The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(83)

Dara looked down, where he still sat splayed across Noam’s lap. He made a soft noise in the back of his throat, half a snort. “I guess this is why you’re a good person.”

Enough of this.

“Dara,” Noam said again, quieter this time. He placed both hands on Dara’s thighs, because if he touched his face, Dara might flinch. “You didn’t come back last night.”

Dara said nothing. His damp cheeks were flushed.

“We argued, and I told you—you said you’d take care of General Ames, and then you left, and you didn’t come back, and now he’s dead.”

Dara lifted one hand, slid his fingertips along the backs of Noam’s. Noam kept his hand still, so still.

His heart beat a strange rhythm, lungs tightening when he tried to inhale.

“Dara, tell me.”

Dara’s gaze flickered up at last. He was so—he was so close, his weight atop Noam’s lap, lips still red and kiss bitten. “I think it’s better if I don’t say anything at all.”

Noam squeezed Dara’s thighs—he couldn’t not, a reflex gesture that made Dara tremble.

He did it. He really did it.

Dara killed General Ames.

That knowledge thumped in Noam’s chest like a second heartbeat, arrhythmic and sickening. For a moment, when he shut his eyes, all he could see was the general’s body lying in a pool of his own blood.

But then Noam looked back to Dara, whose cheeks were as ashen as a magic victim’s.

“Good,” Noam said, surprising himself with the viciousness of it. “He deserved it.”

“Noam . . . please.”

“I mean it. You did the right thing.”

Dara looked stricken. And maybe Dara felt guilty for killing a man, but Noam refused to reinforce that. The general deserved it. (He deserved it. He deserved it.) Noam smiled at Dara and turned his hand palm up on Dara’s leg, twining their fingers together.

“You did clean up after yourself, right?” Noam thought to ask after a second, because, god, the last thing they needed was Lehrer’s department finding Dara’s prints all over the crime scene.

“I told you I don’t want to talk about it.” Dara disentangled his hand and, after a moment, slid off Noam’s lap. He retreated to the corner of the bed, back against the wall and knees drawn up to his chest. He watched Noam from that safe distance, wary, like Noam might lurch forward at any moment.

“Fine,” Noam said, holding both hands up in surrender. He started rebuttoning his shirt, telekinesis clumsy on the metal button backs. Dara sat in silence the whole time, expression closed off. “I’ll leave you alone, if that’s what you want.”

Dara nodded once.

The mattress creaked as Noam’s weight shifted off. He glanced back at Dara, who hadn’t moved.

He wanted to say something else.

There was nothing else to say.

So he did what Dara wanted: he left.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Dara slept the rest of the day, emerging only to steal toast around three before retreating to his self-imposed isolation. Noam avoided the bedroom as much as possible. The one time he went in to get a book, Dara was sitting on the bed in his drabs, and the way he’d looked at Noam when Noam came in, it was—

Well. It made Noam want to do inappropriate things to Dara, situation be damned.

But if Noam hoped to talk to Dara the next day, those hopes were dashed when Lehrer rescheduled his meeting with Noam for early morning. He didn’t invite Dara, because it wasn’t a lesson. Not this time.

Lehrer looked like he hadn’t slept. There was a gauntness to his face, like his bones were finer than before—a hunger. He had a mug of black coffee in one hand as he paced the length of his study. Noam sensed the sparking threads of magic that kept the coffee from spilling out of its cup and onto Lehrer’s uniform, thin live wires enmeshed over the ceramic rim.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Noam said when Lehrer was on his eighth lap and showing no signs of slowing down, or indeed acknowledging Noam at all. “General Ames was your friend, right?”

“Yes,” Lehrer said, finally. He stopped at the end of the ninth pace, turning to face Noam and setting the coffee down. “He was. A close friend, in fact. I’d known him since he was a child.”

Noam nodded as if he understood. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Please tell me if there’s anything I can . . . do.”

Lehrer watched him with cool eyes.

For a single reeling moment, Noam had the sense that Lehrer knew, somehow—that he knew just by looking that Noam wasn’t sorry at all.

Lehrer said, “Actually, there is. Gordon’s funeral is this afternoon. I want you to attend.”

So soon? General Ames had just been murdered—why were they rushing him into the ground?

“I didn’t . . .” Noam started to say, I didn’t really know him but thought better of it at the last second. “Of course. I’ll go.”

“Good. You’ll be my second set of eyes. Report anything and anyone suspicious; Gordon’s killer will be there.”

Yeah, no kidding. Of course Dara would be there—General Ames had doted on him, practically saw him like his own son, to hear Ames tell it. But what was Noam supposed to report back to Lehrer? Yeah, I paid attention, but no one was acting weird; sorry I can’t be of more help?