It dawned on me only then that my wings were gone. Bones’s were gone, too. He stood in front of me, and I stared at the suit he wore, a little bewildered at how he looked. Why had it not occurred to me until now that he’d be dressed for the function, as well?
“You can go back to the party,” I managed to get out, looking up to meet his eyes. “It’s early. It must be early.”
Bones didn’t even pretend to think about my offer.
He grunted, then bent down to slide his arms around my shoulders and under my legs, picking me up by my knees andupper back, like he had the first time. He pulled me to his chest and began walking me over the tall grass.
“You’re sure no one’s here?” I slurred. I could already feel my muscles turning back to jelly, now that the adrenaline was leaving them for the second time.
He didn’t answer that, either.
I leaned my face back against his shoulder and closed my eyes. He smelled like fire-smoke and cloves, what might have been hard alcohol and something else, something I couldn’t identify. It had to be cologne, I decided. Probably something posh and expensive that no other mage in Malcroix was allowed to wear.
He snorted a little, but didn’t speak.
I snuggled into his jacket and sighed. I stopped trying to think, to care.
That time, I know I passed out.
My eyes opened just enoughto confuse me. I stared up at a dark canopy over the bed where I lay, a high ceiling covered in stars, in a room that definitely wasn’t mine.
Strangely it wasn’t the unfamiliarity of the room that bothered me.
It was a groan I heard, somewhere else in the room.
I pushed myself up on my hands, arms trembling.
My mind still swam, if anything, worse than before. I looked across the room, my eyes filled with a strange light, a blinding light I could scarcely see past. I saw him sprawled in a chair, though. I saw the black crystal over him, the smoke and flame that seemed to always ripple in an invisible wind. His arms werespread, his hands down, as if gripping the sides of the armchair. He groaned again, his body arching, as if in some great pain.
He wore a white shirt, something close to a T-shirt, but I could see the scars on the top of his chest and on his arm above the dragon tattoo. He’d either forgotten to charm them, or hadn’t bothered, given how much of his skin remained covered under the suit he’d been wearing earlier. The scars shone strangely silver under the star illusion he had all over his ceiling.
I didn’t even try to think before I did it. I’m not sure anything I could have managed right then would have qualified as thinking, anyway.
I pushed and pulled myself to the side of the mattress with my arms, hands, legs. I climbed carefully down, and pressed the soles of my bare feet to the cold wood.
I didn’t walk well. It felt more like stumble-falling in his general direction. But I made it to where he was and climbed into his lap in the chair. I wrapped my arms around his torso, and laid my head on his shoulder. He jerked when I first sat on him, then tensed, then abruptly relaxed. His hand coiled into my hair, and his fingers gripped me against his chest.
For a long-feeling few moments, he didn’t move other than that.
I felt him breathing harder, like I’d woken him from a bad dream, or, maybe more likely, like I’d startled him, and he was still coming down from the shock of finding me sitting on him.
I was just dozing off when he cleared his throat.
“I think you’re missing the purpose of me sleeping here, Shadow,” he said by my ear. “Rather than in my actual bed.”
I thought about that.
I couldn’t make myself focus on it long enough to puzzle it out.
“Then sleep in the bed,” I told him.
He didn’t answer.
When I still hadn’t made any kind of effort to get off him, he dropped his hand from my hair and wrapped his arm around my back. Heaving himself up off the chair, he brought me with him, holding me against his chest for the third time in what couldn’t have been very many hours. He walked us back to the canopied monstrosity of his bed, which I realized stood next to a floor-to-ceiling window filled with moonlight.
His window looked out on nearly the same view I had from my own bedroom, yet his room was absolutely enormous, even compared to mine. I’d never seen windows like his in any part of Valarian, either, including on any of the mage floors.
All of that left my mind when he placed me carefully back on the open side of his bed. He started to straighten, and, unthinking, I grabbed his wrist.
