“Fia, please, you’ve been poisoned. I need to heal this wound.” Erebus took a tentative step towards her, but she saw her reflection in his eyes, like a wounded deer trying to escape a predator. And yet, there was that word again. Please.
Everything hurt. Her head was pounding. Her chest was tight. Erebus said something else, but the sounds rolled into one and the room slid sideways.
When her vision cleared, she was in that other place with Erebus again. Their bodies pressed together in an embrace; his wings wrapped around her. His silver mop of hair swept across one eye and she brushed it away as if it were something she did every day.
“I won’t let them separate us,” he said quietly.
Fia cried out again in pain. She was face down on a rough floor that felt like wood, but she couldn’t see clearly. A mass of grey filled her vision, and then a face that was fuzzy.
“Fia, I have to put my hands over the wound, I’m sorry.” Erebus’s voice drifted to her, a warm hand clamping down on her shin.
Her vision cleared and she tried to drag herself away but lights danced before her eyes again. She managed to pull herself up to a seated position, her back leaning against the bed. Erebus was crouched beside her, one hand still on her outstretched leg, slick with blood, the other just above the wound where the dragoun had bitten her. She didn’t have the energy to fight him, but still she reached to smack his hand away, her fingers catching his wrist as he healed her.
She felt it then, the way she had before, with the others, and her vision steadied just as some of Erebus’s healing light passed from his hand into hers and fell towards the wound. After a moment, she pulled her hand away. The venom was leaving her system, she could feel it. She closed her eyes, her head resting on the edge of the bed as she let him heal her, let him dissipate whatever remained of the dragoun’s bite. No visions danced behind her eyelids as she rested, the sound of her heart slowly quieting. All that was left was for him to knit the flesh back together, to seal the wound, but Fia already knew she could do it herself.
“Get out,” she said, her eyes still closed. She felt him still beside her. “I said, get out. I can finish this.” Fia didn’t open her eyes until a door swung shut, and she was certain Erebus had left her alone.
She looked down at her leg. Her trousers had been torn off at the knee, and she instinctively patted her pocket for the copper sphere. Still there. Her leg was a mess, but whatever Erebus had done already, dulled most of the pain. Either that or the venom had been so bad, this felt like a papercut in comparison. It certainly didn’t look like a papercut. It looked like a shark bite. A section of flesh was missing at her ankle, revealing bits of sinewy muscle and the white of shattered bone. Erebus had somehow stemmed the flow of blood, but for how long, Fia wasn’t sure, and she didn’t waste any time leaning forwards to hold her hands over the wound, imaging that golden pool of light was pouring from her. Her focus came much easier this time, a quiet reassurance that told her she knew what she was doing. She watched, fascinated, as the bones reformed and smoothed back into place, muscle reassembled over it and at last, skin fused back on top of it all, leaving only three rows of silvery scars in its place. A shadow of the dragoun’s teeth.
She let out a breath, pushing herself up onto the bed. She scraped away the damp hair that clung to her face and took in the details of the room. Wood-panelled walls, and a small window looking out into darkness. A crude wooden table sat on one side of the bed, a half burned-out candle atop it, and on the far wall, an even cruder wooden table with a chair, more candles on the table and one on the window sill. For a moment she thought she might be on a ship, but she felt no sway beneath her and was certain she was on solid ground. But whether it was Evina’s world or Ohinyan, Fia couldn’t tell.
Perhaps they were too late. Perhaps the sun had already died and there was nothing left of Ohinyan for them to return to. The selfish thought flickered through her that if it had died, Alexander was safe. Noor too. But what about the others, Runa and Malachai, Altair? Everyone she loved died. What if the same fate awaited Alexander and Noor too? She rubbed her hand over the golden cuff and thought of the dragoun riders burning to ash. You look like a Makya. That’s what Lorn had said, only days ago, before Fia had killed anyone with her flames. Now she’d lost count of how many lives she’d taken. And for what? How would Alexander look at her and see anything but Lorn? How will he see anything but a Makya, capable of murder? She stopped the thoughts before they could spiral.
He said he wasn’t afraid of me. He’s alive, that’s all that matters. She leaned back and closed her eyes, focusing on her breathing, her thoughts drifting to her sister. So little time had passed, and yet so much had happened. Somehow it had only been a few months since Sophie’s death, and yet it felt like a lifetime. It was as if magic had always been a part of her life… as if Alexander had always been a part of it too, and she wasn’t about to give that up. Not for Erebus’s tricks, not for Lorn, not for anyone.
The door swung open, and Lorn stormed in. “Oh good, you’re up.” She threw a piece of fabric at Fia. “This is the first and only time I will run an errand for you. Get up, we’re leaving.” Lorn didn’t wait for a response, she strode out of the door as fast as she’d come in.
Fia sat up, examining the fabric Lorn had flung at her; a pair of heavy black cotton trousers, like the kind she’d seen the Asharians wear, and they were lined with fleece. As the sweat on her body dried, and the adrenaline of the venom wearing off receded, the cold bite in the air seemed to find her whole body at once. She swapped her trousers for the new pair and found her boots at the foot of the bed, her dagger still inside one of them.
Her body ached, and she wanted nothing more than to sleep, but there wasn’t time for that now. She pushed her way through the door and found Erebus standing in the next room, rolling an item between finger and thumb before shoving it into his trouser pocket. It had looked like a necklace, but Fia didn’t get a chance to see any details.
Something about it made her think of Evina, and she made a note of which pocket he’d kept it in, making sure not to let her gaze linger for too long. She didn’t want him to get any ideas.
“I’m only going to say this once,” she said quietly. “I healed you because I had to. You healed me because you’re using me for part of whatever sick game you’re playing. Touch me again, and I won’t hesitate to turn my blue flames on you.”
Erebus’s jaw tightened and he folded his arms across his chest, no sign of the blood she was certain had been smeared across it before. “Understood. But technically, I didn’t heal you. Not entirely, anyway. Your wound, is it sealed?”
Fia rolled her eyes. This was getting old. “Don’t worry, I won’t drop dead from blood loss any time soon.”
She took in a few details of the candlelit room: more wooden panels, more basic furniture, and darkness beyond the windows. That wicked grin of his broke across his face, and it turned Fia’s stomach.
“I meant what I told you, you’ll be able to wield all the elements, given time,” he said, his expression bordering on impressed.
Fia didn’t care. She wanted answers. “No more wasting time, Erebus. We need to figure out which one of us is the fire mother, and—”
“And what?” Lorn called out from somewhere outside. “Save the day? Really, Fia, your optimism is truly nauseating.”
Fia pushed past Erebus and outside to find Lorn pacing. It wasn’t completely dark, as Fia had thought, but almost, like the light just a few moments after dawn. Fia knew then, this was no longer Evina’s world.
It was Ohinyan.
Chapter Twenty–Four
Fia
“ We’re back,” Fia said, spiralling around to take in their location.
Lorn wore a new jumpsuit, which meant they must have been near civilisation, but nothing lit up the gloom around them, save for the Makya herself, who rolled a ball of flame up and down her forearm as if she were about to begin juggling with it.
Cold wind blew at Fia’s face, carrying with it the scent of briny sea air. “This is Ohinyan.” It was both a question and a statement, but Lorn merely sighed.
Her flame flickered in the wind and died down to nothing; only because she’d let it, Fia knew. “We’re back, yes. And as much as I do hate to agree with you, it is time we settled which one of us is the fire mother. Drop the dead weight, as it were.”
Fia couldn’t see far in the dim light. The cabin didn’t seem to be near any kind of road, any signs of life. All she could see were rocks and low bushes.
Erebus stepped out into the cold to join them, although the chill in the air hadn’t bothered her as much as she expected it to. He was still in his angel form, whether that meant he’d decided to trust Lorn, Fia wasn’t sure. Black veins still webbed their way across his chest where the Makya had previously wounded him, and for a moment Fia wondered if she hadn’t healed him right. Not that it mattered. Any amount of healing was far more than he deserved. “We all want the same thing,” he said.
“And what is that, exactly?” Fia asked.
“What is owed,” Lorn said, folding her arms across her chest. She didn’t say anything else, instead, she let a ball of flame fall from her palm and land at Fia’s feet.
Fia jumped back and patted away a few sparks that landed on her new trousers. “Hey. Watch it.”
Another fireball landed and hit her boot. This time Fia stomped it out. “I told you, I won’t be a guinea pig,” she said, sidestepping another ball of flame.
And there it was. That glint in Lorn’s eye. That look of utter indifference. The Makya didn’t care about anything or anyone save for herself. Whatever she stood to gain from being the fire mother, it was only for her own selfish desires, her own ego-fluffing.
“That was for knocking me off my feet back in the forest,” Lorn said as another fireball barely missed Fia’s arm. “Don’t think I’d forgotten.”
Erebus clicked his tongue but said nothing, and although she didn’t take her gaze away from Lorn, Fia was certain he was grinning. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “You killed Alexander’s father. You murdered Enne. Countless others. You scarred Alexander. You said it yourself. You don’t care about any of it. So why bother, Lorn?”
“Because it’s all I’ve ever known,” Lorn said quietly. “My life’s purpose has been to become the fire mother. To rekindle the sun. To have Ohinyan in my debt.” Her eyes flared again. “They will kneel to me. Or they will die.” She released a ribbon of flames towards Fia, but Fia was ready. She pushed back with her own, blue fire meeting Lorn’s like it had back in the forest when Lorn had offered to train her. But it had never been about training, Fia realised. It had been about Lorn proving something to herself. That her life hadn’t been given up to a cause destined for someone else.
Fia couldn’t pity her. Lorn showed no hint of remorse. None of the deaths mattered to her, the lives lost. She seemed to revel in it. Even now, as Fia fought back at the surge of flames blasting towards her, she could hear Lorn’s cackle over the roaring inferno. The Makya’s hair was wild and she looked every inch the tyrannical ruler.
Fia dug her heels into the dirt as the force of Lorn’s flames began to push her back. She gritted her teeth, knowing that she was too close to the bottom of her power to keep holding on for long. Their power seemed to match each other’s, and again Fia had the same thought that had struck her back in the forest when Erebus had asked her to heal him, but she cast it aside and focused on Lorn’s attack.
Lorn wouldn’t stop this time and Erebus probably wouldn’t intervene either. At the corner of her vision, Fia could see him, silver eyes dazzling in the light of their flames, arms folded across his chest as he watched them both, his expression empty, bored, like he so often looked.
She skidded back a bit more in the dirt, and a thought occurred to her. It was a low blow, but she had no other options. She held fast to the steady stream of her flames, pushing back against Lorn’s own, and focused on the ground beneath her feet. The crumble of the dirt under her boots. The way it rattled and bounced with each footstep. The way it hummed like the energy she could feel beneath her skin and just as Lorn laughed again, a short, victorious sound, Fia willed the ground beneath her feet to shake. Mounds of dirt shot up one after another towards Lorn and knocked her off her feet.
Fia let out a shaky breath, her blue flames diminishing to nothing as she gave herself a moment to recover, a moment for Lorn to pull herself up.
“Impressive, Fia,” Erebus said from his post.
Lorn screamed. Fia blinked, and the Makya became ethereal, a ball of flame as she had seen when she first fell into Ohinyan, hurtling right towards her. There was no time to summon her flames, nothing to do but pull her arms up to shield her face and then—darkness encompassed her. Erebus.
Fia focused, waiting for the moment they stopped, but her head pounded from pushing back against Lorn. Finally, her feet touched stone and Fia stumbled from Erebus’s shadowy grasp. He fell into his angel form, one hand clutched to his side, one hand casually bracing him to a stone wall. A stone wall not unlike the one above Djira.
Fia froze. “You’re sick in the head, you know that?” It was the exact spot he’d taken her from when he’d carried her away to his prison.
“You’re welcome,” he said dryly.
Fia couldn’t even look at him. “Welcome? Where’s Lorn?”
Erebus clicked his tongue again. “I’ll find her when she’s cooled off. She lost control. I couldn’t let her harm you.”
She chanced a look at him then. He looked unwell, and Fia wondered if he could be harmed by Lorn’s flames in his shadow form. But then she realised she didn’t care, and instead turned her attention to the city beyond. There was no moonlight. Fia supposed there probably wouldn’t be, without the sun to illuminate them, but lights flickered across the city carved from the rocks. If she could just break away from him, make it to Okwata’s lab. And then what? He’d said he could find her anywhere. There was no outrunning him.
“Do you know why I brought you here?” he asked, stepping up beside her, but with enough distance between them that even his wing didn’t brush her arm. “It’s where I’d have liked to have a home.”
Fia wanted to roll her eyes, but instead, she thought of that night on Hampstead Heath when she’d chased Alexander into the cemetery without really knowing who or what she was chasing. All she’d wanted then was to belong. To find a home for herself in the world. She’d had no idea it would turn out to be in Ohinyan. “The sick in the head comment still stands.” She turned to face him. He really didn’t look so good. “You’re injured. Again.”
To protect her, she realised. From Lorn. Lorn was dangerous. Unpredictable. But so was he. Together they could destroy the whole world, yet they both seemed to loathe the idea of doing it together.
A muscle in Erebus’s jaw flickered but he said nothing as he surveyed the city. She followed his gaze—gold details shone here and there in the lamplight—the gold bands around the grain towers, some of the buildings capped in gold. Fia had never realised before how vast the city was, how little of it she had seen during her last visit.
The wind picked up and Fia wondered what time of day it was. A spicy scent hit them on the breeze that she remembered from the market the last time she was in Djira. It could have been the middle of the day, for all she knew.
“I need you to heal me. Again,” Erebus finally said.
“I told you. We’re even.” She ran her fingers along the rough stone of the wall, trying to make out details of buildings she might recognise in the almost darkness.
“Please, Fia, I—”
“You what? You’ll destroy everyone I love if I don’t do what you say? You’ll destroy Ohinyan?” She spun to face him again, and a shadow fell across his face at her words. She thought he might fall into his shadow form and run away like the coward he was, but he didn’t.
Instead, he said, “I never wanted to be this, you
know.”
That doesn’t mean you have to pity him. She didn’t reply. She knew more words were waiting to spill out. Words he’d been holding onto. He’d said as much to her before, that he wasn’t like his father.
“I began to whisper to the creatures of Ohinyan not out of spite for my imprisonment, but out of… loneliness. At the start, I told myself I would endure it—for her. For Terah. If it meant she could live. They could lock me up, they could do whatever they wanted with me, but—” He looked at his hands, turned his palms over to examine them as if he were seeing them anew. “I didn’t know they would trap me in my shadow form. I started to forget who I was. What I was. Talking, reaching out to the creatures of Ohinyan, seemed like such a simple act.”
She thought of the gouges in the rock in his prison, and whether she wasn’t sure if it had been dug that way to hold a prisoner, or if something had tried to claw and scrape its way out of there. Him. Maybe my part in all of this is to talk to him, to convince him to change. The thought echoed on repeat. But when Fia looked at him, all she saw were the sick visions he’d been sending her, manipulating her, or his shadows snaking their way around Alexander’s throat, choking him.
If Erebus noticed her tense beside him, he didn’t let on. He just carried on looking out at the lights of the city. “I would give anything to see her. I missed my opportunity the first time. I didn’t even watch as the sun died and Terah’s descendant rekindled it. I couldn’t bring myself to look upon her. I could see from my prison, in a manner, but not through my true eyes.” He reached a hand to his face as he spoke, and gently prodded at the flesh beneath his eyes as if he couldn’t believe it was there.
The First Dawn (Daughter of the Phoenix Book Three) Page 17
