He couldn’t just unmake his whole world.
He was seventeen and shaking on the living room floor again. Griff was ranting about how Mal had betrayed him. Let his dead parents down, disgraced them all by working for the Shadow Queen, some dark sorcerer who hid her decaying features behind a gilded mask. Hedidcare that Griff was looking at him like he didn’t know him. That he was telling Mal they were nothing to each other from now on, calling Mal a traitor, his eyes red and his voice full of a hurt Mal didn’t recognize.
Griff’s eyes had been red since the day before, when he’d walked in on Mal kissing some girl in his room at the cottage for the first time, trying new things.
But Mal didn’t have time to wonder what that meant, or even time to defend himself more than by shouting a few curses and petty insults back at Griff before the person he trusted most in this life was gone. It had seemed so easy for Griff to leave him behind, like Mal had never really mattered to him at all, like he was worth nothing in the end. Like he was just a stain on Griff’s boot.
Griff was so sure, even back then, that the Wardens were right to fight the Queen, that his purpose—and Alys’s, and Mal’s—should be to join the battle the way their parents had. Give up their precious life for it, like there couldn’t be anything else worth living for.
When they made their way back to Mayfair six years ago, Griff had been quick to judge his new scars, his new swagger, his new sneer. Mal had wanted to fight him, had grown so used to fighting in Thrallkeld that he had found everything to insult about the other man. His clothes, his boyfriend of the week, the elves he cared more about than he ever had Mal. Over the site of their parents’ graves, he had mocked and goaded Griff into breaking his nose, and he had given Griff his first black eye in return.
Every time his fist landed, every time his scathing words pierced Griff’s armor like barbs, Mal somehow felt worse, until the whiskey helped him to feel nothing at all.
He had come to rely on Griff to let him down. But the whiskey wasn’t helping this time.
Maybe because this time,hewas the one who had let Griff down.
“Wait, are you seriously leaving me with this mess? Where are you going?” Guts called, her voice ringing with alarm and confusion as Mal raced back up the stairs to the main shop.
“Ate something bad for dinner,” he lied without remorse. “Just gonna get some air.”
With that, he took a seat on the long counter that faced the front door, skinny legs dangling, knife in hand and not enough whiskey in the world, to wait for his boss’s return no matter how long it took. The Shadow Queen’s agents had numbers on their side; he’d made sure of that. Which meant that Griff was already dead. And as far as Mal was concerned, that made Kage a walking corpse too, because Mal was going to avenge his fallen friend or die trying. He wouldn’t hesitate. He owed Griff that much.
Too bad for his boss that unlike Griff, he was no one’s hero. He didn’t fight fair, whatever that meant. And he had figured out how to survive in the dark a long time ago. Alone.
Chapter ThreeRabbit Blood
Griff was unraveling, coming undone just like the threads of Mal’s sweaters that had gotten stretched too thin at the shoulders from him secretly pulling them on over his own broader frame, back in the days of long ago when he still had hope that they might one day be something more.
He was a collection of songs, images, and feelings, twenty-eight years of them spilling out from between the fingers of those trying their best to hold him together, to prevent his fading away—but it was inevitable, wasn’t it?
He could feel little pieces of himself steadily falling like husks of leaves from a dead tree as he sat on a golden shore in the Wood, racing boats with Mal while Alys perched in a tree above them and cheered, fully aware now that he shouldn’t be there at all. He let the small boat in his much-larger hand go adrift in the current, whatever phantom Mal was saying to him blending with the rush of water as he tried to focus, to hold tighter to all the things he was before he lost them forever:
A foreman by trade, good with his hands.
A bard by hobby only, because talented musicians were a dime a dozen in Mayfair.
A Warden-in-training, hoping to fight the darkness like his parents before him.
Dog person.
Good cook.
Better lover.
Two years sober—well, until the bender that had landed him here, in the after. He’d never quite decided what he believed would happen beyond death, but then there was hardly a point in guessing when he was clearly about to find out.
Everything went white, quiet, and still.
There was no more phantom Mal. No golden shore.
Then came a babble of distant voices, all familiar, though he couldn’t see anyone in the empty, almost-blinding brightness around him.
“Is he going to die?” Alys demanded tearfully, not laughing as she had been in the otherworldly Wood. “I should get Mal. He has to know too. I need to—”
“No!” This voice was deeper, firmer, leaving no room for argument: Liam. “Leave him out of this. He’ll only be in the way.”
“Infection … packed with something filthy … his fever …” A softer, smoother voice cut in and out, one Griff hadn’t heard for a few years now. He couldn’t quite place it, though he knew he should be able to.
