CHAPTER 19

Althea lied to me. It was the only explanation I believed. No matter how many times I forced her to repeat herself during the journey to Berrow, she never seemed to make sense.

Duncan is alive. He is alive.

As she spoke, it was like a puzzle with missing pieces. The final piece couldn’t fit together perfectly to form the picture she attempted to paint for me. My mind refused to believe her, protecting myself from the inevitable truth I’d soon uncover.

The journey to Berrow was swift. I was so completely consumed by my thoughts it was like I blinked, and the ruins of Imeria were far behind us. One moment I was stood overlooking the destruction, and the next I stood before the ramshackle ruins of a house. Snow drifted across the bowed roof. The wind screamed around the exposed, rotten beams. I kept my gaze pinned on the open door and the darkness that lurked within. And I waited. Waited to be let down or told this had all been one sick game. A way to play with my mind and break it into as many pieces as the heart in my chest.

What made this reality so terrible was I’d been here – to this house – before. I had stood before this building many weeks ago. And it had hardly changed since. The house was exhausted, leaning to the side as though it’d given up completely. It was a feeling I shared. The glassless windows looked like gaping mouths, the shadowed doorway a mouth ready to devour me whole.

Did it laugh at me or show surprise at my presence? If it was the latter, we shared in the emotion. I never wished to see this place again, and yet here I was, the same broken man, but under far different circumstances.

Erix had been the one to bring me here. Bruised and exhausted in a time when I’d not yet accepted my fate. We’d been real, in a place of ghosts, invading the home of someone who had been forced to leave it behind when the Icethorn power ravaged across the land.

I feared to blink in case the image of our bodies entwined with one another filled my mind. How we’d lost ourselves in a bed, using our skin and touch to fend off the cold night that invaded the forgotten place.

“If you need me, I will be waiting here,” Althea said, waiting just outside the broken gate that hung determinedly to the rotted post at the end of the garden’s path. Beside her stood Rafaela, a silent guard. The wound at her side had still not been dealt with besides being wrapped in a makeshift bandage of material she’d torn from her clothing. That was yet another issue she’d refused the offered aid for. Alongside her rebelliousness against healing, she had also refused to allow me to enter without her.

It took a little persuading for her to finally understand I wouldn’t allow her to chaperone me into the home before me.

This was my problem to deal with – alone. A problem I’d believed would never dare show itself again to me. If it wasn’t for the promise that Duncan was alive and well, lingering in the cottage’s darkness, I would’ve already drawn a blade, stormed inside and faced the horror.

Faced him .

Each step forward was as though I was wading through knee-high mud. I persisted, focusing on the chipped wood of the front door and the suggestive flakes of old blue paint that’d nearly all worn away. The front door was open as if it knew I was coming.

I sensed a gaze scratching across me from someone unseen within the building. I searched the dark, empty windows and found them empty. But that didn’t suggest the being inside was not watching me – waiting for me.

There was only one reason I didn’t unleash the final dregs of power I’d recuperated after the attack with the Draeic.

Because Duncan was supposedly inside. And yet he wasn’t alone.

Althea had assured me he was, and I fought hard to believe her. She told me over and over, never faltering, as I asked her to repeat herself. My heart told me I couldn’t trust what she told me, at least not until I saw him myself. My mind raced with questions. I drowned in them. It was not only the promise of Duncan I couldn’t trust, but the company Althea said he had inside.

One wrong move and I could truly lose Duncan forever. It was a concept I struggled to convince myself of. Not hours before, I’d believed Duncan was dead beneath a mountain of rubble and destruction. Except he wasn’t.

Without a word, I left Althea, my focus on what was waiting for me inside the house. I sensed Duncan as I strode toward the door. His scent of fresh pine and scorched earth. I followed it. However, I couldn’t ignore the other presence that coated him like a blanket of darkness. Something cold and evil.

Of course, he had chosen this place to hide within for a reason. He knew what effect it would have on me – to weaken me, soften me, attempt to make me forget all the pain that came after our last stay here.

And yet, besides my disdain, if what Althea said was true, the person I wished to never see again was the very reason Duncan was still alive. The more rational side of my mind reminded me that Duncan would have been lost beneath Imeria’s castle if not for him.

Somewhere, deep within my chest, there was a spark of gratitude. It was faint and could be smothered completely at any moment. But I couldn’t allow myself to ignore it.

I was greeted by darkness as I entered. The floorboards creaked agonisingly, exposing my presence. A damp scent hung in the air from years of snow melting into the walls and floor of the house. I didn’t remember it being such an unpleasant place before. Daylight sliced in behind me, exposing walls speckled with stains of dark mould. Before me, the staircase was a death trap. The corridor to its side, covered in drifts of snow, squeaked beneath my footfall.

“Duncan?” I called out in question, voice breaking. His name died in the stale air the moment it slipped past my lips. I almost gagged as the air took its chance to assault my throat with its clawing. Taking a deep breath in, I expelled as much of the hideous smell out of my nose as I could.

Then I heard him. His voice was as real as the memories that haunted this place.

“I’m here, my darling.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, my heart almost bursting from my chest, threatening to suffocate me as it lumped in the pits of my throat.

It was him. Duncan. The deep, rumbling tone of his voice caused shivers to pass over my arms. I waited patiently, holding my breath to keep as quiet as possible for him to speak again. This could’ve been a trick of the mind. A way of my memories conjuring a response and luring me to danger.

My knees buckled when Duncan called out for me again. “Come to me, darling.”

I walked faster, following the same steps I had once before. Duncan’s words had led me to a room that sparked discomfort in my mind. My skin itched at the memory, but I couldn’t dwell on it. Then I heard it, the shuffling of someone else, the reminder that Duncan was not alone.

Fury twisted in a blizzard within me.

My foot kicked at the door, wood buckling beneath the force, throwing it open with a crack. I hardly flinched as it slammed into the wall. Light followed behind me, slipping into the room, exposing every untouched detail.

It was the man who sat on the bed before me who demanded my attention first. Duncan. His back was straight, his hands gripped onto each side of the worn mattress as he looked upon me.

“I understand this is going to be a shock,” Duncan said, mouth pursed as he regarded me, an unwanted strain to his posture. “But I’m going to need you to listen before you do anything you’ll regret.”

As my eyes fell upon my love, drinking him in, finally accepting that he was alive, I almost didn’t accept his plea. I didn’t care.

“Tell me this is real,” I begged, gripping onto the door frame to steady myself. My nails bit into the old plaster of the walls until it crumbled away. “Say something again, so I know this is not some illusion cast to punish me.”

I wished to run to Duncan and throw myself into his arms. A sob built in my chest. It crawled its way out of me, exposing the weeping child I buried inside. I found something I had believed was lost forever, and I promised I’d never let it go again.

“I’m alive,” Duncan sighed as if even he couldn’t believe it. A dark lock of hair fell across his eye as he turned his attention to something unseen in the shadows of the room. When he glanced back at me, his stare screamed with pleading. “But you must promise me something.”

“What?” I gasped, tears sticky on my face.

Duncan’s eyes shifted toward the corner of the room, laying briefly upon the shadows clinging like a blanket. “Promise me you will hear him out? I’m only here, alive, because of him – I owe him that much.”

The shuffling of heavy feet sang from the shadows. A part of me registered the twisting of ice that crackled around my fingers as I flexed them to my side. It would only take a thought, and the ice would be directed toward the lurking presence – a presence I’d known would be here before I entered the building.

“I can’t make promises I’m not sure I can keep.” I stared intently at the corner of the room where the figure lurked. “Come out,” I commanded, voice crackling with power. My attention was fixed on the way the darkness rippled as a body peeled away from its concealment. “Slowly.”

And like a dog on a leash, he listened.

The hulking, tall figure stepped into the light, placing himself between Duncan and me. Regardless of my forced bravery, I couldn’t stop myself from choking on my breath at the sight of him.

Erix stood in front of me. Steel silver eyes bore into me, invading my soul in search of something. “Hello, little bird.”

This version of Erix was unfamiliar to me. He was taller than I remembered, as though his body had been stretched and pulled, his arms longer, his shoulders broader to accompany the wings that hung from his back like a cloak of leather. There’d been a time when I had his outline memorised, the way his shoulders dropped like the edge of a cliff to the narrowed, hard shape of his torso and waist.

Just like the last time I’d seen him in this very place, this very room, Erix was without a shirt. Tattered trousers hung off his legs, torn and ripped in places, adding to his dishevelled look. I believed the grey, almost silver sheen of his skin was because of the lack of natural light within the building. But as I shifted my body, giving way for more of the daylight to stream into the room, I was proven wrong. His skin kept that colour, a result of the curse his father had imposed on him. His affliction, his truth.

Erix hung in the horrific balance of fey and gryvern, not quite one nor the other.

“Please,” he gasped, flashing the two sharpened points of his canines catching his bottom lip. “Say something…”

My heart hammered in my ears, my jaw dropping open and eyes widening to the point of discomfort as I took him in. He held his hands before him in such a mortal stance that it seemed wrong for the way he’d changed. Even more so since I had last seen him in the clearing, the night Duncan was captured by Hunters.

Far behind me, winds plagued by ice raced to greet me. They screeched through the house, crawling across walls and floors until they built at my back.

The last I had seen Erix, I promised him death if I was ever disgraced by his presence again.

“Don’t do it,” Duncan said firmly. He’d moved so quickly, seemingly unbothered by the gryvern’s proximity. In a strange turn of fate, Duncan placed himself before Erix, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me this entire time.

I fisted my hands, severing the connection to my power and leaving the snow and ice to fall naturally across the aged flooring of the corridor.

“Robin’s reaction is justified,” Erix whispered, looking to the floor, his shoulders hunched. “I’m exactly the monster he expected to find.”

I couldn’t stop myself from snapping. “That’s just the issue, I never expected to see you again. And yet, here you are.”

“And thank the gods he is here,” Duncan said, briefly looking behind him toward Erix. “Without him, I wouldn’t be alive. Remember that.”

“What are you doing?” My words were more like a sob as I looked from Duncan to Erix.

“I owe him a life debt,” Duncan answered, stepping toward me, arms outstretched. “So I’m keeping it, making sure he survives this conversation long enough for it to actually begin.”

He swept me up in his arms. I was so overwhelmed by his touch that I buried my face in his chest, inhaling the reality of him until his scent lathered the back of my throat. The powerful wrap of Duncan’s arms was more than enough for me to finally give in to the weakness I’d fought away since Althea had told me he lived.

I melted into him, closing my eyes, allowing myself a moment to believe that we were alone in this room.

“He saved me, Robin,” Duncan said, his hold constricting around me.

“I know,” I replied, voice muffled. “But… he… you know what he’s done.”

“We all made mistakes, but at least we can attest to them being our own fault. You know Erix was not in control – you’ve said as much yourself. Come on, Robin. Be rational. Look at me.” Duncan pulled back, gripped my face in his grit-covered hands and held me so I couldn’t do anything but see his desperation glowing within his eyes. “I owe him my life. And because of that, I cannot let you harm him. Not until you listen to what he has to say.”

Duncan was alive because Erix had saved him – that was a fact. Althea had told me as much. I replayed the sickening feeling that coiled within me when she told me. Of course I hadn’t believed her. Even with both of them before me now, the concept was impossible to grasp.

I wrapped my arms around him, wishing to melt into his body and never come out again. “I don’t think I can do this, Duncan.”

“This is going to be hard,” Duncan began, pulling away from me but keeping a firm hold on my upper arms. “But Robin, you’ve faced worse. Think over everything you’ve achieved and tell me you are not strong enough to get through one conversation?”

The gryvern lingered in the corner of my eyesight, not once retracting his silver eyes from us for a second. I wondered how he felt as he watched me in the arms of another man. Just the concept made me want to push free of Duncan immediately.

“I’m in control, little bird,” Erix said, averting his gaze from the two of us.

Erix’s voice was the same as before. The confident, clear drawl as he called me by the nickname I had grown not to despise as I first had.

“Don’t call me that,” I hissed, unable to hide the shaking that exposed just how weak I was at the moment.

Erix’s breathing hitched as though a knife struck him dead in the chest. “I’m sorry.”

Duncan took my face in his hands, making it so I could only look at him. “Remember, Robin. The dead are told to blame the hand which holds the sword, and not the sword itself. Yes, Erix has done something terrible. He took something from you and doesn’t have the power to give it back. But that’s not a feeling I’m familiar with. And you. Erix was the sword, and the hand that controlled him has since been dealt with. Before you decide how you wish to serve him his justice, give him a chance to speak to you. His mind is his own.”

“I… I thought you’d died,” I muttered, picturing the destruction of Imeria Castle. “I really thought I’d lost you, Duncan.”

“If Erix had not acted, you might just have. For that alone, give him a chance.” Duncan took a deep inhale. “Please.”

Swallowing down my anxiety, I managed a slight nod. Duncan exhaled through a smile, bringing his mouth down to mine. But before his lips could touch, I turned away, offering him my cheek instead.

“I understand,” Duncan whispered into my ear, taking my hand and giving it a squeeze. Then he pressed a fleeting kiss to my cheek and drew back.

I looked to Erix, who never stopped staring at Duncan and me. Regardless of my feelings toward him, there was no reason I had to make him watch Duncan be intimate with me. Causing him pain wouldn’t make any of this better. For from the grimace set into Erix’s face, I could tell he’d expected such a show of affection.

Taking a deep breath in, I levelled my eyes, fixing them on Erix. “You can have an audience with me. Alone.”

Erix’s response surprised me. With a slight bow, he replied. “Thank you, Robin.”

Satisfised, Duncan released my hand and made to move to the door. My entire body trembled at the sudden loss of Duncan’s touch. He stopped at the door, offering me a final look. “I love you.”

I opened my mouth to reply with the words Duncan deserved to hear, but they clogged in my throat. I couldn’t reply, not here, not with Erix watching. He had hurt me, but he had also just saved the most important person in my life. There was a time for being a monster, and now was not it.