Black Bird of the Gallows(66)
I close my eyes against the threatening tears and bow under the light weight of the blanket. “Thank you.” I relax, as there’s nothing wrong with his face. It’s the same handsome one I’ve been looking at for the last month or so. But then, his hair shifts away from his eyes, and a gasp tumbles from my lips. I barely stop myself from jerking backward. My fingers tremble against my lips. “Reece…your eyes.”
His eyeballs are solid dark red—the color of congealed blood. Because it’s his whole eyeball, it makes him look dead, at best. Demonic, at worst.
He lowers his gaze to the bed, keeping his lids low. “I’m sorry. This is…what I am.”
“I just…” I choke off. There’s no reassuring thing to say. “Why are your eyes like that?”
He flinches, body curling away from me. “Harbingers of death not as pretty as you thought?”
“Stop it.” I swallow. “It’s a reasonable question.”
His shoulders slouch wearily. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I hate that you’re seeing me like this. I can usually control the eyes, sort of, but not when I’m this…charged.”
“Charged?”
He shrugs. “I’ve taken in a lot of death energy. My body is telling me it’s time to change into a crow and leave.” He brushes his fingers over the back of my hand, then quickly draws back. “You aren’t…You must be disgusted by me.”
“I…” Am I? I’m totally overwhelmed. Shaken, for sure. Scared, oh yes, but that’s more to do with the danger at hand, not him. Disgusted isn’t a word that came to mind. My gaze traces over him. The familiar tousled head, high cheekbones. Other than those gruesome eyes, he’s still Reece, just a little more…otherworldly, for lack of a better word. His features are sharper. The way he moves is a little more birdlike, as if the boy and the crow are not entirely separate anymore.
With a deep breath, I reach for his hand and thread my fingers through his. “I missed you, Reece.”
He closes his eyes, lets out a shuddering breath. “I missed you, too.”
That’s when I notice the heat. It radiates from him. I don’t mean normal body heat, either. The room is chilly. Suddenly, I notice the light steam coming off his skin—the same coming from my mouth when I speak. It feels like I’m sitting next to an attractive, boy-shaped wood stove.
I pull my hand from his and press it to his forehead. “Reece, you’re burning up!”
“No, it’s normal.” He keeps his head low. Hair shadows his eyes. “I mean, normal for me. I get warm when I…” He trails off. And there’s a tightness to the way he’s holding his body. It’s like he’s struggling to sit still.
“So your eyes and your body heat are like this because you just…ah, fed?”
His lips thin into a grimace. “You don’t have to find pretty words for it. My eyes change and my body gets hotter the more death I absorb.” He tilts his head to the ceiling and closes those gruesome eyes. “How can you not see me as a monster?”
Granted, I am still disturbed by his eyes, but a monster, he is not. “Oh yes. You saved me from a dangerous mob, brought me someplace safe and dry, bandaged my cuts, and wrapped my ankle. Very monstrous of you.”
A smile flickers over his lips, but he ducks his head. “Rafette told you a story. I have one for you, too. It’s also short, and one I know only because it’s been passed down from harbinger to harbinger. It started long before the curse found my wretched body.”
“Where the curse came from?” I’ve wanted to know this for a while, but getting information out of Reece has never been easy. “And nothing about your body is wretched.”
That surprises a hot flush out of me and a smile out of him. “Well, some of the story is the same as Rafette’s—there was a time when magic was real and the people who wielded it were powerful. It was science, really, but different from today. This magic-science was used across all social strata—peasants to kings—but the most powerful sorcerers worked in service to the great queens and kings of the time. Harbingers of death were created to scout for potential disasters in a kingdom. If an earthquake, or a hurricane, or an invading army was coming, harbingers could scent it and inform the king, who could then prepare.” Reece slouches forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “But merging a human being with a scavenger bird had an unintended side effect. The crows’ need to feed on carrion manifested in the harbingers’ need to consume the thing they were sent to help prevent—death. It kind of made them a failed experiment. They couldn’t just report back, they had to stay and consume the energy of death to survive. They frequently died, making them unreliable scouts.” He looks at me, and it’s all there—his expression is flayed open and exposed. Raw, vulnerable in a way I’m not completely sure how to handle. I feel like he’s as fragile as thinly blown glass.
I deliberately spread my fingers over his jaw, his flushed cheek, letting his heated skin warm my chilled flesh. I tilt up his face, look him straight in those red-black eyes, and I do not flinch. “Thank you,” I say. “For telling me that story.”
He leans forward, resting his forehead against mine. I feel his breath on my skin as he exhales a deep breath.