Brimstone By Callie Hart - 41

“SHE DIDN’T EVEN try to find Ren.”

Sunlight dappled the grass, spearing through the canopy of the trees. Through the small window created by the branches overhead, a bird circled, little more than a black speck against the cerulean sky. The thick, warm air hummed with the drone of some winged insect. Fisher stalked barefoot through the grass, viciously stripping the leaves from a stick he’d found on the ground and spitting out a litany of curse words in Old Fae that I could tell were highly offensive, even though I had no idea what he was saying.

I hugged my knees to my chest, relishing the feel of the sun on my bare arms. We had both been so tired when we’d passed out earlier that I’d assumed neither of us would dream, but here we were in Ballard. Fisher had explained that this was one of his favorite places to come when he was little. The clearing was small, skirted by forest on three sides and bounded by a rushing stream on the other. Silver fish glimmered like knives in the water, battling against the current.

I wound the blade of grass I’d been fiddling with around my index finger, trying to find some order in my thoughts. It was difficult to concentrate in the dreams sometimes. It was as though I was missing information, and I knew I was missing it, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out what I didn’t know.

Most people’s hair lightened a little in the sunlight, throwing a little red or chocolate, but not Kingfisher’s. His hair looked blacker than ever as the light beat down on him. His shoulder-length waves flicked up around his ears, making way for their pointed tips. What a strange thing he was. He was a winter creature. He’d said so himself. All pale skin, wintergreen eyes, and shadows. He seemed the most himself when there were snowflakes dusting his shoulders and his cheeks were flushed from the cold. But he was a different version of himself here, too. He belonged here just as much as at Cahlish or on the banks of the Darn. Ballard suited him. There was something about seeing him with bare feet and his shirt open to his stomach, displaying his roving ink . . .

His eyes glowed with rage as he turned and pointed his stick at me. “It would have taken her five minutes. Five minutes !” He stabbed the stick in the air, using it to punctuate his words. “And yet look at where we are. Ammontraíeth is a fucking graveyard, Tal is half dead, I have a witch and Zovena locked in separate bedrooms at the estate, and we still don’t know where Renfis is!”

“You’re cutting a new trail in the grass over there,” I told him.

“And! And! ” He spun and hurled the stick into the river. “You have another rune, and we have no idea what this one is!”

The third rune had shown up when I’d touched Tal’s chest. I hadn’t meant to walk into that burning bedroom. Hadn’t meant to touch the male’s marked chest. Something had pulled me forward, unbidden, with a sense of urgency I had been powerless to ignore. My body hadn’t been my own. That had been a terrifying experience, and I certainly didn’t want it repeated, but I had helped Tal as a result of it. More than helped him. According to the others, I’d saved him and prevented a portal to hell from consuming Cahlish. I couldn’t be mad about that, even if none of us understood how it had happened.

I held out my hand to Fisher, wriggling my fingers. “Can you come here, please?”

He clenched his jaw, eyeing me suspiciously. “If I come over there, I can’t pace,” he said.

“Really?” I pretended to look shocked. “Oh, no .”

“If I come over there, I’ll stop being mad at Iseabail.”

I waggled my fingers even harder. “Will being mad at her get you anywhere right now?” He gave me a deadpan look that would have made me laugh had the past day not been one of the shittiest I’d ever lived through. “Can you please just come here and hold me?”

That did it. His hands fell limp to his sides, his eyes burning into me for a second before he finally padded toward me across the grass. A second later, he was sitting cross-legged in front of me, reaching for me; he pulled me into his lap so that I was facing him, guiding my legs so that they were wrapped around his waist. His hands rested against the underside of my thighs, his thumbs working out the knots below my hips as he looked up at me.

“You just asked me to hold you,” he said softly.

“I did.”

“Have you ever asked anyone else to do that?”

I shook my head, throwing my arms over his shoulders, then burying my face in the crook of his neck. “No. And if you tell anyone I asked you to, I will vehemently deny it.”

He laughed, deep and low. “Out of the two of us, only one of us can’t lie, Osha. I think people will know who to believe.”

“Godscursed Firinn Stone.”

His laughter reverberated through his chest and into me. Such a comforting feeling. He stroked his hand over my hair, smoothing it down my back. He’d never said so, but he liked stroking my hair. I didn’t know why. I’d never felt like asking him, either. It was a reassuring touch. It calmed me more than anything else could. “So,” he whispered. “Do you want to talk about the fact that there’s a cure for the blood curse again?”

And just like that, my calm went up in smoke.

“Not really, no,” I mumbled into his chest.

He had to lean back and duck down before he could find my eyes. “Why not? Why are you hiding from me?”

“I’m not hiding. I’m processing .” I groaned, pushing away from his chest and flopping back into the grass, throwing my hands up over my head. I was still technically sitting in Fisher’s lap. Kind of. My legs were definitely still wrapped around his waist.

Fisher raised both eyebrows, looking down at me, amusement playing over his features. My shirt had ridden up. His gaze trailed over my lower stomach, over the patch of bare skin I was now showing, a tiny smile lifting the corners of his mouth. He moved casually, resting his hands there, right where he was looking, his calloused palms rough against my skin, and I couldn’t resist.

“What’s that look on your face, Kingfisher?”

His eyebrows inched higher. “Look? There’s a look ?”

I nodded, the grass rustling around my ears. “There’s a look.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He shrugged, looking off toward the river. “My mate’s ass is rubbing up against my cock, and she’s stretched out in front of me, her hip bones showing—”

“You like my hip bones?”

He trailed his fingers over them without looking, then moved quickly, wrapping his hands around my waist and digging his fingers firmly into my skin. “I love your hip bones,” he corrected. “I love the way your breasts look right now, straining against your shirt like that. If there’s a look , it’s because I’m horribly distracted by you, and I’m trying to talk about very serious things.”

Horribly distracted? I liked the sound of that. Slowly, I wriggled my ass, shimmying so that my shirt rode up a little higher. “I don’t want to talk about very serious things .” I emphasized the words.

His eyes snagged on my stomach again, moving as slow as a glacier as they traveled higher, toward my chest. “I would have thought you’d be excited about the possibility of becoming Fae,” he said.

“I would be. I am . But . . .” I hooked my thumbs into my pockets and pulled, tugging my pants down a little lower over my hips. They were scandalously low now, bordering on inappropriate.

Fisher gave me an open-mouthed smile, canines on full display, as he slowly shook his head. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“I’m not doing anything,” I lied.

He scoffed at that. “Do you think . . .” He ran his fingers lightly up my side. “That this is the first time . . .” He caught his bottom lip between his teeth and bit down when I shivered. “A beautiful female . . .” His hand slipped up, inside my shirt and trailed it up my rib cage. “Has tried to seduce me?” He pinched my nipple, rolling it savagely as he leaned into the word seduce .

I hissed through my teeth, bucking against him at the bright stab of pain that fired down my body and settled between my legs.

Fisher’s eyes flared, the tattoos at his throat swirling as they came to life beneath his skin. “Are you trying to lead me astray?” he asked.

“Only a little.”

“Only a little?”

“Mm.” I arched my hips again, angling my ass down, rolling my hips a little, and Fisher’s eyelids shuttered.

“Okay. Only a little. I’ll let you lead me astray only a little if you answer the question properly.”

“There was a question?” I teased.

“Tell me,” he rumbled. “Why isn’t this good news? Regardless of how much I disapprove of Iseabail’s methods, there are no high bloods in Ammontraíeth anymore. You don’t have to be a high blood anymore.”

Gods alive. I wasn’t going to get my way if I didn’t give him what he wanted first, was I? But this topic felt fragile, too delicate to navigate just yet. I breathed deep and gave him the truth, even though it felt like bad luck to do so. “Because what if it doesn’t work on me? I’m not a full vampire, am I? What if it kills me?”

“It isn’t going to kill you,” Fisher said, squeezing my breast. His other hand worked to unfasten my pants.

I closed my eyes, processing what he was about to do. “What if . . .”

“What if?” he whispered.

“What if I don’t die? What if it makes me human again? Whatever is in those vials made Tal and the high bloods revert to their original state. What’s to say it wouldn’t revert me back to mine?”

Fisher’s expression remained steady, as if what I’d said wasn’t terrifying at all. “Then you go back to being human,” he said.

“And what would happen when I get old and die?”

He shrugged. “Then you get old, and you die.”

“And you’d just—just—” I couldn’t even say it. He would do what he’d always done. He would help the people of Yvelia, and fight against the likes of Belikon and whoever else might pose a threat to those he loved, and I would want him to. I wouldn’t want him to just give up because I was gone, but—

“I would go with you, Osha.” He spoke as if I were insane to think he would do anything else.

My heart squeezed tight as a fist in my chest. He was serious—I saw it in his eyes—and he wasn’t slightly fazed about the prospect. “I’m young in the eyes of this place,” he said. “And yes, there are plenty of things I still want to see and experience in this realm. But I wouldn’t want to see any of it without you .”

“Fisher, it isn’t that simple .”

He crooked his head to one side. “Isn’t it?” he asked softly. “It seems very simple to me. Wouldn’t you want to come and spend the afterlife with me if I died?”

“Of course I would!”

“Then let my love be equal to yours.” He spoke with a tenderness that made tears prick my eyes.

“But what if there is no afterlife?”

He smiled sadly, letting his head hang for a second. When he looked back at me, his expression was all affectionate frustration. “Then there isn’t,” he answered. “There is only nothing. And that will still be better than being here without you.”

“Stop. Stop talking.” I cuffed my eyes with the back of my hands. “You’re going to make me cry.”

“You’re already crying,” he whispered. “Come on. Come back up here. I need you.”

I need you.

Words I had never thought I’d hear from him. Fisher had been nothing short of vile to me when he’d brought me through the quicksilver into this realm. He had been cold and aggressive, and I had hated him with ninety-nine percent of my heart.

But the one percent? That had already been his. And now all of it was his, and he was holding on to me like I was the only thing that mattered in his entire fucking universe.

Need still pulsed in the pit of my stomach, but it had shifted into something more now. Something deeper. I didn’t just want his body. I needed his mind and his soul. I needed for time to stand still so we could stay here, where nothing could disturb our peace, and we could just live .

And in that moment, I would have been selfish. If we’d been able to stay in Ballard and lie in the grass and hold each other forever, I would have done it.

But all dreams had to come to an end.

I flinched, stomach rolling, as I made my way to the forge. The sun wasn’t fully up yet, but it was already wreaking havoc on my body. I shouldn’t have been awake. By all rights, I should have passed out about an hour ago, but I’d only just woken up. My body clock was upside down, and I didn’t even know where I was anymore.

“Hey. Where are you headed in such a hurry?” Carrion was coming the other way down the hallway. His hair was sticking up all over the place, and there was a stack of books in his hands. His shirt was unbelievably rumpled.

“You haven’t been to bed yet, have you?” I kept walking, which meant that, obviously, Carrion performed an about-face and started walking with me, back the way he’d come.

“I have not,” he confirmed.

“Aren’t you tired? How the hell are you running on so little sleep?”

Carrion waved off my concern. “Oh, y’know. Centuries of debauchery and general delinquency. Hey, seriously, where are you going? I could use your help with something.”

The last time Carrion had said this to me, he’d coerced me into helping break into one of Madra’s food stores. At least, that’s what he’d told me we were breaking into. The building in the Hub had turned out to be a haberdashery; Carrion had only wanted me to act as a distraction so he could steal a bolt of fabric that the owner had refused to sell him. I’d been chased through the city by two guardians and had spent nine hours hiding in a sweltering attic space as a result, and . . . anyway, the point was that nothing good ever happened when Carrion said he needed my help.

“Whatever it is, the answer’s no,” I told him.

“What? Oh, come on! There’s no need to be like that , Fane.”

“I’m going to speak to Iseabail about what happened yesterday. I need to know more about what she did and how the cure affects people—”

“That sounds more like a Fisher thing.”

Gods, he was exasperating. “It’s a me thing, Carrion.” I pointed at myself. “ I’m the half vampire. It was my court that was affected.”

“Whoa! When did your veins turn silver?” He tried to grab my wrist to get a better look, nearly dropping his books in the process. “For that matter, we haven’t spoken about the new tricks you can do now. That Alchimeran shield you lit up when you were fighting those guards was pretty fucking cool. What were all those icons around the outside of it?”

“I don’t know, Carrion. I’m still trying to figure that out. They’re probably other elements of threads of magic I might be able to control one day.”

“Sinners.” He whistled. “That’s a whole lot of potential power. Do you think you’ll be able to turn invisible at some point? If I could have access to magic, I would definitely opt for invisibility.”

“I’d love to pretend I didn’t know why you’d pick that, Carrion, but sadly I know you too well. Look, Fisher’s checking in with Tal and Foley. I have a bunch of things to take care of before heading back to Ammontraíeth, and I have no idea where my brother is. What do you need, exactly?”

Carrion hoisted books in his hands, adjusting the stack so that he had a better grip on them. “Well, if you’re busy . . .”

I stopped walking and faced him. “Can you please just spit it out?”

“You’re going to help me, then?”

“No, I’m going to find out what it is you’re up to so I can gauge whether I need to put a stop to it. And then I’m going to decide whether I’ll help you.”

“You are so untrusting,” he muttered. “Whatever. I need you to come with me.”

“And then?”

“And then I need you to tell me if I’m going crazy.”

“Are you planning on setting fire to anything?” I demanded.

“No.”

“Blowing anything up?”

Carrion made a face. “I haven’t blown up a single thing since I’ve been here.”

I folded my arms across my chest.

The smuggler rolled his eyes. “All right. No, I am not going to blow anything up.”

Letting out a deep sigh, I threw up my hands in defeat. “Fine. You’ve got me for ten minutes.”

“Careful, sunshine,” he said, grinning. “The things I could do to you in ten minutes. Whoa, wai—wait! Ow! That hurt! I’m joking, I’m joking ! I’m gonna drop my books!”

I didn’t elbow him a second time. Instead, I took the top three books from the stack he was carrying and gave him a half-amused look. “You just love flirting with danger, don’t you?”

“Ahh, you know me.” He winked at me suggestively. “I’ll flirt with most things, given half a chance.”

When we’d first arrived in Cahlish, Carrion and I had woken in the same room—a huge room, granted, with four large beds in it. There was only one bed in that room now, and Carrion had well and truly made the space his own. There were shelves with a multitude of books. A chaise by one of the windows. There had already been a wardrobe here. Now there were two , though given the wrinkled clothes discarded in piles across the room, Carrion didn’t appear to be using either of them. The windows were fogged up with condensation, probably due to the extraordinary number of potted plants he’d managed to cram inside the room. The place resembled . . . well, I didn’t know what it resembled, actually. I’d never seen anything like it before.

“What the hell have you been up to in here, Swift? Have you stolen all this stuff?”

“What? No! How can I have stolen it if it’s all under the same roof? I’ve only relocated it. Totally different.”

“Uh-huh.” I spun around, taking it all in. There were drawings tacked to the walls, and numerous half-full bottles of whiskey sitting on the windowsill. He’d definitely stolen those . A muddy trowel on the floor by the foot of his bed. A trail of dirty paw prints led from the bed, across the floor, toward one of the wardrobes.

I heard the plaintive whine before I pieced what I was seeing together . . . but then it hit me.

I stormed across the room and ripped open the wardrobe door, and there was Onyx, curled up into a ball in a thick green blanket at the bottom of the wardrobe.

“Carrion! You shut him in the wardrobe ?”

“No. He goes in there to sleep sometimes! The wind must have blown the door shut on him.”

The wind. A likely story. Still, I knew when Carrion was lying most of the time and he didn’t appear to be doing so now. Onyx stretched, his pink tongue curling as he yawned, then he hopped sleepily out of the nest he’d made for himself and looked up at me expectantly, as if to say, Okay, what are we doing?

I scratched the back of the fox’s neck, giving the very same look to Carrion. “You wanted my opinion?” I reminded him. “I came here to tell you if you’re going crazy, remember?”

“I remember,” he said in a high-pitched, defensive tone. “Come look at this.” He went to the closest window and pointed at the sill.

With Onyx on my heels, closer than my shadow, I went to see what the fuss was about. “Why do you have all of these books here, anyway?” I muttered. “You can read in the library.”

“Not naked, I can’t.”

“You shouldn’t be reading these naked . It’s not sanitary —”

“Relax. I’m joking. I’m reading them here because I don’t want to get in anyone’s way. And besides. It’s private. I’m researching.”

“Researching what?”

“Ahh, stuff. Y’know, Yvelian stuff. Court stuff.” He shrugged awkwardly.

“As in, Winter Court histories? And the roles and responsibilities of, say . . . a king ?”

Carrion’s cheeks flamed. “Maybe. Don’t make a big deal out of it. And don’t tell anyone. I haven’t changed my mind or anything yet. I’m just . . . researching.”

“Carrion, this is a big deal. Imagine what would have happened if there had been someone of royal blood to stand against Madra. The people would have . . . they’d . . .” My train of thought abandoned me. I was staring at the plant in the little blue pot sitting on the windowsill. Its leaves were glossy and rich, deep green. White flowers bloomed all over it, tiny and shaped like little flutes, their petals curling up at the ends. I watched as more of them seemed to grow, their petals forming and turning from green to white right before my eyes.

“See, this is why I didn’t tell you. You’re getting way ahead of yourself. I’m just researching. I don’t even know how I’d try to reclaim my throne. I don’t—” He shook his head violently. “It doesn’t even feel right calling it my throne. I’m just thinking that . . .”

“Carrion,” I whispered.

The more he spoke, the more the plant next to him on the sill flowered. New shoots formed as he rambled, and those shoots became branches.

“. . . and even if I did want to take back the Winter Court, how would that even work? Would I have to challenge Belikon to a duel or something? Because that’s not happening. And there are five million other things to consider—”

“Carrion?”

“—I’m not a fucking duelist , Saeris. That evil bastard would kill me in a heartbeat—”

“Carrion!”

He ceased his tirade and threw his hands in the air. “What?”

“Are you seeing this?” I pointed at the plant. It was twice the size it had been a minute ago and it was covered in those tiny white blooms. “The plant . . . it’s growing like crazy.”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s what I was trying to show you. They all keep doing that. I started collecting these plants yesterday. They were just little cuttings, or seeds I planted, and now, well . . .” He gestured to the veritable garden in his bedroom. He hurried to the bed and picked up an open book from his bedside table, quickly bringing it back to show me. “Look here,” he said tapping the page. These leaves are the same, right?” The illustration in the book was identical to the leaves on the plant in the blue pot. I studied both closely before nodding.

“Looks like it.”

He snapped the book closed. “This plant isn’t even supposed to flower ,” he said. “It releases spores once every ten years instead. But those . . . those are flowers, right? And they keep blooming every time I speak, don’t they? I’m not losing my mind?”

Even as he said it, another cluster of the little white flowers grew and bloomed, turning green to white. “No, Carrion. You are not losing your mind. That’s exactly what’s happening.”

“Do you suppose that’s normal?”

I was about to answer him, to ask him what exactly was normal anymore, but before I could open my mouth, the foundations of the estate began to shake. “What in all five hells?” I gasped.

Carrion’s look of confusion matched my own, as he looked out of the window and pointed. “There. In the distance. Coming from the trees,” he said.

And indeed there they were. My heart surged like a piston at sight of the small, dark shapes of figures emerging from the forest. Not just tens of them. Not even hundreds, but thousands .

“Holy fucking shit.” Swift whistled under his breath. “Is that . . .?”

The horde? That’s what he was thinking. What I was too afraid to ask out loud, too. But no. As the figures gathered at the tree line, forming into ranks, I saw that it wasn’t an army of feeders.

It was the warriors from Irrín.

They had abandoned their temporary camp and marched on Cahlish, ten thousand strong, and Lorreth of the Broken Spire rode at their head.