Page 221 of A Winding Wave of Magic
It felt so good, so beyond right. I was the overthinker, both in power and in temperament. I was the person who focused on the weather when another touched me because that was easier than facing the complexities of their mind. Closeness wasn’t in my vocabulary, and yet I was starting to find I had needed it all along.
And now, here was a fae with whom, well, if not my heart, then at least my magic was fated to find. Someone who knew my mind as well as I could know his. Whose kiss could make meforget the direst of situations, including the fact that I was all but being held in a prison, waiting for an escape or my execution.
And yet his kiss was all I wanted. I couldn’t imagine anything else, couldn’t feel anything else but Jonathan’s desire and mine trying desperately to unite. We luxuriated in the sweet pain as his teeth nibbled at my lip before his mouth slanted over mine to plunder it all over again.
We pawed at each other’s clothing, impatient for buttons and zippers to come undone. I touched the tawny skin just under his collar. He tugged at the hem of my skirt, nudging it up my thigh.
It would go no further, of course.Iwould stop it in a moment, just a moment more. Just?—
A blaze of blue called us from above.
Jonathan looked at me, hope—that thing everyone was chasing—etched across his handsome features.
And then he was gone.
I was gone too.
The mountain disappeared, the walls, the courtyard, everything in it gone as my mind went perfectly blank, and darkness descended for good.
60
INTERROGATED BY SHADOWS
For a demon dwelt where his heart should be,
That lived on blood and sin
— JOHN T. CAMPION, “EMMET’S DEATH”
True silence doesn’t really exist. Everything in the universe is made of energy, of movement, which means that it all produces some kind of noise, audible to our clumsy human ears or not. The only real silence is death.
The tiniest of sounds rescued me when I thought I was lost forever.
My ears found consciousness before any other part did. Darkness had swallowed me whole and still held me in a firm grip as I came to, groggy like I’d been under heavy sedation. It could have been a few minutes, hours, or days. At first, I didn’t even care, only vaguely registering that I was alive, that I existed at all, with a sort of detached observation.
Alive, am I? Huh.
Then, there it was again. The drip, drip, drip. The trickle of water.
I would know it anywhere.
I sat up.
I opened my eyes but only darkness greeted me, the same unforgiving black that had wrapped around my senses before I’d been—what? Taken? Moved? Kidnapped?
I inhaled and was rewarded with the dank scent of damp, mold, earth, and air with too little oxygen. But at least that sense was available too. A cautious, salty lick of my hand told me I’d been sweating and also that I could taste.
Cautiously, I reached out, and my fingertips grazed a slick, rocky surface that was a little bit slimy in some parts. Terror had imprinted there too. A cave, then, where other people had been kept before me.
Four out of five senses firing. Not too bad.
I pulled my hands back into my lap as I sat up. Perhaps the Council had decided to pull me into the recesses of the mountain, into one of its ancient spaces where other prisoners were held. I wasn’t quite ready to explore that fear or the cave’s previous experiences. Something told me a place like this would have nothing nice to share. But I was here. I was alive. And I could feel. It was a start.
I blinked several times and tried to find even a pinprick of light to guide my sight, but there was nothing. So, I tilted my head and listened to the drops. They seemed to be far away, and there was an echo, like every drop was falling from a great distance into a pool.
Then something louder, closer. A trickle. The song of a creek coming to life.
Touch the water.
