Page 132 of By the Orchid and the Owl
Coen laughed dryly, finally turning toward me. “I’ve seen faeries disintegrate on the spot just fromgrazingthe shield. It’s not a physical barrier, Rayna. It’s an anti-power that targets the magic in your blood and strikes.”
I couldn’t bite my tongue.
“Well, maybe if you’d told me more about your immunity and the nature of the shield, I could have come up with a solution long before now. You think I want to stay here, the only… the onlyyou know whaton an island with the Good Council who’d like nothing more than to strip me open and investigate every drop of my blood?”
Within two steps, Coen had dropped his bag and was shoved up against me, his head angled down to meet my own.
“Don’t you ever think I’m going to leave you helpless, Rayna. I’m not going to let hertouchyou. But you have to trust me on this one.”
“I. Can’t. Trust. You,” I ground out, and now our noses were nearly brushing. “You said so yourself, Coen. That’s why we broke up. Because I can’t trust you.”
“Oh, really?” Even now, even in this situation, his near-growl had my knees weak. “I was under the impression that we broke up because you were trying to protect me. By cutting me out so that I wouldn’t stay here on the island, where Dyonisia can get to me.”
I felt my eyebrows shoot up, felt the argument gather in my lungs.
“And no, I didn’t need to read your thoughts to figure that one out,” Coen persisted before I could let it loose on him. “I have your mind memorized like the palm of my own goddamned hand, Rayna. I know you’ll continue fighting tooth and nail for the people you love unless you think you’re holding them back—which you weren’t doing to me, by the way. Because whether we’re officially together or not, whether I’m on this island or not, I’m going to make sure you have the tools and power you need to survive these next four years.”
For a moment, I thought he would kiss me. His lips hovered in the spaces between mine, filling my breathlessness with his own air.
But his eye didn’t even dip to my mouth as I said, “I might not be immune to the shield like you are, but I’m accompanying you and the others to the very edge. You’re going to need a Wild Whisperer to keep the jungle from reporting you to the Good Council.”
I clamped my mouth shut, then—cutting off the shared air between us. After another second’s thought, I side-stepped him and scooped up his fallen bag.
Now it was Coen’s turn to clamp his mouth shut. I had him. He couldn’t argue with that, because it was true. Parts of the junglewouldwitness his escape and tattle to the Wild Whisperers of the Good Council, unless I warded them off.
“Fine,” he said, once again soft and sorrowful and nothing like his usual self. “But just to the shield.”
Fine. I hated that word, but I just turned and led him out his own bedroom door.
In the end, I was glad I’d forced myself to come.
The monkeys were awake far past their bedtime, chittering about the “moon goddess” who had just arrived. Just as we found the hatch buried deep among the ferns, one of them chanted down, “Hey, wanna hear a joke?”
None of the others—Coen, now holding his own bag again, Garvis, Terrin, Sasha, or Sylvie, all weighed down with bags of their own—looked up. To them, the monkey’s question was nothing more than another chirp in the early dusk. Coen grunted as he started to heave the hatch aside, then stopped when the twins rolled their eyes and ushered it upward without lifting an arm.
But I paused and chewed my lip as I met the monkey’s eyes above us.
“Doyouwant to hear a joke?” I challenged it instead.
The others stopped to stare at me.
“Sure,” the monkey replied, pretending to sound indifferent.
“What do you call a five-hundred-pound gorilla with silver on its back and fangs in its mouth?”
“I don’t know. What?” It clutched the branches above it and lowered itself ever so slightly, its black tail curling around a stray limb.
“Nearby,” I hissed.
The monkey shrieked and scrambled deeper into the trees.
It wasn’t my best work ever, not with the stress beating against my ribcage, but I knew that the monkey wouldn’t go hopping from tree to tree prattling about the six humans—or faeries—it had seen sneaking away. It would be warning all the other monkeys about the supposed gorilla in the vicinity.
We lowered ourselves into the Throat.
In there, Terrin lit our way with a floating ball of fire, Coen walked slightly behind me with his hand halfway outstretched as if to catch me if I fell, and I told every spider to leave us. I also formed a vibrating hum in my throat that sent even the most innocent of earthworms wiggling away, until I sensed nothing in the tunnel with us—no life beyond our six beating hearts and pulsing lungs.
No one said anything. We didn’t dare talk, as if the echoes of our voices would fling back up to Dyonisia Reeve, wherever she was right now. Somewhere on campus, according to my spider, preparing to capture my friends as soon as the first bird pierced a song through the morning sky.
