“Seven coins for a swatch, my blue-haired beauty,” the booth-keeper chided, pulling Sonara from her thoughts. She flicked her long, bony fingers across the booth, and gave Sonara a saber-toothed grin. Around her neck, the red sigil of the Blood Bucket out west, a now-barren place where Jira’s grandfather had first slain a man with Gutrender in the name of his conquering cause. Those who hailed from the Blood Bucket were fiercely proud of their city’s history with Jira’s forefathers.
“I’m all out of coin,” Sonara said to the woman, and released the silk, her lips forming into a full pout.
Liar,her curse whispered.
The shopkeeper turned her predatory gaze on another young woman who approached the booth, and Sonara deftly slipped a piece of deep crimson silk into her duster. She silently blessed Jaxon for insisting she wear one to keep up her outlawing image, for it was perfect in times like this.
Thieving times.
After last night, and what she would face today… Sonara needed a distraction.
“Blood red is your color,” Jaxon said, stepping up beside Sonara.
She laced her arm through his, and sighed. “Better than Soreian blue.”
He chuckled. “Sonara, I…”
“I don’t want to talk about serious things, Jax,” she interrupted him as they walked. “I can sense the anxiety all over you.”
“I just want to make sure your mind is clear, before we begin.”
“It’s clear, Jax.”
“Is it?” He removed his hat and squeezed the brim, the leather darkened from years of his fingertips worrying at it absentmindedly. “Truly?”
Sonara’s stomach twisted. He wanted to talk aboutfeelings.Those pesky little beasts that plagued the living, day and night. Didn’t she experience enough of feelings? Her curse lusted after them, a near-constant fight against releasing it so it could devour the auras of everyone who crossed its path.
It was exhausting, sensing the sadness of others. The euphoria, the anger, the bitter green of jealousy, the delicate rosy sigh of first love.
But the past ten years had also been taxing in their own right, searching for Soahm. Forsomethingto tell her where he’d been taken in that ship. And now…
“What does it taste like?” Jaxon asked. He waved his hand as a bloodfly buzzed past, likely chasing the scent of so many beasts in the distance. “What do you sense?”
He nodded out at the beautiful chaos all around them. The Wanderer ship with the red bird was nowhere in sight, concealed by the ring of mountains surrounding them. But Sonara swore she could feel its presence, like an almost-imperceptible pulse. Was Soahm inside the ship, returned to Dohrsar once more? Or had they taken him away from this world and left him somewhere else, never to return again?
It was here. Finallyhere again,and soon, she would have the truth.
“It tastes like hope,” Sonara answered Jaxon’s question. He raised a brow, and with a sigh, she added, “It tastes a little like hatred, too.”
She’d once been lost under the power of that word, in the days after losing her brother. It no longer controlled her like it used to, this hatred for a strange, armored entity that came down from the sky and had its way with him. But it was still there. An old friend, ready to be called upon when she needed it to fuel her.
“Ah.” Jaxon snapped his fingers at her truth. “Thereyou are. That’s the Sonara I know, never afraid to speak her mind.”
Those first three words were the very same ones he’d spoken the first time they met. When Sonara had awoken on the sand to find Jaxon kneeling over her, the sunlight like a halo around the fringes of his hat.“There you are, “he’d said with a smile as she came back to consciousness.“Thought you were dead.”
In her first days as a Shadowblood, unable to return to Soreia for fear of a second death, Sonara had had no choice but to roam endlessly through the Deadlands, as uninhibited as the wind.
Those days were still muddled. Full of pain and fear and the desire to simply give up. She’d gone nearly three days without water when he’d found her. They’d stayed together for a time, first only as comrades who agreed to help each other in a job.
But Sonara found that the more time she spent with Jaxon… the more he began to remind her of Soahm. Not in every way, but in the ones that mattered; in the ways that eased her conscience when she thought of her brother and remembered him screaming her name in the dark.
Jaxon was someone else to share knowledge with, to tease and laugh with and relent when she forced him to give over his blanket on the coldest Deadlands nights. He was someone to feel the hot blaze of competition with, on days when they both needed the extra push to keep going.
He’d saved her second life, literally, by simply offering to share his water skin. First it was the fear of being alone, of havingno onebesides their beasts, that first brought Sonara and Jaxon together. But it was their friendship, forged in the fires of life as outlaws and outcasts, that had made them an inseparable pair.
They’d become blood-bonded, with the slash of a blade, their palms pressed together. A pact, a promise sworn with the shadowy tendrils of their blood, to always look out for one another. Comrades in armsandin life.
She wouldn’t make the same mistake with Jaxon that she’d made with Soahm.
