Then the next thing I know, with that lightning speed of his, he’s grabbed my hand and pulled me right against him. Then he’s running his sharp teeth up and down my neck.
“I missed you so much,” he whispers, lips brushing against my skin.
“Me too,” I whisper back.
“I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve your trust. I don’t deserve your love. I don’t deserve any of this.”
“It’s not about deserving, Fox,” I tell him, twining my arms around his neck. I can tell he’s still a little weak – not completely the Fox Tudor I know. “Take some,” I whisper. “Take just a little.”
His resolve weakens. I think now we’ve both done this, there’s no return. I can’t describe the feeling when he fed from me, but it was one of the most astonishing moments of my life, and I want to live it again and again. And I think he feels exactly the same way, because he sinks his fangs into my neck.
It’s not painful this time. I barely feel it at all – just that strange sensation of sucking against my skin, of the pull of my magic and my blood toward his mouth. I close my eyes and sigh, going limp in his arms. It’s dreamy, blissful. I feel like I’m floating in heaven itself.
It lasts for a lot less time than before. He pulls away more quickly. Once again, his mouth is scarlet with my blood, his teethstained red, his lips that color too. His tongue flicks out and he moans.
“I can taste the light in your blood, Briony. I can taste it sparking on my tongue. It’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted before.”
He wraps his hand around my throat, and for a moment he just stares at it, enraptured. But then the shadows creep from his fingers and mend the puncture wounds he made with his fangs.
“You saved me, Briony,” he says. “I think you’ve saved me over and over again.”
“You saved me too, remember?” I say. “So we’re even now.”
“I didn’t trek across a demon realm to save you,” he says.
I shrug. “Doesn’t matter. We’re still even.”
He smiles at me, and there’s some of the old Fox back again. It’s a relief. I want him to be whole again, to be mended. That moment in the earth’s chasm, when I was convinced he was dead, will haunt me forever.
Then something occurs to me suddenly.
“Fox – Esme Jones. She was targeted by Madame Bardin. Did she have powers?”
“Not that I ever noticed,” he says. “But then you had light wielding, and I only discovered that in the third trial. Maybe she had powers that escaped my notice. Maybe there have been other students like that too.” He shakes his head. “Maybe if I’d been better at my job, I could have saved them.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Fox
I wonder if I’m dreaming – if my mind has taken me to some blissful paradise away from the pain and the torture – because this can’t be reality, can it? So close to death one moment, so full of despair, so convinced that I would never see her again, that I’d never lay eyes on her beautiful face.
And yet her fingertips trail over my skin as she winds the rough bandages over my chest and then around the wounds on my back, and her skin is warm against mine, and the beat of her heart loud in my ears, the scent of her vivid in my nose.
This has to be real.Shehas to be real.
But I can’t quite believe it. She’s more beautiful than I remembered – more luminous, vibrant, and electric. It’s as if I can see that light inside her shining outward. It’s as if I can hear it humming and it’s as if I can feel it in the blood that settles in my veins. Her blood. Her blood humming and singing with this bright, light magic.
She smiles at me as she walks around in front of me, carefully placing the bandage across my skin, then looping it under myraised arm and feeding it across the wounds on my back. I wonder if it will be possible to heal them – if the wounds in an undead man’s body caused by those unnatural creatures are too deep to close. I think of the wounds and scars I’ve seen on Briony’s back, and I wonder, not for the first time, how ironic fate can be.
“How did you find me?” I ask her as she loops under my other arm and strides around in front of me again.
She pauses for a moment, straightening the bandages across my chest, letting her fingertips skate against my cold flesh.
“It’ll sound really stupid,” she says. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Sweetheart,” I say, tucking my finger beneath her chin and lifting those green eyes – those beautiful, beautiful green eyes, the only thing that kept me going out there in Veronica’s prison. “I already think you’re crazy. You’ve traipsed across the demon realm, fought against Bardin, battled demons, just to save a loser like me.”
“You’re not a loser, Fox,” she says, little crinkles forming between her brows. “Don’t say that.”
