And yet, I was freezing to death.
It started in my fingertips, the ones on my left hand that were already solid, matte-grey metal. But it didn't stay there. A coldness, absolute and void-like, was creeping up my marrow, sliding past the elbow, seeking the soft, wet warmth of my heart. It felt like swallowing a glacier.
My teeth chattered, a sharp, staccato sound.Clack, clack, clack.It humiliated me.
"Stop it," I whispered to myself, wrapping my flesh arm around my metal one, trying to rub friction into the stillness.
It was like rubbing a statue in winter. There was no sensation, no giving of the skin. Just a hard, unyielding cold that sucked the heat right out of my good hand.
Kaelen was pacing the perimeter of the dais, his boots crunching on the soot-stained iron. He was watchingHephaestus wrestle with a massive set of bellows, but every three seconds, his head snapped back to me. His golden eyes narrowed.
He stopped pacing.
"You're turning blue," he said, the observation sharp, an accusation against the universe.
"I'm... f-fine," I stuttered, my jaw locking up. "Just... waiting for the h-hammer."
"You aren't fine. You are hypothermic in a volcano."
He covered the distance between us in two long strides. He didn't ask permission; he stripped off his gauntlets, letting them clang to the floor, and placed his bare hands on my cheeks.
His skin was burning. He ran naturally hot, a byproduct of the dragon fire circulating in his blood, but this was intense. It should have burned me. Instead, it felt like a drop of warm water in an endless desert.
"You feel like a corpse," he snarled, his voice dipping into that low, dangerous register that usually preceded something exploding.
"The metal," I gasped, leaning into his touch despite myself. "It pulls... the heat... inward."
"I don't care about the process, Aria. I care that you are vibrating apart before we even start."
He looked over his shoulder. Hephaestus was cursing at a jammed gear, his back to us. Thane was guarding the door. Flynn was sharpening a blade, distracted.
Kaelen made a noise in his throat, a frustrated, feral growl. He scooped me up.
The world tilted. I grabbed his shoulders for purchase.
"Kaelen?"
"Quiet," he ordered.
He carried me away from the open dais, toward a narrow, shadowed alcove set into the obsidian wall. A massive vent piperan vertically through the niche, hissing with escaping steam that smelled of hot metal and deep earth. It was a pocket of concentrated, suffocating heat.
He kicked a pile of chains out of the way and set me down, pinning me against the warm pipe.
"We have to go back," I chattered, though my body was screaming to stay right here, pressed against the heat source. "The ritual..."
"The ritual requires you to be alive, not a frozen slab of meat," he snapped.
He reached up and tore at the buckles of his breastplate. The heavy divine steel fell away with a heavy thud. He didn't stop there. He grabbed the hem of his linen undertunic, soaked with sweat and soot, and ripped it over his head.
Kaelen stood before me, stripped to the waist.
In the red glow of the vent, he looked like a god of war carved from living flame. Scars crisscrossed his torso, some old and faded, some fresh and raw from the fight with the clockwork hounds. Faint, iridescent scales shimmered along his collarbones and down his arms, pulsing with a rhythmic golden light.
He didn't give me time to stare. He stepped in, eliminating the space between us.
He pressed his bare chest against mine.
The shock was electric.
