Page 41 of Soothsayer

“Hang on, wait.” I guided him around to the hood, doing my best to ignore how strange, howexquisiteit felt to hold him again, and sat him down on the edge of the hood. The engine had heated up the metal until it was uncomfortably hot, to my mind, but Sören visibly relaxed as the warmth seeped through his clothes. “Lay back.” He went, and I went with him, gritting my teeth and bearing the heat for his sake. I didn’t want to let go yet. “Better?”

“Better,” Sören agreed. He turned his head and looked at me. “So this is real, then?”

“Um…yeah?”

“I thought maybe I was making it up.” He laughed uncertainly. “It’s…I make up a lot of stuff when I’m in the dark. Gives me something nicer to focus on.”

“Fuck, I am so sorry about—”

“It’s not that bad,” Sören hastened to say, and I gritted my teeth against the torrent of curses trying to beat past my lips. “I’m not lying. It’s not that bad when I’m in deep. For the most part, I just sleep. It’s socoldthere, though. If I felt the cold all the time, I think I’d just…sink into it and forget anything else, you know? But the vættir gives me heat and sensation sometimes, and I love it, but it also reminds me of everything I’m missing.”

“Sören.” I didn’t know how to continue. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m so fucking angry at you, though.”

Wait…“What?”

“I did all this for you, and now you’re screwing around with my family again? Cillian!” He smacked me on the shoulder, not even hard enough to sting, and then immediately turned it into a grip that twisted my T-shirt up in his fingers. “I did this so you could be free, not so you could live to fight another day!”

“It wasn’t right.” I knew that?oh, how well I knew that. “You shouldn’t have had to do this for me.”

“None of it was right in the first place,” Sören said, looking pained. “I knew the things we were doing weren’t right, and I went along with my father anyway. I helped him kidnap you; I listened to my brothers torture you, and I didn’t?I didn’t say anything. I didn’tdoanything. And you’re so beautiful, and strong, and you didn’t deserve what we were doing to you. I couldn’t live with that.”

No, no, this wasallwrong. “I seduced you. I made you help me!”

“I fell in love with you,” Sören corrected me. “And I wanted to save the man I love. I still want to save you. It’s not too late to give us back to them.”

“I’m afraid it is.” There was no going back from paintballing someone in the crotch until they collapsed. “And I wouldn’t let you go anyway. I’m going to save you.”

“You’re going to try, I guess.” He sounded so resigned. “But you shouldn’t. Fuck.” Sören wiped his free hand across his eyes. “We’re a pair.”

It was true, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about how fucked we were right now. I rolled onto my side and curled closer to him, and he laid his head against my chest and sighed.

“Star-crossed lovers,” I murmured.

“Does that make me Romeo or Juliet?” he asked.

“Juliet, definitely. I’m the dashing one.”

“You’re the idiot who couldn’t wait for me to wake up before poisoning himself, you mean?”

The metaphor was breaking down now. I didn’t want to speak in metaphors anyway, not when I had Sören actually here, in my arms. I wanted the reality of that, the reassurance of it. Fuck, I wanted it forever.

“You wouldn’t have woken up if I hadn’t come after you, Sören.”

“But you’d be safe,” he whispered against my collarbone. “I just want you to be safe.”

“You can’t fight fate,” I said, and boy, was that ever the truth. “Whatever happens is gonna happen no matter what we do.”

“You didn’t have to come to Chicago.”

“You’re deliberately missing the point, jackass.”

Sören chuckled. “Maybe.” He shifted closer to me. “It’s really not so bad. But I’m so cold, and sometimes I remember the wrong things, and they loop over and over in my head. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy, and that’s?that’s kind of the deal, right? I go crazy so the rest of my family doesn’t have to.”

“That’s not the deal at all.”

“I love my nieces and nephews. I don’t want them to live with the curse.”

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