Page 177 of Mother of Death and Dawn

He did not come to my room. When I tried to go to his, guards turned me away.

After several days of this, Meajqa asked me, “What happened between the two of you, anyway?”

After a long pause—I truly was thinking about the question—I answered, helplessly, “I don’t know!”

Meajqa gave me a curious sidelong look and took a long drink of wine.

At first, I was confused. Surely this must be a mistake. Surely something was wrong. Had I done something insulting? Had there been something about what happened between us that had been offensive or repulsive? At night, I would run over those moments again and again, searching for clues. Was that really desire in his voice, or was it anger? What had I missed?

Then, I was hurt.

I had not realized how much I relied on Caduan until he wasn’t there. I didn’tneedhim anymore—not the way I had in the beginning, when I probably would have withered away if he hadn’t been supervising me to make sure I ate and slept and didn’t throw myself off the balcony. But I liked him, and that almost felt worse. I had learned what it was to experience pleasure in someone else’s company, and now I missed it.

I missed him.

The days passed.

And then I grew angry.

Who was he to do this to me? What right did he have to make me feel like this? I had shown him vulnerability that I didn’t even know I was capable of, and he left me trembling alone in the garden. He made me feel something for him and then abandoned me.

He abandoned me just like so many others had. Like every human host that held me, like Maxantarius, like Tisaanah.

This thought infuriated me.

A week later, Meajqa asked me again, “I mean it, I’m now desperately curious—what happened?”

This time, there was no hesitation. “He is a coward,” I snarled.

Meajqa’s eyebrows rose. “Hmm. Sounds as if perhaps he should have read more romance novels,” he said, and took another long drink of wine.

Coward. That was what I told myself when I craved his attention at night. When I missed the sound of his voice.

He is a coward.

You don’t need him anyway.

You don’t want him.

But the worst part was, coward or not, I did.

CHAPTERSIXTY-SIX

MAX

Ididn’t like that Tisaanah and Sammerin had not returned.

All my nerves felt very close to the surface of my skin today, frantic energy clenching my hands and leading my feet to pace back, forth, back, forth around the camp. Brayan and I hadn’t said a word to each other on our walk back from the woods, and we didn’t say a word to each other at camp, either.

And then, when Sammerin and Tisaanah did not return, I thought,What a day for the worst kind of scenarios.It was easy for me to invent terrible things today.

Eventually, I turned to Brayan and announced, “I’m going to look for them.”

“You’ll just make it harder for them to find you when they come back.”

“I don’t care. Something—”

Something isn’t right,I was about to say, when a blood-soaked Sammerin appeared at the camp.

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