Page 49 of Light

In the canister labeled “tea”.

He scanned the counter and shook his head reaching for it. He found the teapot and the strainer after a bit more searching and no other help from her.

Going slowly up the stairs, he balanced a cup of tea, sugar, wafers, and fruit on a tray. He stepped through the door and stopped.

Adalaide looked up, giving him a tentative smile. Cradled in her arms, tiny mouth latched to her bare breast, his child drew strength and energy from his soul’s other half.

In that moment, something inside him changed. He could understand why humans sometimes gave up everything for their offspring, laying down their lives or making bargains in exchange for the small helpless creatures they’d made.

He moved into the room, bringing the tray to her bedside table and setting it down.

“Thank you,” she said, looking up at him.

He sat at the edge of the bed, transfixed.

Her cheeks were flushed with color, and he didn’t know if it was from her nudity or something else. He couldn’t tell what she was feeling either.

“How are you blocking me?”

Her cheeks flushed a deeper pink.

“Jophi has been teaching me.”

“She has no right to interfere in our business,” he grumbled.

The soft smile working its way across Adalaide’s face vanished. “She was helping me. I cannot say the same of you.”

He slid closer to her on the bed, letting their thighs touch. The warmth bleeding through the blankets made his soul sing. He had truly been gone too long. “How is blocking me from your life helping?”

Adalaide let the babe in her arms—asleep again—slide back into the blankets beside his brother. She pulled up a bit of fabric over her shoulder, covering herself and scooted back on the bed, moving away from him.

“You left me alone. Do you have any notion of what it’s like to fight demons and night-creatures when you're round with not one child, but two? Sanura and her creatures came for me on too many occasions to count.”

The pain lacing her voice was a spear through his chest. He lifted a hand to touch her cheek, but she turned her face, swiping at a single tear.

“On the nights when I wasn’t heaving up my guts from the nausea of pregnancy, I was fighting for the lives of myself and our unborn children. On the rare night when neither was tormenting me, the ache in my chest at your distance or whatever pain you were enduring…” At this, she choked on a sob.

Gabriel inched along the bed, moving closer to her once more, and wrapped a tentative arm around her. He thought she might pull away, but this time, she didn’t, letting him wrap her in his embrace.

Her choked cry became a soft whimper as she leaned against his shoulder. Wet tears soaked into his arm as she cried softly, and he held her.

He pressed his cheek to her soft curls and squeezed her tightly to him. “I was afraid. It’s no excuse. I know.”

“Afraid of what?” Her reply was muffled by his arm.

How could he put into words his fears? He couldn’t, he realized, so he showed her instead, letting all the things he’d held back when they were together dance across his mind. Millennia alone, watching all his siblings find their analogous umbras and connect or, in rare cases, not.

Thousands of years of hope, not for someone to share it with, but to be reunited with the part of him that had been stolen. His plan to take it back, to rip his soul from the woman who would be gifted a part of him.

She said nothing, listening to all his chaotic, jumbled thoughts as he let them spill into her mind.

He moved forward to the moment they had met, the guilt and pain over all those centuries of plotting. The fear that he wasn’t worthy of a creature as perfect as her. The way the darkness had begun to consume him until her light had erased it.

He shared the memory of the day he’d almost taken the elixir that would relieve him of all those feelings.

Her tears dried, and slowly, the wall in her mind crumbled. Emotions peeked through. Terror, fear, sadness. Not because she was stuck with such a selfish, unfeeling being, but for all he’d suffered and at the thought of losing him to his darkness. His chest warmed.

“I didn’t deserve you. Didn’t know how to be what you needed. Didn’t feel worthy of the joy you brought me.” His arms loosened as she tipped her head up to look into his eyes. Her piercing blue gaze searched his face. He swallowed and went on. “I never thought of what it did to you to be parted.” Selfish, he thought, but didn’t say.

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