“Are you ready to tell me what’s going on yet?” he asks, crossing his arms.
I bite my lip, wondering how upset he’ll be. It’s not that I’m afraid of his anger, but I don’t want him to be unhappy with me, not when we’re finally together again.
“One thing first,” I say, turning so that I stand opposite him, toe-to-toe.“Kiss me,”I speak into his mind, across the connection, and his eyebrows rise. He responds out loud, a sign of his wariness, I think.
“I’m always happy to do that, Ana, but can I ask why?”
“Because when I tell you what we did, you might not feel like kissing me for a while, and I deserve at least one after what you’ve put me through.”
Concern flickers in his eyes, but I feel his guilt flare through the mooring. That, at least, might work in my favor.
He takes my face in his hands and molds his mouth to mine. His lips are warm and persistent, his tongue softly caressing. I sigh into him, letting my eyes slide shut for a blissful minute before he pulls away, his forehead coming to rest against mine.
“Was that good enough to earn me the truth?” he asks, his voice low and rough.
I open my eyes. “I’ll always tell you the truth. We promised, remember?”
He nods, the movement brushing his jaw against my chin. I want to stay close to him, touching like this, but I know it’s time to explain, and I need a clearer head for that than I’ll ever have while I’m in his arms.
“We needed to find a way to bring your soul back,” I say, easing myself away from him. “Lafia and Mal guessed we could use the mooring, as long as I could locate you first. I needed to send a part of myself out to you.”
I feel the concern turn to cold fear inside him. “What part?” he asks.
“A piece ofmysoul,” I say, so quietly it’s almost a whisper.
His fear hardens into ice, and his hands grip my shoulders.
“You used up a piece of yoursoul?”
“I didn’t use it up,” I insist. “I sent it to you. I…I don’t know exactly how it worked, but I put it inside you, or you absorbed it, or something. Mal and Lafia think it means we’re probably…connected, now.”
I drop my gaze, wondering how to phrase the next bit.
“We were connected before. Pretty powerfully,” Leon says. “So what’s changed? Ana—look at me. What in the gloam do they think this means?”
“They think that our lifelines are probably intertwined now. As in…when you die, I will too.”
He drops his hands from me so abruptly I flinch, then stalks across the other side of the room, gripping the windowsill so hard it splinters beneath his fingers.
“So you’ve essentially had us sign a death pact,” he growls. “If one of us goes, both of us do.”
“Well…not exactly,” I say slowly. “Because obviously I can’t survive if part of my soul dies, but yours…”
He spins around as he realizes what I’m saying. “But mine is still intact?”
I nod. “They just cut your soul loose with the scythe, they didn’t damage it.”
“So if you die,I won’t?!” His voice reaches a crescendo on the last few syllables. The windowsill is essentially pulp now.
“What was I supposed to do, Leon? We didn’t have another plan, and your body wasn’t going to survive that long without you in it.”
“So you just went with the first crazy scheme they gave you, cooked up by a mad dryad and a teenage girl?”
I feel defensive for Mal and Lafia’s sakes. If their plan was crazy, it was the kind of madness geniuses come up with—desperate geniuses.
“None of the actual healers offered any solutions other than watching your body wither and die and leaving your soul to wander for eternity,” I say, throwing my hands wide. “And it worked, didn’t it?”
He shakes his head, eyes burning with frustration. “Did it ever occur to you how unfair this is? That I might not want to live in a world without you in it?”
