She wanted to slap him, shake him from this foolish blindness that had almost cost him his life. It was better to finally have done with it, once and for all, and she spit out every word.
"The night you saved me from the warehouse, you just slit yourself open and fed me without a thought. If Brenden hadn't been there to pull you away, you would have stayed there and died in my teeth. I'd have awoken with you dead in my arms. Not once did you think of it-don't even try to deny it, because you didn't. That's how easy it is to kill you, Leesil. And you'd let me be the one to do it."
Magiere could no longer look at him. Between the memory of his blood in her mouth and the heated rage in her flesh came the pain of final loss.
Leesil dropped to one knee, leaning toward her.
"Neither of us knew what was happening that night," he said. "You no less than me. How could we, how could I? But we're beyond that, and we're not those same people anymore."
He put one hand to her cheek, and as much as Magiere felt the urge to pull aside, she couldn't bring herself to harm him any more man she just had.
"I've lived three lives," he said. "As a child in the War-lands, knowing only deceit and death. Then roaming the countryside alone but for Chap. Finally, the game with you, from the night we met… with Chap's meddling. I'm looking at a fourth life now. Any life begins by simply living it. And I say again-I won't die on you."
Before she could stop him, Leesil placed both hands upon her cheeks, and pressed his mouth against hers.
Magiere stiffened in revulsion as the touch mixed with the lingering memory of the night he fed her. But the blood faded from her taste.
His mouth was warm and soft for that brief moment, and beneath the swirl of fear and sorrow, she felt another loss when he pulled away.
"I will never leave you," he whispered. "But I can't stay adrift between lives. You will have to decide-for both of us, it seems-since you already think you know what I can and can't do."
Without another word, Leesil crawled tiredly up into the top bunk and out of sight.
It was a long while before Magiere lay back upon her bed, numbed with a maelstrom of emotions in the room's silence. Chap lay quietly on the floor, now and again lifting his head to look at her.
Sometime during the night, Magiere drifted off, but only after she could hear the comforting sound of Leesil's slumbering breaths from above.
Chapter 21
Leesil rose in the morning with his stomach churning. Only severe fatigue had brought sleep in the night, as his thoughts tumbled into dreams-or nightmares. Not of death or the repulsive lessons of his childhood, but of his mother, locked away for years somewhere unknown, and of Magiere's sadly confused eyes as he left her sitting upon her bed. So it came as only a minor shock when Magiere announced there was more to be done before they were finished with the undead of Bela.
From his perspective, they need only retrieve the head of the undead they'd found mysteriously struck down on the house's second floor. With Wynn and Chap along again, they returned by coach to the three-story stone house. As Magiere entered, she immediately began shattering furniture with her falchion.
"There are too many things we've found to be false in hunting these creatures, like the stake through Sapphire's heart," she explained. "We need to be certain this is all done with."
Though she winced in pain from her wounded shoulder, as before it seemed to be healing more quickly than it should. When she dumped a divan's remains in the street, oiled them, and lit the pile ablaze, Leesil understood, though he wasn't certain this was the best place. Wynn was aghast, but Magiere silenced any objection with a dour shake of her head. They'd continually stumbled upon false superstitions in their hunts, and Leesil understood leaving nothing to chance.
"I'll get more wood," she said quietly. "Start bringing out the bodies."
Leesil nodded, and signaled Chap to follow him. Before he stepped back into the house, he looked at Magiere standing near the fire, hair bound in a tail, and the flames feeding blood-glimmers into her black hair in the early-morning light. She was tired and worn in her damaged armor, falchion on her hip, but she gazed pensively into the pyre. Leesil felt suddenly afraid he'd pushed her too far the night before. He turned into the house.
Stopping short of the parlor and Sapphire's body, he glanced to the cellar stairs. If there were any uncertainty for the demise of an undead, there was one he wanted to be certain of first. He headed down to the passage into the sewers.
Leesil didn't relish a return to the city's underbelly, but the distance seemed shorter somehow, as Chap led the way. They found Ratboy's body lodged against the walkway a little way down from the intersection where Leesil had taken his head. The severed hand seemed to have been washed away.
"He looks dead to me," Leesil said.
Chap yipped once in agreement, but they weren't about to argue with Magiere. Leesil dragged the waterlogged corpse all the way back and dropped it next to Sapphire's in the parlor. He was about to climb to the second floor, and instead returned to crouch next to Sapphire's corpse.
A thin, raised line in the congealed black fluids on the carpet had caught his attention. Leesil slipped out a stiletto and poked at it. It shifted slightly, and he hooked it with the blade's tip to pull it out.
It was a necklace covered by dark ichor. He wiped it with the skirt of the blue gown, and before him hung a gold pendant with a sapphire the size of his small fingernail.
Leesil stared at it in thought, knowing just how Magiere would react if she caught him pilfering the dead-or the undead, for that matter. There might be long months ahead, and what the council would pay them needed to go to Miiska.
Spoils of war, he thought, and finished roughly wiping it off before tucking it into his hauberk. He would deal with Magiere later, when objections were pointless. If later still remained a possibility in her mind. Then another thought occurred to him.
A gown with a matching stone. And if there were other gowns…?
He was about to head upstairs when Wynn scurried through the front door.
"You have to stop this," she urged. The outright dread upon her face was plain to see. "You cannot let Magiere burn bodies in the middle of a public street!"
Leesil was about to answer when Magiere stepped through the door behind the young sage.
"You find Ratboy?" she asked him.
Leesil nodded. "He's in the parlor. I'll bring the third one down, the one we found already dead last night."
"Time to finish this," Magiere added. "People are already out and about, and that's not such a terrible thing-though they may not agree when they see what we're doing."
She headed back outside and down to the pyre.
Leesil sensed there was more to this than burning undeads to be certain of their destruction. Wynn looked at him uncomfortably. While the little scholar respected Magiere, she would never understand all of it.
"She hates to admit it," Leesil said. "But deep inside, Magiere likes the drama of a good show. She's angry that these creatures lived comfortably amidst the wealthy, and none of these fools appeared to know or care enough to realize what was happening. We'll shake them out of their complacency."
"Oh…" Wynn answered. "Is she still angry with me over Chane?"
For a moment, Leesil tried to find some way to spare her feelings, to understand what she had done. But he couldn't.
"You were wrong, Wynn. You should've done anything in your power to help Magiere take his head."
Wynn stepped back, and it was perhaps the first time he'd seen her grow cold and harsh.
"I had a place among you in this," she said. "You, Magiere, and Chap possess strength and courage beyond anyone I have known, but you lack conscience. I was that conscience last night. Not all beings of a kind are the same, Leesil. And I believe it is possible not all Noble Dead are the same."