“Go away,” she whispered as she heard the murmur of his clothes at the door.
He didn’t.
Ida’s back rippled with pain. The physical event was gone. The attack had left her skin unmarred, but she hurt far beneath the skin where her heart was beating, and her lungs were filling and expanding, and her stomach tightened into burning knots. She hurt in her heart, and her lungs, and her belly, and the hurt was expanding, and maybe Louka had been right. She’d be the death of Raphael.
But God knew, he’d be the death of her too.
Raphael stood patiently behind her, and she couldn’t imagine for even a second that in the last five years, she’d missed this pain. Him, yes. Not this.
She turned and faced him, and his expression fell at the look in her eyes. Or maybe it was the tears.
“Really,” she said, “Go away. I’m leaving. I don’t want you here.”
“Because of what he said?” he asked, not even pretending that she hadn’t heard the entire thing.
She shook her head.
He nodded, stepping further into the room.
She stepped further away.
When Raphael looked back up at her, his grey eyes were thundering with anger.
“You’re punishing me for who I love,” he said.
“No.”
“Don’t lie.”
“Then do as I ask,” she said, “And you won’t have to hear me lie.”
“Ida,” he said.
She stared at him. “What, no pet names?” she asked, and there was anger in her voice that hadn’t been there moments ago.
“I thought,” he said, “That you would, at least, be happy to see me.”
“I’m not,” she lied, gathering her old clothes from the floor. “Please move,” she said, as he blocked the door.
He shook his head, his eyes wide.
“Please?” she begged.
The walls were closing in. If he didn’t get out of her way, she’d leap from the tower balcony.
“Please don’t go,” he whispered.
She was stepping back and away from him, but he didn’t follow. He stood, watching her, with an intense burning gaze that made her skin feel like it was flaking away from her body. The strange heat between them only seemed more virulent with years apart. He reached out to her, and his shadow slipped forward, touching hers, and she felt a release of need, stepping close to him, running the tips of her fingers down his face.
He brushed his fingers back through her hair, ripping it loose from its stays. She growled with the pain, staring into his expression. She thought, from the corner of her eyes, she could see their shadows sliding together, arms extending to enfold each other.
“Please,” he said again, and she closed her eyes, letting his lips touch hers.
“Why would you want me to stay?” she said.
“Because I love you,” he whispered. “Because I need you. Because I’ve always loved you. Always needed you.”
“I need you too,” she whispered, hitching in a breath that died in a sob.
Raphael stepped back and looked at her, and, in a careful, steadying movement, held out his hand. “Then come to my arms, Dolcezza.”
She surged forward, meeting his lips, and kissing them deeply, tasting him on the tip of her tongue, like salt water. She saw their shadows again, watched as the black, thick shapes, like spilled coal wine curled around one another, unfettered by silly indignities, and she followed the urging of the monster in her, that kissed him with the last fires of the passion she could remember from nights ago, when he’d been a magical, grand magician, and she’d been a silly girl, besotted with him.
Now she was a monster like him, and she wanted him, she wanted every last bit of him she could have. He was hers. And she was his.
It was glorious. Every moment, every movement, every slide of his hips between her thighs and the subsequent filling of her empty spirit with him, made her feel the soaring devotion she’d almost believed she’d forgotten as if it had been moments only since they’d parted ways.
Raphael pushed himself deep between the parted folds of her secret self, and she felt nothing but the sheer joy of connection. Of the right key to unlock the secrets she held inside her. It had taken only one of these deep, penetrative thrusts of his hips before she started to cry.
He cupped her face in his hand, holding her so that her face caught the faintest stream of moonlight through the ruined wall of the bedchamber. She was surprised to find that the cold wind on her skin was not in the least a discomfort, but caressed her skin and made her tremble. Or was that the look of devoted love in his eyes as they locked their gaze with hers.
“What is it?” he asked, concern filling the age lines in his face.
Ida shook her head, confused emotion welling in her until she began to sob, and he slowed his hips, sitting and pulling her into his lap, keeping himself cloistered inside her. She wrapped her legs around his waist and held him, in a tight embrace, pressing her damp face into the crook of his neck where he couldn’t see the intensity she was feeling. But he stroked his hand up and down her back.
“Tell me,” he said.
“You feel,” she whispered, swallowing her words a moment as a sob strangled them down, before finishing, “Just as you were.”
“I am still the same man, Ida,” he whispered, kissing the side of her face, his lips soft and tender as he moved them across the line of her jaw.
Ida craned her neck up, shaking with need and emitting quiet sounds, pulling her arms tight around his back, her body acting on the impulse of possession. Any moment, without warning, he might be gone again, and she’d be back in the bowels of the earth, crying for him, like a lost orphan child that had been abandoned as a new city was built over her head.
“And what manner of man is that?” she whispered in return, feeling a shudder build somewhere where he was warmed and enclosed deep inside of her flesh. It flowered out, climbing the notches in her spine and spreading under her hair where his fingers coaxed it out, stroking her tresses back, his other hand resting on her hip.
With a small motion and a sound that made her stomach clench, he tightened that hand and pulled her firmly into his lap, deepening his piercing of her and parting his lips, sliding the tip of his tongue up her neck where her pulse threatened to drown out the sound of his whisper: “A man powerless to defy the pull of your tide.”
She shivered and scratched her nails hard across his back, relishing the crumbling expression of pained lust on his face when he groaned and kept her where he could remain buried inside her.
In less than seconds, their moment was vanquished.
There was a thunderous crash of noise from below, and Ida’s gaze shot up.
But Raphael was standing, the warmth of their brief embrace gone before she could so much as prepare herself to lose him. He was standing at the door, and in his hand, he held a sword. She wondered briefly where it had come from. Its ebony draconian hilt glinted.
Ida was up from their fur-lined pallet bed, but Raphael held his hand out to her, the other now holding a long, thin blade that he kept at the ready as if it weighed nothing. He shushed her, a silent shake of his head from side to side, his eyes locked with hers in a brief intimate moment before he slipped from the room and down the spiral staircase.
She blinked and then stamped her foot in a soundless act of rebellion on the stone floor.
“Damned if you think I am going to stay here,” she whispered to the space he had occupied and followed him down to where she heard a rummaging, the raucous display of either thievery or destruction.
Metal clanged through the tower, carrying up with the acoustic bend of the staircase to where she could hear it. Glass smashed to the floor and the walls, and she heard the soft thumping of books tearing their way from shelves, and, as she neared the lower levels, she heard an outraged Raphael demand: “Get out.”
The returning voice she recognised only after a moment of thinking, so unlike himself did he sound.
“Make me,” Aubrey laughed.
His voice was almost feminine, silken and soft, and deeply mocking.
Ida came into sight of the hallway just in time to see Raphael pick Aubrey up by the throat and toss him clear across the room so that he crashed into the thick stone bannister that marked the base of the staircase. He didn’t stump against the stone. But smashed right through it.
Her throat closed up but she managed a loud cry of negation, and only then did Raphael spy her on the stairs, watching him.
The flicker of emotions across his face ranged from disappointment to rage, to suddenly stunned horror, and he moved. She, in time, moved backwards away from his approach. A loud crack had resounded that was all too organic when Aubrey struck the stone, and Raphael seemed to read the fear she felt suddenly striking up in her, but his approach was incautious. Ida scurried back two or three steps as Raphael reached the base of the stairs and paused. His arms, which had been held out to receive her, dropped in a slow arc back to his side and he watched her, his gaze slipping in a cautious motion to look at Aubrey, groaning on the floor between them, before looking back at her.
There was a pool of blood forming under her uncle, and, although Ida knew he was in no real danger, she’d never seen that much blood, not even on her victims. He was moving, and a fractured stone struck through his chest. It must have only just missed the crevasse where his heart was. The shadow was moving in the faint light, undulating, spilling shadow in confused puffs of escape.
Aubrey released a groan of distress, and her fingers moved to clutch her chest, just beneath her throat.
“Dolcezza,” Raphael said in a soft, soothing coo. “He wanted to separate us again.”
She looked between them, her gaze settling with finality on her lover. “He didn’t separate us before.”
Raphael frowned, clasping his useless hands in front of himself.
“You left,” she said.
She’d crouched now, and her skirts slowly soaked some of the blood that oozed from beneath her uncle’s body. Aubrey’s gaze rolled to look at her, but his jaw stood askance, and his tongue tried to work to make words, but they could not find the supportive floor of his teeth.
Though even as she watched, the wound was knitting, and an ugly grinding sound was coming from Aubrey as his bones tried to right themselves. But that wasn’t strictly true, was it? She watched the dark blood and saw it move as if it were its own entity, and she knew, that even that was an untrue assessment. That the true machine of alteration was the thick, sentient shadow that moved the blood to fill the broken pieces of humanity and repair them to the cold, isolated state of the still monster that the Gens was.
The sounds coming from between the broken man’s lips were monstrous, incomprehensible, and she shuddered away from him, sitting back on the stair just above him, holding her head in her hands. It was only by chance that she saw Aubrey reach the fingers of his large hand to her. Seeking comfort.
But she didn’t reach back.
“What a cruel daughter I am,” she whispered. “You were my father when I had none.”
Aubrey again made a sound, but she blocked it from her head. “And not once have I maintained my faithfulness to you,” she said, her nails digging into the side of her face, eyes squeezed shut.
Wherever Raphael had slunk to to lick his wounds, he was silent, and the only sound that she could hear was the slow shushing of the blood as it moved, and the intermittent groans of Aubrey’s attempts at broken speech.
Sounds, though, were coming clear now. He was strong; he healed fast. And for the first time, since she’d been taken into the garden and through the long night with him, she wondered, how he’d come across this shadow-stained blood that he’d given her. She’d always suspected it was the black-hearted woman that had killed Monsieur Douveaux, the one they’d been running from. But he never spoke about it, and when she asked, he shut her down with a kiss, a gift, some fanciful thing to distract her. And she, wanting to make him, at least a little happy, had gladly played the role of his devoted daughter.
But it was just never enough. He was never going to be what she wanted.
“I can’t love you as I love him,” she said to her uncle, and he issued a hissing sound that hurt her ears; her heart more so.
“Will you…” she said, swallowing, and opening her eyes to look at him, reaching for his hand with her fingertips. “Will you just go?”
Aubrey’s jaw had knitted almost back to where it had begun before his injury, and his eyes were grey in their sockets as he looked at her. His fingers coiled around her hand and he squeezed with a genteel possessive grip.
In his eyes was an anguish she hoped she’d never see again.
He shook his head, and the words came cleanly from his broken lips. “I can’t, Ma Belle,” he said.
“That, is a pity,” she replied, feeling the cold, ice fog of despair rising in her chest and retreating until all that remained was the monster Raphael had expressed such disgust with before. The same thing that her uncle feared.
But what neither of them knew, would be her secret forever. Hers and the monster’s.
She reached forward and lifted her uncle up into her arms. He was still too weak to resist, and she comforted him with a stroke of her fingers through his greying hair, softly kissing his lips, tasting the blood with a shiver of anticipation, and moving her kisses to his cheek, the line of his jaw, the crook of his neck where his pulse thundered to push the shadowy blood to its destinations.
“Know that, when I do this, I’m doing it, to ease your suffering,” she whispered, lips pressed to his skin, her fangs pressing behind them hungrily. She had still not healed entirely from the encounter with the vagabond who had tried to kill her, and now, she mimicked his actions, parting her lips, and biting down, gently at first, and then with vigorous abandon.
Aubrey didn’t retaliate, but his arms snaked behind her, to hold her hunched body, to stroke the drooping tresses of her dishevelled curls.
“There’s no coming back from this,” Raphael said, somewhere in the darkness of the hallway, but she cursed him in silence as she drank, feeling the deep draughts merge from comforting and warm and iron-esque, into something altogether colder. Something that reached out to the same cold tendrils in her, the long, fingerless arms, the winding embrace, as if their shadows knew one another on a level deeper than family, than love, than blood. Deep into the realm of what was consciousness.
