Page 218 of May: Bloom & Bane

“Therael.” My hand closes over his cold forearm. “I won’t ask you to give me more.”

“I know.” His voice is threadbare, gold limping back into his veins. “But you needed something. I think of you like one of my⁠—”

My eyes snap to his.

“I cannot stay,” he murmurs. “I must go back to my realm to seek… answers.”

I reach for his arm, but my fingers slip through as the air spins and the vortex of leaves collapses inward, vanishing and leaving nothing behind but a single pine needle.

“Like your what, Therael…” I whisper to an empty room.

CHAPTER 62

for her

—ASHÁN

Coming back is like being dug up. That’s the only way I can describe it. The dust packs the dark over me like wet earth, and I don’t sleep under it so much as get interred beneath a weight I can’t move. When things finally thin, I have to claw up through all that packed dark, fighting for every inch, until something in me breaks the surface and I drag the first breath back into a body that’s spent gods-knows-how-long without me in it. I surface gasping.

Easy, Ash, Sage murmurs. I’ve got us. You’re back.

The trees outside the windows cast long, eerie shadows across the sunroom floor.

How long was I gone?

Since this morning. It’s around midnight, he rasps.

I flinch. And you’ve been—what? Sitting here alone since this morning?

He doesn’t answer right away.

Sage? I push outward, filling more of our body, taking the weight from him the way I do when I can tell he’s struggling. What happened while I was under?

“I wasn’t me, Ashán. I was a little boy with a twin brother named Mark. I had a name before this one.”

I stay silent.

“My name was Micah… does that name mean anything to you?”

I wait for it to mean something. It should, shouldn’t it? If it was his name, and his soul is mine, then somewhere in the tangle of us, that name should have a thread.

But there’s nothing.

No, I tell him. I’m sorry. Whatever you’re reaching for, it isn’t in my half either. Tell me the rest.

Therael came, he murmurs. He couldn’t tell me much.

Couldn’t? I ask.

It ties into that curse he mentioned, Sage mumbles. Something stops his tongue. He said he knew exactly who Micah was, and that he’s always known, but he physically can’t say. And he wasn’t smug about it the way the Horsemen swore he would be. He was upset, Ash. And he hurt himself to give me what he did.

And what did he give you? I ask.

A riddle.

I have not taken my eyes off Eden in roughly forty minutes, and I refuse to feel pathetic about it. She’s in the yard, sprawled on top of a quilt next to Elena, with a truly alarming amount of snacks being fought over between Droot and Penelope. They’re currently locked in negotiations over a single blueberry. Droot is cheating. Penelope is also cheating. Eden is refereeing, which means she’s lying on her side with one hand on her belly, crying with laughter as she pretends to yell at them. Utterly useless as an official, that mate of mine.

She’s only twenty feet away. She is safe. I can watch every breath she takes, and still the cold thing in my chest anxiously paces in a slow circle. I let it pace. As long as she’s in my sight, I can almost ignore it.