21. Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

Three months after they first arrived at Nailah's house, Xian lost his mind.

Everything else so far had happened incrementally, and Rafael had expected this aspect of his detoxification to be the same, but instead it was shockingly abrupt. One day he was speaking, albeit slowly, and could follow a conversation and recognize his caretakers, and the next he was completely insensible, even catatonic at times.

In this new stage Xian gave no indication of being able to see, he barely reacted to voices or sounds and only after hours did he respond to loving torture. He was skeletally thin, and Nailah had warned Rafael for several weeks that Xian was reaching a critical point in his descent.

"His body may not make it past the low point without our intervention," she warned him.

"What kind of intervention?"

"The uncomfortable kind." That was all she would say on the matter, and all Rafael could do was more of the same, tugging the lighter and frailer body of his lover into position and carving new lines into his flesh, or tracing over old ones that were barely healing faster than a normal human's now.

Every wound brought the blackness welling to the surface of his skin, and that skin was like paper, thin and easy to tear. Rafael had to bind Xian tighter now to keep him from injuring himself, if not with his hands then with his own teeth. When he did react to stimuli it was the reaction of an animal, wary and raw. The white orbs of his eyes were shot with purple veins, and more than once he tried to attack his lover.

"He doesn't know what he's doing," Nailah said after one such attack. Xian had drawn blood with his teeth before Rafael pulled back, and watching the pallid, bruised nightmare before him lick at his crimson lips and whine gutturally was almost more than Rafael could stand. "It's not as easy to be strong when he bears almost no resemblance to your beloved, is it?" There was nothing mocking in her tone, just compassion, so rare from her that Rafael could barely believe it.

"There's nothing I can do right now. I feel…useless," Rafael confessed.

"You do plenty for him. You clean him, you care for him, and you watch him. This is almost as bad as it gets, boy."

"How could it be worse?" he demanded.

"It can always be worse," Nailah said darkly.

She was right. The following dawn, not a minute after Rafael had entered the dark, stuffy room and Nailah had left it, Xian stopped breathing. The absence of the low, rasping wheezes was so surprising that it took Rafael a moment to realize what that signified. "Nailah!" he cried, laying his hands on Xian's sunken chest. The bones flexed easily beneath his touch, far too soft. "Nailah!"

"What?" she demanded from the door.

"He's not—he's not breathing." Rather than coming in, Nailah turned and thumped rapidly through the other room. Rafael heard the ceramic lids of jars being slammed onto the nearest surface.

"Is his heart beating?" she demanded.

Rafael bent his ear to his lover's chest and listened. There was nothing. "No."

"Of course not," she said angrily, "why would he make this easy for us?" A moment later she hurried back into the room. "Move," she ordered, and Rafael crawled reluctantly back from Xian's side.

"Fool of a man," Nailah muttered as she opened the folded white rag in her hand. There were thorns inside, not long but incredibly sharp. "Fool. Idiot." She picked up a thorn and pushed it to the root directly above his heart. "Selfish. Selfish ." She pressed two more thorns in just below the junction between collarbone and shoulder, and another into the base of his throat. "Impossible man." Another went beneath his navel, and without ceremony she swept aside the loincloth that covered his groin and pressed a final thorn just behind his testicles.

Rafael winced reflexively watching it but he didn't do anything to interrupt her. His own heart was trying to race out of his chest, all the latent fear and worry that had died down with the monotony of caring for his nonresponsive lover surging back full force. He watched as Nailah massaged Xian's chest, pressing down firmly over his rib cage, muttering curses to herself even as worry crept into her face. She rubbed harder, stroking lines between the thorns, unashamedly handling her brother's body as she scowled.

"What are you doing?" Rafael asked hoarsely.

"The thorns are placed in energy centers in his body. With enough stimulation those centers will reanimate him. The thorns themselves are coated with stimulants that ought to be working." She scowled down at Xian's still body. "But it should have worked already. The stimulant is also a poison, and I can't risk giving him any more of it than is already inside of him."

Rafael could hardly process what he was hearing. "You mean he could die… Now."

"He's been one step away from death for days, boy, you know that," she said harshly.

"But we were waiting for the turning point!" Rafael shouted, losing his tenuous handle on his emotions. "This isn't a turn, it's an ending!"

"Sometimes things end!"

"Not like this!" He pushed off of his knees and raced to his bedroom, clawed through his long-forgotten saddlebag until he found the sealed vial of Erran's blood, then raced back into the room. "Use this."

"Get that out of here!" Nailah exclaimed. "How can that help—it's what's killing him now!"

"You said the poison is in the dose."

"For the uninitiated. For someone like Xian, or myself, the barest hint of that blood in our bodies again will bring the craving back." Nailah actually looked frightened. "If I had known you had it with you, I would have forced you to destroy it the first night you arrived."

"Xian is dying," Rafael said, forcing his mouth to speak those words and not the ones that hammered in the back of his throat, far less hopeful. If he spoke the other words he would be screaming in moments. "Move."

"Would you torment him longer?" Nailah asked, her warm brown eyes welling with tears. "Would you bring him back only to put him through hell again before he goes? How can you bear to do more?" All of a sudden she collapsed back, away from the bench, covering her face with withered hands. "So long…too long, too many years, I'm too old, I cannot… I cannot…" She crawled a few feet back. "Do what you must. I lack the will for it."

Rafael had been hoping for more guidance than that, but he took her place at Xian's side and laid his hand on his lover's unresponsive chest. "You're coming back to me," he said firmly. Taking infinite care, Rafael broke the seal on the lead vial, letting the sweet scent of the lifeblood of heaven permeate the room. Nailah groaned with exquisite pain, her breath catching in her throat, and after another moment she began to sob.

"I'm sorry," Rafael said. He didn't know who he was apologizing to, or for what. Possibly his words were for the demigod himself, trapped in his pit and harvested for his immortality. "I'm sorry. I have to." Picking up one of the remaining thorns sitting on the rag, he dipped the very point of it into the vial, reclosed it and set it behind him, then raised the thorn to Xian's forehead.

Rafael touched the thorn to his lover's third eye, then began tracing a line down his face, not breaking the skin, not really, simply tracing its lines. He went over Xian's septum and lips, down his chin and throat until he connected with the thorn in his throat. He continued the network, branching from Xian's heart to his shoulders, down to his belly and beneath, delicately over lax organs and onto the tender skin behind them.

A moment later, Rafael heard Xian's heart start beating again. A second after that he began to breathe, and a bare instant later Xian was clutching at him with a savage, unexpected strength, his unused voice cracking and breaking as he began to scream with need. He lunged past Rafael for the vial but Rafael held him firm.

"Not that, you don't need that," he panted. "You need something else." Before he could rethink it Rafael scratched himself with the thorn, gouging a line just below the crease of his thumb. "Me," he said, raising his bleeding hand to Xian's mouth just as impossible bliss overtook him. "You need me."

Erran's blood had never entered Rafael's body before, not directly. There was hardly any left on the thorn after he finished rubbing it over Xian, but what trace amount there was more potent than any drug he had ever experienced. Even the lightning-strike feeling of magic in his blood after feeding from Xian couldn't compare to the nirvana that coursed through him now. Just a scratch and it was already almost more than he could handle. Almost, but not quite enough to make him turn and lunge for the vial behind him and drain its contents.

Instead Rafael kept his hands on Xian, always on Xian, and focused on the steady suck-suck of his lover's mouth worrying his flesh. It hurt but that was fine, because for the first time in far too long Xian was holding him, was clinging to him, and it hardly mattered in the moment whether the creature in his arms was the Xian he knew or something else entirely. Whatever he was, he belonged to Rafael. "Mine," Rafael whispered, his vision gone fuzzy with blood loss, fatigue and pure pleasure. "Mine."

After what felt like an eternity, the sharp teeth left his hand. By the time he was able to focus again, Rafael's vision had coalesced into a pair of large eyes standing out in a chalk-white face. The eyes, though…they weren't seamless white from edge to edge, or riddled with midnight veins. The eyes were brown, golden brown, like dark honey in the sunlight, and their centers were perfect black circles. Thin lips were stained red again, but beneath the blood was a hint of native color. Their eyes met, and Rafael felt like he was staring into the face of a god.

"Yours," Xian breathed at last, and in that moment he was became precious to Rafael than any deity ever could be.