“What about unintended consequences now that it’s gone?” I ask.
“None so far,” he replies. “Let me prove it to you.”
He scoops me up and rises to his feet, letting the blanket fall away. “See? Arms and legs working fine.” He tips his head to the side, his focus becoming distant. “My senses are working normally. I can hear the guards in the far distance talking about dinner. Night birds have started singing in the forest outside this place—their song is drifting in through the air vents. I know it’s a forest because I can hear the leaves rustling in the trees. The sun must be going down, for the birds to start calling.”
He inhales, as if to test his sense of smell, but his focus falls to me. “You have blood in your hair.”
“So do you,” I retort.
He arches his eyebrows at me. “The blood in my hair is my own. The blood in yours belongs to multiple people.” He gives me a garish grin. “My sense of smell is working fine.”
“And so is your mind. Clearly.”
I glance around. I didn’t pay any attention to this little room before—I couldn’t.
Now I see that it is, indeed, some sort of bathroom, as I had first suspected. A sink is carved into the wall and there are cloths piled on a chair in the other back corner.
Without the darkness of the medallion and the panic of its removal, I’m very conscious of how little I’m wearing. Only a thin tunic. Not that Erik hasn’t seen me naked many times before.
This feels different. He was the Vandawolf then.
Now, we’re in unknown territory.
He follows my gaze to our surroundings. “We both need to wash, but where is the bath?”
He slides me to the floor, scoops up the blanket, and wraps it around me again. After tugging it tightly, he veers toward the left wall. His fingers dance across it.
“I hear water flowing,” he says, pausing at a spot halfway along. “Right here. Which means there must be… Aha!”
His fingers wrap around a mottled knob of rock protruding from the wall before he gives me a triumphant grin.
In the next moment, water pours down onto him, but not from low on the wall like it would for a bath. It pours from the ceiling, instantly flattening his hair.
With a yelp, he leaps clear of it.
He lands lightly, outside the downpour, which cascades directly from the ceiling a full foot wide of its central point.
His shoulders hunch as he growls up at the water, as if it triggered his fight reflexes. “Instant rain? What the fuck?”
Water droplets drip down his head and chest before he shakes himself off.
He clears his throat and straightens. “It’s perfectly warm.”
I bite my lip. It’s not often that something startles him. “It must be a fae invention.”
He said the water was warm so I step straight into the spray, tunic and all, letting the liquid flow down my hair and face and body. The waterfall is so wide that it nearly extends from one end of my shoulders to the other.
I stay there for a moment, my eyes closed, letting it wash over me, conscious of Erik remaining quietly nearby.
Then something soft presses against my arm and I open my eyes to find him holding a small cloth out to me.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he says.
My hand closes around his before he can withdraw. The cloth drops to the floor, but I ignore it. The impulse to pull him under the spray with me is strong.
Before I can move, he turns my hand over.
It’s my right hand.
