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But then I hear her whimpering in pain, and something snaps inside of me.
The shadows of my paldihv catch up to her before I do, swaddling her in a thick darkness that protects her skin from further damage from the burgeoning sun.
The paldihv’s shadows aren’t enough to fully encase both of us, which is why portions of my back have been exposed to the sun the last several minutes. The shadows keep skipping back and forth, trying to douse the flames that have been popping up on my back every few seconds.
It burns, and I have to bite the urge to call out, to bring attention to the vampire set afire by the sunlight and the woman cloaked in shadows.
There’s a cement bunker nearby—one of several scattered about the Sahli in case merchants encounter sandstorms. They’re not exactly common knowledge, and I’m only aware of them because of the time I spent reading Gunter’s books as a child.
I haul Blaise into the shelter just as the flames cut into a deeper layer of skin. I hate that I drop her to the floor, but I have to extinguish the flames, flopping around on the ground in agony as they lick at my skin.
I lie there for a long while in the dark after the flames are doused, breathing heavily and wincing as my skin reknits itself.
Blaise breathes shallowly next to me, hardly conscious after her exerted run across the desert. I had the benefit of coming from a shorter section of the vast desert, since I didn’t have to worry about stopping in inns along the way. Blaise ran almost double the distance overnight.
No wonder she’s passed out.
My eyes adjust well enough to the dark, and now that my skin is healing, the pain is subsiding.
When I roll over to face her, she doesn’t stir. I’m struck for a moment, reminded of the first time I met Blaise. She was lying supine on Abra’s dais, reeking of her own filth and face sallow with dehydration.
Still, she’d looked like she’d picked a fight and come out on top.
I’m still not sure how she managed that.
But I find myself glad that she did.
I watch her eyes dart behind her lids, reminded of how I used to try not to admire her as I worked on extracting the parasite while she slept.
But then her eyelids flutter, her chestnut eyes settling on mine. “Is this the part where you go back to watching me sleep? It’s creepy, you know.”
I laugh, though it’s the boyish type that makes me feel as if I’m twelve years old again. Or at least the type of twelve-year-old who is granted a normal life, free of being ripped from his family.
“Or is this the part where I get to convince myself I’m dreaming?”
Her words send me back to a night not so long ago, back when she was human. Her lips feeling the blood at my wrist, drinking from me just as I sipped from her.
Desire sparks at the memory, but I have to push it away. Because it wasn’t Blaise I shared that moment with. It was the parasite.
But it was Blaise, in a way. Her body, at least. That part I don’t think either of us can deny, not when I heard her call to me just a few nights ago.
When the Old Magic cursed me, I assumed he’d shattered that bond, but then I’d felt a tug toward the Rip, the slightest prick of a goodbye, as if whispered from Blaise’s lips themselves.
It’s almost as if that bond has been there the entire time, but the Old Magic’s curse clogged the vein that’s supposed to deliver the blood flow to it.
Love. That’s what I thought he took away.
But now that I’m here with Blaise, love seems too generic a word.
Because what does it mean to love someone, and why do we use the same word for the objects of our infatuation that we do our parents, our siblings, our friends, when those feelings are all so very different?
In fact, I’m not sure love is something the Old Magic has authority over.
Because as I study Blaise, it’s true—I’m no longer infatuated with her. I don’t look at her and see perfection. I’m no longer blinded to her shortcomings by intense, all-consuming lust.
I see a girl who has been so incredibly hurt that she hurts others. And I no longer see that behavior as excusable.
I see a woman who bends her morals for a taste of love—or what I thought love was only a day ago.
