The Sweetest Dark

Chapter Twenty-Two

I knew to hold my breath but not to close my eyes. It turned out that saltwater stings.

I was a fish without fins, sunk into the deep. I was engulfed in silver glow and bubbles and treacherous, looming chunks of pillars and craggy island stone. I was flailing still, unable to manage anything else, my body smacking against one of those huge ancient columns, scraping off muck.

Then there was a frothing of more bubbles, and a new shape was beside me. Armand, fleet as an arrow, grabbing me by the hair and then the shoulders. I clung to him and tried to breathe too soon when we broke the surface together, so I ended up inhaling mostly water.

He got me to the embankment, I’ll say that for him.

My fingers fumbled along the slick stone but couldn’t find a hold. Armand’s hands had become a painful pressure against my rib cage, but no matter how hard he pushed at me, I couldn’t do it. We were both flailing now.

Then, a miracle. Jesse was there, hauling me up to my feet, twirling us both about so that he stood between Armand and me.

I held on to him because my legs felt weak. I dropped my head to his shoulder because I was still heaving for air. I was naked and made of rubber and my hair was a long wet river draped along Jesse’s arm, and I wasn’t about to try to move anywhere else.

You can envision how it looked.

“Don’t,” Armand spat, pulling himself up atop the embankment with no apparent effort. I raised my head to see him better. He was pushing his hair out of his eyes and glaring at Jesse, his face white with rage. “Don’t you touch her!”

He was at us at once. At Jesse, I mean. He was shoving himself between us, trying to pull me away.

“No,” I rasped, holding on tight. “Let go, Armand! Let go!”

Jesse hadn’t released me, nor had he defended himself. He simply lifted a hand to Armand, grabbed him by the sleeve, and said a single word.

“Stop.”

And Armand did. He stood there dripping and panting, his gaze raking us both. Then he jerked his arm free.

“So this is how it is. This is what you’re about, Eleanore? This is what you like?”

“Don’t be smutty! It’s not what you think.”

“Actually, it is,” said Jesse.

Armand took a surging step toward us again. “Bugger you, Holms, and—what? What the hell? You can speak?”

I looked up at Jesse, who glanced down at me and offered a grave hint of a smile.

“What have you done?” I whispered.

“Right.” Armand was still furious. “What the bloody hell have you done, you lying bastard?”

“Not what you suppose, mate. Not yet, anyway.”

That was the barb that hit its mark. Jesse said it and instantly something in Armand shifted. It was real and utterly unmistakable: He was standing right there next to us, so close I could feel his exhalation on my neck, and that connection that had always existed between the two of us frosted into deathly ice.

“Get your hands off her,” he said, very quiet, very composed. “Or I swear I’ll kill you.”

Jesse met his eyes, then gave a nod. “You’re not going to kill me, Lord Armand. But I’m going to give Lora my coat now, so take a breath, and take a step back.”

“And close your eyes,” I added around clenched teeth, because I’d started to shiver.

He glowered at us a moment longer, then turned his back. Rigid shoulders, ramrod spine, legs apart, spoiling for a fight. If his eyes were closed, I couldn’t tell, but I took advantage of the moment, anyway, as fast as I could.

“I think you should just keep this,” Jesse said to me, again with that smile. He brought the lapels of the peacoat together over my chest. “You can grow into it.”

Armand turned back around. When he spoke again, it was still in that ghastly, deathly voice. “What’s happened to your legs?”

I glanced down. The coat reached to the middle of my thighs; the scratches I’d made last night gleamed a vivid red against the bluish-pale rest of me.

“Did he do that to you?”

“No,” I said. “I did it. I was asleep.”

“Fuck,” said Armand, very clearly, and walked back to his own pile of clothing and shoes. “Get on with whatever you want. I’m leaving.”

“Wait.” I trailed after him. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”

“Can’t I?”

“Armand. Mandy. You can’t tell.”

He slung his coat over a shoulder and smiled at me, but it was a dire smile, as deathly as his voice.

“How charming,” he said, “to hear you say my nickname at last.”

“Please.”

From behind us, Jesse sighed. “It’s no use. It’s time to enlighten him.”

“Oh, are we going for enlightenment now?” Armand’s eyes narrowed; he pushed again at the chestnut hair plastered against his forehead. “Excellent. Here’s some for you both. I’ll have you sacked, Holms, and I might have you expelled, Jones, but I’ve not quite made up my mind about that yet. After he’s gone you might be more in a mood for a toss with me, since it’s clear you’re that sort of girl. All it’s going to take is one quick discussion with my father to end your liaison forever, as no doubt you both know.”

I walked forward. My hand lifted. Before I had realized it happened, I’d struck him, a ladylike slap that would have gotten me mostly jeers back at the orphanage, but I was angry enough to put some force behind it. His head whipped to the side.

Time stopped. None of us moved.

A slow, spiky throbbing began to flood my palm.

Just as slowly, Armand brought his face back to mine. There was my handprint upon him, red on white, just like the scratches along my body.

“You have no idea what you’re set to destroy,” I bit out. “You’re not thinking. You’re acting like a child.”

“Actually,” murmured Jesse, wry, “he’s acting like a drákon.”

We both shifted to stare at him.

“What?” Armand said, a stifled sound.

“What?” I said, much louder.

“Show him, Lora.” Jesse placed a hand on my shoulder. “Show him what you can do.”

I shook my head. Of course I wouldn’t. Of course not. Going to smoke was one of the very best secrets that lived between us. I wasn’t going to add Armand to that.

“Lora. It’s important.”

“He won’t tell on us. I’m sure he won’t—”

“Dragons do not exist,” Armand interrupted, still so white.

“You’ve got to show him.” Jesse held my eyes, sober and determined, love and light behind his gaze. “He must see to know.”

“But—”

“He said dragon, and I said drákon. Didn’t you hear it? In his bones and in his heart, he already grasps the truth. His mind needs to see.”

Armand clenched his fists. He looked from me to Jesse, back to me, and the fear that enveloped him now was strong as stink. “You’re barking mad. Both of you. I won’t listen to this.”

“Oh,” I said, hushed. “Oh.”

Because in that moment, that heavy and wild moment there in the cool moon grotto, with the sea and the rocks and the sparkling walls, I understood what Jesse was telling me but what he had not actually said. I took in Armand’s sharp, unhappy face and saw my handprint again, saw myself.

And everything clicked. Everything sorted out into big, obvious truths. I understood the connection I’d always felt with this reckless son of a duke. I understood his stifling fear. Without me even speaking to him of it, Jesse was confirming that all I’d suspected of Armand and his mother last night was, in fact, real.

… the true nature of our world is for matters to arrange themselves along the simplest of paths… .

What could be simpler than grouping us all together?

“You don’t have to be afraid,” I said, looking past Jesse to Armand. I tried to smile at him, but my lips felt numb and I don’t know how successful I was; he glared back at me like a cornered animal, desperate to bolt.

Jesse’s fingers tightened on my shoulder, a silent message of reassurance.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” I said, and meant it, right before I went to smoke.

Jesse, I noticed, caught the peacoat before it reached the ground.

...

We met that night in Jesse’s cottage. Armand had wanted us all to go to Tranquility, but Jesse pointed out, correctly, that it was far less risky for Armand and me to steal away to the cottage than it would be for Jesse and me to steal into the manor house.

“You’ve got a staff of—what?—thirty? Thirty-five these days?” Jesse asked. “Lora can’t be found alone with either of us at Tranquility. Her forced departure from the school would be an inconvenience to all of us. But the only person who cleans my home is me.”

I thought personally that if I was able to evaporate quickly enough, it wouldn’t matter who caught me where or what they said. It might even prove amusing.

Oy, guv’nor, she was there and then she turned into bloomin’ smoke, I swears it! Only three pints of ale tonight at supper, guv, I swears!

But I didn’t want to sneak all the way out to Tranquility, so I said nothing.

Armand and I sat across from each other at Jesse’s table. A stack of letters and a diary had been placed in the middle between us. The diary was mostly jaunty and newer, but the letters were very old, combed with very old, spidery writing. Combined, they’d spelled out a message that was nothing short of electrifying.

When I’d finished reading the last page, my fingers were trembling.

Jesse, of course, had noticed. He’d said we could discuss everything after eating and was now moving about in the tidy little kitchen, slicing bread, finding jam. Stoking the coals in the oven into brightness for a kettle and tea. He’d muted his music again and so these small, comforting sounds were the only noises to be heard; thankfully, tonight had a brilliant moon, so the Germans weren’t bombing. Even the crickets were quiet.

It jarred me to see Armand in Jesse’s setting. His dark hair, his intense blue eyes. His posh tailored shirt and high starched collar and clean fingernails. He seemed to just gleam more than either of us. Perhaps that’s what being born into a fortune could do. Polish you up to a shine, light up the world, no matter where you wandered. I expected this was as informal as he ever got, but compared to schoolmiss me and hired-hand Jesse Holms, he was done to the nines.

Even in the half-light of the candles, Lord Armand looked ill-suited to this rustic place, a foreigner discovering himself in a foreign land.

The kettle began to steam. The berry-ripe scent of the jam caught in the vapor, wafted over to me in long, draping coils.

Do you even know how to do that? I wondered, watching Armand from beneath my lashes. Have you ever even had to boil your own water for tea?

I should try to be kinder. He’d had more than a shock today, I knew, and it wasn’t as if I didn’t understand how it felt. But a mean little part of me still smarted over being derided as that sort of girl. If he was uneasy, that part of me was glad.

The brittle cold ice that had frosted inside him, that had connected us in the grotto, had melted. In its place was … I wasn’t sure what. Something new. Something that felt like swords and power. Gleaming, like him.

“What is it?” he muttered, his eyes moving to me. “Why are you staring?”

“I’m not,” I replied. But I felt the blood rise in my cheeks.

Jesse thwacked a plate piled with bread between us, followed by half a brick of butter and a crock of raspberry jam. A knife–the long skinny kind that looked like it should be used for poking things, for digging insects out from tree bark–stuck up from the middle of the red goo.

Armand regarded it all without moving. I reached for the bread.

“How can you eat? After everything, how can you be hungry?”

“I’m always hungry.” I used the knife to smear butter across the bread, and then jam. It was brown bread, sour to the jam’s sweet, but I didn’t care. It tasted superb.

Jesse served the tea, then took the chair beside me. As soon as I was done with the bread, he laced his fingers through mine and brought our joined hands to rest atop the table, in plain sight. Happiness began its tingling spread up my arm.

It wasn’t subtle, but it was clear. Armand leaned back from the light, staring disdainfully at a fixed point beyond us both.

“How long have you known about him?” I asked Jesse, using my free hand to gesture toward his guest.

“Forever. Nearly as long as I did about you.”

“God, Jesse. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“He was a shadow of you.” Jesse shrugged. “His background is diluted, his dragon blood less strong. Even with you in his proximity, I wasn’t certain any of his drákon traits would emerge. He hasn’t anywhere near your potential.”

“Pardon me,” Armand said, freezingly polite, “but he is still right here with you in this room.”

“Do you mean … I did it?” I asked. “I made him figure it out? What he is?”

Jesse gave me an assessing look. “Like is drawn to like. We’re all three of us thick with magic now, even if it’s different kinds. It’s inevitable that we’ll feed off one another. The only way to prevent that would be to separate. And even then it might not be enough. Too much has already begun.”

“I don’t want to separate from you,” I said.

“No.” Jesse lifted our hands and gave mine a kiss. “Don’t worry about that.”

Armand practically rolled his eyes. “If you two are quite done, might we talk some sense tonight? It’s late, I’m tired, and your ruddy chair, Holms, is about as comfortable as sitting on a tack. I want to …”

But his voice only faded into silence. He closed his eyes and raised a hand to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose. I noted again those shining nails. The elegance of his bones beneath his flawless skin.

Skin that was marble-pale, I realized. Just like mine.

“Yes?” I said, more gently than I’d intended.

“Excuse me. I’m finding this all a bit … impossible to process. I’m beginning to believe that this is the most profoundly unpleasant dream I’ve ever been caught in.”

“Allow me to assure you that you’re awake, Lord Armand,” I retorted, all gentleness gone. “To wit: You hear music no one else does. Distinctive music from gemstones and all sorts of metals. That day I played the piano at Tranquility, I was playing your father’s ruby song, one you must have heard exactly as I did. Exactly as your mother would have. You also have, perhaps, something like a voice inside you. Something specific and base, stronger than instinct, hopeless to ignore. Animals distrust you. You might even dream of smoke or flying.”

He dropped his arm. “You got that from the diary.”

“No, I got that from my own life. And damned lucky you are to have been brought into this world as a pampered little prince instead of spending your childhood being like this and still having to fend for yourself, as I did.”

“Right. Lucky me.” Armand looked at Jesse, his eyes glittering. “And what are you? Another dragon? A gargoyle, perchance, or a werecat?”

“Jesse is a star.”

The hand went up to conceal his face again. “Of course he is. The. Most. Unpleasant. Dream. Ever.”

I separated my hand from Jesse’s, angling for more bread. “I think you’re going to have to show him.”

“Aye.”

A single blue eye blinked open between Armand’s fingers. “Show me what?”

...

He must have known this moment was near, because only this morning he’d gotten up in time to venture out to the back meadow, where lush knots of foxtail and buttercups nodded through the grasses. By the light of dawn he’d picked a dewed bouquet—he’d thought for Lora—and brought it back to the cottage.

It rested now in his mother’s green glass vase on the sill of his bedroom window, all the dew dried, fragrance sowing wild and heady into the blankets and pillows of his bed.

Too much to hope, it seemed, that he could have shown it to his dragon-girl in there.

Jesse beheaded one of the buttercups, brought it to the table where the two of them waited, Lora with her hair down and her gaze steady on his, still chewing her slice of bread. A smudge of jam traced an endearing curve along the bottom of her lip.

And Armand, leashed but so coiled inside, looking absolutely as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world right now than here with the two of them.

You and me both, mate, Jesse thought.

He uncurled his fingers to reveal the buttercup in his palm. Armand’s gaze flicked to the flower, but that was all. Lora, who knew what was imminent, wiped at the jam, closed her eyes, and turned her face away.

He would never, ever let her down. Jesse steeled himself, opened his soul to the fire, and let the agony come.

...

“A star,” Eleanore said once more, after the light had faded and Mandy had gotten his vision back.

He’d shoved away from the table without being aware of it; his chair now laid on its side by his feet. Holms no longer had that brilliant, horrifying glow that had blinded Armand, that had seemed to boil his blood to a peak and send his mind into a fierce frantic babble: It can’t be, it can’t, it cannot be.

“Dragon protects star,” Eleanore announced coolly from her place across the table, her half-eaten bread pinched between two fingers. “Star adores dragon. And now you can’t betray us.”

...

Like a dazzling reminder of the impossible made possible, the golden buttercup shone upon the table, lucent metal against the duller wood. Armand couldn’t seem to stop staring at it, even as we talked about the letters. Even though he’d held it in his hands and turned it over and over, searching for the hoax that wasn’t there.

The metal buttercup sang a metal song now, and it was clear both of us heard it. A very pretty song, too, jingling soft as fairy bells beneath our conversation.

I’d definitely remember to slip it into my pocket before I left. Armand probably had mountains of gold stashed away somewhere inside his mansion, anyway.

“I knew it was your mother’s side,” Jesse was saying, perusing one of the letters, “but I didn’t know how far back it went. These are over a hundred years old. That’s, say, four or five generations. Possibly even six. And for each generation, they could have passed through either the matriarchal line or the paternal. It’s astonishing your mother had them at all.”

“But who was the author?” I asked. “Who was Rue?”

“No idea.” Armand ran a hand through his hair. “Reginald hasn’t been too keen to talk about my mum or her family. I do know she was the only child of a baron and that her parents, my grandparents, died right before the marriage. He mentioned once that their estate was sold off, taxes or something. And it seems that Rue was a member of the nobility, whoever she was. It’s signed M. of L. in each. That’s how titles were disguised from the public in the news back then, the dailies and such. So maybe she was still wary enough of this ‘tribe’ to hide her true name.”

“And that of your ancestor.” I tapped my finger to one of the sheets. “Or someone was, since she dictated it. That might be why there are no other proper names besides Kit, and no envelopes.”

“M could only stand for Marchioness. Surely not too difficult to track down. We’ve a copy of Standish’s Peerage of the Empire back at Tranquility. I think it traces lines back past the fifteenth century.”

“Unless your Rue wasn’t of the empire,” Jesse pointed out.

“Or she fabricated it,” I added. “That’s what I would have done, if I’d truly wanted your line kept hidden.”

Armand dropped his head into his hands and made a sound like a groan. “If I wasn’t barmy already, I’m going to be.”

From somewhere in Jesse’s bedroom, a clock gave a single chime.

“It’s half past three,” he said abruptly, standing. “You need to get home, both of you. Louis, I’d like to keep the letters here, if you don’t mind. I want to go over them again.”

I came to my feet. “And ask the stars about them?”

Jesse nodded. Armand only shook his head, gloomy. There were bruises under his eyes that hadn’t been there yesterday.

“Ask the–fine. Splendid. Keep them if you like. Burn them. Turn them to gold or silver or lead. In the morning I’ll wake up and none of this will have happened.”

“No, lordling,” I said to him. “You’re never going to wake like that again, and you’re never going to be able to forget.”

“Bugger you, waif.”

“And you.”

He walked past both of us without another glance or another word, opened the door, and disappeared into the night.

I went to Jesse and wrapped my arms around him. After only a second’s hesitation, his arms lifted to embrace me, too.

“I don’t want to go,” I whispered.

I felt his chest expand beneath my cheek. “This is going to be much more difficult than I anticipated.”

“Which part?”

“All of it.” He brought a hand to my hair, his fingers weaving through. “Things are about to change rapidly now, Lora. He’ll come back to us stronger and stronger. He’s going to crave you more and more, and not having you will eat him raw.”

I frowned up at him. “What do you mean?”

Jesse tucked a strand behind my ear, his eyes emerald dark, his lashes tipped with candlelight. “It will be in his nature. He’ll feel compelled to claim you, and he won’t stop trying to do that. Ever. When that happens—”

“That is not bloody going to happen.”

“When that happens,” he said again resolutely, “I want you to remember two things. One: I’ve loved you since before he even knew you lived. Two: Spare a little pity for him. This isn’t entirely his fault. He was born into his role, just as you and I were. But, Lora-of-the-moon–only a little pity, all right?”

“My pity may reach as deep and wide as the ocean,” I answered. “But my heart is already claimed.”

To prove it, I clutched his shirt and lifted myself to my toes and brought my lips to his.

Sweeter than raspberry jam, warmer than candle flame, softer than bread.

People often spoke with religious rapture of milk and honey, but if I had nothing but Jesse to consume for the rest of my days, I’d die a heathen beast, content.