Page 87 of Guardian Falling
Breathing doesn’t fix this.
I have breathed so much in the last ten days, I am the most well-oxygenated disaster you have ever seen.
Even though Ido notneed goddamn oxygen.
Scorch’s fire bought me forty minutes this morning before the bloodlust came back as if it had never left. The burning had been an interruption rather than a solution. Forty minutes where I could sit at the table and hear the sounds of thecabin without tracking every heartbeat in the room by proximity and temperature. Forty minutes that felt, in the immediate aftermath, like proof that something was possible.
Then it came back, and the forty minutes stopped feeling like proof and started feeling like the universe had a mean sense of humor.
Here… look at this thing you want. Now watch it burn.
Cool, great, thanks.
Rogue is on the floor beside me.
Not touching, he’s learned the distance I need when it gets like this. Close enough to anchor me without being close enough to make the hunger worse. Because his smell is the most intoxicating out of everyone here, and if there was anyone’s throat I was going to rip to shreds because of my insatiable hunger, his would be my first target.
Why does he have to smell so damn good!
His shoulder is three inches from mine, and I feel the warmth of him, that lycan heat running a few degrees above baseline, and I’ve gotten better at registering it without it becoming a trigger.
Better, not good. There is a significant distance between those two words, and I have taken up permanent residence in it.
“Talk to me,” I say. My voice is steadier than I feel, which is its own kind of dark comedy. My voice has been doing that for days, holding a composed surface over an experience that bears no resemblance to composed.
“About what?”
“Anything that isn’t this.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “There’s a ridge about two miles north. Elevation drops off on the east side, and at this time of year, the ice on the rock face catches the moonlight in a way that looks like it’s lit from inside. I found it on the third night. I couldn’t sleep.”
I close my eyes and try to build it. The ridge, the dark, the ice lit silver from within. “Did you go back?”
“Every night since.”
“Alone?”
“Mostly. Once with Talon. He didn’t say anything about it, just stood there, which was the right call.”
Talon, who I have privately documented as the one most likely to win a staring contest against a mountain. Correct instinct. “I want to see it,” I say. “When this is over.”
“You will.”
Not maybe.
Not hopefully.
If the Coven doesn’t decide you’re a liability and Crave doesn’t show up and—
He doesn’t do that.
He says‘You will’and means it.
And somehow the simple certainty of it is the most useful thing anyone has said to me in ten days. Possibly ever.
I tip my head back against the bed frame, stare at the ceiling, and hold the image. The ridge. Moonlight doing something extraordinary in the dark. Me, standing at the edge of it, not on a floor, not fighting a hunger I can’t suppress, not an ongoing supernatural incident requiring crisis management.
The door opens.
