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Her breath caught at that last thought. She looked at him over her shoulder. “Is that what you want? To be loved?”
He held her gaze for a moment longer before rolling to his back to stare at the ceiling. The thick hair fanned out around his head on the pillow. In profile, his features had a coarse beauty that was more fascinating than handsome. He spoke so quietly she had to strain to hear him. “I want the darkness to end.”
“But—you need the darkness to survive, don’t you?”
“Only so much of it.”
Cassidy waited, inviting him to fill the silence, even though she knew how unwilling this being was to share his thoughts, even with his own younglings, much less random mortals.
But Kambyses was also aware of how there were no secrets between her and Dominique, and this seemed to be the approach he wanted to emulate now. He drew a deep breath and in his soft accent said, “When ships first traveled across this sea, I rode on one to witness the worlds beyond the horizon. We traveled peacefully for weeks beneath the stars. Until one day, while I slept, hidden in the hold—” His mouth froze, his eyes wide and unblinking.
Unease slithered in her belly.
“I woke while falling through darkness,” he said, and the unease condensed into a smooth, cold stone. The memory of him feeding from her without the pleasant illusions was all too fresh. She had fallen into a blackness so thick she could feel it eddy around her and squeeze into her body. A nothingness made of water.
“Ice cold darkness. Impenetrable darkness. A darkness as I had never imagined,” he continued. “I don’t know how long I fell. Maybe hours. Maybe days. At last there was a bottom to it.”
“You—you fell to the bottom of the deep ocean? And you survived?” She shook her head, trying to un-boggle her brain. “Sorry. Of course you would.” Here was an aspect of immortality she hadn’t considered—not being able to die when surely that would have been preferable to unending tortures.
The expression in his hyper-dilated eyes was unfathomable. “You know so much of these things in this age. I knew nothing. I even doubted there would ever be a bottom. There was only the cold becoming thicker and thicker. The pressure crushed even my bones. They healed, only to be crushed again. Over and over.”
“How did you get back to the surface?” she asked, morbidly fascinated. He wouldn’t be able to swim or float any more than Dominique would.
“I crawled.”
“Crawled?”
“For a century. Maybe more.”
Cassidy recoiled a little. Her mind struck dumb with shock. Kambyses gave her a small, humorless smile, acknowledging her understanding. A hundred years on the bottom of the sea, crawling in the muck and rock, through abysmal trenches and across submarine mountain ranges that put their terrestrial counterparts to shame. There would be no light there to see by except for the bio-luminescence of deep-sea creatures. Not much blood either, to say nothing of heat.
For a century.
Lifetimes.
Spent in the frozen dark.
“There was heat and some light,” he said, reading her thoughts. “I crawled only sometimes. More often, the current pushed me where it would. Eventually, I came to a place where the bottom splits and boils with the fury of the gods. I stayed there for a long time and fed on what life there was, but mostly…mostly I wanted the darkness to end. I may have spent years there or decades just staring at the light.”
Cassidy had gone slack-jawed, unable to utter a sound, drowning in the terror of being trapped in an alien world—alone—and only wanting it to end. Not unlike her present situation.
“Eventually, I regained the will to keep going, and when I found land at last, I would have crawled ashore in the middle of the day if the sun had allowed it. Of course, I traded one hell for another. I found nothing but sand in every direction.” He paused, losing himself in those memories for so long, she wondered if he had forgotten about her, and not minding if he had. Eventually, he said, “I could travel a little faster there. Much faster after I followed the smell of water and found a Bedouin caravan camped at an oasis.”
She sucked in a breath. No need to ask what happened to them. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because you asked. Because it has never been told before, and…because my chosen one chose to share his tale with you. Now you have heard mine.”
“And I’m ever so grateful you shared it in words,” she said. Had he made her relive those experiences, she might have gone mad. “I’m impressed that you’re living on a boat, given that history.”
“The sea has always been my home. But there are precautions; I do not intend to dwell on its floor again.”
She thought for a moment before speaking. “It’s not the physical darkness you want to end now, is it?”
This time, he replied silently, flooding her with a longing so ardent it made her eyes sting with tears.
Know me. Accept me. Love me.
These were all that mattered to him—everything this timeless man asked of Dominique—to vanquish unimaginable loneliness. Forever.
