My what? My mother? My mother did that? I shook my head, and the tickle of memory was gone.
“I think my mother taught me that,” I finished. “Or someone. I don’t know.”
He bowed his head, seemed to be examining the venison in his hands that I knew he couldn’t really see.
“Do I? Have a fever, that is?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “Honest to God, Armand, I don’t know how anything works anymore.”
Likely it was the darkness freeing me, freeing my tongue. Likely it was that I didn’t have to look into his eyes and acknowledge what I’d find in them, the constant hunger, the unwavering focus that made me feel both huge and tiny at once: selfishly pleased to be the recipient of his desire, inwardly terrified because I didn’t know if I’d ever be worthy of it, or even able to return it.
I’d loved Jesse. I had. And it had been easy.
But now, with Armand … everything was topsy-turvy. Jesse was the star I couldn’t hear. Mandy was the dragon at my fingertips, right here, right now, and he wanted me.
I’d never have to wonder what he thought. Where he’d gone. I’d never have to wonder how he truly felt.
Only how I felt.
Which was … confused.
not alone, sang the stars, a refrain that shimmered through the cool, dark air, chasing shadows.
“I think I need to sleep now,” I said.
“I know,” he answered, and moved over in the bed to make room. “Come on, Lora. It’s soft, just like you’d hoped.”
“I should get you some more aspirin first.”
“Later.”
“But—”
“It can wait. Everything can wait until tomorrow, waif. When there’ll be sun.”
I was too knackered to argue. I placed the canister upon the floor and crawled toward him, not even bothering to remove my boots. I let myself slump into the bedding, a pillow downy beneath my cheek. Armand didn’t try to get closer, only lay there beside me, but eventually, after counting out more than two minutes silently in my head, I felt his hand clasp mine.
Fire, still.
Weary as I was, it was a long while before I fell asleep.
Chapter 24
Shed this skin.
He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t. He felt wrapped in flames, tortured by the simplest sensations: the weave of the sheets. The revolting smell of the dried meat. The dampness of the night.
His heart, too large in his chest now, too large and too desperate to get out, because it hammered and hammered against his bones with such violence it would splinter him into a million pieces. Every bit of him smashed, right down to his cells.
Only her touch was still right. Only Lora’s hand, lax around his, felt like the anchor he so greatly needed.
Armand remembered what Rue had written about the first Turn of the drákon as if he’d composed the words himself: It’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt so very much that you will wish you could die.
But he couldn’t die yet. He hadn’t saved his brother yet. He hadn’t confronted his father. He’d never even kissed the girl he loved, not really, and if he died here, tonight, she’d be the only one who’d ever truly know what happened.
It would ruin her, the burden of that secret. Somehow he knew that it would.
Finish this life.
The Turn was building inside him, a tidal wave of smoke and disintegration so colossal it blotted out everything but his fear.
He dug his fingers into the sheets and stared up at the black timbered ceiling.
Shed this skin. Finish this life. In the twinkling of an …
The dam of his willpower crumbled, spent.
The air went to syrup, too thick to breathe.
His heart slowed. Slowed.
Stopped.
He couldn’t die—
Chapter 25
I jolted upright. I didn’t even realize I was awake until I heard the mournful piping of the water bird again, and I looked at the windows because it sounded so near.
I was awake, and I was alone in the bed. I felt ill and sweaty for no reason I could think of, as though I’d just broken a fever.
A fever.
I looked down and yes, there they were: his shirt laid out flat, the bandage that had been around his head fallen to his pillow. Beneath the sheets I’d find his trousers and underwear, too.
I sprang from the bed.
“Armand! Where are you? Mandy!”
I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. There was no one else here, no one at all.
All the windows were closed tight. If he’d left as smoke, it hadn’t been that way. There was no fireplace up here, but there was the one downstairs, and the door—
I hit the stairway so hard my feet slipped; only my grip on the railing kept me from spilling all the way down. As it was, I had to skip and hop and finish the last few steps at an awkward run, my boots cracking against the floorboards of the landing.
The front door gaped open. The night sky hung beyond it, coal black dappled with treetops and stars.
I tried to Turn. It didn’t work. I raced out into the open and scanned the heavens, searching for him.
There were some clouds, that persistent haze hanging over the lake. No smoke that I could see. But he had to be here. He had to. He wasn’t going to be one of those unfortunate young drákon who Turned and dissolved into death, because I was going to save him—
“Where is he?” I shouted to the stars. “Where?”
rise up, came their response; even they sounded mournful. rise up, fireheart.
And then, as if they’d unlocked the hidden shackles that had bound me, I could.
I went to smoke, freed from the earth. I left my garments behind, the lodge, its mossy roof. I launched upward, and suddenly I could see all of the lake, the bristly stretch of forest encircling it, the mist that shifted and curled above the surface of the water …
Hold up. There was no wind, no reason for that patch of curl there near the center of the lake. I moved closer to better see. It spun and whirled like a miniature cyclone, no natural thing.
Armand.
I flowed over to him, became thin and hollow and surrounded him as best I could. I couldn’t tell if he realized I was there; now that I knew where and what he was, I felt him as strongly as ever. It was obviously Mandy, gone to smoke but in such a furious way. The force of his whirling was sending me spinning, too, tearing me into tendrils.
I was beginning to feel ill again, so I had to draw free and let him alone.
What was he doing? Below us both, the water grew stormy, thick wide ripples that slapped all the way back to shore.
I wished he’d stop. I wished he’d move away from the lake, because if I accidentally Turned to girl here, I probably wasn’t going to be able to swim to safety. I was rotten sick of nearly drowning.
He went faster, faster. He was pulling a spiral of water up into his middle, sending drops in every direction. I hung back farther, baffled, as the spiral became a funnel, and the drag from his rotation became something stronger and more ominous.
What’s happening to him? I asked the stars.
They didn’t answer. I wandered higher and hunted the heavens, but Jesse wasn’t anywhere in sight.
Tell me why he’s doing this, I demanded.
shape and form, they sang to me. form and shape.
So … Armand was attempting to hold on to his shape? To not Turn back to a human or into a dragon, but remain as smoke?
Why would he do that? Unless … unless he thought that if he didn’t, he’d have no form left at all.