Page 81 of Fated or Knot

“See you soon.”

At the next juncture where the halls split, he went one way, and we went another. I could scent the infirmary from here, and my skin began to crawl. It only got worse when we arrived. It was the same white tunnel, with its sectioned-off areas for different levels of triage. Spotlights of essence lamps showed where thedoctors were working, while patches of darkness in other places suggested resting patients or empty beds.

Thatsmell. The sting of pure alcohol mixed with stale sheets and surgical tools, plus undertones of blood and sickly sweet illness. It still made me want to vomit.

We spoke with the squat goblin nurse who’d been one of my primary caregivers while I was bedbound here. She smiled with all her yellow teeth and greeted me warmly by name, even now. Once she saw her new patients were a prince and an omega, she bustled to the back of the infirmary and slid the curtains around until we had a private area with two beds.

I placed Lark in the bed against the wall while Tormund got Kauz situated.

Then we looked at each other. “What now?” he asked.

“The worst part,” I answered. I angled the chair next to Lark’s bed so I could see her with my good eye, laced my fingers through her limp hand, and waited.

And waited some more.

Time bled away. There was no telling the hour when Thalas visited to apply a powerful sleeping spell on both my brother and my mate. He then painted a fertility blocker and a heat suppressant on the inside of her wrist with essence-infused ink and left.

Day two, he kept them under with the same spell.

My beast tuned out most of the comings and goings of various fae who checked on both the bedbound dreamers. Maybe they tried to talk to me, but nothing got through the feral haze. I refused to move from her side.

Three days, then four. I marked them by Thalas’s visits.

The infirmary was the same nightmare as before. No windows meant no true understanding of day or night. I nodded off out of sheer exhaustion, just to startle awake to a new whiff of the smell around me. In those incoherent moments, I fearedI was a boy again, trapped in some nightmare where the p’nixie was still alive but I hadn’t recognize her and was an ass to her.

No, that was real. And if she never woke up, I’d never have the opportunity to grovel for her forgiveness.

Wake up, Lark. You have to wake up…

On day five, Thalas reached over unexpectedly to apply a sleeping spell to me, too.

24

LARK

This was not the normal darkness of rest. I didn’t feel the wind, but somehow, I knew I was falling. My mind traveled down.

And down.

And down some more.

Flashes of color and sound whirled by. Snippets of the past…though no past I could remember. They fell around me in a sharp-edged rain, and I felt something from each one. They were all mine, fractals of different times. Times I was loved, times I was victorious, times I was hurt so badly it was a mercy to forget. There were so, so many of them.

I looked down to see a jagged bed of forgotten memories. They awaited my inevitable crash, ready to tear me apart in a buzzing cacophony of everything all at once.

I tucked myself into a ball and braced for impact, just to land in another’s arms. “That was too close,” Kauz murmured. Our bodies rose and fell with the powerful flaps of his wings. The span seemed impossibly huge in this space…wherever we were.

“Kauz, what’s going on?” I asked, clinging to him. “Is this a dream?”

He lifted his head, watching the last shards of memory fall around us. They passed right through him on their way by, and he surged up the tunnel I’d fallen into, keeping me away from their sharp edges. “No, it’s not a dream. I just put a sleeping spell on you, so you’re in the second stage of rest right now.”

I was so wildly confused. But he found an alcove of sorts to land on and sat, dangling his feet over the drop. The details were fuzzy at best, like any dream.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he said, patting the space next to him. I eased onto it and leaned into him when he put an arm around me.

He began to explain that we were in my head, watching broken memories get cycled toward long-term storage. They were broken because I’d been forced to forget them by Cymora, who’s always had the power to order me to forget things.

“She must’ve abused this a lot,” I muttered.

---