Page 92 of What Is Dark Within Me

This reminder of her former life didn’t make her want to wince as usual, but she hadn’t been exaggerating about the fire. The Astraelis’s wings had put out some of the flames but fanned others. Embers scattered across the ground like giant rubies, but the snowpack stopped the fire from spreading into the forest.

“What about them?” she asked, referring to villagers she couldn’t see.

“Cleaning up this mess will be punishment enough. They can live out their natural lives, thinking about what they’ve done. Come on. If you’re not amenable to being hit on here, maybe I can try it again elsewhere.”

“I’m still mad at you,” she said.

“Well, I am very good at groveling, too.”

“Let me think about it, Knowing One.”

She forced herself upright and hobbled a few feet before turning to find Nicolas standing over the exploded corpse of the Astraelis, now a mass of pulp and feathers. He bent down and picked up a few shards of scattered bone as the fire began crawling toward them.

* * *

This is goingto leave a scar, Aleja thought, examining herself in the mirror. Without Nicolas’s power to speed her healing, the burns were stubborn in their refusal to fade. Most of her face had been spared, but her shoulder and neck were a different story. The mottled skin slashed across her left collarbone, then toward her ear.

“I think it looks badass,” Violet said from the bed. With her hair and skin clean, she seemed more like the smiling girl in her photographs, but she had a hard time keeping anything down except for bone broth and peppermint tea. There were dark circles under her eyes, though she usually slept for much of the day, curled into the corner of the bed as if she’d grown accustomed to sleeping with her body as compact as possible.

The bones Nicolas had collected were not for another Unholy Relic, but rather an attempt to recreate the well water with the help of an alchemist living in the Hiding Place. For a few hours after Violet drank it, her eyes grew clearer, and her laughter came more often. Still, it was obvious the magic produced by the Astraelis could not be so easily recreated. Aleja felt sorry for Louisa, the doctor’s last potential victim, who had yet to light the black candle.

Aleja hoped she would in time.

Violet seemed uninterested in returning to the human world to resume treatment. “Nothing was working. Why do you think I—” she’d said before her eyes filled with tears and Aleja decided not to press the issue anymore.

“You’re welcome to stay here if you like,” Nicolas had told Violet. “You could live out a lifetime without aging a week.”

Aleja suspected Violet accepted this offer because she had no other choice. “At least I’m not dodging feral podcasters every few minutes,” Violet joked, but there was a distance in her eyes that Aleja had never seen before, even when Violet had been battling her illness in secret.

Aleja fastened one more button on her collar, so the burn was hidden, except for the tendril over her jaw. She’d been trying to find the words to comfort her friend, but all she could come up with were platitudes that seemed hollow to offer someone whose every choice had been taken away in the name of survival.

“You brushed your hair. I’m impressed. Does that mean you’re going to see him?” Violet said. Aleja was grateful for the change in subject.

Well, partially grateful.

Nicolas had been busy since their return to the Hiding Place—leaving often to search for the missing Saints. For all his flirting while she’d been bloody and covered in feathers, he’d done little except for a brief kiss to the corner of her mouth when he’d caught her staring at the painting of Persephone outside his office.

She knew why.

The stirrings of war were simply that—stirrings, but Aleja’s dreams came more often now, as if by fractured memories of the past, she could divine the future. It frightened her. It seemed to frighten Nicolas more, though he hadn’t asked Aleja if she wanted him to return her home. She hadn’t brought it up either.

“Just going to explore the grounds a bit, see if Taddeas wants to train. Want to come?” Aleja asked.

“I thought I might sit in the garden for a while,” Violet said, folding her hands into her lap. “We should get dinner later, though.”

It was clear Violet wanted to be left alone, so Aleja didn’t push. Nor did she make it to Taddeas and Jack’s cabin in the hills. The Hiding Place was more temperamental than usual. It was part of the reason Nicolas was gone so often. There were now only five Dark Saints left.

She got lost twice while trying to find the path to the palace’s rear entrance, which had a more direct trail to the woods. Aleja circled through the same sculpture gallery multiple times before it spat her out in front of the double doors she hadn’t seen since her first visit to the Hiding Place. The throne room, with its unflinching depiction of the war that had set the Astraelis against the Otherlanders—once a single group, now divided by a gulf too wide to be reconciled.

Aleja pushed the doors open and wasn’t completely surprised to see Nicolas with his back to her. His wings flared, the jagged scar crossing from one to the other. She winced, like the memory of him bleeding in her arms still affected her, even if she could no longer picture it.

“When you’re alone, do you just hang out with your shirt off all the time?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe.

He half-turned to her, a wing blocking his torso. There was an odd smell as he shifted; something slightly medicinal, like the ointment she’d been using on her burns. Menthol, lavender, and thyme.

“No. Sometimes, I take my pants off too,” he said, shrugging on the shirt draped over one of the thrones.

“Don’t flirt with me if you’re going to disappear for days at a time with no explanation.”

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