Page 15 of Sidhe
Sasha’s eyes fell on him and instantly filled with further pain. He approached slowly, cautious. “What are you doing down there? Are you all right? I know this is all a lot to deal with, but I also know you’re still you.”
Nathan didn’t know how the incubus could believe that so blindly.
Since Nathan didn’t move from the floor, Sasha came over to sit near him on the bed. They all thought he needed space. Space wasn’t going to cure him. But then proximity wasn’t helping much either.
“Guess it doesn’t really matter. Can’t change any of it now, can we?” Nathan said. He tried to be less of a pessimist, but he was too practical to ever really believe things would go the way he wanted.
“Nathan,” Sasha started in again with his blue eyes drooping at their edges and his shoulders hunched, “we’ll figure it out. We have all the time in the world now. No rush. As long as I can stilllook at you, and Jim for that matter, too, and see the men I know then it still comes down to choice. Malak can’t take choice away from you.”
But he can. He already did.
‘We have all the time in the world now.’
What a lie. The time they might have had together, that might have lasted longer than a human lifetime, was just a passing dream now. Once again their love had a time limit. Nathan was something of Malak’s making now, and itwasbecause of choice. They had made so many choices that led them right to where they were.
“Nathan, I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Sasha began more carefully, eyes on the floor and hands fidgeting, “but I…I don’t understand. Down there before, you…” When he looked up to meet Nathan’s gaze again, his eyes were almost fearful. “When you were still lost, still thinking you were in the Veil…why did you say forJimto stop?”
Nathan stiffened.
“I was wondering that myself,” came Jim’s voice from the open doorway.
No.They weren’t supposed to know. He couldn’t let them know.
Nathan struggled for something to say. “I…I was just…confused, and…Jim was the one I was looking at. I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did,” Jim cut him off, coming into the room fully. “I saw the way you were looking at me, Nate. You were saying that to me. You weren’t confused. You knew you were saying it to me. Malak…usedus. Didn’t he? Like in your dreams. The bastard was giving you a preview.”
“What?” Sasha gaped.
“No.” Nathan started scrambling up from the floor.
“Malak used us?” Sasha repeated, horror dawning on his face.
Jim remained standing off the foot of the bed. “When you came back, you said you hadn’t gone to the Veil. You didn’t think you had been there, Nathan. Malak…he made you think you were still here.”
“And that…we…” Sasha finished, shuddering, looking up at Nathan from where he was slouched so bonelessly on the bed. “And you thought it was all real…”
Nathan stared wildly at both of them: Sasha on the bed, Jim standing in front of him, both of them filled withpity. He started to shake again. Jim and Sasha’s voices drifted around him with soothing words and concern but he didn’t want to hear it. He flinched when Sasha reached out to him, his skin burning at the contact when the incubus managed to grab his arm anyway. That touch, that fierce and insistent touch nearly brought Nathan back into his visions again. He saw it in flashes that overlapped the real Jim and Sasha that were with him.
Dead land. Barren. Burnt. Buildings and streets in shambles as if a rain of napalm had decimated everything. Jim would make him go along. He didn’t want to. Never wanted to. He’d plead. He’d beg. He’d scream and curse. No tactic ever saved him.
Sasha, monstrous and large like he had been in the cave, was always there, too. Smiling. Laughing with Jim. Laughing when they brought people before Nathan and made him choose who died. How they died. It was always worse if he stayed silent. Worse yet when it was people he knew.
Save one. Kill the other. Choose, Nathan. Choose. Choose or they both die. Choose how or it will be slow. It made him active even when he wanted to stay out of it. It made him an accomplice even if he never said a word.
“Nathan! Help us!”
Nathan howled at the ceiling as the memories flickered over the truth before his eyes. Rage. Hatred. None of it was as strongas his grief, his guilt. Those emotions were powerful enough to rival any fury. Powerful enough that even though he saw Jim, his real brother before him, he saw the monster too.
Nathan rushed Jim like he had downstairs, slamming him back into the wall beside the door. “Why can’t I hate you?!” he cried, voice cracking on the final word. “I…wanted to. I tried every day. But I never could. So I gave in. Do you understand me, I gave in! I gave in…so you’d stop. You promised you’d take the pain away if I just did what you wanted…”
Jim wasn’t even attempting to struggle as Nathan held him firmly to the wall. “It wasn’t me, Nathan, it was Malak,” he said mournfully.
“Malak,” Nathan huffed, grimacing at the name, “I barely even remembered Malak.”
“How could you forget Malak?” Sasha asked breathless from behind him.
The grounding of their voices, their calm tones and patience, stilled the overlaps little by little until finally it was Jim in front of him again. Just Jim. Just Sasha. The ones he wished he could forget wanting to hate.
