Page 148
His hand rests against my jaw, trembling with the effort of staying there. “Hi,” he whispers.
The word breaks reality.
I make no sound at first. I cannot. My body forgets every function except staring. The bond, once ruined and collapsed, flares like dawn forcing itself through roots after the longest winter ever suffered.
It hurts. It is glory. It tears through the hollow center in me and fills it so violently that I nearly drop him, then clutch him closer with a terrified care that shakes every limb. His heart beats beneath my hand—slow, strange, stronger than before, not the same rhythm, but there.
Living. Living!
“Lucas,” I breathe, and his name comes out clearer than it ever has, whole and shaking. “Lucas.”
His smile flickers. “Yeah. That’s me, Wildheart.”
I start to sob.
It is not dignified or controlled. It tears out of me as if the roots beneath the circle have dragged grief up by the throat and forced it through my mouth. I fold over him, shaking, holding his body against mine while he makes a faint protesting sound because I am crushing him, and I immediately loosen my arms with a frantic apology.
Then I am on my knees more fully, bowing over him, bowing to the stone, bowing to the roots, to the air where Aestrata stood, to the whole merciless, miraculous earth.
“Thank you,” I say, and the words come again and again, broken and rough. “Thank you. Mother, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
Lucas’s fingers move weakly on my jaw. “You’re shakin’, baby.”
I laugh through a sob, and the sound is so wrecked it barely resembles laughter. “You were dead.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs, blinking slowly. “Didn’t love that.”
A broken, helpless sound leaves me. I press my forehead carefully to his, and warmth meets me. His living warmth. The mark at his shoulder glows under blood, not with visible light at first, but through the bond—a deep ember-gold threaded now with green-white rootfire. I can feel it in him. Not only the bond returning, but something else. Change woven through flesh that was human and is still Lucas, but no longer only what he was.
My body stills enough for him to notice. He searches my face, then whatever expression he has learned to read beneath it. “You feel it.”
Yes, I send first, then force the word through my mouth because I need him to hear me in every way I have. “Yes.”
He breathes in carefully, wincing a little, though the wound at his side is no longer bleeding, and the torn fabric and the blood remain. Beneath it, when my shaking hand moves close, I see the skin knitting with faint lines like pale bark beneath freckles. Not healed fully, not untouched, but alive by some law older than death. His wrists bear rope marks, raw and dark, but small green-gold threads move under the skin there too, closing what would have scarred badly.
“What happened?” I ask, and the question comes out incomplete because too many questions are inside it.
How are you living? Where did she take you? What did she ask? What did she change? Did it hurt? Are you still mine? Are you still yours? Will you forgive the world for sending you back different? Will you forgive me for making the choice necessary at all?
Lucas swallows, and I feel the motion through the hand I still keep near his throat without quite touching the mark. “I think I was between,” he says, voice rough and slow. “Not alive or fully gone. I thought I was dreaming at first, because apparently dying is confusing as hell, which feels rude.”
Tears blur my sight again.
He is making jokes.
He is alive enough to make jokes.
I nearly thank Aestrata again, but Lucas’s hand pats my cheek, weak and bossy. “Look at me, Wildheart.”
I obey at once.
His smile softens at that, though his eyes shine with pain and exhaustion. “I saw things. Your things, I think. The past, fast as lightnin’ but slower somehow. I saw when she made you.”
Lucas’s gaze drifts for a moment, not away from me, but inward toward something immense. “I saw you rise out of the earth—you and him. I saw the forest before people named it. I saw how long you walked alone.” His voice thins, and his fingers curl faintly against my jaw as emotion moves through him, deep and aching and not pity, never pity. “God, Onyx. You were so lonely.”
I want to turn from that, but I cannot, because Lucas holds my face with barely enough strength to lift his hand, and still I cannot deny him anything.
“I did not know another way,” I say, each word hard-won.
