He held up the dressed carcass and tossed it to Kaz for setting up on the fire the imp had made. This didn’t please her, but then nothing would, he supposed, and he could only shrug at her tiny yet irate form.
After eating, they bedded down as normal across from one another, the fire between them falling into low embers. The trees kept the worst of the chilly wind at bay, but the cover made it darker too, blotting out the stars and moons. Kaz sprawled out on the back of one of the knoggelvi and fell immediately asleep to begin the few hours an imp required, and Damien was quick to close his eyes as well.
“Did you hear that?” Amma’s sharp whisper cut into Damien’s mind as it began to drift into sleep.
He groaned. “You mean that terrifying cry that sounded like a woman being gutted?”
“Yes!”
“No, I didn’t. Go to sleep.”
Amma whined pathetically again followed by the sounds of her flopping over in the dead leaves on the other side of the fire. There had been a noise, but it was just an owl, crying out low and long into the darkness, and they had certainly heard almost the exact same sound some previous night while lying out.
“You should have been more frightened when we stayed at the inns—there were actual, living beings there with sharp blades and worse intentions. I don’t believe there are any squirrels about who are malicious enough to gnaw an acorn down for stabbing.” Eyes still closed, he grinned at his own joke. Surely that would lighten her mood.
She moved about in the dark again with another whimper. “I’m sorry,” she finally said with that infuriating but affecting tone. “We were just always warned to never come here, and sometimes people did and never came back, or worse, they would, but they were…changed.”
Damien sighed, a hand behind his head, eyelids no longer heavy as he stared up at the outline of a branch, looking like a claw against the sky if he squinted just right. “You were told fairytales, yes? I can tell you, there don’t seem to be any portals to the Everdarque here, so no need to worry about fae.”
“Not fae,” she said, a waver to her voice in the dark. “More frightening than fae.”
Damien glanced over at where Kaz was still sleeping heavily, limbs hanging over the knoggelvi’s back. Then he swallowed. “Look, if you are truly that frightened, you can come over here and—”
He’d never seen Amma move so fast. She was suddenly beside him with a skitter quicker than any rabbit through the underbrush. Wrapped in her cloak, she dropped down onto the leafy floor, breaths coming hard and fast, and fell onto her shoulder, her back pressing into his side.
“Oh, well, all right then,” he mumbled, unable to lower his arm from behind his head with her nestled against him. Other hand on his chest, leather armor removed for the night, he could feel his own heartbeat thump harder and his body stiffen. He checked again to ensure Kaz was still asleep, but he hadn’t moved, and even the knoggelvi had their heads down, not casting him disapproving glares.
Well, if everyone else were going to act as though this were normal, then he supposed it was. Yet he couldn’t relax, the sudden urge pumping through him to get up and go for a sprint or take part in some other fatiguing activity. But then she wouldn’t be touching him anymore, which would be quite the disappointment, and he couldn’t just leave her there. No, that was the whole point—she was frightened, and he wassomehowcomforting her.
Damien forced his eyes shut again. In the darker darkness behind his lids, sleep was much further off than it had been before, though it should have been easier: Amma was warm in the chill of the night, warmer than the dying fire, and he thought briefly how much warmer and nicer it would be to roll onto his side, wrap arms about her middle, and pull her up against his chest.
Then he slashed through that idea like so much rabbit skin. She hadn’t come over to him for that. Even after the looks she’d been giving him in the previous days, there had been something else on her mind, surely. He was misreading her longing glances, how her lips sometimes fell apart as if halfway through a thought she ought not be having, how her fingers slid over the knoggelvi’s reins back and forth suggestively when she stared. Maybe he was just ruining her mind with the talisman—it hadn’t been tested on anyone and perhaps his theories about it leaving the target unchanged were incorrect.
The arcana in the talisman was not meant to leech out into its vessel, but Damien was suddenly struck with the deep concern it was changing her, infecting her, and he did not want that. There was a way to check, he thought, and despite the wariness of his body, he had plenty of arcane energy left. Besides, reaching out with magic would be exceptionally easy when the one he wanted to touch was already touching him back.
He whispered the Chthonic as quietly as possible, opening his mind to the being nearest him and letting his magic creep over her. Amma’s blood was racing like mad through her veins, heart pumping as if she fled through the forest at that very moment. It was a familiar reaction, fear, panic, terror. Those things could, of course, be confused for excitement under the right context, but that couldn’t be the case now.
Past the coursing blood and intensely beating heart, everything remained the same as when he had first felt her this way in the swamp. No hint of Abyssal poison eating away at her, no noxscura lying in wait to choke out the goodness. There was, however, that familiarity again, that thing in her that was in him too that he so infrequently felt. Humanity.
He tarried about her aura a moment longer, and by all that was grim and unholy, it was trulygood. No being could be purely good, of course, but everything that existed was tainted by its intent, and Amma’s was such a comfort. Kindness floated through her and radiated out. It lulled him into a sort of bliss even as the intense beating of her heart began to have a reciprocal effect back on him—something that happened rarely and only when he spent too long focused on one other creature.
His own heartbeat quickened, pulse jumping in his throat. His body was mimicking what the spell attempted to deduce from her, but then he wasn’t feeling the fear he expected. Not exactly. There was something, something that felt more frantic, more stimulating, and urged him to run a hand along the curve of her body, over her hip, around her thigh…
All at once, Damien went back into himself, snuffing out the spell.Thank the basest beasts she’s not arcanely adept and didn’t feel that, he thought. But then she stirred beside him, body shifting against his, and he knew at this rate he would never get any bloody sleep.
Damien pressed up onto the arm behind him and shifted onto his side to look down at the back of her head, hair golden even in the dark. “You’re still not asleep yet, are you?”
Amma did not move. “No.”
“Is it because you’re staring out into the darkness and imagining all the terrifying things in it staring back?”
“Well, it isnow,” she hissed.
“For being so afraid of what you think is out there, you sure seem determined to see it.”
“But,”—she swallowed—“the ghosts…”
“Is that what you were told live here?” He glanced out at the edge of the ring where the dying fire reached, a wall of pitch black beyond.
