“You haven’t been hungry in three days.”
Silence. The wind. The soft sound of feathers settling.
“No,” he said. “I have not.”
I walked toward him. My feet on cold stone. His back still to me, those impossible feathers catching the light.
“Were you planning to tell me?”
His shoulders tightened. The feathers flattened, then rose again.
“Tell you what?”
“That you’re changing. That something’s wrong. That you’ve been hiding out here at dawn so I won’t see,” I gestured at him. At all of it. “This.”
He turned.
Oh.
Oh, god.
His eyes. Pure gold now, the amber completely swallowed. Pupils slit like a cat’s. Like a predator’s. And his face. The bones sharper, the angles more severe. Still him. Still recognizably him. But more.
My pulse raced. I could feel it in my throat, my wrists, the tips of my fingers.
He looked at me looking at him. Waiting for the fear.
“You should be afraid,” he said.
“I should be a lot of things.” I didn’t step back. “Apparently I’m not very good at doing what I should.”
“Wren.”
“You’ve been lying to me.”
His expression tightened. “I was not.”
“You were hiding. Pretending to eat. Coming out here before dawn so I wouldn’t see the feathers. That’s lying. That’s the definition of lying.”
“I was trying to give you time.”
“For what?”
“Before you knew.” His voice cracked. Actually cracked, like something physical was breaking. “Before you saw what you had married. What I am becoming.”
“And what is that?”
He didn’t answer. Just looked at me, the feathers on his shoulders rising and falling with each breath.
“I thought I did something wrong,” I said. “When you stopped eating. When you started leaving rooms when I entered. I thought…”
I stopped. My throat was tight. Stupid. Stupid to be upset about this.
“I thought I’d disappointed you somehow.”
He moved.
I didn’t see him move. One moment he was at the edge of the balcony and the next he was there, right in front of me, his hands on my shoulders, fever-hot, those golden eyes inches from mine.
