“I’m not sure. He only said to tell you he’ll be back soon if you asked.”
I swung my legs off the bed.
“You need to rest,” Zath reprimanded.
I was already dressing, too flustered to care that Zath was in the room, but to his credit, he turned his back as I did. Stuffing my feet into boots, I headed out.
My instincts took me through the surrounding woodland until I emerged on a cliff ledge. The same one where I’d found Nyte right before he fell under his curse.
I looked up and I remembered…
Burdens are heavy on the ground.
I didn’t unglamour my wings before I ran through the snow, pushing with all I had for the best momentum, and then I leapt off the side.
I made sure not to dive in my free fall, instead letting my body fall in a weightless cradle.
Arms caught me, and my anticipation of it had me clamping my arms around his neck.
Nyte was so beautiful my words stalled for a second to take in his subdued pale gold eyes and the wind whipping his midnight hair across them.
“There you are,” I whispered.
“That was very bold of you,” he said.
“If you hadn’t caught me, I do have wings.”
He helped me maneuver on Eltanin’s saddle to sit facing him, half straddling his legs. Before I could tell him what I suspected from the past, his desolate expression distracted me.
He wasn’t looking at me. Instead his fingers lifted the hem of my shirt to examine Auster’s stab wound.
“I don’t know what to do, and I’m fucking terrified to lose you.”
“It might heal. We don’t know that it will continue to spread.”
It was a grasp of hope in the dark we both knew was weak, but it was all I had.
I said, “Do you remember when I was dying from being ambushed and struck by the key, and I came to you?”
“This is a kind of terror I’ll never forget,” he answered grimly.
My heart skipped, then squeezed.
“I think the attack was ordered by Auster, that he knew I would have to go to one of you to save me with the bond, and it had been a test.”
Nyte frowned. “I thought Auster didn’t know about us at that time?”
“So did I… but, looking back, it makes sense. Your father must have told him to goad him about us and perhaps to have a new potential ally in his pocket should he need it. To confirm if it was true, Auster staged my ambush by a group of vampires, hoping I would go to him to save me, and he would get what he always want… to forge our bond and have access to the key and my power.”
Nyte’s eyes closed for a moment. Collecting his wrath when the culprit was no longer alive for him to unleash it upon.
“You came to me,” he murmured. “Your intuition has never led you astray, even when people you trusted tried to make you doubt yourself.”
I held his face in my hands.“Youhave never led me astray, Rainyte.”
28Astraea
We rode Eltanin until our burdens were distant enough to bear the weight of the ground. Now, Nyte’s warmth pressed against my back while we lay in the bath in our room in Nadir’s home. His bare flesh wrapped around me like a shield against the emptiness that always threatened to creep in.
