Your bargain is death to their power. If you hold on, you may find your way back again.
The air turned into liquid light. The ground rippled beneath us, then melted away, and we fell down into infinite depths, the fire falling with us in great coruscating streams that swirled and screamed through darkness.
In that darkness waited the Children of Typhon, who laughed and sang as they swirled around us. Just as before, their song left me shuddering in helpless horror. And they devoured us: they crawled under our skin and wept out our eyes, they bubbled into our lungs until we choked on the infinite, icy shadow. They hollowed me out until I was only a senseless parchment husk. But no matter how they shredded away all meaning from me, I was still circled in Lux’s arms and I was his.
The fire roared down upon us. It curled through our hair, then wrapped around our wrists and faces, trying to drag us apart. It seared across my skin, hotter than the Heart of Fire, and yet more painful was how it seared through my mind. The fire burned away my memories, taking back his name and mine, both of my pasts and all of my hopes, the sky and the sparrow and the world itself. I clung to somebody I did not know, could not imagine knowing, but I still knew beyond all doubt that he was mine.
We fell until we had been falling forever and always, and always would continue falling, because nothing existed outside this chaos of fire and shadow.
But I held on to him.
And he held on to me.
I woke with the dazzle of morning sunlight in my eyes, birdsong chattering in my ears. I lay on the hard ground, stiff and cold and sore, but there was somebody beside me.
Lux.
I bolted up and then didn’t dare move. It didn’t seem possible that he was here: the prince I had dreamt about, actually real. The husband I had betrayed, actually rescued. The ghostly prisoner, actually whole. Yet here he lay, half curled on his side, his chest moving softly with each breath. I felt like he would vanish if I moved.
So I sat still and stared at him. He had the same slender, lovely face that I remembered seeing on both men. His skin was shockingly pale, but it was a human pallor, not the ghostly milk-white of Shade. His hair was black, but lanky and tangled as I had never seen Ignifex’s.
The line of his jaw was exactly the same as I remembered kissing. But I had never kissed him, not in this life. And he was not exactly the same man.
Since I had remembered him last night, I hadn’t had time to think of anything except what I had done and the terrible need to set it right. I hadn’t even wondered what he would be like, reunited. Now I could think of nothing else. I had loved Ignifex, and after a fashion, I had loved Shade. They had both more or less loved me in return. But Marcus Valerius Lux? What were we to each other?
His eyes flickered open and focused on me. They were bright blue eyes, the pupils round and completely human, but they were not exactly Shade’s eyes; the way he squinted against the light, his whole face wrinkling into the expression, was exactly like Ignifex.
Then his lips curved in a faint smile and he reached up to touch my face. I caught his hand against my cheek and held it; his fingers were warm and gloriously real, but they felt rougher than I remembered. I held his hand to examine it and saw that his palms and fingertips were covered in a network of thin, pale scars.
“This is real,” he whispered, sitting up.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re real. I thought—I started to think—” He was shaking now. Shame burned through my body, but I pulled him into my arms, and still holding on we rolled back down to lie on the grass.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
For an answer, he only buried his face in the crook of my neck, and we lay still together for a long time, until at last he whispered in my ear, “At least you’re not as shy as when we met.”
I was about to say, Do I need to remind you how much I am used to you?—and then I bolted upright, skin burning. Because I remembered everything we had done together, remembered being this woman at ease in his embrace, yet I knew bone-deep that I had never even held hands with a man, let alone kissed one. Memories tangled in my throat and I couldn’t breathe.
Then I realized I had thrown him to the ground. “I’m sorry,” I blurted, hoping I had not hurt him.
But he was sitting up now too, leaned back with his hands behind him, his head tilted to one side. It was exactly the sort of posture that Ignifex might have sat in.
“You saved me,” he said quietly. The cadences of his voice were uncanny: entirely familiar, but not exactly like either Ignifex or Shade. “You saved me, and I think that covers almost half your sins.”
I snorted. “I was more than a little late.”