Page 126 of Kissed By the Gods
I drop my lips to her ear. She shivers, as she’s done every godsdamn time I’ve done this from the first moment we met. It makes me want to drag my tongue along the curve of her ear, to tease that soft, vulnerable place at her neck until she can’t hold backthatsound she makes in my dreams.
“We stopped being about debts owed and paid a long time ago,” I whisper, voice low, breath brushing her skin.
She gasps. Her hand trembles on the door. But when she speaks, her voice is steady.
“What are we about, then?”
I give in—finally. I lick that sweet curve of her ear and then give a quick tug with my teeth. She moans, and the sound is everything I knew it would be. Everything I’ve dreamed it would be. Sweet Serephelle—it’s everythingshedreamed it would be. What a godsdamn mindfuck to know that this pull between us isn’t just lust. It never was. We don’t only find each other in our sleep. We reach for each other across the Veil—through whatever both gods and man put between us.
“Fate,” I breathe, hoarse and wrecked in a way that has nothing to do with the ash still clinging to my lungs. “Because even the gods didn’t see us coming, my rebel girl.”
PART III
THE GIFTED
“Truly, I’ve heard the myths. That the First could step between realms as easily as breath. That he drifted through our world without tether. They say he was untouchable in battle—able to shatter someone from the inside before a blade ever left its sheath.
Some even whisper he spoke with gods. Some say ... with the dead. (And between the two, I’m not sure which terrifies me more.)
But I tell you this, Master: I don’t believe it. The Veil is not a path. It is not a gift. It is chaos—pure and hungry. And we are children of order, are we not? Children of the True Gods?
The Veil offers none of that. So perhaps it was never meant to be salvation. Perhaps it is our undoing, and best avoided.”
Letter from Aerion of Fellsworn, the last veilstrider
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
LEINA
There’sa fine sheen of sweat on my forehead, and my heart is pounding so hard against my chest that it echoes in my ears. My hands are damp and sticky, and my fingers cramp as I uncurl my fists. The sweat cools on my skin, the frosted winter air causing me to shiver. I lie in the snow, gasping, letting the world spin back into place. Then the pain hits.
Not sharp. Not clean. It burns. I try to sit up and hiss through my teeth.
Vaeloria lands beside me, snow flurrying around her, her wings folded as she lowers her head to mine. Her breath mists in the cold, her body tense.
“I’m okay,” I rasp.
It’s a lie, and she knows it. We’ve been at this for nearly four months now, and I’m never okay.
We both look down at my injured arm, but I’m not bleeding. Well, not technically. No, the substance trickling out of me is darker. Thicker. It glimmers faintly, like ink in moonlight. The edges of the wound don’t look torn or sliced. They look … unstitched. As if the skin itself was peeled apart, thread by thread.
Footsteps crunch lightly on the snow. The Elder stands a short distance away, hunched over a slab of stone he’s shaped into a desk, long fingers scrawling something with charcoal. He doesn’t look up.
“Does the wound itch this time?” he asks, mildly.
“No,” I say through gritted teeth. “It burns.”
He nods once, then tosses me a small jar. I catch it awkwardly with my good hand.
“Elowen’s latest,” he says. “Specifically mixed for Veil wounds. She’s experimenting with lay leaf this time.”
Elowen has never worked harder than she has in the last few months. If she’s not buried in some ancient tome about the Veil, she’s elbow-deep in her workroom mixing tonics that smell like death.
Thank the gods for Elowen.
