Page 121 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
I slumped, but he caught me before the floor could. Hoisting me up, he cradled me against his chest, staring down at me with shock-wide pupils that actuallyglistened. Maybe it was just the condensation of the mist, but I could have sworn tears were streaking down his cheeks.
He fumbled in his pocket one-handedly and brought a pill to my lips.
“Take this. Just take it and… I’ll fix this. I’ll find a way to fix this.”
His voice snagged on the syllables of that last word. Sleepily, my past self heeded his Mind Manipulating command. I opened my mouth for the pill and swallowed it before slumping back against his chest, my eyes rolling in their sockets.
Steeler backed up against a stalk of bamboo and just held me, rocking my sleeping body against his. He didn’t move from that position for several hours, until bats began to swoop overhead, moths began to flutter around him, and a low growl sprang from the shadows.
You need to put her back before someone wonders where she is.
It was strange to hear Jagaros speak, not through my Wild Whispering magic, but through Steeler’s memories that had dissected his thoughts from the dark.
“I… I can’t,” he breathed, not looking up from my dreaming face to pinpoint the tiger’s lithe form that stalked to a halt before him. “She doesn’t just remember me. She—shehatesme. I saw it in her eyes. Felt it in her mind. I can’t put her back or she’ll just keep thinking of me as a goddamned villain every time I return for her.”
Jagaros chuffed, his eyes gleaming like two moons in the dark.Then be the villain, Coen Steeler. Play the part until you don’t have to anymore, until you can whisk her away for good.That way you’re not confusing her subconscious or pulling her mind in two different directions.
His whiskers twitching, his tail flicking, he looked so much like a protective father figure as he let his slitted pupils flicker toward my sleeping face that a lump knotted in my throat.
When Steeler only continued to rock me, Jagaros repeated,Be the villain—do you understand?
This time, when Steeler looked up, I could see that dark, wicked glimmer lighting up the smoky quartz of his eyes along with the first purplish bruise of a black eye.
“Yes, I understand.”
Good. Because I’m going to make sure she can do more than just throw a few punches at her enemies, so you’d better come prepared next time.
Steeler didn’t wait any longer. Hoisting himself up with me still lolling against him, he whipped us away into his realm of darkness—straight into my Wild Whisperer room. The other girls were all fast asleep in their own beds, but Steeler was so quiet as he lowered me into my own that none of them so much as muttered or stirred.
When he dug into his pocket for a second time, it was to bring out one of those little black pearls that he carefully set on my nightstand: the scene I’d always imagined since the morning I’d woken up to find one next to me.
“Sleep tight, little hurricane.”
His voice was little more than a sigh that might have been a gust of warm air against the windowpane.
Then he was gone.
When the mist of this memory began to replay, Steeler in real time waved it away.
I turned to him, processing the reality that I was no longer that sleeping, helpless girl in his past. I was inhismind now, and I could damn well do more than throw a few punches.
“I wasn’t going to give you the pearl at first,” Steeler said quietly, his head angled down to meet my eyes. “I found one when I was hunting for food a few days after my magic exploded and I landed up near the lighthouse. I kept it with me because it reminded me of the dress you wore when you first came over to the Mind Manipulating house.” A smile lifted up one of his cheeks before a frown dropped it again. “But as soon as I realized how much this whole experience had altered your mind—and how much I would have to keep altering it—I knew I had to give it to you as a way to help your subconscious deal with the repeated memory loss. A way to prove to you that you weren’t crazy, that the holes in your mindwerethere. My hope was that they would be significant to you, but not significant enough for the Good Council to pick up on it and punish you for our repeated meetings.”
I could hardly get my breath to move along in my lungs after seeing all that.
“It—it worked.” I rubbed a hand across my throat, trying to unclog the lump in there. “It helped me keep track of the gaps.”
Among other things. Like how many times I should have driven my knife through his heart by now. But when I thought about my tally, I found something else burning in the background behind that revenge and hatred it had always stood for, too.
Something I didn’t want to confront just yet.
“Rayna,” Steeler began, urgency creeping over his tone, “I know you won’t ever forgive me, but I want to say it anyway. I’m…” He clawed a hand through his hair. “I’m not sorry that I led you to keep believing I’m a monster, because I am. I’m not sorry that I’ve made some messed-up choices to keep you safe, because I’m fuckingmessed up, and I won’t deny that. But Iamsorry that I kept you locked away in my little lair of protection without ever considering the fact that keeping you inthe dark was hurting you more than any outside threat. I’m sorry I didn’t trust that you’re just as formidable as all the things I feared might want to snatch you away.”
I’m learning how to trust the other parts of you that aren’t as soft,he’d told me earlier. Which meant that even though he didn’t think of himself as forgivable, he was still willing to change.
His mouth parted as if he wanted to say something, and I moved before I could think—because in here, within Steeler’s mind, every actionwasa thought.
Taking a step closer, I raised my hands to his face. My thumbs found the tip of his fangs, and I sucked in a breath at the feel of those sharpened points I’d only imagined until now. Ever so slowly, I moved them up along the slopes while the rest of my fingers landed gently on his jawline to anchor myself to him.
