Page 79 of May: Bloom & Bane

He reaches out, and he uses his gold-tipped finger to draw a symbol over my heart.

“This will help you.”

I look down at my chest, but I can’t see whatever he drew. It feels like a coal pressed gently against the place where the bond lives.

“What did you just do to me?”

“Insurance,” he says simply.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agrees, beginning to drift away. “But it’s what you’re getting.”

“Damon!”

“If I could stop this, I would.” He sighs. “When it gets dark, and it will get very dark, that—” he gestures to my chest, “will remind you what you’re fighting for when the Reaper can no longer remember.”

A single feather drifts loose, dissolving into nothing.

His coat, or wings, explode into a hundred ravens, flying higher until I can no longer see them.

CHAPTER 26

professor

—THERAEL

Ihear the ravens before I see him. A hundred wings folding back into a large black cloak.

He flashes me his insufferable smile as he lands beside me. Eden has not moved in the last ten minutes. She is still leaning against the tree with her eyes closed, knees pulled to her chest. A tiny empath carrying the weight of everyone’s pain. Ømnara‡ help her. She will need it for what’s coming.

“You gave him the symbol.”

“Well, someone had to. Poor kid.”

“It is not as if it is in my realm of powers to do it. Or I would have.”

I turn from Eden, studying the way his charm is sitting slightly wrong on his face. No one would ever notice unless they know how it used to look before.

“He waited,” Damon says quietly. “At the barrier, though he could have torn through it easily.”

“He loves her. He has always loved her.”

Damon is quiet for a moment, which is unusual enough to be noteworthy. “She’ll forgive him,” he says. “Won’t she?”

I watch the slow rise and fall of her chest, the cedar needle still doing its work to keep her scent tucked safely inside this pocket of meadow. “She already has.”

We fall into an uncomfortable silence, the kind that comes when two people are thinking about the same thing and neither wants to say it first.

“The reaper cycle—” He finally blurts it out.

“I know.”

“And after, when he remembers Micah⁠—”

“I know.”

“Therael—”