Shana Abe - The Deepest Night

I flicked a hand at her, cutting her off. “Oh, marvelous. Are you about to go on about me daring things again? Truly? I’d think you’d have a new diatribe by now.”

Mrs. Westcliffe, the school’s headmistress, entered the library with a staccato clicking of heels and a rustling of black organdy skirts. She spotted us at once and paused, her gaze keen and her shoulders stiff; the three of us together could only mean trouble.

Chloe drew in a long breath through her nose. She exhaled, took a step closer to Sophia and me, and brought back the red smile.

“Soon we shall be off enjoying the summer, holidaying with all the very best people, attending dances and dinner parties and living the kind of life you will only ever read about in the rag sheets. And where shall you be, Eleanore? Which lice-ridden dosshouse shall be taking you in?”

“One with only the very best lice,” I whispered back to her, but she was already swishing away.

Nightfall on the island nearly always meant velvet skies swept with stars, and the Channel filling the air with the tang of salt, and the slow, rhythmic drumbeat of waves crashing against the rocky shore.

As a child in London, I’d never smelled the sea, nor seen the heavens so spangled. I’d never known nights any hue other than black or brown or sooty gray, but here they came saturated in color. Navy, sapphire, indigo. And, very rarely: deep, pure amethyst.

An amethyst sky had welcomed me the first night I’d set foot upon the isle. It had reappeared for my first visit to Jesse in his cottage in the woods, and again for the night I’d been shot and Jesse had died.

It shone past my window on this night as well. It was a purple so thick and luminous I might well believe something Other than nature had created it. Something magical.

Less than a year ago I would have laughed at the thought. Tonight, though … tonight I wondered.

I leaned out past the sill of my room’s sole window, surveying the stars. My hair was unpinned, draping over my shoulders to tickle my crossed arms. In direct sunlight it looked an ordinary pale mousy brown, but when I glanced down at it now, I was unsurprised to see it had gone almost as purple as the heavens. It did that, taking on other tints, reflecting back whatever color was near, especially pink. I’d thought perhaps it was a dragon trait, but since Armand’s hair always seemed to be the same glossy chestnut, I couldn’t be sure.

My eyes were like that, too. Changeable. Lavender gray most of the time … except, apparently, when they flashed incandescent. I’d never seen it happen—I guess I’d have to be looking in a mirror—but Armand and Jesse had told me about it.

I was sixteen years old, more or less. It was peculiar to think of my own body as a stranger, but it was. I was learning new things about it nearly every day.

The room assigned to me at Iverson encompassed the top floor of one of the smaller stone turrets. It was round and crammed wall to wall with just a bed, an armoire, and a bureau. The other girls at the school all shared lavish suites bedecked in jeweled glass and rosewood and lace, but I didn’t think any of that compared to what I had been given: Privacy. Solitude. A window glazed in a thousand diamond pieces, with hinges that worked and a view to the sea and the mainland bridge beyond.

And the stars.

Oh, the stars, twinkling and winking at me.

come out, they sang, a celestial chorus only I could hear. come out, beast. come fly to us.

Somewhere belowstairs, from one the parlors perhaps, a clock began to chime, followed by a cascade of others.

Midnight. Perfect.

I stepped back from the window so my nightshirt wouldn’t blow away, took a deep breath, and Turned to smoke.

I’m not sure how best to describe what it’s like. Imagine all the weight of your body, all those heavy pounds of muscle and bone and fat, abruptly melted away. You still exist, but you’re vapor. Diaphanous coils, elegant and twisting, lighter than air. You can see and hear, even control your direction. You’re not cold or warm. You feel no physical pain.

Only the hunger to fly.

This is the first step to Becoming a dragon.

As smoke, you can sift through an open window, float out past the walls of a castle. You can spread yourself as thin as sea spray or bunch up thick like a cloud. You can rise and rise and hear the stars more clearly than ever before, pulling at you, celebrating you. Humming and praising.

You belong to them; they belong to you. And there will always be an aching, festering fragment of you that yearns to just keep going up, forever and ever. To never touch the earth again.

I glided over the smooth manicured lawn fronting the castle, the tidy rose gardens and the sinister huge hedges that had all been pruned into animal shapes, wolves and lions and unicorns. I might well have been an odd sliver of mist, or the creeping fog that uncurled from the woods to slink along the grounds. Except I moved as nothing else did.

I left Iverson behind me, soaring farther into the forested center of the island. Black spiky crowns of birch and beech skipped past, their leaves flashing purple. Meadows opened up and closed again. If I dipped too low, the forest’s branches would tear me into pieces. It wouldn’t hurt, but it wouldn’t be especially pleasant, either. I made certain to remain above the trees.

As compelling as the stars’ songs were, I had a different goal in mind tonight besides just flight.

I knew the way to the cottage by heart. It sat alone and empty in an uncivilized portion of the woods, a place none of the other students would dream to venture. As far as I could tell, none of the staff came out here, either. The windows were shuttered. The door was locked, but it was wooden and old and no longer quite fit the jamb. The gaps were easily wide enough for smoke to slide though.

I Turned back to girl on its other side. Nude. Chilled.

I didn’t like to linger here. It might have been my imagination or just a depressing truth, but the air inside Jesse’s cottage was still scented of him, and I didn’t like to breathe it. I think deep down I was worried that one day I’d breathe it all gone, and that would be the last of him. The last time I remembered his fragrance.

I removed a shirt and trousers from his closet, got dressed, and left by the door—then doubled back when I realized I’d forgotten the shovel stored by the woodshed. None of Jesse’s boots fit me, so I went barefoot along the trail that wrapped around the cottage and vanished into the trees.

Leaves and grass folded soft beneath my soles. The tip of the shovel made a soft chuck into the ground with my every other step. A breeze slipped by in fits and starts, ringing me in the perfume of wildflowers and bracken and mossy logs.

It was bloody dark. But I was able to find my way by memory … and by following the subtle, lilting music that was gradually growing louder ahead.

Dragons hear all manner of music that humans don’t. It was one of the reasons I’d spent a year of my life imprisoned in the hell of Moor Gate, because I kept asking the adults around me to explain all the unending songs. Songs from the stars, of course. But also from metals. From stones. Songs from stickpins or emeralds or iron bars, each one unique, strident or gentle, a ballad or a symphony—the music never ceased.

Not even when I was given the electrical shock treatments.

Not even when they submerged me in the ice baths.

Not even the morning they’d killed me because they could, and then forced my dead heart to beat again.

The music I followed tonight was muffled, because it emanated from several feet underground. I stopped finally at a tall rowan tree, leaned the shovel against it, and sat down at its base. I eased back against the trunk, dug my toes into the peat, and waited.

It wasn’t too much longer before footsteps approached.

“Miss Jones,” Armand greeted me, winding his way through a strand of whispering beeches.

“Your Grace,” I answered.

“Not quite. That’s still my father.”

My eyes had adjusted to the night by then, and I was able to make out the pale folds of his scarf, the ghostly outline of his face and hands against his linen duster.

He would have driven from his mansion on the mainland to as far as the island bridge, then walked the rest for stealth. I wondered that he hadn’t gotten hot in that coat.

“Your … lordiness. Whatever you are now. I don’t know the proper address for a marquess, I suppose.”

“Lord Sherborne,” he supplied smoothly, coming close to the rowan. “Or simply my lord. But you can call me sweetheart.”

“I don’t believe I will.”

His teeth flashed in the gloom; I’d made him smile. “We’ll see.”

Armand had nearly everything in the world he could possibly want. He had money, social status, and inhumanly good looks. His family owned the castle and the island the castle sat upon, along with most of the mainland nearby. He lived in a monstrosity of a manor house perversely named Tranquility, a few miles inland. He was intelligent, brooding, and dangerously magnetic in that way somehow unique to young men born to power. He’d been booted out of Eton twice and I still couldn’t think of a single girl at Iverson who wouldn’t give her right arm—or, more specifically, her left-hand ring finger—to him at the drop of one of his expensive hats.

Especially since his older brother, the previous Marquess of Sherborne, had been so accommodating as to go and get himself killed in the war. So the future Mrs. Armand was guaranteed a duchess’ coronet.

I used to think it was selfishness or just boredom that had him constantly showing up at Iverson to seek me out. The desire to rebel against his father and Westcliffe and all the sticky spiderwebs of rules that entangled us both. I was hardly a seemly companion for the son of a duke, and everyone knew it, especially me.

Then we’d found out. About being dragons, I mean. And about how it would be in his nature to hunt me like this till the end of time.

I don’t which of us was more appalled.

But Armand’s drákon blood was thinner than mine, and his powers were only just emerging. He couldn’t Turn to smoke or dragon yet, so at least I had the advantage over him there. He knew if he pushed too far, I’d Turn and leave.

“Bloody dark,” he commented, settling down beside me. He was holding something bulky in his hands.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Really?” He stilled. “Is that a dragon trait? You can see in the dark?”

Now I was the one smiling, though I was glad he couldn’t tell. “No, my lord. It is bloody dark.”

“In that case …” He rummaged through the bulky thing, and suddenly I smelled cheese and salty olives and bread and smoked fish.

“Good God,” I said, my mouth beginning to water. “Did you bring a picnic?”

“A small something, perhaps. And …”

And a lantern, as it happened. He struck a match; the delicious food scent was briefly overwhelmed by sulphur, and then the amethyst shadows retreated against a small yellow glow.

“That’s better,” he said.

I drew my knees up to my chest. “Someone might see.”

“Who the devil,” Armand responded cordially, replacing the lantern’s glass, “is going to see all the way out here in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night? I’m not going to attempt to eat Russian caviar in the dark, Eleanore. It stains. And this is a new coat.”

“Very well.”

He sent me a glance from beneath his lashes. With the light cast up from below, he was all stark jawline and cheekbones and diabolical dark brows. I saw the dragon in him then as clear as could be. Only his eyes were reassuringly familiar: rich cobalt blue, the color of oceans, of heaven’s heart.

“Hungry?” he asked, soft.

There was an implication in his tone that he meant for something other than food.

“I’ve never had caviar,” I said deliberately.

His gaze fell from mine. “Then I’m honored to be the one to offer it to you now.”

And that is how I discovered that caviar is one of the most purely revolting substances ever to exist. I actually had to spit it out and wipe my tongue clean with a fresh piece of bread to get the disgusting fish-jelly flavor out of my mouth.

“Charming.” Armand was smearing more onto his own bread with a delicate silver knife. “Glad to know all those lessons in deportment aren’t being wasted.”