Page 61 of Snag
“The gryphon went dormant,” she prompts. “After you watched me die?”
“I didn’t know the gryphon part then, at seventeen. But yes.” I lean forward again, setting my elbows on my knees, hands clasped. But I force myself to shift slightly closer to Zaya. Now is not the time to shut down. I’m making too big a deal about all of this. I push through. “On your twenty-first birthday … I …” I rub my thumb over the scar on the meat of my thumb. “I decided I needed to … move on …”
“That was a long time to wait, Rought,” Zaya says, like the fucking goddess she is. “Especially for a teenager.”
I huff, then justify myself. Just a little. “The bite mark didn’t fade. It silvered …” I open my palm toward her. “But it didn’t blacken like a rejected bond would, and it didn’t fade like a broken bond.”
She leans forward just enough to take my hand, inspecting the bite mark but not touching it. Thankfully, because I already know that would be far too distracting.
“I was … severely hurt. It took me about six months to walk without assistance.”
Zaya sighs, pained.
I don’t give her space to interject though. I need to barrel forward now. “Rath will tell you that the only reason he was on his feet earlier was that the dragon saved his fucking life. Not quickly enough to save you as well, but …” I swallow that part of the story down. Zaya doesn’t want to hear about that yet. “Anyway … I went to school, took online courses, got into the tech thing. I was already into cars.”
“The gold Camaro coupe you restored,” she murmurs with a hint of contentment. Maybe she’s pleased that she already knows that little bit about me?
“Right.” I take a breath. “I patched into the Outcast MC at eighteen. Too young, but I think my uncle, the Outcast, was worried. I figured out pretty quickly that I had to hide it. But he saw, I think. Or felt it, maybe. The void … the need to follow you into it … I … couldn’t do that …”
“Of course not. For your family.”
“No, Zaya.” I look at her. “Because the bite mark hadn’t faded. Everyone said it would fade in time. I waited, part of me desperately hoping it wouldn’t. Part of me hoping to just be released from it. But Rath, Reck, they were convinced that …”
“I was dead. That was the logical conclusion.”
I huff again. At her logic. It was never logical between us. It was friendship, then passion. A deep abiding love.
“I was … living in that void too,” she confesses quietly. “Partly in it, maybe. But I didn’t know it.”
Grief shudders through me. I rest my bowed head in my hands and simply weather it. “That’s done now,” I croak.
“Yes,” she echoes, as if testing out the idea. “That’s done now.”
I take a deep breath. I’m laboring the point, trying to come at it around the edges so I don’t have to reveal thecore. “I took off a couple of days before your twenty-first birthday, just got on my bike and rode south. Crossed the California border, tried to get arrested. Or better yet, beaten down or even killed, for some petty fucking shit …”
“Unsuccessfully?” she asks playfully. “You weren’t trying very hard.”
I snort an involuntary laugh. “On your birthday, I sought out this underground shifter club on the outskirts of San Francisco, took every drug and drink offered to me. Then followed a girl … a woman … wolf shifter out back …” I take a deep breath, glancing over to see if Zaya is still with me.
“Do you think I didn’t have sex with anyone in the last thirteen years?” she says, matter-of-fact about it.
I blow out another breath, focusing on my hands again. On the bite mark. “I thought that if I could be intimate with someone, even just to get off … I picked someone your opposite in every way, light-blond curly hair, deeply tanned skin. Tattoos. Brown eyes. She wanted to kiss, but I … couldn’t. But I could … touch her. If I kept my eyes open. That was okay. She got off on my fingers, then dropped to her knees. And that was okay too. But I couldn’t stay hard. She was …” I laugh hollowly. “She was sweet about it. She blamed all the shit that was in my system and asked me back to her place to sober up. I can’t even remember her name. Maybe I never knew it. I told her I’d get my bike and meet her around front. She left to tell her friends or go to the bathroom. I really have no idea.”
I finally look over to meet Zaya’s gaze. Not a hint of judgement in her eyes. “I’d heard the train coming. Even the light rail track they have in California has this buzz to it when the train is near. I took off my cut, left it with my bike. I climbed onto the tracks. They’re above ground eventhrough the less populated areas. I watched the train coming.”
Still holding my gaze, Zaya takes a breath. I watch her chest rise, then fall.
“I … those trains are automated, so I was careful to stay out of sensor range until it was too late. I …”
My chest feels as though it’s cracking open. Weirdly painful tears flood my eyes.
“I couldn’t exist without you. I knew … I knew you were waiting for me in the aether. That’s why the bite hadn’t faded.” I take a shuddering breath. “I timed it perfectly …”
Silence settles between us.
Zaya smooths her thumb over the bite mark on my hand. “And then …”
“And then the gryphon tore through me, from me. And I woke up three days later on the beach, as close as I could get to the boundary wards keeping me from the Gage estate without alerting anyone.”
