Page 19 of Embers of Midnight
I lose direction. Lose shape. My self shrinks to one thought:Not like this. Not here. Not now.
Something grabs me. Not water. Not me. It takes hold—not rough, but certain. Firm. Cooler than the river, but alive. Shadow. I want to scream. I can’t. I want to strike. I can’t. I want to breathe. I can’t.
All I have left is the flick of a blade in my chest—No.
And somewhere, past the noise, I hear it: I’m being pulled. Not swallowed. Not punished. Pulled.
It’s enough to hold on.
I move. Slow, then faster, then slow again when the current throws a tantrum at a hidden snag. The cords cinch, adjust, slide without cutting. They carry heat without burning. They feel like the absence of light given intention, which is a sentence I hate and also true.
The bank rises under me in ugly sections—rock, snow, ice, then mud that wants to keep a souvenir. The cords pull me one more body length and then ease off like they were never there. I hit ground on my side, lungs locked, chest a bellows with no handle. Water sheens off me. Steam lifts and dies and lifts again. Windhas a mouth and it puts it on my ribs and takes from me like it paid for the privilege.
Note to self: water is my kryptonite. Also gravity. Also ridiculously good-looking men.
I lie there and breathe like I’ve been collecting air on spec and the invoice just came due. Steam sheets off my back and vanishes. The cold argues with the heat and wins on the parts of me that aren’t listening. My right foreleg shakes in tiny, insulting quivers. The horn hums at a pitch I associate with bad decisions.
Boots set careful music into the crust. They spread instead of stacking. They keep hands empty. The gold-eyed one—heat without blaze—drops to a knee three paces out, body angled so I can read all his choices. He sets one palm on the snow where I can see it, the other lifted, open.
“Easy,” he says, and his voice is low and clean, a temperature more than a sound. “You’re safe on the bank. Breathe first.”
I don’t speak back. There’s a line between stupid and suicidal. Mine is horn-length.
He doesn’t reach. He waits like patience is a muscle he trains on purpose. The silver-eyed one lets his shadow do a slow, harmless stretch at the edge of my vision, claws in, manners on. The storm-blue keeps his hands where men keep them when they want to fix something and know fixing isn’t on offer. The green-eyed one steps half a pace to the side, breath easing the glare off snow without asking for attention.
The gold-warm voice comes again. Words I understand because the universe didn’t change English on me tonight. “Easy. In slow. Out slower. You’re not alone.”
My body disagrees on every point. I pull air and get a cough that tastes like coins and river. Steam jumps to show off and then dies of embarrassment. My legs twitch out a useless performance of readiness. The horn hum climbs a fret. I pull it down by will and accident. It listens for one heartbeat. It’s a start I don’t trust.
“Gently,” he says, heat sliding into the air near me like a thread I could hold. Not at me. Near me. “Four in, hold one, four out. Again.”
He does it with me once, chest a metronome I can borrow. My lungs copy like they have no pride. The air tastes less like panic. A second breath follows. I hate the gratitude that sneaks in. I do it again anyway because I like not drowning.
Shadow returns as a smaller ribbon and sits by my foreleg like a polite animal. It shapes itself into a thin-necked serpent of night and lowers its head. The silver-eyed man’s fingers flex and still. If this is a trap, it’s the kind that waits for consent. That’s new.
Heat in the patient man’s palm shifts a fraction lower. It feels like a hearth turned down so far you only remember it’s there when your toes stop hurting. He talks me through breath like he’s patched a hundred lungs in cold places and knows which muscles pretend to be stubborn and which are just scared.
“There’s a way back,” he says, as if he’s telling me the shape of a door I’ve already touched. “You close the heat, but you don’t kill it. You bank it.”
Bank the fire. Let the shape change by subtraction. I want that more than I want pride. Also, I want thumbs. Preferably with skin.
My ribs stop trying to grab knives and settle for an ache. The horn’s hum flattens and holds. The river’s voice drops back to background noise instead of sermon. The pull inside my chest tightens when the silver-eyed one shifts half a step closer. It tightens again when the gold-eyed one speaks, and Future Me can pencil in a meltdown about that later.
He shifts his weight like he knows where pressure lives and won’t step on it. “Think of a door,” he says. “Not iron. Something that takes weight without fighting you. Lower it on the heat. Latch it. Not shut forever—just enough.”
The picture comes from nowhere and everywhere. Not iron. Stone. Old, smooth, warm from hands that trusted it. A hinge that doesn’t squeal. A latch that doesn’t lie. I marry it to breath because drowning on dry land is not my sport. In, the door lowers a finger. Hold, the latch catches. Out, it settles without slamming.
Again. And again.
Heat in my bones argues. It remembers it can coexist with instructions. It gathers under my sternum and waits there,humming, annoyed but obedient. The edges of me cool by inches. The horn stops trying to convince my skull to be a tuning fork.
“Head,” he says, softer. “Let the weight in your head roll back into your spine. You don’t need it forward now.”
It sounds like nonsense. It works. The pressure under the horn eases. Light stops biting. The world loses one vicious edge.
“Forelegs,” he says. “Think knees. Bend the idea of them. Don’t climb. Fold.”
My body resists a concept called knees. I bend the idea anyway. Something in my shoulders loosens with a hot reptile-quiet pop. The crust under me creaks a warning. I don’t slide. The green-eyed one drops his gaze to the edge where ice meets churn and tilts air in a way that dims glare and spares me another flinch.
