Page 18 of Dark Mate

The wanting is mine. Not the Ordained’s, not the theology’s, not the tea’s. Mine. The first thing I’ve been sure belongs to mesince a woman named Mora put a cup in my hands at ten years old and told me to drink.

The wall breathes.

I’m on my knees before I decide to be, pulled across the room by the vibration the way the tea pulls my hand to the cup every morning.

My palms press flat to the stone. The warmth’s there at once—hotter than before, hotter than any of the other nights. It spreads through my hands, into my wrists, up my forearms to the elbows. My skin flushes. The heat sinks deeper, past the muscle, into the bone.

My whole body’s leaning into the wall now. Forehead resting on the cool stone above where my hands press. Under my hands the stone isn’t cool. Under my hands the stone is alive with his heat.

The vibration’s stronger. Not a hum now—a rhythm. A pulse, deep and slow and steady.

I can feel it when he breathes in, the stone pressing outward, a tiny swell my palms catch—and when he breathes out, the stone settling back. His breath moves the wall. His body’s against the other side, close enough that his heat comes through two feet of stone, big enough that his breathing is a tide I can feel from my hands to my knees.

If I shut my eyes and go still enough, my own breathing falls into his. In when he’s in. Out when he’s out. Two bodies with stone between them, breathing together in the dark.

Something hums. Lower than the vibration—deeper, out of his chest, not his lungs. I’ve felt this before. The first night in the corridor, the sound I couldn’t name.

It’s on purpose. He’s making the sound because he knows I’m here. Because he can smell me through the stone the way I can feel his warmth through it.

The hum travels the wall into my palms, down my wrists, into the small of my back. My spine curves toward the stone. My belly’s against the cold stone above the warm, my hips against the cold, my hands against the heat. My breath comes fast and shallow, matching his.

I’m not afraid. I should be afraid. The theology says the divine instruments are met in ritual, in clearings, in white dresses with flower crowns and borrowed calm. Not like this, not on my knees in a dark corridor with my palms flat on a wall and my hips flush with the stone.

Something under the fear, under the wanting, under the clarity the tea can’t reach—says:this is the only honest thing that’s happened to me in thirteen years.

I don’t pull away.

I stay until my knees ache on the floor and my arms tremble from holding still. The warmth stays. The hum stays. He stays.

Three days, the Ordained say. Three days until preparation.

But the thing on the other side of this wall keeps its own time, and its patience is running out.

8

ELLIE

He comes at night.

Not a sound. A shift, the air in my room pressing on my skin a little different, the way it does when someone opens a door at the end of a long corridor. Except nobody opened a door. The door’s shut. The window’s barred.

The wall is open.

I sit up. The sheets fall to my waist. Moonlight comes through the gap—three feet wide, stones set aside, the edges clean. Cold air hits my arms, my throat, my chest through the thin sleep shift. It smells like wet earth, bark, something under both that closes my throat. Not the filtered smell that seeps through stone. The raw thing. The real thing. Air that’s never once been managed.

He’s in the gap.

The moonlight’s behind him so I can’t see anything but the shape. The size. The size fills the opening and then some, his shoulders wider than the three-foot break in the wall. He turns sideways. Something scrapes stone over his head, and I feel the shiver of it through the bed frame, through my palms flat on the mattress. Horns. The shape of them is wrong, lopsided,one curving back and the other shoved forward at a broken angle, like a branch that grew and snapped and kept on growing anyway.

The scent reaches me before the fear does. Dark musk, heavy, with something metallic under it that coats the back of my tongue. And beneath that, the warm woodsmoke smell I’ve been feeling through the wall for a week—only now it isn’t strained through stone. It’s in my room. It’s in my lungs. It’s in the space between my ribs where I’ve been keeping the clarity the tea can’t reach, and the clarity knows him before the rest of me does.

My body knows him. My hands are shaking but something deeper than my hands has gone completely still. The scent fills a space that was waiting to be filled, a hollow I didn’t know I’d been carrying, and the fit of it is so exact that my terror and my certainty come in the same breath.

I reach under my pillow. Neve’s knife fits in my palm. My hand’s shaking but the knife is there, the knife is mine, and I hold it the way you hold a thing when holding is all you’ve got.

His tail finds me before his hands do.

The weight of it hits my waist from behind—fast, muscular, coiling tight around my middle before I can turn. The heat of it bleeds through the shift. It squeezes once, pinning my arms to my ribs. The strength in that one squeeze runs through me like a current—not pain, just absolute proof of what his body can do to mine. My lungs press flat. I can feel each separate coil, the muscle shifting, settling, reading the shape of me and tightening to fit it.