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“It’s not too late to bring back what’s left of the serum,” Nur says from where he’s watching, perched on a fallen statue.
Arsene shakes his head. “I’m never going back.”
Something broke in him when he saw the feral sentinel. The last piece of trust. The belief that, in spite of everything, the Seraphim Council only did what they thought was best.
Nothing about the sentinel’s fate was right. The Council molded him into an obedient vessel,then senthim to be driven mad by a task he could never fulfil. The creature that remained saw his kin only as enemies who would steal from him. Even death would have been more merciful than that.
“I don’t belong there anymore,” he tells Nur. “I belong with you.”
Nur’s dark wings twitch as he hops down from his perch. “I don’t want you to have regrets.”
Arsene captures his hands. His skin is sun-warmed, his scent bright and sweet. They slept the night curled together in the shelter of an empty building. Arsene jolted awake more than once to check that his mate was still warm and breathing, that no enemies were sniffing around…and that he himself hadn’t turned into a monster in the night. He won’t relax until they’re gone from this place. But when Nur turns his hands palm-upand laces their fingers together, the coiled tension unwinds the tiniest amount.
“I might regret that things aren’t different for my people. But I won’t regret leaving my life as a rapier of New Yden under that pile of blocks.” He squeezes Nur’s fingers.
“I saw the vials in your pack,” Nur says, arching a brow, and Arsene smiles guiltily.
“One of each—the primus serum and the healing one.”
“I don’t need you to be all primus. We can be oddities together.”
A hot flush creeps up his neck, but he holds firm. “There is one thing that would be better for both of us if I’m a full primus.”
A gleam of understanding enters Nur’s eye. “You filthy bastard.”
“Tell me you don’t like my knot,” he growls, nuzzling Nur’s cheek, but his mate only laughs.
Chapter 49
NUR
Leavingthe city behind is a weight off his soul, but neither of them are unscathed—Arsene in particular. The bunker left his mate with slow-healing bruises inside and out. Every time memory of the feral sentinel crosses his mind Nur wants to hunt down the Seraphim Council and snuff out their miserable lives one by one. He and Arsene match each other for night terrors now, each taking turns pinning the other down so he doesn’t scratch his eyes out, holding him tight when he’s shuddering through the aftershocks. It’s a novel experience. Nur hates that it’s necessary. But they’re surviving.
They meet the caravan at the far edge of the Deadlands, and Arsene is visibly relieved to be out of the desert. The sky loses its dual set of stars, the earthly realm triumphing once more, and the sand turns to hard-packed dirt, and even the sun is more kind. But Nur finds himself paradoxically missing the poisoned land as they drive into a greener, gentler world. What place does he have in such a realm? He’s tattered, laid bare by the gladness in Arsene’s eyes when he helps the hunters haul in a big kill, or fells trees so the wagons can ford the river. His mate is healing.
Nur is terrified of being left behind.
Still, there’s no shortage of passion when they pass in the night to change the watch, one always seeking the other out for a brief, brilliant moment. Seed spills on the green grass—far from the tents—or in breath-caught silence under a canvas cover. Bright arcs of pleasure burst from their bond, so sparkling that Nur fears everyone can see them. And Arsene touches him reverently, possessively, taking and giving with such fervency that Nur drowns in it.
He feels like he’s drowning most of the time. Gulping in his new life as if he can take it all into himself before it swallows him instead.
Then one of the human scouts returns to the caravan to say the settlement is in sight, and amid the celebration—crying and cheering and embraces that Nur somehow gets swept into—Arsene comes to him with a shadow in his eyes.
“They have a new opportunity,” Arsene says, smiling though his spine is taut with uncertainty.
“Thanks to you,” Nur points out. He’s begged off the embraces, escaping to sit on the back of the wagon and watch over the mules. It seems like a lifetime ago he killed someone in this wagon. The wood still smells of blood, but it’s overlaid with other things now: leather, salt, green boughs for building smoking brackets.
“And you.” Arsene leans against the wagon frame next to him.
Nur aches to reach out to him, but he senses his mate has something to say.
Arsene has been getting better at keeping parts of himself from the bond, which Nur both hates and understands. Arsene needs to know himself first in his new paradigm. Nur would be a hypocrite to argue against it. He’s learning to read his mate in other ways instead.
Now he consciously lets his walls down, letting the bond shiver with pure emotion. Arsene’s chest rises with a deep breath.
“I don’t think we should go with them to the human settlement.”
He nods. There’s more.
