“It looks worn. You need a new one.”
“Works as well as any other.”
I found myself grinning at him. I did not like the fact that I owed him for the webbing, and his flat stare still gave me the distinct discomfort of conversing with a corpse, but I could not deny the way I was warming to him, ever so slightly.
He did not return the expression.
“Do the Warlords of Riverdark smile?” I asked. If I’d ever met another from that world, I could not recall it.
“They do,” Aeshyr answered. “I don’t.”
Without another word, he hurtled upward into the sky with more speed and force than those skeletal wings should have been capable of. The sky turned to stone, he opened his door with a vicious crack, and then he was gone.
Blast. I wouldn’t have minded asking him a few more questions. But it seemed that Aeshyr was finished answering them.
I stared up at the fading remnants of his sky door, stone dissipating into bright blue clarity.
For a long moment, my mind was blank. The river motionless.
And then, the full force of his words crashed over me like a mighty wave.
Suvi was my mate. Mine in every conceivable way. She’d led me out of the darkness, and now she would share her life with me. And I would tie mine to hers.
The relief at that was thick. Palpable. And the relief was not about the fact that mating Suvi presented a permanent cure for the darkness. The mate madness.
The relief was that, even once permanently cured, I would not have to give her up. She was my mate and I would keep her. It was my right and it was the only thing that made sense. I no longer entertained questions about whether I’d be willing to let her go if I no longer needed her as an antidote.
I already knew I was not willing.
Now I understood why.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Suvi
Skallagrim couldn’t have been gone for more than half an hour, but it was the longest he’d been away from me for... well, this entire time. I tried to appreciate how nice it was to have some alone time. True alone time (as long as you ignored the two guards outside the door, which was currently closed.) But after five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, anxiety started to gnaw at me. Everything I knew about Skallagrim had shown me that he was basically a tank in dragonish alien form. I doubted anything could hurt him out there. So I wasn’t worried, exactly. But there was discomfort. Discomfort at not knowing where he’d gotten to. I couldn’t tell whether it was some messed-up codependence I was forming, a toxic attachment based on the fact that he was the only one in this entire world who understood me when I spoke...
Or if I actually missed him.
I wasn’t sure which option said worse things about the state of my mental health, to be honest.
But whatever it was, whatever the reason, the longer he was gone from the room, the more fidgety I got, until I was pacing, warming up for the body-burning, mind-numbing repetitiveness of doing hockey drills. I hadn’t done hockey drills in years, but I fell into the old muscle memory like it was nothing at all. I’d started building up a little bit of muscle again, maybe even more muscle than I’d had before when I spent all day doing mandated research for the military on the ship. I’d regained some weight in my recovery, too, which I was grateful for. Getting back my strength and maintaining the familiar folds and curves of my body made me feel much more like myself. And being in an alien world, that was a precious thing.
I was so far from everyone I’d ever known.
But at least I could recognize myself.
I was just starting to work up a sweat doing some lunges when Skallagrim returned, the door opening then closing with a bang so loud I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Panting, half from the surprise and half from the exercise, I looked over at him.
Something seemed... off. He was different from before. We’d developed a somewhat easy (or perhaps not easy, but unavoidable due to proximity) intimacy being together nearly non-stop for more than a month. But that feeling suddenly went cold and vanished. It was as if his being out of the room for thirty minutes had erased weeks of contact between us. All those endless hours of conversation and bumbling language acquisition, awkwardness and even laughter, vanished.
Hell, the man had even seen me naked. More than once.
But now...
Now he looked at me as if for the very first time.
I fussed with my robe, unsure what to make of his almost ominous silence. And not just silence – distance. Usually, he was within arm’s reach of me at all times, unless one of us was in the adjoining bathroom. But now, he remained where he was, all the way across the room, his back and his hands plastered to the door he’d just shut as if someone had glued him there. He was breathing heavily too, I suddenly noticed, his gleaming green and gold chest heaving beneath the white robe. His eye on me was brighter and more intense than I’d ever seen it, and yet, at the same time, his gaze was incredibly serious. Solemn.
My sweat became a cold one. Because something in his gaze, his expression, reminded me of when Elvi’s doctor told me she wouldn’t make it. A sobering sort of gravity that told me bad news was coming my way, and quickly.
“What happened?” I said, fighting for a steady voice.
Something had changed.
It scared me that I didn’t know what it was.
Because in all the turmoil of recent days, Skallagrim had been my only constant. If something was going on with him, something that would change how things had been, how they were...
If he decided to leave...
No. You don’t need him. You’re a survivor and you will figure this out.
If he decided he didn’t want to be around me anymore, if he had other things to do, if he left me here and never returned me to the ship... Maybe I could stay and find some way to be useful. I understood enough Bohnebregg to at least be able to do something around here. I’d scrub floors if I had to. Perhaps I could help in their gardens. Jolakaia was the only one I’d had much exposure to in this new place, but I liked her well enough. She seemed caring and gave me hope that maybe she would vouch for me even without Skallagrim.
In Skallagrim’s silence, I built up a whole emergency plan about how I’d survive in this world without him. If I couldn’t stay in this specific building, maybe I could find somewhere to go beyond it. When we’d been out in the courtyard area today, I’d seen the buildings beyond – what looked like an entire alien city.
Or I could go back to that abandoned house, if I could find it, anyway. Maybe, just maybe I could hack it on my own out there. Catch fish in the river. Start a small Bohnebregg veggie farm. I was a botanist for fuck’s sake, and even if my training had been mostly restricted to Earth plants, surely I could figure out some way to feed myself without my big, scaly babysitter who currently stared at me like he’d never seen me before in his life.
When Skallagrim finally did answer, it took so long that I’d forgotten I’d even asked a question.
“I talked to Aeshyr.”
I shivered. Aeshyr. That was what Jolakaia had called that other winged being who’d come from the sky. The creepy one. Despite the wings, the glowy bits of skin, and the ability to apparently travel between worlds the way Skallagrim did, Aeshyr looked completely different from Skallagrim.