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For a moment, the pain mingled with the happiness of having him back in my life.
He was in a formal shendyt of deep yellow that made his skin seem more gold-toned than it already was, and picked up the gold sheen of his dark hair, and the luminescent shade of his eyes. He was so dangerously beautiful it made my heart hurt to look at him. Now that I was molted, he seemed even more...Auryn. Like I perceived him with a couple dozen extra senses.
He knelt on the bed and crawled across the expanse to the center, where he knelt next to me and caressed my cheeks with both hands. The touch of his skin was one thing, but there was a restraint in theradianceof his touch.
“I know that look.” He trailed his fingertips gently along my jaw.
“What look?”
“Something’s troubling you.”
I stretched against the sheets. “Dekka grounded me.”
He hesitated. “Not what I expected to hear. I felt our tethers just now.”
“I’m just having some feels.”
He felt along the scar Maren had given me with gentle fingertips. I tried not to flinch. “So why did Dekka ground you?”
“I told her about what went down at Hekon’s. She told me I’m not allowed to play with the big kids until I master breathing. Andyouaren’t allowed anywhere near the Atlantean archives either.”
He shifted from his knees onto his haunch, one knee up so his shendyt pooled around his ankles. “I wasn’t planning on being part of that project. I was never a career topside drake. I did it to gain practical experience with human medicine to bring back to Lemuria.”
“So no loss?” I said bitterly.
“Helena, you need to learn to breathe,” he said gently.
I sat up and ran my hands through my purple-tinged hair. “Fuck. It’s happening all over again.”
“What is?”
My tethers to him ached. “Where everyone tells me it’s over, move on, do something else, and Ican’t.”
“It’s dangerous for Ethereals to engage in denial,” Auryn said softly. “The things you see and experience can be terrifying, and often, there’s no one who can understand what you’re experiencing or feeling. So it’s easy to ignore those things and hope you never encounter them again. Brushing things off that cause your magic to react is very dangerous until you’re sure you’re in control.”
I looked at the back of my forearm again, then drew up my knees and tucked my chin on them. He shifted closer and lowered his face to mine. “Now, do you want to tell me why I felt you claw at our tethers as I walked in?”
I sighed. “It’s stupid.”
“See, that’s the sort of denial that’s dangerous. It caused you to flinch and grab. We say not to name evils in Lemuria, but sometimes we have to name cruel truths to give them form.”
“So we can take it out behind the barn and shoot it?”
“Exactly.”
Fine. I could adult, and have a conversation like an adult. “It’s dumb. I was thinking about how I don’t like always waking up alone. And then it reminded me for an instant of the day I woke up without you as usual, and you never came back.”
Even thinking about it still made our bond ache like a bone that hadn’t healed properly.
“I don’t want to think about it anymore,” I confessed. “I want it to be over, and to stop echoing through our lives.”
He picked up my hand and held it over his heart, where the scales had been taken. He placed his other hand over the gnarly, barely healed hole in my side. “Why are you giving yourself grace for this injury, which will need months to fully heal, while you refuse to give yourself grace for needing years to recover from what I put you through? Or what is happening to us now?”
“Because I can sit down and have a good fucking cry about it once everything is on fire and it’s too late and there’s nothing else I can do.”
“That’s only going to grind the wounds deeper into your psyche. Thereisn’tanything else you can directly do except wait and prepare. It’s out of your hands now. And suppressing things doesn’t make them go away. Your mind just waits until you have the bandwidth to deal with it, and then all the ghosts come out to haunt you, and you are left to wonderwhy is this still affecting me? Because it neverstoppedaffecting you.”
“I suppose. And no, I’m not asking you to hang around in bed. You know I don’t want that.”
