Page 45
“You don’t have to be gentle,” he said. “It’s worse when you are.”
Something in Maia’s chest tightened.
“Caelith,” she said softly. “How dangerous is this? For you. If you lose too much blood, is it the same as it is for us?”
He looked away before he answered.
“My blood doesn’t clot the way yours does. It dissipates. It burns through me faster when I’m wounded, but only from another Fracture-born creature. A blade, a fall, an ordinary wound, I heal from very quickly. This is different.” He paused. “Whatever comes from the Fracture can leave a wound so deep that it keeps bleeding, long after the skin closes.”
The cloth slipped. “So did that happen back there?”
“It nearly did,” he whispered. “But I was fortunate. I’ll still heal quickly. Well, quicker than Julen anyway.”
A cold draught slid under the door and the lantern flame shrank. Maia swallowed, furrowing her brow. There were too many things tonight she didn’t understand. His sudden appearance, the way the shards had pulsed and the power that came from them. And the creature that shouldn’t exist.
“Caelith,” she said softly. “Tell me the truth.”
His shoulders stiffened.
“You’d seen that creature before, hadn’t you?” she murmured, pressing the cloth to his ribs. “You knew it.”
The storm cracked again.
“I’d heard about them,” Caelith said carefully.
“But you reacted like—”
“Maia.” Her name came out strained, low, almost pleading. “Not tonight. Please. I just need… calm.”
“You always do this,” she whispered, ignoring his request.
“Survive?”
“Shut me out.”
His voice dropped. “It’s the same thing.”
Every instinct told her to keep pushing, but something in the way he gritted his teeth, the way his hand had gone rigid against his own knee, told her this wasn’t a door she could open twice in one night.
She let it go. For now.
He watched her with a guarded expression, jaw tightening every time she touched the wound with the wet cloth. She tried to ignore the feeling of his eyes on her, the way his breath stuttered once when her fingers brushed too close to his skin.
“Why were you alone in the Archive, Maia?” he murmured, something brittle under the words.
“I wasn’t. Well, I was for a little while. Julen had left because something was happening with the fragments. It was like there were signs to tell us what was coming, although we didn’t know it was going to be… that.”
“I might not always be there to save you, Maia.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I know.” He paused for a moment. “That doesn’t stop me wanting to.”
She froze.
His eyes shot to hers.
She swallowed hard and nodded. When she wrapped the bandage around his torso, he lifted his arms slowly. The movement forced him closer, his chin over the top of her head. Her hands trembled slightly at the nearness of him. His breath stirring her hair, the warmth of him under her hands where she had expected something colder.
