“I want you to remember now.”
Remember what?
He sent an image to her, but it was not one of the visions that were familiar and frightening. It was a narrow room, and two men were there with a woman. With her. One sat next to her. The other in a corner.
This is a memory. This is mine.
“Remember, Ava.”
“You are… Irin scribe house.”
“Istanbul.”
“What are you?”
“…angels.”
Angels? Her eyes closed. Her mind focused. Angels.
“Did you think the angels—”
“Ava!”
SHE woke with a sharp breath, sitting up as her eyes flew open. Malachi was beside her, his hand on her arm. It was early morning, and grey light shone around the corners of the curtains in the house by the sea. The room was cold, but she was covered in a sheen of sweat.
“Ava?”
“I’m awake.” She cleared the rasp from her throat. “I’m okay.”
“Was it Jaron again?”
“Yeah.”
She took a soothing breath as he pulled her into his arms. She no longer had to ask. He no longer hesitated.
In the month since he’d come back to her, they’d grown more familiar, though they still handled each other with care. Malachi was cautious about certain topics. Their past in Istanbul was safe. Their months apart were not.
Part of Ava felt as if she’d woken from a nightmare when Malachi came back.
The other part waited in terror to wake from the dream of him being alive.
“Better?” he whispered into her hair.
“Yes.” She breathed again, closing her eyes and listening to the steady surf in the background. “Yes, better.”
He held her against the solid wall of his chest, anchoring her to his body, holding her in the circle of his arms.
Safe. Safe.
Some mornings Ava woke feeling as if she could drift away. She was smoke on those mornings. The thin fog that hung over the ocean in the moonlight. They clung to each other in sleep, no matter what had happened during the day or how distant she felt.
Sometimes she woke and he was watching her, frowning as if he was trying to remember.
On the best mornings, she woke and Malachi was the man he had been, light in his eyes and a teasing smile at the corner of his mouth. They made love on those mornings with playful passion. The joy of new lovers in familiar skin, hiding away in his grandparents’ house on the edge of the sea.
On those mornings, they didn’t speak of the other times he woke her. The hours when she cried in her sleep. Stifling screams. Weeping with remembered loss. In the bleak darkness of those nights, they held each other desperately.
“I’m here,” he’d whisper. “Ava, I’m here.”
Once, she bit his shoulder hard enough to break skin, and the taste of his blood had lingered in her mouth for days.
“I’m here.” He said it over and over again.
And in the mornings, she believed him.
But the nights always came. The dark angel walked with Ava in her dreams, and she woke crying, seeing Malachi’s face dissolve into gold dust that rose in the damp air of the cistern where he had died.
“HOW is she?”
“She grieves.”
Rhys paused on the other end of the phone call. “But you’re back.”
“Her mind knows that. But there are moments when I think her heart forgets.”
Malachi held the phone to his ear while he watched his mate take pictures near the shore. His grandparents’ house sat on the ocean north of Hamburg, hugging the edge of the North Sea. It was bitterly cold in the middle of winter.
Malachi craved the warmth of southern waters, but Ava resisted a return to Istanbul no matter how Rhys and Leo reassured her.
His brothers called every week and asked the same questions.
How was Ava?
Had Malachi remembered more?
Had any more of his talesm returned?
Malachi continued to remember in scattered bits, but nothing like the full recovery they’d hoped for when he and Ava reunited. His talesm were stalled. They were nowhere near a scribe house where he could perform the rituals correctly, and none of his previous tattoos had reappeared as they had for a while during their dream-walks.
Ava refused to use her magic.
“Have you asked her about going to Vienna?”
“She keeps saying ‘later.’ She’ll go later. We were going to go when her father performed there, but she changed her mind at the last minute. Said she wanted to have more time with just the two of us.”
“That’s understandable.”
Malachi shook his head. “That’s not the reason, Rhys.”
“No?”
He took a deep breath and debated confiding in the scribe who had once been his closest friend. Though he couldn’t remember all of it, moments came to Malachi when he remembered how close he and Rhys had been. Years of history tied them together. He’d had to learn to trust the man he had been, even if he couldn’t remember the whole of himself. Even if it was possible he’d never remember it.
He watched Ava as she looked out to sea. She hadn’t moved in minutes. She was letting the icy surf lap her feet as the wind picked up. It whipped her hair into a cloud of black waves. But even as the cold crawled up her legs, she didn’t break her gaze on the horizon.
“She won’t use her magic.”
“What do you—?”
“She’s reading a lot. Has me help her with translations sometimes. She’s read through everything Orsala sent at least twice.”
“But she’s not practicing spells?”
“No. She mouths the words, but she won’t say anything aloud.”
“Do you ever see her marks glowing?” Rhys’s voice was concerned. “Any sign?”
“Dreams. Only in our dreams.”
“And the visions?”
“Nothing like what happened to her in Norway. She dreams, but she doesn’t remember it clearly.”
Both men paused in the conversation, and Malachi looked up and down the beach as Ava continued to walk and take pictures. Scanning for threats. Always scanning. She was his to protect and always would be, even now that she had her own power.
Ava looked up and smiled at him once before she went back to taking pictures of something in the water.
Other than when she was reading, she was rarely without her camera, and he often glanced up to see her taking a picture of him with a shy smile.
He loved it when she did.
“Do you think she’s feeling unsure of using her magic?”
“I think she’s terrified.”
“Of what? You’re more than capable of shielding her at this point, even with your talesm diminished. Your bond with her—”
“She’s terrified of what she can do. She hasn’t said anything, but you know she feels different.”
Rhys was silent.
“She’s not like the others, Rhys. Even Sari and Orsala know. They don’t say anything, but her magic feels… different.”
“We’ve never understood where it comes from. That has to be disconcerting.”
He squeezed his eyes closed for a moment. “Disconcerting” didn’t even touch the surface of it.
“Is there any sign of her grandmother?”
“If the older Ava is still alive, Jasper Reed has hidden her so completely that not even I can suss out her location. We’ve torn through his financial records. Other than being ridiculously wealthy and spending money on enough drugs to intoxicate a small country, everything lines up.”