Page 37 of Of Flame and Fury

Kel chewed the inside of her cheek. Though she’d loved those stories, they weren’t the real reason she’d latched so tightly onto Savita—at least, not in recent years. Something about Savita’s immortality made Kel feel safe in a way that nothing else could. No matter what happened to her family, her friends, even Cendor, phoenixes—Savita—would always remain.

Sometimes it felt like death trailed after Kel, a second shadow. Savita was the only thing she couldn’t get killed.

Coup laughed, oblivious to Kel’s half-truth. “My mom told me the same stories. She wasn’t from Cendor, but her parents had told her stories about Ryker and Deja. That’s why she came here when she fled.”

Kel frowned. “Fled?”

Though Coup remained still, gliding his hand along Savita, his voice was sharper when he said, “My father wasn’t a good man. She escaped the continent not long after I was born. Bekn told me once she’d fled to Cendor because of its reputation. She didn’t think he’d follow her here.”

Coup shrugged, though the movement looked forced. “It worked. She never heard from him again.”

The smallest sliver of guilt wormed through Kel, crawling between her ribs. Whatever she’d assumed of his childhood—it hadn’t been that.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” she said, softly.

“I’m sorry about your father,” Coup replied. “And I’m sorry for what I said on the train. I just—”

“It’s okay,” she said, crossing her legs. “I get it.”

She hadn’t realized it was true until she’d said it. Coup’s words on the train had hurt, but she also knew what it was like to think you’d come to terms with something. To have that delusion yanked away with no notice.

Memories flashed behind her eyes in painful starbursts. She remembered the anger that had blazed through her after her father’s death, the way Dira and Kel had lashed at each other night after night.

Savita ruffled her wings and lifted her head. Coup shifted toward Kel as Savita rose to her feet. Copper flames flickered along her back as she scraped her talons twice against the ground. A moment later, she catapulted into the air, stirring a dust storm.

Kel and Coup coughed. Savita’s heat lingered, thickening the air into hot syrup and tangling with the strange, sudden tension of their confessions. Kel rolled up her sleeves and Coup removed his jacket, placing it on the dirt to Kel’s left. Kel didn’t know where Sav’s heat ended and Coup’s own furnace-like warmth began. His dark shirt bunched around his shoulders, tanned arms lined with lean muscles.

Kel shook her head as Coup’s gaze drifted to her lap. “What’s this?”

She slammed her notebook shut. “Nothing, it’s—”

Coup wrestled the book from her lap, his heat making her flush almost as much as Savita’s. She tried to stave off his attack with little success, managing to swat at his ear before he skipped out of reach, flipping through her inked pages.

A minute later, his laughter filled the enclosure. “Twenty pages?You wrotetwentypages on how Cristo has to care for Savita?”

Kel launched to her feet and snatched back the notebook. “Eighteenpages. I just wrote some ideas for Savita’s training.”

“More likedemands,” Coup scoffed. “Why am I surprised thatyou assume you know more about phoenix care than a billionaire philanthropist who’s rehoused dozens of phoenixes?”

“Leave, then, if you’re just going to mock me,” she growled. She still had plenty of thoughts to pen. Most of them about the infuriating Warren Coupers.

Savita screeched overhead, her silhouette glowing among the trees.

Coup merely sat to Kel’s left, head tilted toward Savita’s glowing figure. After a few minutes she reopened the notebook and continued writing, trying to ignore his warm presence beside her.

Kel eyed him occasionally, wondering why he was still here. They sat in silence for a while. Shockingly, it wasn’t as unpleasant as she’d expected.

Eventually, Kel’s list of demands turned to scribbles of Savita, soaring across her hastily sketched new enclosure. Kel ran her nails over the paper and imagined her sketch coming to life, imagined feeling Savita’s flames beneath her ungloved fingers for the first time.

As Kel flipped to a new page, Coup leaned over and said, “You forgot to draw her collar.”

Kel’s hand stilled. “Oh. Right.”

Sleep finally starting to slow her fingers, she hastily added a narrow halo around Savita’s neck.

Kel’s father’s death had made it clear to her that phoenixes needed to be collared, for theirs and others’ safety. It kept people from being burned, mauled, eaten, and it helped phoenixes to build homes, free of chronic destruction. And yet, something about the forgotten addition of the sketched collar made Kel’s stomach knot.

After a few minutes of silence, Kel asked, “Do you ever think about what it’d be like if phoenixes weren’t collared?”

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