Feversong (Fever #9)(122)
“I haven’t even begun to plumb your secrets,” he said. “And you didn’t hack them. Your boy genius did. We found the calling card he left.”
“He left a bloody calling card?” He hadn’t told me that! I was furious that he’d taken such a ridiculous chance, but then I started to smile. That was my Dancer. No fear. I loved him for that.
Ryodan flinched, and I got the impression he’d just heard me think that. And apparently I’d been right, he didn’t like the thought of me caring about someone we both knew could die any day. My smile vanished because I despised myself.
If I’d told Ryodan as soon as I’d returned, if I’d trusted him, he could have helped me rescue Shazam. Assuming my testy, adorable beast was alive, he’d be here with me right now.
I’d blown it.
R-E-G-R-E-T. I can spell that word now. Raw. Endless. Grief. Raining. Eternal. Tears. That’s what regret is.
“You had no reason to trust anyone, Dani,” he murmured. “And every reason not to.”
“Yes, I did have a reason, and a big one—trusting would have saved him,” I said bitterly.
“You’re not allowed to beat yourself up. Only I get that privilege,” he said, and I smiled faintly with brittle humor.
“Can’t you mark the Silver from this side?” I hated the way my voice broke on the words. That was what I’d spent the majority of my time seeking—a spell to etch a symbol on the mirror that would show on the other side, guaranteeing we could find our way home. We’d have to be fast to hit the right Silver, but Shazam and I were speed demons. Still, if I hadn’t searched, if I’d only trusted and asked…If only. I got it now. Why people got so fucked up as they grew older. Impossible choices, impossible trade-offs; each erosion had a price you carried in your heart forever.
“Barrons and I tried to devise a way to do that for a long time, with no success. You said they caged him. It’s been decades. Do you really believe he’s still there and alive?”
My hands fisted behind his neck. “I have to try.”
He said nothing for a time, and I stood there with his arms around me, in no hurry to step away because it felt so quiet and solid and safe. With Dancer, it felt quiet and solid and safe, too, but in a different way.
“Wait a few days. If all appears hopeless on Earth, we’ll go through together and save him. But you have to promise you will never try to return to this planet.”
“I can’t promise that. It’s my home. Maybe we can make it back in time.”
“You wouldn’t know until you tried. And the odds are high you’d die. You should have left already with the other colonists. Go somewhere. Live.” He started to speak then stopped, shook himself and said roughly, “We’ll take Dancer with us. The three of you can make a life somewhere for yourselves.”
“Right. So I can watch Dancer die.” Here and now, I could deal with my boyfriend’s condition. But go off with him to a new and potentially dangerous world? Start a life, maybe one day even start feeling safe and have children—only to lose him? God, why were there no easy choices anymore?
“How many fucking people do you think I’ve watched die?” His silver eyes flashed crimson. “Over and over. That’s what you do. You love them while you have them and when they’re gone, you grieve. That’s life. At least you had them for a while.”
I stared up at him, realizing that, just like Dancer saw only part of me, I saw Ryodan through a filter, too. And right now I was seeing him in a way I never had before. He’d loved. Many times. Deeply. And he’d lost countless times. And that was why he fought so hard to keep his men together. He was intensely controlled because at the heart of it all, he cared intensely, and even though he was immortal, he’d never turned off emotion. I narrowed my eyes, staring into his gaze, startled by how similar we were. He felt as fiercely as I did, and like me, he’d donned his own version of my Jada persona. He slipped it on every day with his crisp businessman attire, his aloofness, his calculation.
“Do you know why I didn’t kill Rowena?”
“Ro?” I shook my head, not following the sudden leap in conversation, still off-kilter by how differently I was seeing him now. He’d become a whole person, not a caricature of my archnemesis anymore. A man.
His hands were on the sides of my head then, and he was urging me to close my eyes with his mind, and this was a spell of compulsion because they drifted shut without my permission and he filled my head with images and I stared at the visions in horror because he was showing me that his childhood had been so much worse than mine. It was brutal and savage and punishing and desperate, and Ryodan had actually been a child once, some kind of child, and he’d been so badly abused I couldn’t believe he’d survived it. One man had done it all to him, and his hatred of that man who kept him chained in a dark hole in the ground had been so consuming, there’d been nothing of a little boy left.
But one day he’d escaped. Like me.
And he’d sworn vengeance.
But the man who’d so heinously abused him was killed before Ryodan got the chance, and he’d been cheated of his vengeance.
He said, “For thirty-two years, three months, and eighteen days, I carried rage and hatred for everything and everyone in my heart. Thirty-two years I walked around, dead inside except for a single emotion: fury. Then I found him. Alive. I’d been deceived. He hadn’t died. The bones I’d dug up and crushed to dust weren’t his. His friends had protected him. Lied. Transported him away.”