I lie against him and listen to his heart beat whole under my palm and wait to learn whether I just killed my husband in our bed.
Chapter
Two
The second time Celeste’s power reached for me, it found the seam and pulled.
A fraction. A thread of force drawn along a fault line I didn’t know I had until her gift mapped it. I have been killed before. I know the shape of a thing that means it. This meant it. Then she hauled it back, and my heart kept beating under her hand.
She asked if something pulled. I told her nothing came loose. It’s the first lie I’ve told my wife, and I told it without a pause, because the truth serves no one tonight. I don’t know what the pull cost me. Something, nothing, a wound that hasn’t shown itself yet. Elena will have the fact by morning, away from Celeste, because Elena needs every number, even the ones I would rather not say out loud. Celeste gets the lie until the lie is either true or it isn’t.
She isn’t afraid of dying. She’s afraid of being the thing that kills me. I felt it through the bond while she lay rigid against my chest, andI’ve watched this woman walk into rooms full of men who wanted her dead carrying less fear than she carried lying in my arms tonight. So I kept my arms easy and let her listen to my heart until every instrument she owns told her I was whole. I’m not afraid of her. I have never once been afraid of her. I’m afraid of what happens if she decides she’s the danger. Fear like that convinced her to vanish from her own sister’s life and call it protection. I won’t watch it teach her to leave herself.
I sent for Elena while Celeste’s heart was still slamming against mine. She came within the hour, the portable diagnostic unit under one arm and her notebook in her hand, took one look at the cracked wall, and set up without a word.
“On the bed. Both of you.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re a data point. Sit.”
She was already unspooling the scanner leads. The unit is Dalton’s work, modified for supernatural physiology, and the notation system is Elena’s own invention, because standard charts don’t have a column for telekinetic amplification. I sat.
“Tell me the worst number first,” Celeste said.
“There is no worst number. Your vitals are a fortress. Theirs are...” Elena turned the screen. Two signatures inside the larger one, fast and bright and enormous for what they were. “Strong. Stronger than last week. Stronger than anything in the literature, and the literature has never met these two. The amplification starts below the navel, where no gift of yours has ever lived. It’s theirs, channeled up through the gift you do have. The modification marker is stable. Medically, the three of you are as well as a thing no instrument was built to measure can be.”
“And the surge?”
“I can describe what happened. I can’t predict it.” Elena has never once softened a fact for comfort. “When it comes again, howhard, whether it keeps getting easier to catch or stops being possible. That’s beyond the scanner.”
The wand passed over my chest twice. The readout held steady. I watched Elena’s face while it did, and I didn’t say the word pull, and the word stayed in my mouth the whole time. Morning. She gets it in the morning, when Celeste isn’t lying beside me measuring every breath I take for damage.
“I’ll know more after Seraphina has had her hands on it,” Elena said. She looked at Celeste a moment longer than the readings required. “You’re all right tonight. Right now, tonight, you’re all right.” Then she gathered her instruments and left us the room.
Celeste stayed rigid through all of it and said nothing, and I stayed close until her breathing changed.
She’s asleep now. The fever has eased to something I can almost call warm. Her breathing has settled into the rhythm I know, and it was harder won tonight. Before the surge, the pregnancy pulled her under fast. Now her body fights sleep like it fights everything beyond her control, and the surrender, when it comes, is more total for the fighting.
I lie behind her and listen. To her breathing. To the twins, two small rapid rhythms folded inside her own, audible when the compound goes quiet enough. Faster than hers. Bodies building themselves from nothing have no patience for the pace the world runs at. The crescent mark glows against her skin, a soft crimson pulse matching her heartbeat, the only light in the room. The mark on my chest answers it, and the two rhythms run in sync through the dark.
I follow the pulse because following it is the nearest a man like me gets to setting the work down.
The want underneath it is simple, and I won’t dress it up. The morning comes. She walks into it safe. The plan works. That is the whole of it.
She wentunder with the bond wide open, and the bond does what it has started to do when we rest this close. It takes us somewhere.
It’s been building places for us since Thessivane. What changes is what it builds them from.
I know the place before I’ve finished arriving. The rooftop again, high over a city that is and isn’t Atlanta, the grid of lights running out to a horizon that stays put when I look at it. The bond built this for us once. It doesn’t waste a place that worked.
The air has the hyper-real weight these spaces always have. Gravel sharp and specific under my feet. Wind off the parapet. Below us, ten thousand windows lit gold, none of them real and all of them exact. Celeste stands at the edge with her back to me, and even built from a dream she is more vivid than the city behind her. The line of her shoulders. The loose fall of her hair. Warmth I can feel from three steps away that no earlier version of her ever ran.
“You’re working,” she says without turning. “Even here. I can feel you doing it.”
“I’m looking at the city.”
“You’re looking at it like a map.”
