“It’s been almost two thousand years, Alosia,” I replied. “Don’t tell me you’re still homesick for that shit hole.”
Her brows came together as she frowned deeply.
“That shit hole is where we come from, Chasina,” she reminded me.
Under any other circumstances, I would have laughed with delight at getting sweet, gentle Alosia to say the words “shit hole”, but my head was pounding too hard to savor the moment. I groaned, rubbing my temples as the servants teetered the room, tea, herbs, and bandages in tow.
“And what does that say about us?” I grumbled, reaching for the piping hot tea.
Alosia slapped my hand away before dropping a wad of clean bandages into the cup. It absorbed the tea instantly and, before I could even groan in protest, she was crushing herbs on top of it. I sighed, leaning back in my seat and closing my eyes, trying to ignore the painful throbbing as best as I could.
“Did it really fall?” Alosia asked then.
“The wards were broken when I left,” I replied, keeping my eyes closed. “So I imagine that Fallen and her friends tried convincing the inhabitants to leave. Whether they succeeded or not, I couldn’t tell you. We’ll know soon enough. I imagine Deimos will have my other ear if he’s lost his recruitment grounds.”
“Adrian and Dante are the first recruits Deimos has gotten for centuries anyway,” Alosia muttered. “I can’t imagine why he should be upset about losing Sanctuary.”
My eyes flew open.
“Control,” I said simply but leaned forward, examining Alosia closely as she reached into the cup and gave the contents a stir. “You’re lucid.”
“I’m always lucid,” she answered with a sigh and a roll of her eyes. “You just never want to hear what I have to say.”
“Valin said a few months ago you went stark-raving mad and tried to heave yourself from the highest tower in the palace.”
“You’ve never tried to kill yourself?”
She looked up at me, brow raised in clear indication that she wouldn’t believe me if I tried to deny it. I frowned but nodded. Of course I had. In almost two thousand years, we had all thought about ending it a time or two. Alosia more than most, Valin less, but we’d all tried at least once. Usually, another of us was there to stop it.
“Was he there?” Alosia asked, interrupting my thoughts. “Did you see him?”
I sighed, falling back in my seat again as she retrieved her poultice from the teacup and leaned over me with it.
“I don’t understand why you still ask about him,” I replied.
“He was my partner,” she answered, defensive on this subject as always.
“Exactly. He was your partner. Right up until the moment you pushed him into an abyss, thinking you’d murdered him.”
She brushed the poultice over my wound a bit harder than was necessary and I hissed in pain.
“Harlowe will always be a part of me,” she said. “Just as I will always be a part of him. It is natural, therefore, to wonder.”
“Wonder all you want but I have no answers for you. I didn’t see him. "
She frowned but reached for the gauze, wrapping my wound without a word. After some time, she slid back, admiring her work with a grim expression.
“At least it won’t get infected,” she told me. “But I imagine you’ll have some difficulty wearing sunglasses now.”
I snorted, leaning my head back.
“Thank you, Alosia,” I told her.
“This is what we do for each other, Chasina,” she reminded me with a shrug. “This is how we survive them. I may not like you but we’re here, together, for all eternity. Might as well be neighborly.”
I snorted again. Only Alosia would call the act of binding my missing ear after our overlords stripped me of the appendage for failing the mission they’d given me being neighborly.
“Where do you think they’ll go?” I asked, dreamily, as Alosia stood and made her way to the door. Whatever she had put in that poultice was working already. I felt a cool, healing sensation spreading through the left side of my face. It was making the muscles there slack and the scent of it was reminding me just how exhausted I was. I yawned as Alosia paused in the threshold and turned back to look at me, her brilliant auburn hair slipping over her shoulders as she did.
“All I know,” she started, seeming to return to that melancholy state we so often found her in lately, “is that this is only the beginning.”
Then she was gone and I was falling into my own abyss, praying that, this time, the drugs would keep the nightmares at bay.
