Page 122 of Love, Nemesis
His curiosity in Ana’s silence quickly became fascination when he didn’t have to wait for her response. He saw vibrant, green vines of trust that flickered between them, and he wanted to wrap them in his physical hands, coil them around his fingers.
A sudden impression came over him, and he tried to translate the intense sensation into a thought as it pushed through his body and made his head spin. He tried to center himself in logical thought, but the rush continued like a flood through him.
Hold on.He coaxed himself back into his humanity, finding that this other part of him was becoming harder and harder to stuff away the more it continued to wake up.
He repressed it compulsively now. He didn’t even understand logically why he was still resisting it.
It was only a matter of time before the Snake Bite was gone completely and he became what he’d truly been all along.
He checked his fingers out of the corner of his eye, focusing hard to hide the bruising, and feeling relieved as it seemed to recede again. He still had enough Snake Bite in his system to keep The Eating Ocean and all of its symptoms at bay. For now.
Ana turned slowly in his arms, looking steadily into his eyes for a moment before she said anything. “Lethe,” she started, emphasis heavy in his name as if it were new to her somehow.
She continued to search his eyes, and he explored hers in return. Something was wrong. He saw her uncertainty, a coming question in her eyes. He could almost mouth it as she whispered, “How are you?”
When he hesitated, he saw a deep emotion shoot through her like bright electricity, this distracting, jarring image that he could almost feel in his chest, and for a moment, he lost his train of thought, his senses reeling as they intensified on her in search of the flash of emotion.
He saw the scent of oak trees, subtle traces of sweat on her neck, and a rhythmic pulse that emanated with a sensual and vibrant warmth through her. He wanted to feel her pulse, not with his fingers but with some sixth sense to connect with it—become it.
Everything she’d touched and that had touched her that day emanated like an aura of influence and feeling. A blue heaviness throbbed in her core, a creature coiled out around her ribs and forcing her to have tense and shallow breaths.
He found her gaze, and everything else around him became quiet. He took a deep breath in the presence of something so shocking and beautiful, and her essence danced in the depths of her eyes like a light—so many feelings.
“I’m fine,” he replied simply, feeling like it had been hours since the question and hoping it had only been a moment. “How are you?”
She seemed to be studying him, and he wondered if she’d noticed anything strange.
He continued, “Everyone is on a different side, fighting over The Great Light. You have”—he gestured to her arm—“that, and no help to know what you should do with it. That’s a huge responsibility.”
She looked down at her arm as if her mind hadn’t gotten there yet. She swallowed, and he was relieved to know she was distracted, at least for now.
But why? He questioned his own compulsion again—his need to hide. What would she do if she discovered what he was? What nature he would soon be forced to embrace?
No.
That wasn’t his real fear—and truthfully, he hadn’t expected to fear his awakening so much. It didn’t seem Strike-like at all.
Lethe cursed inwardly. It wasn’t just that he was a Strike; it was that somehow, Ana was becoming the object of that nature’s fixations. The thought crippled something inside ofhim, breaking down some internal wall that had hidden his understanding of the other Strike.
Many of the other Strike had felt this way, hadn’t they?
Evira had preached that being a Strike meant falling in love with humanity, and as if his mind had been rearranged to accept the thought, the doctrine locked itself firmly between stacks of ideologies and principles that had once belonged to the ROSE.
He still thought himself a ROSE.
He was a ROSE, still. Right?
He injected the statement into his mind over and over again like a cure against the diseased ideology of Evira’s teachings that rose from the dead and haunted his brain. It was as if she’d known all along her words would come back to him in the end. The Strike priests and priestesses had been experts at helping facilitate the infection of The Eating Ocean once they’d found an infected host. Had he been her intended target from the start?
His mind raced, covering a thousand things in the few seconds Ana took to respond.
“I can’t trust the State,” she said. “I can’t trust the Mystics. I can’t trust my own friends not to lie to me. Everyone thinks they are doing the right thing and will do anything to do it,” she said. “We’re both En Sanctan, and we know what happened to the world and what the Strike are capable of. I’ve been lying to myself this whole time and I’m tired of it.”
Through new eyes, he could now see the fear vibrating through her nerves, the fierce alert in her eyes, the tension emanating offher muscles as that deep and awful wrong he continued to sense began to surface.
Some tension was beautiful—the pause in a song, taught instrument strings, sensual touch, a bow and arrow—namely because the release of that tension inspired something miraculous.
This fear, this tension, had no satisfying release. She was wounded, and this wound wasn’t new. This was old and deep and rotten, so profound that it divided her soul down the middle, almost cleaving it in half. It was the reason for her stony exterior, her vacant shell, her silent reserve. He wanted to reach through her chest and remove it.
