“You were starving. Food seems pretty necessary.”
“And the shirt? Drying my scales?”
She sounds pissed, but now I’m really not understanding. I have to use magic. The lack of it will kill us just as much as using it. And magic issupposedto be helpful. “You were uncomfortable.”
“I’ve been in worse situations thanslightly wet.”
I can’t help the grin that suddenly splits my lips. “Have you, now?”
Her gaze narrows on mine. “Pull your mind out of the sandbar and stop killing us faster. I don’t need you to dry my shirt. I’m fine existing with my tail. I can refrain from eating for seven days without being sick.”
“How do you know—”
“Not important. Listen to me, Arion. You may have some magical suicide clause in your warlock contract, but you don’t need to trigger it for me. You don’t need to use magic to be helpful or productive. You’re eight hundred pounds of rippling muscles. You’re plenty helpful without it.”
“I am not eight hundred pounds.”
Determination wrinkles her brow as a vein throbs in her neck. She pushes her pink hair behind her ear and crawls forward to poke me in the chest. “You are more than your magic, Arion Stone, and our lives are worth more than a baguette and some moldy milk.”
“You ate most of the cheese yourself—”
“I’m being serious.Listento me.” Her palm flattens over my heart. “Most people are born with some sense of self-preservation. What the fuck did they do to you in that tower? Scramble your brains and rip them out through your ears?”
The question irritates me. I don’t want to talk about this, least of all with a mermaid. The ground trembles beneath me, unsteady. Unstable. And I’m trying—I’m trying to breathe through it. Trying to repress it, stuff it all back down in the dark crevices of my mind so I can continue on this fucking journey. So I can keep hoping the heart is real and Abysses is close and I—we—won’t die in the next few days. “I turned traitor to rescue you so I could find a fabled heart. I think that proves I have plenty of self-preservation.”
“Bullshit. You could have left anytime. You could have huntedMortem’s stupid heart the first day one of those veins appeared. Why didn’t you? Why did you wait?”
Because, I think suddenly,warlocks aren’t meant to fear.Life or death or any of the pain in between. And the day I spotted one of the black veins, felt the agony of magic drying inside my chest, was the day my fucking fear cracked open.
I glare at the mermaid, eyes flaring at her sanctimonious psychoanalysis. “Would you rather discuss your issues? I’d love to dive into the inner workings of a merrow’s mind. Let’s talk about the library, Zephyra. Let’s talk about what happenedlast time.” I capture her wrist, trapping her hand as she freezes. Her eyes widen, and panic pulses through the cord. “Who died?”
She tries to tug her hand free. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No? How about your enemies? Why are you so afraid of the Syl? What’s out there that had you pulling grave robberies in Crestfall? You aren’t better than me, Zephyra. You don’t have all the answers.”
“I never said I did.” Her frustration, my frustration, throttle the cord now, as if the whole thing—the entire debt—might implode. “But you act like ‘warlock’ is some higher entity. You are a man. You may have magic, but you’re still human.”
“And that’s the worst thing I could be, right?”
“No.No.The worst thing you can be is hateful, cruel,obsessive—” Her voice breaks on the last. “I don’t care that you’re human. I care that you are heinously wrong about merrow. I care that you—you, not the whole of humanity—slaughtered mermaids and threw me in prison. And now you’re putting our lives in jeopardy. If you want to jump headfirst into a forest fire, fine. But don’t drag me with you.”
“I didn’t ask for the life debt.” I release her wrist, but it’s too fast. She can’t catch herself in time. Collapsing against my chest, her hair splays over my skin, concealing my blackened veins. Neither of us moves, at least not right away. Without thinking better of it, I brush her hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear. She peers up at me then, her gaze crashing into mine, and whatever she sees in my expression throws her backward. She sidles up against the other wall.
I wait for her to snap at me. To admonish me with her disdain.To tell me to eat shit and die. But she doesn’t do what I expect. She never fucking does.
“Why did you tell me to run?” she asks. “When the freaks—thecult—cornered us, and its leader was choking me, you told them to torture you instead. To kill you.” Her gaze snags on my chest, on those veins, before rising to meet mine.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re linked, Arion, and we’re in this together regardless of your hatred for me or my hatred for you.”
She’s right. I do hate her. Even when she’s lit up by the bioluminescence of an ancient cavern, awash in shades of purple and blue like an ethereal depiction of the sea, I have no other choice. Not hating a merrow would feel like carving out the last bit of Mortem that resides in my veins. The last parts of greatness. Not hating Zephyra would mean being irrevocably broken. Still, the longer I look into her eyes, the longer I can parse out the truth there. A facade of sunlight strung over a vivid moon. Bright, but only because everything around it is so bleak. Dark and fathomless as the night sky.
I can’t tear my eyes away.
