Follow Your Heart
Idon’tknowwhatwakesme.
Not a sound. Not the fox outside, not Felix shifting on the sofa, not Bristol doing any of its ordinary Bristol nighttime things. Just a sudden sharp awareness of being awake, sitting up in the dark with my heart already going too fast before I’ve fully worked out why.
Then the pain hits.
It is not gradual. It does not build. It arrives all at once, a vicious twisting agony somewhere in my abdomen, and I double over with a sound I am not going to describe because it is not dignified and I have some standards left.
I am dying. Obviously. I am twenty-six years old and I am having some kind of catastrophic internal event and Felix is asleep on my sofa and I need to call an ambulance and I cannot currently straighten up enough to reach my phone, and I don’t have enough breath to shout for help.
I breathe through it. In and out. The way you breathe through something when you have no other options.
The pain doesn’t ease exactly. But in the breathing, in the forced stillness of trying to get through it, something shifts. A quality to it I hadn’t noticed in the first shrieking panic of it. It is pain,yes, absolutely pain, genuinely impressive pain that I would like to never experience again. But it doesn’t feel like mine.
I know my body. I know the particular landscape of my own aches and ailments and the occasional dramatic overreaction of my lower back after a long shift, as well as the way my guts cramp when I’ve had too much dairy. This doesn’t feel like any of those things. This feels like something coming from somewhere else, transmitted through a channel that isn’t quite physical, arriving via a route that bypasses the normal business of nerves and tissue and goes somewhere deeper.
The bond.
The realisation doesn’t arrive gently.
“No,” I say out loud to the dark bedroom. “No, no, no…”
I lunge for the ring on the nightstand. I hold it in both hands and I concentrate, the way I’ve learnt to concentrate on the thread of the bond when I want to feel whether it’s still there. I reach for it.
It’s there. It’s still there. But it’s wrong, fraying at the edges, pulsing with something that is not the steady warm presence I’ve been checking every night since he left. It’s desperate. It’s flagging. It is the thread pulled taut to the very edge of what a thread can bear and starting, very slowly, to fray.
He’s hurt. He’s badly hurt, and somewhere in a realm I cannot reach he is running out of what he needs to survive and I am sitting here in my uncle’s flat in Bristol completely and utterly useless and I cannot do anything, I cannot do a single thing, there is nothing I can…
“You’re catastrophising,” says a voice from the corner of my bedroom. “Quite impressively.”
I spin around.
Fiend is sitting on my desk chair, which he has turned around so he is straddling it backwards, his arms folded across the top of it, his extraordinary face propped on his forearms, waist-length black hair tumbling all the way down to the seat. He looks like someonewho has been there for a while and has been waiting with great patience for the screaming to stop.
He also looks, at close range in my bedroom, at what must be two in the morning, even more unreasonably beautiful than I remembered. This seems deeply unfair under the circumstances.
“How long have you been sitting there?” I demand.
“A few minutes.” He tilts his head. “You were processing. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“You didn’t want to interrupt my panic attack?”
“It was very expressive. Very succulent. It would have been a tragedy to waste all that nourishment.”
I blink rapidly in the dark as I frantically try to get my mind to abort its attempt at processing. I don’t want to know. I really don’t. I already feel several kinds of violated, I really don’t need anymore.
Fiend unfolds himself from the chair with the fluid, boneless grace he brings to all movement, and stands, looking at me with those purple eyes that are bright and steady and missing absolutely nothing.
“He’s hurt,” he says, and the lightness is still in his voice, but there is something under it now, the same thing I saw when he told Hex to take care of himself. Something old and tired and genuinely concerned. “The fight did not go as planned.”
“I know he’s hurt,” I snap. “I can feel it. The bond…”
“Yes.” Fiend looks at the ring in my hands. Then at me. “You can help him.”
I stare at him. “I’m a barista from Bristol.”
“You’re considerably more than that, and you know it.” He sounds almost impatient, which on Fiend is extraordinary because Fiend in my living room was all theatrical languor. This Fiend is something slightly different. More direct. More urgent. “The ring. It isn’t just a ring.”
