Page 42 of Demon Touched

She’s lying on her side, because these days her back is too tender to sleep on, and I can feel the ache of her emerging wings radiating through her. It makes her restless, and the hours struggling to fall asleep are wearing her out. I can feel all this and more, just by reaching out a tendril of awareness and sweeping through her body, and I want to help her.

“Can I ask you something?” I murmur and wince when I feel her stiffen. There was a time when she welcomed me, rather than flinching away.

“Only if it sticks to the rules,” she replies.

“If there was a way for you get out of the trials, would you take it?” Technically, this is still allowed. We said we would discuss the trials and her training only, and this is perfectly on topic.

It apparently passes muster, because she pauses to think about it.

“There was a way out,” she says. “The captain who brought me to Aradis, Pellery, offered to help me escape before I came to the academy. I didn’t accept.”

“Why?” I demand, shaken by the thought.

“Because of you,” she says, her voice low and strained in her mind.

“What are you talking about?”

She shifts her head on the pillow, tucking her hands under her cheek and sighing. “It doesn’t matter. I just felt I didn’t have any other options.”

“No,” I disagree, my anger flaring at the way she so easily lays the blame at my feet and then walks away. “It does matter. I want to know how you justified doing something so extreme, so dangerous, so...” I run out of words that won’t cause more damage than they’re worth.

She pounces on this, as if she’s been waiting for me to say something similar this whole time.

“Maybe I will tell you, if you tell me how you justified trying to hide my power from me.”

I grimace. She’s too good at this—tying me in knots.

“What happened to not going over the past?” I say, even though I know very well I started it.

She huffs and sits up in bed, too agitated to lie still.

“I’m so sick of you using vague excuses about circumstances beyond our control, and people not being safe. How can you expect me to stake my whole life—my heart—on something you refuse to share with me?”

The words come out in a rush, but I don’t miss the mention of her heart. It lights something in me, sending me pressing up against the inside of her mind like I’m backing her consciousness up against a wall.

“I could have told you once,” I say, unable to temper the intensity of my voice. “I would have, probably. But then you had to go and do the one thing⁠—”

I stop and swear in Cyrax, a stream of curses to try to stem the other words that want to spill out of me. It half works, and I’m a little calmer when I speak again. “You had to go to Aradis and become a tool of the enemy. That made it impossible. I can’t trust you anymore. Not with this. Not now.”

She barks out a loud, bitter, disgusted laugh. “And I’m just supposed to believe that? Ancestors, you must think I’m such a naïve idiot.”

“No, but I think you’re starting to become more like them than you realize. I…I care for you, Leah,” I say, catching myself before the full messy reality comes tumbling out. “Very much. But I also have a lot of people who depend on me. And I will cross a lot of lines for you, but not this one.”

The spikes of her anger blunt into confusion and hurt.

“Then I have to draw my lines too,” she says simply, though of course nothing about this is simple.

She lies back down and turns toward the wall, as if that will somehow shut me out. “Goodnight, Syrus,” she says, flat and cold.

I respect her implied order and go, slipping from her mind. At least tonight I got a little bit more—even if that more was harsh words and anger. It will have to keep me satisfied for now. Until tomorrow.

Leah

I hate to say it, but Syrus might be right. Not about lying to me or still insisting on withholding the truth.

But things have changed lately. My wings are coming in now, and in a few months, anyone who looks at me will see a child of Aradis. Meanwhile, Syrus remains a whole realm away, separated by an impassable aether.

Is it so important to me to know the whys? It’s not like there’s any going back now, so it shouldn’t matter to me. And maybe, if I start accepting that, I’ll have some peace.