They left. Quickly. Illyris did not offer them supplies or even another meal, and Hawk was grateful. The complexities she added to the situation were not things Hawk enjoyed. Especially not the thought of her and the Shadow together.
Goddamn it, he’s not mine to be this jealous of, she groused from her place on his back. He’d shifted back to his great cat form, and they leapt and raced across the ground, going back to the Temple empty handed.
Maybe Emile is right, Hawk thought. I should just let Henry go. She paused on this thought, observing her own visceral rejection of this release. Henry wasn’t just a person or a friend, he was the living embodiment of—
Oh. Oh fuck me. She thought. She’d transposed her hopes and fears for her own relationship onto Henry and Emile. As if restoring them could somehow fix the mess between herself and Shadow. How dreadful of her. How monstrously unfair. Especially since she had no more intention of letting the man go on this side of the revelation as she would have on the other. Either man. She was stubborn that way. She wanted to see life in Emile’s eyes again. She wanted to claim Shadow’s hand, arm, shoulder, chest, entire body. And she wasn’t accomplishing either today.
So she settled against the neck of the monster she loved—oh, that hurt to admit, almost more than it hurt to deny it—and allowed herself to weep. Running was a good time for tears. You could lie, and say you’d gotten hurt, or that the wind was in your eyes, or that you were having an allergy attack and that’s why her eyes were running and puffy and why she was so red-faced. Tears don’t count when no one witnesses them.
She told herself she was being pathetic. She’d called these people acquaintances before Glass made them more. She valued them more, now. And Shadow…she wasn’t thinking about Alex anymore. His current self had fully supplanted the past, and that hurt. But how could she do anything else? People are the sum of their experiences. The Shadow had, due to a dearth of memory, not experienced any of Alex’s life, but he was indeed its terminus. And what he had experienced was…well, largely without her. Largely alien to any Earthsider, as foreign and strange as he was, now. It was not fair to him to try to stuff him, his messy and likely homicidal past, his bitter and iron-clad present, into the small cupful of memory she held so dear. He deserved rivers, waterfalls, oceans. He’d grown beyond Alex, and shown her that growth in its fullness and beauty.
And despite liking her, he was working to discard her the way he would old socks. He probably thought he was protecting her. He’d probably internalized the self-sacrificial instinct so deep that he couldn’t make room for what she wanted. And that put paid to the whole affair; if he said he did not want her, that was what she had to obey. If he would not fight for her, there was nothing here to fight for.
Loving, sometimes, means letting go.
She’d been lost in these thoughts for some time when she realized the Shadow had slowed. She lifted her head and looked around. They were in the dark, of course, and beneath them lay a sea of embers and smoke, so they’d reached the plains before the Temple of Light. The Shadow bowed his great shoulder, allowing her to slide off to the dry stone beneath their feet. He shifted in the next breath, and dressed with a speed she should have known he had, given the number of times he’d surprised them in full regalia.
“I still want to replace those robes,” Hawk muttered.
“I have told you the reason I keep them,” he said.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“I know. But if you want to self-flagellate, a whip would be a better show.” And then she dropped her head. “Sorry. I just…don’t like seeing you in rags. Why did we stop?”
He didn’t seem to notice what she’d just said. “We are in Argon’s territory, now. It is his until the embers die, and they should have ebbed to char ages ago. He’s holding it for a reason. Probably to find me.” A pause. “Or to find you.”
“Why me?” She said.
He looked at her in amazement. “Whyever not? They know I do not betray my compatriots…and your name was once mine. I’ve seen how Kali’Mar and Illyris react when they hear it. The connection between us is known.”
“And I killed a god. Is that known?”
A thin, unhappy smile. “If it is, they will discount it. Publicly, if not privately. You are mortal, and your appearance in Illyris’s territory—there were spies, of course—will be known quite rapidly. You were mortal when you did it, and are mortal still. One of their justifications for devouring me was that it was irresistible. What mortal could resist eternity?”
Hawk, having seen what eternity does to people, thought she could resist just fine. “And they wouldn’t want their worshippers thinking that they can die. Otherwise people will start getting ideas.”
He nodded. “The one thing we have in our favor is that only you and I and that demented man Kaiser know who struck the killing blow. They have every reason to think I did it…but as I said, you are either killer or witness. They will want you.”
Hawk theatrically shuddered. “So let’s not, and say we did.”
“Indeed. Except we must go this way. The Temple of Light does not move, which means Argon merely needs to park his army beneath the spire and we will have no easy way in.”
Hawk nodded. “You have a way?”
“I can climb the ceiling. I cannot do it with you clinging to my back. Your arms will tire, and I won’t trust rope. Not with your life.” He paused and took a deep breath. “We’re going to have to go by land. Which means a straight shot through his army.”
And he didn’t think he could pull it off. That was the only reason to stop and start explaining things. The risks were apparently very great.
“Then we go through,” She said. “And this is the point where you tell me it’s too dangerous, and why, and you wait for me to talk myself out of going. Which is not going to happen.”
His lips quirked. “I don’t suppose arguing with you for the next half hour would keep you from it?”
“Never worked before,” She said.
“And did I? Argue with you for your own safety?” He said.
“Every damn day. And I argued with you just as often. You running off half-cocked was kind of a thing.”
The air between them seemed tingling with the tension. God, she just wanted to hug him, scream at him, kiss him, fuck him. Their hands were fairly close together. She could go full high-school girl-crush and manufacture a reason for fingertips to barely touch. God. Grow the fuck up, she thought. Turned to look at him and met his own questing, alien eyes.
“Is it common to want to fuck on the edge of a battlefield?” she murmured.
“You were the one who said we once danced on a stranger’s desk.”
“Is dance a euphemism? Because the only thing we did was the horizontal tango.”
This mode of conversation wasn’t making the tension any easier to bear. If anything, she now wanted to start doodling his name on her bedroom walls. Loopy schoolgirl curls, meticulous in devotion. She just didn’t know what name to write. That kind of spoiled the fantasy. Shadowmaster wasn’t the kind of thing you whispered in fantastical darkness.
He reached up and almost cupped her face, stopping just before contact. He started to withdraw and she just couldn’t let him. She bent her head into the touch, savoring each tactile spike thrilling through his fingertips. It was electric. It made her come alive. And now her own hand reached out and found the tangle of his strange hair. It did not feel like hair, or any other substance she’d ever encountered before. But it was pleasant to touch as it shifted around her fingers, and she could more than endure it. The hunger for his lips rose up, and up, and in spite of herself she was starting forward…his fingers trembled against her face. It was part of the shudders coursing through his body. The heat in his eyes grew, as did the pressure of his touch.
“How are we going to get past Argon?” She asked, again.
“Well, I think the answer is simple: We are going to walk.”
And he smiled, and did not let her go.
