I frowned, my hand twitching. It was low on his stomach, right where I could feel his power. His muscles pushed back against my touch, clenching as I spread my fingers out.
There was something wrong.
His magic was so hot, so loud, so … angry. The fever spreading through him didn’t seem natural.
“There’s a sickness inside you,” I whispered.
“Keep looking,” he growled.
I focussed on the fever, ignoring the brash distraction of his power, and suddenly grew cold. I shuddered, my fingers curling in until it was a fist that I pressed against him. The fever was dark.
Evil.
It filled me with an angry, empty despair so complete and overwhelming, that I lost my concentration entirely and felt the loud, bright rush of his power shroud my sight again, drowning out the cold darkness.
I drew away from him slowly, my eyes blinking open and settling on his face. I kept my expression steady. Blank. Free of the horror and despair I could still feel washing through me.
“Calder.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“It’s the Darkness, isn’t it?” He wasn’t looking at me anymore, though his hand remained at my waist, his fingers digging in.
I didn’t answer because I couldn’t allow it to be true. He watched a point over my head, his jaw working, before his eyes slammed back to mine, so full of emotion that I found it was my turn to avert my gaze.
“The Darkness killed Alina,” he said lowly. “As soon as her power reached maturity, it consumed her. But we were attached. How do we know it didn’t infect me through her? How do we know it wasn’t in me this whole time? How do we know it doesn’t live on through me, now that it has nowhere else to exist?”
“Because you haven’t tried to kill me.” I pulled away from him, threading my hands through my hair in frustration. “You’ve done everything in your power to save me.”
“Then why does my hatred for you only grow?” he asked, dragging me back into his body again. I wasn’t sure if he was doing it to have me near, or to intimidate me.
“H-Hate?” I choked back, a sharp crack wheedling through the centre of my chest. My eyes were wide, my heartbeat amplified in my ears.
“I feel other things too,” he admitted, his gaze dousing me in confusing fire and ice. “You’re a tiny thing with so much significance—I don’t know whether to crush you or worship you.”
“You hate me.” I sounded numb. I was consumed with panic.
“So much it hurts.” He released my hip, his hand wrapping around the back of my neck. He pulled my head up, his lips claiming mine again. It was a punishingly brief kiss and I hated how it chased my confusion away. “I look at you, so tiny and delicate, and I feel this overwhelming urge to watch you shatter under the weight of me.” He kissed me again, somehow knowing that it would stop me from reacting to his words. “But then someone else touches you, and the violence I feel toward them is tenfold, and I no longer want to see you hurt.” He kissed me again, and I could feel that anger in the heaviness of his lips, the pressure of his fingers flexing against the back of my neck, the press of his hips into my stomach, the hardness of him swelling angrily against me. When he pulled up again, I was breathless and there was a rasp in his voice. “Sometimes I wake up with the taste of you on my tongue, sometimes with your blood on my hands. I dream of ways to destroy you—to defile this bond as much as I feel defiled by it. I want to watch you squirm against me, my hands around your neck, but I don’t know if I’m inside you in this fantasy or not.”
I choked again, but he kissed away my response, chasing the alarm out of my head. When his teeth grazed my lower lip, his hand slipped around to the front of my neck, and I finally found the strength to pull away. I fell to the balls of my feet, my hands wrapping his wrist. I held him there as he stared down at me.
“I felt the Darkness inside the Spider.” I was pleading with him. “It was the only living thing inside her—she was long dead, a puppet, a skin for the Darkness to wear. You’re still there. Still alive.”
“But it’s also there.” He groaned, his eyes flicking up to the sky, like he was searching for a moment of patience.
“Yes,” I finally admitted, the despair escaping whatever box I had shoved it into to echo along the word. “You’re infected. It’s there.”
He released me, sinking to his knees. He sat before me the way the Spider had, his fierce gaze tunnelling through the ground.
“Maybe I was never your Blodsjel,” he said, the words tripping dread through me. “Maybe our connection was always just the Darkness trying to reach you.”
“Get up.” I refused to listen to him, even though the conclusions popped through my head like fireworks detonating too close to my face.
“It can come back, Ven.” Calder stared at me. “You have to kill me. I could infect the rest of this world again.”
“We don’t know that’s how it works.”
“We don’t know it isn’t.”
I was mustering a whole new bout of arguments when a very real barrier popped into my head.
“I can’t,” I croaked, my dread tripling. “I’m tapped out. I couldn’t even step into the midworld to find you. My magic is burned out.”
Which meant that if the Darkness chose to attack me again through Calder, it would win. He seemed to realise the same thing, because he surged to his feet, falling back several steps until he was on the edge of the dock.
“I need you to look inside me again.” His blue eye was shattered, a thousand fragments of pain. “Tell me how much longer I have.”
I reached him in a second, my hand against his stomach. I ignored the cold feeling of the smoke curling around my fingers, biting back my tears as I closed my eyes and turned my attention to his energy. The fever burned at my prodding, melting away into cold darkness. My teeth sank into my lower lip as I forced myself not to recoil, to keep going, to slip into the endless depths. It felt like the icy surface of a lake cracking away beneath my feet, pulling me violently under—but it wasn’t water that rushed over my head. It was dirt.
I was buried, soil packed around me, worms in my eyes. I tripped into death and then tumbled further, somehow falling even as I was raised up, a neatly wrapped body. I was carried across the gravesite to a sheet-wrapped table, the smell of sterilising poultices arid in the air. There was a sponge on my skin, blessings on my brow.
To the King’s service, you go.
It was customary to bless stewards in that way, before they were buried.
I was moved again, falling down onto the ground. Booted feet walked around me, avoiding where I lay, crumpled. A face appeared above me: dusky skin, dark eyes, wavy hair pressed behind his ears, a strand falling over his forehead to tickle the bronze dots pierced along his left brow. I counted five of them before another face appeared. Green eyes whispering with seductive power. A mouth twisted in perpetually cruel amusement. Dark coppery hair, the top section loose, the sides drawn through small bronze rings to keep the strands tucked behind his ears.
“What secrets have you to tell us?” Vidrol whispered, his eyes lightening to a poisonous green, threaded with sunlight yellow and bright with power.