House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(92)

The desert tears away from under us and we are falling though a dark so intense that for a moment I think we have died, and this is just the final, endless moment.

Then my back hits something and all my breath is knocked from my body. There is a solid weight next to me, and the darkness, the darkness. I open my eyes and stare at a ceiling I know from year after year of counting the cracks and water stains. I twist and hold Jannik tighter, all that’s left of his magic seeping into my pores, and breathe in the familiar smell of him, of leather and white soap, and fainter, blood and sweat, and fainter still, sea salt and dune grass. His breath hisses against my ear. I am about to break him. I can feel the bond between us, bright as ribbons. I wonder how much it will hurt. I have his magic, and I no longer need this bond.

It seems I will always be doing the exact thing I shouldn’t.

“Ready?” I don’t wait for an answer. The muscles in his arms tense, and I snap the ribbons, their ends reaching up for the stained ceiling as they fray. The bond between us breaks and it is worse than the pain outside. For a moment. Then it is gone and his body with it and there is only his magic, completely under my control.

I push back into consciousness, into my gasping body. Immediately the pain down my back returns, no longer distant. Or perhaps my sojourn through our minds has made the pain all the more real.

“–capable of.” Rutherook’s voice is strained. “Damn it all, I think the bat just died.”

“How annoying,” Eline says.

I open my eyes. Jannik’s magic is surging through me. I feel like I have too little skin to hold me together, that I’m bursting. I almost expect my body to split like an over-ripe fruit, spilling my insides out along with all this last gathering of power. I suppose it barely matters now.

Eline steps back from me, frowning. “This wasn’t what I envisioned. Ah well, I shall simply have to make do.” He shrugs. “It was the bat I wanted. You can let the girl die.”

Rutherook’s scriv-fuelled magic bites at my throat, cutting off all my air. I have seconds, minutes at most. I draw all the stolen power up in my core and stop fighting the urge to break beneath it. Giving in never felt so sweet. It will be my final act, to slip him from his leash. Peace consumes me. And I am left stripped of all of Jannik’s magic, released.

My eyes are still pinned open as power lashes out in whirlwind of invisible knives, tearing Eline’s surprised head straight from his neck and sending it hurtling across the room to land at Yew’s feet.

Yew blinks, then throws up a shield before it can do the same damage to him. Rutherook, preoccupied as he is with strangling me, is not as lucky. I feel his death, the way he splatters, chunks of flesh and bone spraying across the room. Karin explodes like a berry popped between finger and thumb. My hair is matted with his brains and blood, and I slide to the floor gasping, released from the magic at last. The storm rages all about me, tearing Eline and Rutherook and Karin into increasingly smaller pieces. Their blood paints the walls, drowns me under, and soaks into the carpet, turning the deep blue wool a sodden black. It batters uselessly against the scriv-shield Yew manages to keep up.

When the storm blows itself out, I crumple, and close my eyes. Let Yew kill me then, it is already past the hour of my ending.

“Interesting,” he says in the sudden silence. “Fascinating, even.”

I slip back into the dark and the memory of Jannik.





DOGLEAF


I heard funeral chants. They were distant dreams while I was buried under a blanket of soft goat wool. I was neither awake nor asleep. Instead of being alive, I lay in a half-world of raging sands and alternating fogs so damp and heavy that they pinned my arms to my sides, kept my eyelids pressed shut. It was better to stay there than wake and deal with everything I’d lost.

My skin feels tender and stretched, even the slightest movements pull at stitches, remind me of my bruises.

The thunderstorms rolled out the days, counting each passing afternoon in flashes of lightning. In the dripping silence after the rain, the pied crows kah at each other in the gardens. Light seeps into my room.

Carien’s ghost watches me silently from the dusty streamers of sunshine.

Or perhaps I am dreaming.

I fall asleep again.



*



“You should be glad you missed the funeral,” Harun says. It sounds like he’s sitting near me. I’m almost alive. Servants bring me light soups, tea for the pain, they shake me gently awake and make me eat, but this is the first time I remember Harun coming here to this sick room. So I have been saved, but I don’t care.

“Bloody awful affair.” He sighs, and the leather of the seat creaks. “I’m not grateful to you. Not for going off at Eline like that, thinking you could save everyone like some grand hero.” I suppose, at the very least, with Eline’s death the proposals will be forgotten, and we have bought Isidro and the other vampires a little more time before the next fool decides to revive the idea. There will be no more vampire murders. I’m sure Jannik would have thought it worth dying for.

Harun’s boots sound dully on the carpet. He’s pacing now, his voice moving away, then closer, away again. It’s annoying. I will him to stand still. “You’re damn lucky, and you should be dead.”

Damn lucky. If I hadn’t broken the bond with Jannik, I would be dead. Luck. I suppose. If one wants to call it that.