“If you were afraid I’d been kidnapped, why did you tell everyone I was sick?”
A line of thought formed between his eyes. “We checked everyone who’s ever publicly acted against you, like Merton, but I was afraid that—no matter what actually had happened—people would find a way to twist the truth. You were kidnapped because everyone hates you, or you ran away to live with the sylph. I don’t know. Scared people are creative people. They would have come up with something, so if I only said you were sick and no one knew the truth—that you were missing—I could control what people said.”
“Sam.” I tried not to imagine how frightened I’d have been if our positions were reversed. I couldn’t blame him for the way he watched me now. “Sam,” I whispered again, because the only thing I could say was his name.
He pressed his hand over mine, resting on my lap. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as afraid as when I couldn’t find you that night.” His breath was long and shaky. “I’ve been inside every darksoul home, every warehouse and building in both the agricultural and industrial quarters, and every closet in the Councilhouse. I don’t think I slept for more than five minutes at a time.
“When we first met, you asked about the scariest thing I could think of.”
The day had been clear and cold, filled with questions. I hadn’t even known who he was then, just that he pulled strangers from frozen lakes. I wished he could pull me from the frozen shock now. “I remember,” I whispered. “You said not knowing what would happen if you died and didn’t come back. Where would you go? What would you do?” My gut twisted.
“When I couldn’t find you that night, I realized that wasn’t my answer anymore.” He pulled my hand up, placed it over his heart. The beat raced under my fingertips. “If you asked me now, I’d say the scariest thing I can imagine is losing you.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“I wish I could tell you all the things you make me feel. I tried putting them into music, but even that wasn’t strong enough.”
I wanted to ask how he knew, how he could tell the difference between love and infatuation. But I couldn’t force my mouth to form the words, because then he kissed my fingers one at a time and my focus sharpened, narrowed to all the places we touched. Our knees, his hands over my wrist, his lips on my knuckles.
When each finger had a kiss, he turned my hand palm up and cupped it over his cheek. “You’re part of me, part of my existence.” Muscles in his jaw shifted under my fingers. “Everything was dimmer without you.”
If he’d been the one missing, I’d have crawled onto him to keep him from leaving ever again. Even in my imagination, I could feel him beneath me, bones and muscles and the solid presence of him. In my imagination, he lay there beneath me and never left.
I was both relieved and disappointed that he didn’t have the same impulse. Or he had better restraint.
Sighing, he released my hand. “I’m still not sure you won’t vanish if I’m not holding you.” He glanced at my fingers, now curled on my knee. He started to reach again, but hesitated. Maybe he did want to crawl on top of me after all. “But you just got back, and there are so many things we need to do, which means anything I want will wait. And whatever happened to you, it must have been terrible.”
The odor of Meuric’s nest, the blackness with weepers, and Janan’s voice by my ear. My breath came like a stutter.
Sam tucked my damp hair behind my ear. “Can you tell me?”
“You don’t want to know,” I whispered, hating myself for all the terrible things I was about to make him feel. “But it’s important that you do, anyway.”
He waited.
“First, you have to know that for a little while, you knew exactly where I was. You were going to go inside the temple with me.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is. I had a key.” But it was gone now. Had the stranger given it to Deborl? What would they do with it? “We were going to go in together. You insisted, and I didn’t want to go by myself. But Stef spotted you and I had to go in alone, before I lost the chance. It’s just, Janan plays with your memories. You aren’t allowed to know certain things, so you forget them, and you don’t question inconsistencies because none of you notice them.”
“That sounds crazy,” he whispered. “We remember everything, from the very first lifetime.”
“You don’t.” I touched his hand. “You don’t remember everything. And that’s not the only thing.” I told him what Janan did to souls like mine.
19
TRANSFORM