Daybreak (4 page)

Holthan lived on to torment her, even through his death.

Elena still wasn’t strong enough to stop him.

In a few of the darkest hours, she thought about telling Jake. Perhaps if he knew, he would understand that she needed him. Perhaps he would see that the warmth he’d given her might be the thing that melted the ice from her blood. Perhaps this would be just another battle they might face together … 

No. 

No, with the rising sun came clarity: Jake could never love her if he knew the truth. He wouldn’t look at her in the same way again. The woman he knew was strong, after all. The mask she wore was of a warrior who could not be beaten. But inside, she was a broken thing.

Nobody could love something broken.

It was that thought that finally dragged Elena to her feet. She wouldn’t try to fight the cold any longer. She would simply cover it up, and perhaps time would eat its edge.

The mansion was alive that afternoon. Servants bustled here and there. She followed the pattern of their steps and slipped around them to avoid their eyes. Elena was little more than a plume of smoke, a breeze so slight that it hardly stirred the things it passed. She drifted through the crowd on the balls of her feet and took refuge among the shadows.

A manservant peeled from the main room and set a brisk pace down one of the hallways. Elena followed silently in his wake — using his broad shoulders as a shield against the eyes of passersby.

“What’s all this confounded noise about?” a blustering voice called from up ahead. “No sooner does a man get his grand-nephew settled for a nap than the whole house erupts. It’s a curse, I tell you — a
curse
!”

Elena slipped behind the manservant’s right shoulder when she saw a frazzled crop of gray hair approaching. Of all the many bodies swarming around the mansion, the Uncle was the absolute last one she wanted to be caught by.

She had no choice but to pin herself against the wall when the manservant stopped abruptly. “There’s trouble in Harborville, Mr. Martin. Captain Lysander’s ordered an emergency sailing —”

A metal platter struck the polished stone floor in the main room, and the resulting
clang
woke the baby with a scream.

“Confound it all!” Uncle Martin swore. He bounced the blankets in his arms for a moment, but to no avail. “What in high tide are they doing with the silver? No — you come with me,” he said when the manservant tried to escape. “You can explain it all on the way.”

Elena kept herself close to the servant’s right shoulder throughout his reluctant turn, slinking behind him as she would an opened door. The Uncle and the servant took off back towards the main room, and Elena ducked into a nearby chamber.

She was careful to breathe lightly as she entered. Her mask muted the stink of magic in the spell room, but she could still taste it. The fumes made the back of her throat itch and stung the sensitive flesh inside her nose.

Shelves lined with books, tables piled high with vials and instruments covered the room. She could barely see the floor for the mess. But it wasn’t nearly as messy as she remembered it being — it wasn’t as messy as it
ought
to have been.

The last time she’d been inside the spell room, rings of books covered the floor. There’d been various liquids inside the vials and bits of parchment strung all across the chamber, covered to their bottoms with strange symbols. Now the books sat neatly upon the shelves, the vials lay empty. There wasn’t so much as a scrawled note in sight.

A small cot lay crammed against one corner of the room. She stepped over to it carefully, wondering why its blankets had been stripped and folded to the side. Then she spotted the tongue of a rucksack sticking out from beneath the cot.
 

It’d been packed. When Elena sifted through it, she found a cloak, a fresh change of clothes, and a couple of books — including a plain leather tome with no title.

She drew the plain book out and held it carefully. It was Jake’s notebook — the thing he was always muttering over and scribbling in. Elena ran her thumb down its pages, watching as his words, numbers, and drawings flipped by. Some of it was written in the strange tongue of the mages.

She’d begun to flip through it a second time when a pair of shuffling steps echoed down the hall. She slid the journal back exactly where it’d been — wedged between two thicker tomes — before she kicked the rucksack beneath the cot. Elena had just enough time to walk to the other side of the room before Jake entered.

His robes scraped quietly across the floor as he ducked in, arms laden with what looked to be stashes of dried provisions. Elena watched from the shadows as he tried to make room for them in his already-bulging pack. She read the frustrated words that formed upon his lips, watched as his rounded spectacles slid further down his nose.

When they neared the tip, she stepped forward instinctively — afraid they might slide off and be broken. But Jake managed to catch them … just as her shadow crossed the wall.

He whirled around so quickly that one foot caught against the heel of the other, and he sat down hard. “Blast it, Elena! You know I hate it when you do that.” He sprang up from the cot. His face burned red as he tried to cram rations between the folds of his spare robes. “Why are you here? I thought you didn’t want to see me again.”

His voice cut across those words and scraped against the thing buried beneath them. “I’ve come to tell you I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean it … I don’t want you to leave.” 

Jake’s hands slowed, but he didn’t answer.

Elena stepped closer. “I was only a bit nervous.”

“Is that all it was?
Nerves
?”

“Yes,” she said evenly, trying to ignore the scoff in his voice.
 

There were so many things she wanted to say, so many things she
needed
to say … so many things she couldn’t tell him. They wove around inside her head as she glared at the back of his neck, trying to work them all out. In the end, she couldn’t. So she grabbed him by the robes and turned him around.

His brows lowered over his spectacles at the question on her lips.

“Please, give me one more chance.”

“I don’t think it’ll —”

“I love you.”

The words were out of Elena’s mouth before she could think to draw them in. Her chest lurched strangely at the end — the throes of some fear trying to escape. She crossed her arms and held it pinned; she tried to meet its curious gales of frost and fire with calm. But it was difficult.

Jake, and his peculiar, quiet gaze, undid her.

“Do you?” he said, his voice hushed.

“Yes.”

His face was completely unreadable. Even the vein beneath his chin moved in a steady throb. Jake held her gaze for a moment more before he sighed. Then he slid his gloves from his hands and laid them carefully upon the cot.

Elena’s heart thudded once, hard, when he stepped forward. Her arms fell from across her chest and she closed her eyes.
 

Be calm. You
must
be calm
, she told herself when she felt his hands against her throat. Warmth bubbled up inside her middle and she clung to it desperately, hoping it would be enough to hold back the frost.
Jake is a kind man. You love him. You
—

No, the ice wouldn’t let her. Memories of a dark set of eyes overtook her vision; a spine-raking laugh filled her ears. The softness of Jake’s hand turned callused and hard. His grip became strangling. It snuffed out the warmth and left Elena frozen. But she fought to hide it.

Be calm. Don’t move. Just
…

“You’ve gone cold again.”

She opened her eyes when Jake took his hand away. Shock stole her breath for a moment before she remembered to hide it. “You’re imagining things.”

“No, I’m not. I can feel it. Your skin is like stone.”

“It’s only nerves,” she growled, stepping into him. “Quit worrying about every little thing and love me. I won’t stop you.”

“That isn’t what I want! That’s the
least
of what I want. At the moment, there’s only one thing in the whole Kingdom that concerns me.”

“And what’s that?”

“Your eyes,” he said shortly, glaring as if she should know full well why he was angry with her. But she didn’t.

“You can have those, too. Take whatever you want.”

“No, that isn’t … ” Jake was quiet for a moment before he grasped her hands. “When I look into your eyes, I see a monster.”

Elena glared to hide her surprise. “You knew what I was from the beginning, mage. I’ve told you that I’m a killer. I’ve made no attempt to hide it.”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t mean you — I mean
me
. My reflection. You go cold when I touch you … you close me out. I won’t be the thing that frightens you. I would rather harm myself a thousand times over —”

“Please, you’re —”

“Listen! No,
listen
to me,” he shouted, clutching her hands. “I won’t do it. Too many people have looked at me that way. I know fear when I see it — and I’ve lived as a monster, but no more. I know my magic must hurt you, and I … I won’t do it. I swear I won’t touch you again.”

He spun away from her and tugged his gloves on roughly. Elena watched, still half-frozen and in shock. “Where are you going?”

“To the plains. There’s a ship leaving this afternoon. Brend promised I could stay for a while and study things, so that’s what I mean to do. It’ll help, I think, getting some time apart.”

He swept past her, and she couldn’t even turn to follow. The truth might stop him. One confession might bring him back, might possibly change everything …

Then again, it might well
end
everything.

“Elena?”

When she finally managed to turn, Jake was standing in the doorway. A faint smile bent his lips as he pulled his eyes from the floor to meet her.
 

“I love you, as well. I always will. It was too much to ask of a whisperer to withstand a mage’s touch … but I thank you for trying.”

He slipped out the door, then — taking every last shred of warmth away with him.

Darkness cloaked his eyes — impenetrable, at first. But it slowly began to soften. The dark gave way to a warm, golden light. The light crept from yellow, to orange, to a heated, furious red.
 

It was the red that woke him.

Kael groaned as the morning light glanced across his eyes — stinging at their fronts, aching across their backs. He slammed them shut once more and draped an arm over his face, absolutely determined to sleep until a decent hour …

Wait a moment.

The fog crept back. He braved the glare of the sun just long enough to peek out from beneath his arm and groaned when he saw that the hour
was
decent. Even through the chamber’s one small window, he could see the sun had risen a good inch above the glittering waves. All of Copperdock would be about its chores by now.

Which meant that Kael was already late.

He tried to bolt up and very nearly snapped his neck. There was a strong arm clamped across his chest. It held him pinned to the bed — and it absolutely refused to budge.

“Kyleigh?”

She mumbled unintelligibly from beside him.

He’d learned the hard way not to try to force her awake. The first time he’d grabbed her by the arm, she woke up swinging — and he tumbled off the bed with a broken nose. So he’d had to come up with a trick to get free.

After a few moments of careful squirming, he was able to reach the back of her shoulder. He jabbed, flung his arm aside to avoid the wild swing of her fist, and managed to roll successfully onto the floor. “Get up, Kyleigh,” he said as he tugged on his trousers. “Copperdock can’t have its lady sleeping in all day. The sun’s awake, so you might as well be.”
 

Somewhere amid her muddled swears came a word that sounded suspiciously like
no
.

She was a tangled mess: wound up tightly among the blankets, pillow crushed between her arms and her raven locks held tamed only by a very clumsy pony’s tail. It also looked as if she’d claimed one of Kael’s shirts during the night — the one he’d stripped off the day before because it’d finally become too filthy.

He frowned when she shifted to clutch her pillow tighter and he saw the grimy streaks trailing behind her arms. “There are plenty of clean tunics lying around here, I’ll have you know.”

“Well, I like this one,” she mumbled, grinning into her pillow. “It has your scent.”

“
I
have my scent. And I’m lying right beside you. So there’s no need —”

“Anything you leave on the floor is fair game, whisperer.” Her eyes cracked open, and her lips bent into a smirk. “Now come back to bed.”

No. He had to tell himself, very firmly,
no
. Flames danced behind the green of her eyes as they locked onto his. Her smirk spread into a grin that almost made him grin back. He swore he could see the memories drifting behind the flames, the shadow of the secret they’d shared …

“No.” He had to say it aloud. For some reason, his legs had started to drag him towards the bed. “You can stay here if you like, but I’m going to the docks. I swore to Shamus that I’d look after the repairs while he’s away. And I mean to keep my word.”

“Suit yourself.”

He would. As a matter of fact, he was determined to get his boots on and head out immediately. Kael righted a chair that lay on its side in a corner of the room — and nearly toppled over before he remembered that it'd been broken.

The back was gone, having been snapped off and hurled to another end of the room. The book he’d been trying to read lay sprawled between the wall and the floor, while the bedside table had been knocked askew. Though their chambers were in a near-constant state of mess, it certainly wasn’t the worse thing to have happened.

After their first night together, Kael woke to find the mattress in ruins and the bed’s stuffing plastered across his every inch: stuck in his hair, against his skin, and wedged into places where no man should’ve ever had to find feathers. The bed’s frame had been reduced to splinters — crushed, with its legs trapped beneath it.