Page 160 of Threadbound

With a sigh, Jamie cuddled close, very gently pulling Bran into his arms. Bran nestled his face in the side of Jamie’s neck.

Thank you.

Jamie’s fingers brushed through his hair, and Bran felt his body relax for the first time in weeks. Months, maybe. Letting go pulled a heavy sob from his chest, and he clung to Jamie’s chest as more ripped through him, painful and harsh.

What did I do?Jamie’s question hurt more than the emotional overload.

Not you. Never you.

Jamie’s arms tightened a little—careful and tender.I love you. Please don’t leave me.

Bran held on tighter.You are my everything. I will never leave you.

He could feel Jamie’s confusion.I love you. The thought repeated.

I love you.Stay?Arms squeezed gently.

Always.

Chapter

Fifty-Two

Even though Trixie usually dragged them all out to celebrate the new year with loud music, dancing, and copious amounts of alcohol, this year she suggested they stay in, have some takeaway, and share a bottle of bubbly at midnight. Rob had immediately agreed. Jamie had waited a day before suggesting the tiny apartment he was yet again sharing with Bran.

They’d spent new year’s eve eating fish and chips and Jamie’s fresh-baked cookies, one of which they’d shared with the booka family, whom Bran had convinced to come out and be introduced to Rob and Trixie, who had been delighted with them.

They played cards and drank cheap wine and toasted to a new year with little plastic champaign glasses. Rob and Trixie left at about one in the morning, hugging both Bran and Jamie before making their way out into the winter night of a new year.

Bran had been asleep by the time Jamie came back upstairs from taking out the trash.

Bran was recovering—slowly. He still slept more than Jamie thought was healthy—a nap every morning, another every afternoon, and he was usually asleep before Jamie was tiredenough to think about bed. But he slept lightly, waking when Jamie made too much noise, so Jamie tried not to worry too much. This wasn’t the dead sleep that he’d fallen into when he’d been poisoned.

The part that had Jamie the most worried, though, was that sometimes, when he slept, Bran would speak—sometimes in a language that Jamie didn’t understand, a strange and ancient tongue that seemed at once alien and familiar, sometimes in a stilted kind of Scots English Jamie recognized from manuscripts half a millennia old, and sometimes in his familiar, modern tongue. But always about pain or darkness, sometimes weeping softly, the tears drying on his face before he would awake.

When Jamie woke on the first morning of the new year, he could see the tracks on Bran’s face, the salt of his tears having left slightly more pale streaks. Unable to help himself, Jamie ran a fingertip down one of them.

Bran’s vibrant green eyes opened.

“What do you dream about?” Jamie asked, running his finger down the track on Bran’s other cheek.

Bran’s brow furrowed. “I canna remember,” he replied.

“It makes you cry,” Jamie said softly.

Bran’s frown deepened. “I really dinna remember,” he said.

Jamie nodded, accepting the answer.

“I think—sometimes I feel like all my thoughts are na’ mine,” Bran continued, his tone thoughtful. “As though as I stood on the wall, a thousand or a hundred thousand lives rushed through me, and not all that’s left is mine.”

Jamie didn’t know what that meant. “What do you mean—their lives rushed through you?” He let his fingers stroke gently through Bran’s feathered hair.

Bran drew in a long breath, resting the long, gnarled fingers of one hand on Jamie’s arm. “When you summon the dead,” he said, his voice quiet, but serious. “You become part of them.It is your will, your spirit, I suppose, that reanimates them for the time that they walk again. And in return, a part of them stays with you, even once you release them back into sleep.” He paused a moment. “Perhaps that is what I dream—the lives of the dead. Their deaths, perhaps.” He gave a small, careful shrug. “I dinna truly know.”

“And they stay with you? These dead?”

“Aye, for a while.” Bran’s talons brushed gently across Jamie’s arm. “They fade, like all memories.”

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