Page 225 of May: Bloom & Bane

“I don’t like how you worded that.”

“No,” he says. “I do not imagine you do.”

“Sage was Micah.” I turn the words over. “You said it three times, three different ways, and not once did you say we. Not once did you say I.” The cold thing in my chest goes still. “Why does it matter how you say it, Therael? We’re one soul. If Sage was Micah, then so was I. That’s how this works.”

“You have found an edge of the cage,” he says quietly. “There is a thing here, Little Reaper—right where you are standing—that I am bound from setting in your hands. And you have always been too clever not to feel the shadow of it.”

“What thing?”

“If I could tell you, it would not be a binding,” he murmurs. “But I cannot walk you to this door because this one has not quite opened yet. And until it does, all I can do is stand here and love you through it.”

My eyes snap to his. “Love? You love me?” My voice sounds so small, almost like a child’s. Therael’s face crumples.

“Little Reaper, there are a thousand things I am bound from telling you. Truths I would tear this cage apart to give you, but that is not one of them. That, I am free to say, and I will say it plainly, so you never have to wonder again.”

He leans down until his face is level with mine.

“I have watched over you across lifetimes. I held the thread of you when it nearly came undone. And somewhere in all those long years of guarding you from the dark… you became one of my own. Both halves of you. I could no more stop loving the shadow than I could stop loving the seed.”

A serpent slithers down his arm, scales shifting from deep emerald to bright jade. Its hood is half-flared, slitted golden eyes locking on me with predatory interest.

“You’re the one that hissed,” I say. “That night in the kitchen. Sage and Eden searched, but they couldn’t find you.”

His tongue flicks out. “Few do,” he rasps. “I am ssseen when I wissssh to be ssseen.” His golden eyes narrow. “And yet here you are, little ssshadow, looking sssstraight at me.”

“Arteus,” Therael says, a note of warning in his voice.

He slithers lazily from Therael’s arm onto mine, winding around my shadow.

Therael’s eyes widen.

“... He does not do that.”

“Thisss one tassstesss of the sssame ssseason as you, Rael,” Arteus murmurs, his head resting against my shadow. “I like him.”

“I still have questions.”

“Ask,” Therael murmurs.

“Before Micah, we were Therin, and we jumped after Naya?”

“Yes.” His voice softens. “Therin was the first turn of your thread. A man who thought he loved Naya.”

“But we didn’t love Naya.”

“No.”

“Then why would we jump after her?”

“Do you remember the riddle I gave Sage?”

“Yes.”

“Mm,” he hums. “Let us go over one of the lines: In every life, beneath the sun, the hunter’s chase was never done.

“You’re saying in our first life, we went after the wrong woman too? Please tell me that’s not what you’re saying.”

“In every life, beneath the sun,” he repeats. “Not some lives, Little Reaper. Not most. Every one.”