her cane for bringing her the wrong tea. Nailah recovered quickly after that. Her personality lent itself to dominance, and being on the receiving end of such close attention was intolerable. She fought her way back to stability, and if at times she was a little faint, or sat for longer in her chair than Rafael was used to, he didn’t mention it.
Rebuilding Xian didn’t end with the return of his mind. His muscles were wasted away, and none of them were even considering exposing him to sunlight any time soon. Nailah forced him to eat, and Rafael forced him to move. In truth it was less forcing and more helping, but Xian exhausted himself quickly. Even sitting up was a challenge at first, much less standing. After weeks of convalescence, the first time he came to his feet he only managed to stay upright for less than a second, but Rafael was there to catch him.
“It’s rather like caring for an infant, isn’t it?” Xian mused tiredly one evening as Rafael helped him into bed. They couldn’t risk exposing Xian to sunlight, but that didn’t mean that Rafael was going to lose one more second of time they could spend together, and he’d moved the bench out and his own bed into the dark room. It nearly filled the small space, but neither of them cared.
