Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

The duke had fired his guns at them all. They’d retreated, thought to go to the automobile to fetch a doctor and the sheriff, but they’d stumbled the wrong way and fallen down the slope to the beach instead. All three of them. And there, noble Jesse had died.

Fact. Fiction. Likely because so much of it had happened, and because Armand’s red-eyed, stoic distress seemed so genuine, the adults around us had accepted it as truth.

Mostly.

I think if I hadn’t been discovered wearing only Armand’s coat as I knelt next to Jesse’s body, Mrs. Westcliffe might have found the whole thing easier to swallow.

Yet the official version ruled the day. And here we all were basking in it, breathing fresh sea air, warmed by the generous spring sun. Burying a hero. A far, far greater hero than anyone standing around me at his funeral would ever suspect.

Somewhere in deep-blue briny waters, a U-boat rested, filled with live torpedoes and solid-gold men.

I thought I better understood Rue’s letters now. I understood her warnings about the pain that would come with my Gifts.

I understood my sacrifice.

I listened to the vicar speak. I listened to the breeze. The birds. The sea. I watched the first handful of dirt land on Jesse’s coffin and thought with absolute sincerity, Wish it were me.

...

I waited until Aubrey’s funeral to steal away. It wasn’t long to wait, only a week, so I made myself tolerate it.

I paid attention to my spiders. Their remarkable webs.

Due to a loss of blood, I’d been excused from attending classes, although the professors had made an effort to extend their best wishes for my recovery, mostly by assigning me homework. It’d been piling up on the bureau. I knew I should at least inspect it, but it bored me. Everything bored me.

Let them kick me out of Iverson if they wanted. Perhaps I’d fly to the moon to live.

Lora-of-the-moon. That would be me.

I itched where I was healing. The wound to my wing was a phantom itch somewhere in the vicinity of my shoulder blade; unlike with my arm, no bullet hole showed there in my human form. But that particular itch was especially maddening, because I could not scratch at it. It was always present.

The following Saturday morning, the castle emptied. I got up to watch them all go, all the ebony girls, all the teachers, most of the help. Sophia had told me the formal ceremony was to be held at Tranquility, which had a completed chapel and nice, virgin grounds for its first grave. They would be burying an empty casket.

The duke, regretfully, would be unable to attend.

I wondered briefly if his madhouse was anything like mine had been, and found that I couldn’t wish Moor Gate even on the man who had killed my true love.

I dressed–Blisshaven’s clothes, not Iverson’s. I walked like I knew what I was doing and where I was going, which was true, and I left the fortress.

It was an easy journey through the forest. The day was sublime, the kind of day reverently described in those sweeping, romantic histories of England that populated the castle library. Shafts of sunlight broke through the green canopy of trees, daubing yellow along wildflowers and butterflies and once even a rabbit, half a primrose in his mouth, staring at me with his ears high and straight.

I could smell the coming summer still, just as I had my first evening here, as I’d stepped from the train. It was warmer and lusher now, less a tinge in the air than a sultry blossoming. It traveled across the sea and laced through these woods. It slipped up my arms and neck and face and kissed me with the faintest hint of bitter salt.

Summer in the woods. Summer on the isle. I imagined it all so … full of life.

Jesse’s cottage stood deserted. I’d wondered if Hastings had come by yet—surely he had—or had thought to maybe move into it now himself from his loft above the stables. Seemed like it be would nicer than living over horses.

I knocked on the door, in case. No one answered.

The latch gave at my touch. The cat’s-eye knot watched me go in.

A shadowed place. A place of shadows. I had the feeling all the lamps in the world wouldn’t illuminate the cottage again. Jesse had been its light, the heart of these woods.

Pine, soap, coffee. Cinnamon, vanilla, rain. Scents that wrapped around me as I walked, a last trace of him. It was awful comfort.

I drew my fingers along the tabletop, remembering the buttercup turned to gold set there on that wood, how it had sung and gleamed. But then, Jesse’s home had always sounded like song to me. Even at night, in our sweetest dark as I’d lain in his arms, golden songs had drifted over me.

Like now. Right now.

I glanced around and saw nothing but the expected. The table and chairs and stove and plates. The rug and fireplace. His closed bedroom door.

Ah. The bedroom. It was coming from in there.

I rested my hand on the knob and knew that I had to go in, that he had wanted me to go in. That’s why there were songs resonating from inside. It was a message just for me. A message from dead Jesse.

But … the bedroom. The bed. Quilts we’d slept under. Sheets. His drowsy smile, half tucked against a pillow. The glass vase on his windowsill, pinkish-green with the first flush of dawn.

I hadn’t come out here for his bedroom. I hadn’t planned on being strong enough for that.

My hand pushed open the door.

I stood fixed in place, not breathing. I had no breath left in me. All the gold in the room had stolen it, and I might not ever breathe again.

I’d dreamed once of a forest of gold, and Jesse had done what he could to give it to me. His bedroom had been transformed into a wonderland of leaves and flowers, pinecones and branches of birch and oak, all of it glimmering, all of it singing. The bed was covered, his chest of drawers, the sill.

Much of it was jumbled together, beautiful for what it was if not its presentation. Jesse had last left this room on the night of his death, right after he’d called to me, right before he’d gone to the castle. So he would have been scattering his final gift in haste, knowing he worked against the clock.

Knowing, somehow, what was to come.

Which meant he’d been making gold for weeks. When I’d seen him so tired, when he’d told me all those nights that we should rest apart … he had been doing this.

For me.

A folded note had been set upon the bed. My name had been scrawled upon it.

I love you was all it said inside.

I sank to the floor. I looked up and all around as the sun danced through the window and turned Jesse’s room into an ambered heaven of song and shimmer and sparks.

That was how Armand found me, hours later. That was what he saw, as well, what he heard, as he walked slowly into the chamber and eased down beside me to rest his back against the bed.

We sat there together, listening, marveling.

In time, his hand reached out and took firm hold of mine.

So now you know the beginning of her story, and the ending of mine. The end of my mortal time with her, at least.

But I’m not really gone. I’ll never really leave her. How could I? She had been carved from the mud of the world just for me. I had fallen from the stars for her.

I told you before: Once a drákon holds your eyes and touches your flesh, you belong to them. And, believe me, when that happens, you’re glad for it. You lay your heart at their feet and hope for their favor, knowing its true worth.

Our time together had been so short. Every turn of the planet, every hour and minute and second, I had loved her and celebrated her. And I considered myself blessed, even unto death, to have known her smile. The rapture of Eleanore.