Chapter 31

Chapter Thirty-One

Time didn’t mean much when plasma scorched a hole in one’s side.

Petra moved in and out of consciousness. She’d been injured enough times to know, in some slow, hazy way, that she was badly hurt, but the terror that had wrapped its fist around her throat in the belltower drifted away along with consciousness.

Sometimes, she could hear voices arguing. The familiar slam of a metal door. The roar of an engine. Silas’s voice was the most common and comforting noise, though she couldn’t always pick up what he was saying exactly. Mostly she just listened to the cadence of his drawl, not as smooth as normal, but familiar and soothing all the same.

Understanding was elusive. Why she was hurt, why he sounded stressed, where they were going — it all escaped her as shock insulated her from the worst of reality.

Her mind became a kaleidoscope of memory and sensation interspersed with periods of deep, restful darkness. She liked those moments best. They reminded her of how safe she’d felt in bed with Silas, when his shadows were a second skin and his weight settled on top of her.

She thought she recalled being scared of the dark once upon a time, back when her biggest fears were what might be hiding in her closet and hearing her parents argue while she tried to sleep, but now it was a place of refuge. The darkness was as soft as velvet, cradling her with the utmost gentleness, and she trusted it to hold her when consciousness trickled away.

Cigarette smoke and searing agony woke her briefly, but the memory had the uncanny glow of a dream, so she couldn’t really be sure if any of it was real. It would be just like her to dream of the Broken Tooth, of Rasmus and Silas snarling at each other just out of sight as someone unseen sealed a huge, rubbery bandage over her side, of terrible pain.

Certainly it wasn’t the first time she dreamed of wounds, real or imagined. Sometimes she woke up in the darkness before dawn still feeling bruises painting her ribcage, the agony of hunger cramps, and the grim imaginings of what it must have been like for her parents to die their ugly, ugly deaths.

But Silas was a new addition to the cruel landscape of her dreams. She could feel him there, his energy like the weight of a thunderstorm about to break, and somehow she was comforted by it.

Silas was a monster, her monster, and the only one terrible enough to make the darkness a refuge.

She didn’t make a noise — or maybe she did, dreams being tricky things that they were — but Silas materialized by her side in an instant, his big hands cupping her cheeks.

“Shh. Easy, baby, you’re okay. Breathe through it. You just gotta hold on for a few hours and?—”

Rasmus, his hoarse voice as loud and furious as a bomb blast, bellowed, “If you won’t let the best fucking healer in the territory see her, then let me call my?—”

“No one’s touching her but clan!” Even in her dream, Petra shied away from the rage that crackled in Silas’s roar. “I don’t trust anyone, anyone to touch her or know where she is. The only reason I’m here is because I didn’t have bandages big enough to get her through the trip. If one more person so much as looks at her, I’m going to rip their fuckin’ heads off.”

“Shade, have you lost your mind?”

“Yes,” he answered simply, raggedly. “Yes, I have. Can you blame me?”

He sounded so upset. Petra was compelled to reassure him, to tell him everything was all right and to stop yelling at Rasmus, but the dream was slipping away. The edges of her mind went fuzzy again, all soft and warm with darkness, and she was too tired to fight it.

She drifted back into the gentle hold of the shadows, each breath saturated with the scent of thyme, and let go.

Soft sunlight brushed her cheeks, and the fresh, green scent of growing things drifted around her on a warm breeze. The air was almost uncomfortably balmy even under the thin cotton sheet covering her.

Petra tried to turn on her side, her legs kicking to remove the sheet, but she was stalled by a heavy arm tightening around her middle. “Stop fussing,” a sleepy voice drawled from somewhere near the top of her head.

“It’s hot,” she complained, shimmying again.

A deep sigh made her aware of the rest of the body squished against her side — a large, warm body made of sturdy muscle and bristly leg hair. There was some shifting before the sheet was pulled away from her sweaty skin. A heavy hand settled back in the curve of her waist.

“Better?”

“Yeah.” She tried to crack her eyes open but closed them immediately. The room was way too bright for her poor, sensitive eyes first thing in the morning.

Is it morning?

The thought was a stone dropped into the placid water of her mind. Ripples followed.

Where am I? What happened? Who— No, I know that one.

Petra turned her head, which felt a little too heavy, a little too full, in her bed partner’s direction. Smooth skin, satin over muscle and sinew, met the tip of her nose.

Thyme.

“Silas,” she breathed, not entirely sure why her eyes stung with relief.

“Who else would be in your bed? Go back to sleep,” he ordered, not quite gently, but as gentle as she’d ever heard him. “You need to rest.”

But rest was an impossibility as her mind slowly came back online, a bit like an old-fashioned computer bank being booted up. Lights began to flash one by one, and screens flickered to life in the dark, hazy control center of her mind.

A full body shiver coursed through her, a symptom of an all-consuming, unmoored fear. Petra’s muscles seized as if tensing in preparation for a blow. She didn’t know why, nor what she was suddenly so afraid of. Her body acted on its own in response to something that was still too far away for her mind to make sense of.

Petra turned instinctively, curling into a tight little ball under the circle of Silas’s arm, and pressed her face into the hollow at the base of his throat. It was warm and dark there, softly scented like skin and thyme and his particular musk. Safe.

A gentle pressure curled around her neck. It didn’t squeeze, but held her carefully as she began to shake in earnest.

“Hey, hey,” Silas grated, “you’re fine, Petra. You’re okay. Stop being upset.”

He made it sound like she was doing it just to vex him. Of course she didn’t want to be upset. In fact, she didn’t even really understand why her body was going haywire in the first place.

“W-What happened?” Her teeth clattered, making it difficult to speak.

Silas shifted. His arm banded almost painfully tight around her middle. “You don’t remember?” After a short pause, he sighed, “Dad was right. I think you’re in shock.”

Shock? The computer bank came on all at once.

Petra lost all feeling in her limbs when she breathed, “I killed Antonin Vanderpoel.”

The events of the previous night — maybe, she had no idea how long she’d been out, which was its own terrifying thought — came back with all the noise and speed of an m-lev train.

Antonin knew about Max.

Antonin wanted her to bond with him that night.

Antonin had a gun.

Silas appeared from the stairwell.

Antonin’s finger pressed down on the trigger, the gun aimed right at Silas’s head.

She didn’t remember making any choice or having a coherent thought at all. There’d only been the white-hot rage that overtook her when the Protector threatened to shoot her demon at point blank range.

Things got too bright, too hot, too volatile with magic after that. A blow knocked her down even as Vanderpoel’s body ignited. A luminist of greater power wouldn’t have been affected by the raw wave of magical fire she’d poured over him, but he didn’t stand a chance. The fat in his body ignited immediately, immolating him from the inside out.

It was unfortunate that watching him burn was a crystal clear memory. She could see him in her mind’s eye, his arms flailing as his fat cooked him from within, the marrow of his bones getting so hot so fast that the bone itself began to splinter and pop long before the flesh of his skin peeled away.

She knew logically that it had only taken a handful of seconds before Silas swooped in, gleefully tearing into flesh already beginning to char, but it felt like a lifetime. In the moments between ignition and beheading, she watched his eyes cook in their sockets and knew the instant his brain became little more than stewed gray matter in the chalky bowl of his skull.

A wave of nausea overcame her.

Petra squirmed so violently that Silas was forced to release her. She threw herself blindly out of the strange bed and stumbled across a wood floor to what she prayed was a bathroom. He called after her, barking orders she couldn’t process, but she didn’t have time to stop. She feared that if she opened her mouth to speak, she’d be sick all over the floor.

Blessedly, there was a bathroom behind the first door she wrenched open. Petra’s knees met cool white tiles as she hunched over the bowl of an antique-looking toilet and expelled the contents of her last meal — the one she’d shared with Antonin.

Her stomach muscles tensed painfully with every convulsion. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her fingers trembled so violently they struggled to grip the rim of the toilet as she desperately tried to hold herself steady against the storm.

While she retched, big hands pulled her hair back from her sweaty face. Silas knelt behind her, his body heat permeating the sudden internal chill that bit into every nerve.

His voice took on an unfamiliar edge of panic when he said, “Easy, easy. I’ve got you. Just try to breathe. You’re okay. It’s okay. I’ll fix it. Everything’s okay.”

If she could stop throwing up for a second, she would have laughed. It’s okay? Nothing was okay. She had no idea what was going to happen now, who she could trust, or what she was supposed to do.

For so long she’d been walking on a straight path. First it was following in Max’s footsteps, content with a small life as long as it was a safe one by his side. Then it became a much more dangerous but still straight path toward the truth, toward justice. The end of that path wasn’t one she wanted, but it, too, had a certain comforting finality to it.

What now?

Now her path had dissolved beneath her feet — or rather, it was burned away in a fire fed by greasy human fat and vengeance.

At some point her retching stopped, but her tears didn’t. Huge, wrenching sobs shook her shoulders. She didn’t even know what exactly she was crying for. Certainly it wasn’t guilt over Antonin’s death. But she couldn’t seem to stop, no matter how hard she tried.

Her mind was fractured. She couldn’t settle on one thought long enough to find a center point, a shelter to take refuge in, so her thoughts became a whirlwind of broken glass, cutting, cutting, cutting?—

Silas was speaking to her, her voice strained enough to sound truly desperate. She didn’t hear the words, but she tried to focus on the sound of his voice as he peeled her away from the toilet and hauled her against his chest.

Still, she cried. If anything, she cried harder as she recalled her suspicions that he’d told Antonin about her connection to Max. She so badly wanted to trust him. He’d come to her rescue. Hadn’t he?

But nothing was certain anymore, and it terrified her to think that now he was her only real friend in the world.

If he betrayed her, she’d have no one.

That thought only made her sobs worse. She pressed on it like a bruise, exploring the pain it caused because at least it was straightforward, understandable. She didn’t want to lose him. She didn’t want to believe he’d betrayed her. She cared about him, needed him. Gods help her, but she thought she might shatter if he left her now.

A string of hissed curses broke through her downward spiral, but it was suddenly finding herself under the frigid spray of the shower that shocked her into stillness.

Petra opened her stinging eyes to find herself staring at an old but well-polished showerhead. After the initial shock of cold, the water that rained from it began to warm, soaking her nightgown until it clung to her like a second skin.

Silas was behind her in the tub, his legs framing her sides and his arms coiled around her middle, pinning her wrists to her front. His cheek pressed against hers. She could just feel the shape of one horn against the side of her head as he curved his bigger body over hers.

“You’re okay,” he crooned, voice breaking. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

The way he said it, she really wasn’t sure if he was reassuring her or himself.

For several minutes, she watched the water rain down from the spigot, her mind blissfully empty. Her shaking gradually subsided. Silas rocked her gently back and forth, murmuring nonsense in her ear, as she went limp and numb in his arms.

The warmth of the water, the sound of his voice, the pressure of his arms around her — all of it brought her back to herself in inches.

Safe, the sad little thing in her whimpered. I’m safe here.