Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

“That is enough,” I shouted over them both; rather, I tried to shout, but my voice was so strangled it came more as a gasp. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I don’t appreciate your games. I—I came here to tell you to stop pestering me, and leaving me gifts, and smiling at me—”

“You dream of flying,” Jesse said, which cut me off mid-sentence.

“Aye.” He nodded, shadows and gold, tall and warm and much too near. “I know all about it. I know all about you. You have wings at night. You lift as smoke. And you come to me, don’t you? Always to me.”

I could not reply. I could barely take a breath.

This is a dream, this is all still a dream, it’s just a new part to the dream, that’s all—

“It’s why you’re here now, tonight. You’re drawn to me, as fiercely as I am to you. You didn’t even have to follow my song this time. I muted it, didn’t you notice? And you came anyway.”

For a long, long moment, I gave up on breathing. For a long, long moment, all I heard was my heartbeat and his, and a gull crying miles away, and the distant thunder of a German bomb exploding on innocent ground.

Jesse lifted a hand and placed it on my arm. His palm felt hot against the cotton of my sleeve, his fingers felt firm, and that rush of longing and pleasure that always overtook me at his touch began to build.

“Lora,” he whispered again, so quiet it was barely a sound. “Inhale.”

And when I did, he bent his head to kiss me.

...

He tried to be careful about it. He tried to limit himself to a barely there touch, just his mouth to hers, nothing alarming, nothing assumed. But her lips were even softer than he’d dreamed, and with their bodies this close her scent wrapped around him in a heady rush. Jesse felt like he was drowning in flowers and fever and delight.

He wanted to drown. This was so much better than he’d … ever …

It spun out longer than he’d planned. It was still a joining of near chastity; the as-yet-contained part of him was afraid to move, afraid to lift his hands to her face, as he desperately wanted, to discover the contours of her with his fingertips. To feel her bare skin.

But he didn’t want to frighten her, and he didn’t want the kiss to end.

When he pulled from her at last, they were both sleepy-eyed and breathing hard. She looked stunned, so flushed and so beautiful and so very much at the edge of what he knew her to be that he nearly smiled, which would have been a drastic mistake.

When her gaze met his, her irises were luminous, pooling bright silvery purple, a definitely inhuman glow.

He’d awoken the beast in her.

Good.

“What are you?” she whispered.

Jesse took a step back to clear his head, to free himself from the tendrils of her sorcery. It’d be easier for both of them if he could think straight.

Right. He needed to focus. He’d waited his lifetime for this moment, but, even so, the words came with difficulty.

It was never painless to bare a soul.

“I am both less than you and more,” he said. “An alchemist, an amalgamation of two opposite realms. I’m the fabric of the stars.”

There are certain moments in life when hard, hot truth shines at you like a spotlight from heaven, like the focused beam from a lighthouse on the shore of yourself, and you find yourself stripped naked in its light. You can’t hide from it. You can’t close your eyes and wish it away. It’s truth; easy truth or unbearable truth, either way, it won’t be vanquished. And there you are for all to see, stuck in its merciless glare.

One of those moments for me came that night with Jesse, there in his cottage in the island woods. I was caught in the glare of not one but three impossible truths:

I wasn’t human.

Neither was he.

And he had kissed me. On the lips.

One of those truths—I couldn’t even tell which—kept me standing in place before him with a hand pressed to my mouth, as if I could hold in the soft, lingering sensation of that kiss, the cinnamon-vanilla-rain taste of him. The last bit of heat from his body, which I was already growing cold without.

My eyes were wide as saucers as I stared up at him, so I shut them, opened them again.

I was a … what?

He was of the stars?

The candle flame continued its merry little dance, undaunted by anything but the breeze. A cricket hopped close to the door, right up close, and chirped a few bars before leaping back into the dark.

Jesse was looking down at me with that patient expression, a suggestion of worry now mixed in. This time he was clearly waiting for me to say something, so I said, “Oh.”

Brilliant. I still couldn’t bring myself to lower my hand, so I’d said it around my fingers.

“Are you breathing?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I can prove it,” he said. “My part, at least. Not yours.”

He didn’t need to prove it. I believed him. It was crazy, as wildly insane as anything I’d ever heard at Moor Gate—but I believed him.

Yet the words remained stuck behind my closed lips.

He walked to the piecrust table, threw a glance over his shoulder at me through the fall of his hair to make sure I was still paying attention. As if I’d be looking anywhere else.

He needs a haircut, I thought, my mind clinging to any sliver of rationality. He needs a haircut, but it looks so good like that.

“You don’t have to come closer,” Jesse said. “In fact, you shouldn’t. But watch.”

His arm stretched out. His hand reached down, index finger pointing, the others slightly tucked, a familiar contour both elegant and timeless, like that Michelangelo painting on the ceiling at the Vatican. He touched a single petal of one of the white flowers that he’d shaped in that half circle on the wood. Touched just the very tip of it.

And light poured out of him at the touch. Light, golden as he was but shimmering brilliant, a shower of sparkles, of glittering diamonds or gold-leaf confetti—I was processing what was happening but wasn’t; for heaven’s sake, he was shooting light. In an instant it engulfed not only the flowers but his hand, and then his arm, and then all of him, and Jesse Holms became the spotlight that I could not bear to see, and I had to turn my face away from his brilliance and truth.

Shadows cut crisp and black around me. The table, all the chairs, every tuft of the rug, every wooden plank of the floor, illuminated. I heard the air leave my lungs again. The thin whoooo of my breath, hollow as could be.

I sucked it back in, and the golden light faded.

His back was to me. His shoulders were bowed. He stood for a moment without moving, but there was something about him anyway that read pain. He stood as if he hurt, his body held smaller, tighter, than it’d been before. His face was a pale mask in the reflection of the window. His eyes were closed.

“Jesse?”

“Yes. I’m all right.”

I guess to confirm it he straightened and returned to me, graceful as ever, offering me the flat of his palm.

He had the braid of flowers balanced there, still in their half circle. But they were changed now. They weren’t white any longer or even alive.

They were made of gold.

Actual gold, because they sang to me, just like the circlet of roses had. Just like the regular rings and earrings and bracelets and stickpins of all the people I’d ever known.

Jesse had turned the living flowers into metal.

He lifted my arm and slipped them over my wrist. Rigid in their golden death, they hugged the bones of my arm snug like a cuff, like they’d been made specially for me.

Which, I supposed, they had.

I’m not proud of what happened next. In my defense, it had been a long, strange day followed by a sleepless night, and I was more than a little unnerved from—well, from everything. The tea, the duke’s ruby song, Armand and Chloe and the bombs and then Jesse and the night and the kiss and not being human. Not being human.

All I remember is that I was looking down at the cuff, at the perfect composition of the flowers, how they connected petal-to-petal in the most miraculous way, humming warm against my skin. I thought that the king’s own jeweler could not have designed a better bracelet and how funny that was because I was surely as opposite the King of England as a person could be.

Anyway, I wasn’t anticipating it: The shadows from the floor rose up in a rush and clasped me in opaque arms. They encased me and Jesse and the entire room.

Yes, I fainted.

Even as I fell, I realized how humiliating it was. My very last conscious thought was, Please let me wake up alone in my own bed.

And I did.

...

You’re wondering if I awoke with the cuff.

Because if I didn’t, perhaps it had all been nothing but a dream. Or my own particular brand of insanity, my notoriously hysterical imagination. Even before we’re out of short pants and pinafores, we’re taught to dismiss both dreams and imaginings as if they count for nothing, and without the cuff, I would likely have done just that. With every fiber of my being, I yearned to be normal. To glide through my days at Iverson without incident. The last thing I wanted was to indulge in my differences from everyone else.

But with the proof of those braided flowers, I’d have to face the fact that my life was about to unfold in a very, very different way than I’d ever envisioned. Normal would become forever out of reach.

The answer, of course, is that I awoke with the cuff.

At first I didn’t even feel it. At first, with the light of day creeping over me—a gray light, a cloudy light, because even though the sky last night had stretched so limpid, by morning a rainstorm was rolling in—I felt only grit in my eyes and the gnawing awareness that if I didn’t get up soon, I’d miss breakfast. And I was hungry.

I staggered out of bed and over to the bureau, yanking open the drawer that contained my Sunday blouse and skirt. It was only then I understood that the heavy thing about my wrist was Jesse’s flowers.

It stopped me cold.

I remembered it all, everything at once in a sickening flood.

I was a …

I was …

The beast in my heart said nothing. Ever since Jesse’s revelation, it had gone still as death. I had to finish the thought all alone.

I was a dragon.

Reflexively, I ran my hands up and down my sides, feeling my ribs, my hips, my legs. Except for my boots, I was still wearing every bit of last night’s clothing—thank you, Jesse—and it didn’t take long to tear it all off entirely so I could examine my skin.

No scales, no plated spine or new, hideous claws where my toenails used to be. No hint of anything dragonish at all. Even when I twisted around practically in half, using the looking glass to try to glimpse my backside, I still looked … ordinary. I still looked just like me.

But there was the cuff on my wrist, singing a soft, soft melody. And what had happened with the piano. And how I’d made Malinda choke. And all those years of all those silent songs.

This is only the beginning.

There was only one person who could explain it all to me. I had to find Jesse again, had to find him right now—

Downstairs a door slammed, followed by startled laughter. The exodus to breakfast was well under way.

Damn. It killed me, but Jesse would have to wait. If I didn’t show up for breakfast, Mrs. Westcliffe would send Gladys or Almeda looking for me. I’d heard that the only excuse for missing chapel or meals was illness, and if you were ill, you could expect a sizable dose of cod-liver oil and bloody little else.

I tugged on my clothes and hurried down the tower stairs, only just managing to join the final stragglers darting past the dining hall doors. I made my way to the tenth-year table, hardly registering the customary tittering that churned in my wake.

“Lovely coiffure,” commented someone beside me. “Was the price of a few hairpins really too dear?”

I glanced to my right, where Chloe stood with a hand atop the back of her chair. The runny-nosed girl slouched beside her. Both of them were smiling small, malevolent smiles.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Your hair.” Chloe pulled out her chair, turning away. Her ladyship was already bored. “Quite the rat’s nest, isn’t it? Either you can’t afford even cheap pins or else you simply don’t care how you look. Either way, it’s an obvious indication of inferior blood.”