Page 31 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion
Creature.The certainty of that word from his lips broke my heart.
‘Blackthorn gave his own newborn son over as a decoy – along with my mother’s body once it was done. The boy was a failed attempt to awaken Serus or any of the other princes from beneath the earth.’
A sharp talon of dread clawed its way down my back as I remained in horrified silence.
‘Gideon was the decoy. He was labelled another failed bastard and returned to Blackthorn to ward. Safe in a lord’s house who swore loyalty to a mad king.’ Emrys grimaced.
Gideon was Blackthorn’s child. It was why he looked familiar to that portrait on the stairs.
‘I stole his life.’ Emrys nodded as if seeing that realisation slip across my expression. His smile was cold and self-mocking as he stood abruptly, breaking my hold on him as he turned to the window. Running a hand through his dark hair. Pulling at it as if he could free himself from the burden of his thoughts. ‘I don’t even know where they buried her.’ Such a quiet confession, almost lost to the wind. ‘Blackthorn said he didn’t remember.’
Didn’t remember. As if Emrys’s mother was nothing in that tale. Just another fragment of a myth that didn’t matter to them. My heart broke for the boy who’d asked. For never knowing.
A shudder moved through him, darkness flashing beneath his skin before it settled once more. There was a new tension in his body as I saw that darkness curl beneath his skin, just beyond his shirt’s collar. Marks I’d glimpsed before, only fainter. I told myself it was nothing more than a play of the light.
‘You’ve been repressing it,’ I said. Understanding how easily he could have known I’d been doing the same.
He nodded almost reluctantly, looking down at his own hands in mild disgust. ‘To summon such darkness is to be consumed by its hunger.’
The warning from one of the old texts came so easily from his lips, as if he’d repeated it often.
He shook his head, curling his summoning-stained fingers into fists. ‘I’ve been taking beasam bark since I was twelve. When the summoning began to manifest within me. It was poison at first. Unbearable. But I gathered it was no more than I deserved.’
His words punctured my heart. He was a child.
‘Do you believe that?’ I rose, coming to his side. That he was a monster. Some foul thing from an ancient text, no better than the galmoth in that pit, or the gobrite that had crawled out of that book.
Such a hopeless sound slipped from his lips. ‘I’ve seen what I do, Kat. Blackthorn brought a curse into his house and his family paid the price.’
I shook my head. Knowing he was Verr and yet understanding that part of him was fey too. I shortened the distance between us but he wasn’t finished.
‘Blackthorn used me to try to find more. I found others in the west. Hidden in villages and slums. Verr that had survived the sealing of the earth centuries before. Nothing like me. Settled and hiding amongst the fey. Traders, innkeepers and maids. Normal beings trying to live – mortal-passing, even.’
His words froze me in place. Verr. Amongst us all this time. It didn’t seem real, and yet I knew it was truth from his lips. It could be nothing else.
Serus. That name came again. He may be part Verr … but I was something equally as vicious. Something else that perhaps shouldn’t exist from the destruction I’d wrought and the ancestors before me.
We were two sides of an ancient coin. Two things that should be dead. Too dangerous to exist. Only we’d found our way here.
‘You weren’t the only one with secrets, Emrys,’ I challenged quietly. Reaching for his hand again, seeing the darkness beneath his skin he’d been hiding, muted and fading. Ancient strange marks that belonged pressed between the pages of ancient tomes or deep within my imagination.
How his fingers tangled with my own, still marked by the darkness he’d summoned. That crescent moon at the knuckle that I dragged my fingers over.
I won’t leave you alone to that darkness, Kat.
He hadn’t. I wasn’t alone. It was me who’d left him, sleeping in that bed as I’d wandered into that nightmare and nearly got him torn apart. How ravenously and how he’d screamed out from the agony of it.
‘In that darkness … I forgot my own name.’ My voice broke with those words. Remembering the brush of death’s breath, how close I’d allowed it to come. ‘But I remembered yours, Emrys.’
Even in the depths of my pain I remembered his name.
That he was there. Waiting. That he would call me back.
‘You asked me to stay,’ I whispered, knowing I’d made my choice in the pit. His hands captured my face, thumbs wiping away my tears. Breath unsteady with restraint, but I tightened my grip on his forearms. Holding him to me.
Knowing it haunted him as it haunted me.
So much had changed but I didn’t want this to change. Not this fragile tangle of threads between us. He touched me as if he couldn’t resist, his fingers brushing along my jaw, the arch of my ear and then the curve of my throat. As if the flutter of my pulse against his fingers was the most important thing in the world.
