Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

When Farrow was gone, I dropped to my knees beside Vale.

“I—I don’t know how to help you. Do you have medicine, or—”

“Burn them first,” he wheezed.

“Not with you like this.”

“Burn. Them.” His gaze slipped to the parted curtains—to the sky. No sign of a god’s anger now, but the longer we waited, the greater chance there was it would come.

I knew what he meant: we don’t have time.

So, reluctantly, I did as he asked. It took longer than I’d hoped. The bodies were heavy. I struggled to drag them far enough from the house to keep the flames from spreading to the building. There were many of them.

By the time I was done, the red cast from the fire doused the entire estate. It was dusk, the sky pink as scar tissue, gritty with smoke. I rushed my work and hurried back into the library the minute I was sure the fire wouldn’t take the house with it. Sooty sweat plastered my shirt to my skin. I was panting. I had worked so, so fast. But when I saw Vale lying there, right where I had left him, I thought, I made a mistake. I should have healed him first.

Still, I breathed a sigh of relief when he turned his head laboriously to look at me.

Did he look a little better? A little?

“Medicine,” I demanded. “Where?”

“Study,” he said, in a thick, scratchy voice. “Third drawer.”

The drawer, of course, was a mess—I could barely get it open for all the clutter. I cursed him for it as I rummaged. I didn’t even know what Obitraen medicine looked like. Finally, at the bottom, I came across several glass bottles. Most held blue-white liquid that glowed faintly. When I touched them, I shivered a little, like the magic was calling to some dark part of myself.

I wasn’t sure if there was a difference between them, so I filled my arms and brought all of them back, dumping them on the coffee table beside Vale.

“Which?”

Vampires did have incredible healing ability. Vale was able to move a little bit now—at least enough to select the bottle he needed. He shot one back like strong alcohol, hissing and cursing.

“Upstairs,” he said.

“You shouldn’t move—”

He glowered at me. “Up. Stairs.”

I rolled my eyes, but managed to get him into his bedchamber, though he leaned heavily on me the whole way. I helped him strip off his bloodstained clothes, conscious of every wince as coarse fabric clung to raw skin. Vale had lit the candles in the room with a wave of his hand when we walked in—the flames were strange and white, and moved a little differently than fire did. They cast silver over his bare flesh, and as I watched him withdraw another glass bottle and tend to the worst of his wounds, a knot formed in my stomach.

I’d come to admire Vale’s form so much—his blood, his body. But now, the blood that I had found so breathtakingly entrancing covered the flesh I had found equally stunning in grotesque smears. A dark, taunting mimicry of everything I’d grown to find so beautiful.

He didn’t want my help, at first. But he was being ridiculous—he couldn’t even reach the worst of his burns. I snatched the medicine from his hands, and after a few minutes of grumbling, he let me take over dabbing the potions onto the wounds of his back and shoulders.

Honestly, I was grateful that he had the energy to argue. And maybe he was grateful that he didn’t have to do much of it.

Nyaxia’s magic must have been powerful, because the healing was miraculous. Still, Vale’s wounds were deep, brutal. The cuts from swords were bad enough, but the sun had inflicted the worst of it. It had been a bright day today. It left seeping, blackened patches over his skin. The potion helped, closing the open patches of skin, but still leaving behind dark purple marks.

It was my fault this had happened.

This thought solidified in my mind fully formed, a single truth.

I should have been more careful. My colleagues at the university, my parents, my sister had always been right about me—my enthusiasm made me careless. I had been so excited about my discoveries—about Vale—that I hadn’t hidden my work. I forgot to be afraid.

A mistake.

“I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen,” I said, quietly, as I worked.

“None of this was your fault, mouse. Do you think this was the first time humans came to my door blaming me for whatever tragedy they faced that decade?” He glanced back at me with a wry smile. “Humans. All the same.”

I hated my own kin in this moment. But not as much as I hated myself.

I moved on to another burn, watching Vale’s skin twitch and burn beneath the silver liquid.

“You should have left,” he said. “I would have survived.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“Your friend wanted you to go with him. More than he expressed, I think.”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter what Farrow wanted me to do.

Then Vale added quietly, in a tone of voice I could not decipher, “He is in love with you.”

My eyes stung.

I couldn’t even deny it. And what good had it ever gotten him?

“It’s just old feelings,” I said. “We were together for a while. But it ended.”

“Why?”

“He wanted more than I could give him.”

A life I couldn’t live. A heart I couldn’t free. A role I couldn’t play.

Vale nodded, as if this made sense to him. We didn’t talk for a long time. I was working on the last of the burns when he finally spoke again.

“I decided to go back to Obitraes.”

My heart stopped. My hand slipped. Just as well, because he turned around, his amber eyes cutting through me.

Why was it suddenly hard to breathe?

“Why did you change your mind?” I asked.

His fingertips ran back and forth over the back of my hand, absentmindedly. His gaze slipped away, to the strange white flames.

“Have you ever been in love?”

My brows leapt. I wasn’t expecting that question. I didn’t know how to answer.

I loved Farrow. He was one of my closest friends. But was I ever in love with him?

Strange that it wasn’t Farrow’s name on my lips as I watched Vale’s serious profile, silhouetted by the white firelight. And I was grateful that he didn’t wait for my answer—or perhaps, heard the truth in the lack of one.

“I had only one great love,” he went on. “The House of Night. I helped build an empire. I shaped it with my blade and blood. I gave my king, my men, and my kingdom my unquestioning and all-consuming devotion. If you have ever loved something that much, you know that there’s no wine sweeter, no drug stronger. And when it fell…”

His throat bobbed. He stared into the fire.

“I was angry for a very long time. I came here to escape the memory of my failure—but then I spent every day dreaming of returning to the House of Night. Dreaming of rebuilding what I had let fall.”

“Then it’s good you’re going back,” I said, my mouth dry.

It’s good, I had to repeat to myself.

Vale needed to leave. He needed to leave to save himself and to save us. He’d murdered an acolyte of the White Pantheon. Maybe Thomassen had been right. Maybe Vale’s presence here—his presence as a tainted child of Nyaxia—did only worsen our fates.

What did it say about me that, despite all of that, the thought of Vale leaving made my soul ache?

I fidgeted with the rag because I needed something to do with my hands. “You must be happy to go home.”

Vale’s gaze turned to me.

“I thought I would be,” he said. “But perhaps they, like your friend, want something I can’t give them. Maybe they want some part of me I have already given to someone else.”

I let my eyes fall down to the bedspread—to my hand pressed against it, and Vale’s atop it, those graceful fingers stroking the shape of the delicate bones at the back of my hand the way a musician stroked the strings of an instrument.

My heart thrummed so loudly in my chest.

And looking away didn’t save me from Vale’s stare, because I could feel his eyes the way one can sense a wolf stalking them in the forest.

Except I wanted to be caught.

The bed shifted as he turned to face me fully. He leaned a little closer. His scent surrounded me.

“Why did you come here,” he asked, “when you realized they’d come for me?”

“Because my work isn’t done.”

A lie. It was as done as it was going to be.

“Look at me, Lilith.”

Vale rarely said my name. The sound cut me down to the bone, shivered and swirled just as it did when he wrote it over the page.

Look at me, my sister had begged.

And I felt just as frightened now, as I forced my eyes to lift, forced myself to meet Vale’s stare.

Once it had me, I was utterly ensnared. I couldn’t hide.

Run, a voice inside me whispered.

Stay, another begged.

As Vale’s fingertips reached for my cheek. Stroked my cheek, my jawbone. Brushed the bridge of my nose. He wore the same expression that he had the day I showed him his blood—the day I realized, for the first time, that the only thing more beautiful than his blood was the expression of amazement on his face.

Tears pricked my eyes.

“You want more than I can give you,” I whispered.

“I can’t imagine that ever being true,” he murmured. “Because I want only you, Lilith. Whatever of you I can have. I’ll take one night. One hour. One minute. Whatever you want to give me. I’ll have it.”

My breath was ragged, choppy. It burned in my chest with all the emotion I realized I could no longer smother.

I had never been enough.

I had never been able to give any of them enough—enough time, enough love. Everyone gave up so much trying to get more from me, and now I did the same for them. From the moment I was old enough to understand my eventual fate, I made every decision knowing this. Knowing that I couldn’t be enough. Knowing that I would wither too fast, like a flower in an early frost.

I didn’t realize how much I had liked that Vale didn’t see that in me until this moment, when I knew that it had to end.

“I’m dying,” I choked out.

I didn’t know why I said it. It didn’t really matter, now, when he was leaving and the gods were damning us and the whole world seemed to be ending.

“I’ve been sick my entire life. Every year I don’t know if it’s the last. I’ve been leaving this world since I was brought into it. No one wants to believe it, but it’s the truth. It always has been. I’m—I can’t stay.”

You’re asking for more than I can give.

His hands had come up to my face. He held me firmly, so I couldn’t look away from him.

I could always see the moment things changed, once they knew—the moment they started grieving me while I was still alive, the moment me standing in front of them stopped being enough.

But his gaze was firm.

“Whatever you wish to give me,” he repeated, slowly, like he wanted to make sure I understood. “I’ll have it.”

I didn’t know that I had been waiting my entire life to hear those words until now.

I wasn’t accustomed to goodbyes. I never thought I would need to be the one to say them. It’s so much easier to be the one who leaves first.

I could leave now and spare myself a goodbye I wasn’t ready for.

But instead, I put my hands on either side of Vale’s face, a mirror of how he held me.

I pulled him close, and I kissed him.