Page 48 of Tell No Tales
"I'm sorry," he said. "This is stupid. I'm stupid for caring."
"No." Hannah grabbed his chin and stared him down until his tears had fully dried. "There's never anything wrong with caring. Don't let anyone tell you different."
"Fucking Vadim."
Hannah shook their head. "I highly doubt Vadim could have done anything, but if you must blame someone, he's an easy target."
The reproach in their voice made Klaus think, which only made his head hurt worse.
Chapter 12
Vadim
TheWildfire'sburnished wood glistened with condensation. Everywhere Vadim looked, the distressed wood appeared to have survived its namesake, from her mast to the boards of her hull and everywhere in between. He tucked into Yvette's small room in the hold when she opened the door at his knock.
"Felt you coming. Thought this needed a face-to-face?" she asked. She always could raise one black eyebrow higher than the other. Her hair hung like sharp blades on either side of her face, angling upward toward her nape. The bottom half of her head was still shaved to stubble, he noticed when she flipped both sides back behind her ears, a sign she was nervous.
He swallowed and admitted defeat. "I don't know how to communicate with healers."
"It's really fucking easy, Vadim. All you had to do was try."
"Fuck's sake!"
"Fuck's sake!"She copied him to show she could hear him, same as any death weaver.
"I've never communicated with Martiz like this without an open wound."
"That's because Martiz is a fucking asshole."She rolled her head around her neck until it popped twice, once on each side, and then she grinned at him. "You're not so bad. My opinion of you has shifted greatly since we arrived."
"Were you listening to my thoughts?"
"Of course not! You would know."
Even now, Vadim could feel Yvette's presence in his mind, the warm and healing presence that had always made him uncomfortable, mostly because the only healer who had ever invaded his mind like that had been Martiz.
"I'm not invading. You could block me out easily. You could block your little piece of ass, too, if you wanted."
Vadim shook his head as Klaus's words distorted hers."Vadim! I need you!"
Klaus was worried about one of the kittens in the box. Gods. A kitten, of all things. Vadim fucking hated cats, with good reason. One had scratched him from hip to knee when he was a child, leaving his first set of three jagged scars down his right leg. The damn cat had scratched the hell out of him and had the audacity to sweep around his legs afterward, asking for pets until his aunt shooed it away with her broom.
"What do you know about the smallest kitten in the box on deck?" he asked.
"I've tried to heal it." She shrugged. "It's no use. The mother cat shuns it and won't let it feed since I first tried to heal it. The other kittens, too. It's determined to die and won't consent to healing."
He finished his conversation with Klaus, and then did his best to ignore the wall of rage between them. He couldn't deal with Klaus's anger right now, not when he had so many questions for Yvette.
"Did your healing change it somehow?"
She shrugged. "You know how it is. Healing always changes something. Surely, you noticed a change in your loverboy since the spectral weaver healed him."
News traveled fast between pirate ships, or maybe Nola had been listening in for longer than they'd known. "He's resistant to disease." He also seemed far more attracted to Vadim now than he had been when they'd first had a life link. He did his best to keep that thought from Yvette, but she smirked.
"He's a healthy young man, possibly for the first time in his life. He should have healthy appetites, too."
Vadim snorted. "You think any appetite for me is healthy?"
She laughed with him, for once, not at him. She'd laughed at him back at the academy when he hadn't been able to do the simplest healing weaves. Laughing with her now felt good, like he belonged with his extended pirate family, after all.
