Page 84 of Darkest at Dusk
“Isabella, no—” Panic split him raw and he glanced at the hearth. He would wreck the book. He would fire the wing again. He would damn every name he had begged as a boy if it kept her breathing under his hand.
She turned her head the smallest fraction, her mouth brushing his ear. The voice that threaded out was thin but steadier than his. “Rhys…let me.”
“No.” The word broke in him. “Not you.”
Her eyes shone with tears and with courage, steady and true.
Love. She did not speak the word for it; neither did he. She gave it in the pressure of her hand. He gave it back. He would follow her into the fire, into ruin, into death itself.
“If I let go,” he said, his voice rough, “she takes you. If I hold, she drains you.”
“Don’t let go,” she whispered with all the trust in the world.
Light woke along the grimoire’s brass seam, unfurling from glow to blaze, searing through the dark like a brand holding heat. The split arc found its mate and the newly formed whole sang a note that struck him deep, shivering through his teeth, his bones.
And then he saw them.
For years he had heard only fragments of coughs deep in the walls, sobs woven through floorboards, a lullaby splintered by the wind. Now, he saw them in truth. His mother, her hair braided down her back, eyes alive with recognition as she lifted her face to him. Ned, hand outstretched, lips curved in that sweet grin, two front teeth missing. Will, still a boy just starting to go gangly. They were not shadows, not stretched and hollowed by Catrin’s hunger. They were his. For the first time in over a decade, they were his.
Catrin’s laugh shattered on stone. You see them because of her. Without her, you are nothing. And when I have drunk her dry, you will be nothing again.
Isabella convulsed. Her hand slipped for one beat of his heart. In that beat he saw the life that would remain to him if he lost her: the endless silence of her absence. He would be a husk, a shell, his ribs empty, his breath an echo.
He shouted, a sound that rattled the scorched rafters. He crushed their hands together until bone ground on bone.
“You will not have her,” he said.
Catrin reached. Shadow-hands plunged into Isabella’s breast. Heat ran up his forearms as if those claws held his pulse, too. He shoved his arm between them, useless meat between hunger and the thing that wanted.
“Take me,” he said through his teeth. “Take me.”
You are already mine, cousin. You always were.
Isabella’s fingers crushed his. She found his eyes through smoke and light. “Rhys…do not listen to her lies. Hold fast. Only…hold….”
Truth hit like a post driven clean. He tightened until their joined hands went bloodless, set his brow to hers and felt the shaking and under it, the steadiness that did not break.
The room convulsed. Fire bent inward as if the hearth had a mouth. Catrin went to pieces, shadow tearing from bone, teeth to dust. She clawed and wailed; the pull did not heed her. It heeded the circle they made, and the hinge of Isabella’s will.
“Let them pass,” Isabella whispered, and the air rang as if a bell had answered.
They came. They brushed him like cool breath, his mother’s sleeve, Ned’s small fingers catching his, Will’s thin shoulder resting, a remembered weight against his chest.
Then they were gone.
Catrin’s shriek broke and dropped away. The blaze sank to coal, then ash. The pull slackened. His arms found he was holding a woman again, warm, breathing, living.
He sank with her to the blackened boards. “Isabella—God?—”
Her cheek turned into his shirt. He felt her mouth shape the words against him. “I am here,” she whispered, fragile and defiant at once.
Silence fell, heavy and whole.
Not a pause before the next harm. Not the breath the house took before the whisper began again. Silence like a shore after storm the air clean.
He had forgotten its shape.
He set his face in her hair, lavender and salt and smoke.
