Page 61 of May: Bloom & Bane

“You know I can only tell him as much as he figures out himself.”

He looks toward the warm light in the kitchen window, where Eden is probably washing paint from her fingers while Sage hovers nearby, learning what it means to love something without knowing what it might cost him.

“Tellian still hasn’t found any loopholes?” he asks.

I shake my head.

I look at the darkness behind his eyes and how they hold everything he carries but never dares to say.

“Serephina,” I say softly.

His jaw tightens before I get her name out fully.

“Do not, brother.”

So I do not. And we stand in the ash together.

Two gods. Two wounds. Watching a light glow in a window that neither of us was supposed to need this much.

Damon finally shifts, the shadows at his heels losing their predatory edge and smoothing out into a quiet, velvet cape. He doesn’t look at me when he speaks again.

“The Horsemen are five miles out, Therael.”

“I told Sage that they would stop at nothing to get this bond sealed.” I weave my own roots into the soil, searching for their exact location. “Speaking of bonds, have you found him yet?”

Damon scoffs, a tiny flash of his usual arrogance returning to his eyes. “As if I wasn’t the very one to make the deal.”

“And just how successful was this… deal?”

“He has eleven days left.”

My heart clenches. “Is there any other way?”

“I tried everything else, Therael. This was the only way to keep them together. If not for this deal, he would have had to wait eleven more cycles.”

“You may fool everyone else, Daemøn,” I say, watching a single black raven feather drift from his cloak and dissolve before it hits the scorched earth. “But do not imagine I failed to scent your sacrifice the moment you set foot on this grass.”

“I have not the slightest clue what you are going on about.”

“Do you really think I would not notice the glamoured stitches?”

“Trying out a new costume.”

“Mm.” My eyes roam over his dark skin. “Did this new costume inform Damien that you tied his pain to your own body? That you’re living in perpetual torment so Damien’s body doesn’t rot back into the dirt before he’s able to seal the bond?”

“Costumes don’t talk, Therael,” he scoffs. “Eleven days, dear brother. Eleven days for him to prove he can hold three souls that were meant to stay in Aevhørath‡. (Afterlife) If he fails… the deal reverts. And I’m the one who has to drag them all back into the dark.”

CHAPTER 21

pretty pink nipples

—EDEN

The spell Therael cast hums through the house like a hive full of bees. I keep replaying Therael’s face when I reached for that jar of paint. The way something in him just… stopped. I’ve felt my fair share of grief since waking up: Sage’s, the Horsemen… my own. But what came through his skin when he grabbed my wrist—that wasn’t grief. That was the hollow room that grief screamed into until it lost its voice.

It felt like starvation.

“You’re thinking about him,” Sage says from across the kitchen.