Page 69 of Adam, Mine

Elias felt sadness like a tsunami that flowed from the top of his head through to his fingertips and down to his toes. Rushing forth and receding: the ocean meeting the shore. He felt it deeply, too deep to concentrate in a singular place.

Victor sobbed. He clenched his teeth around a wad of sheets and let Elias overwhelm him.

He rocked in place, as all the shades of Elias’s sorrow ran through. Elias knew he was listening now, and this is what Victor handed him: deep brushstrokes of the sadness hidden in terror, a lush wave of self-loathing, loneliness so potent it made Victor wretch and heave until his mouth filled with bile.

Anger, raw and terrible. The kind of fury that made one blind and forgetful in their violence.

Elias pushed toward Victor woe so deep it felt like he was drowning. Dark enough that Victor wished that he were dead.

Then the agony of understanding. A peculiar thing to feel, but Victor recognized it anyway. He’d felt it when he realized he would never quite be welcome among his peers. When he’d sat in the stuffed armchair at Mr. Sauer’s home and copied addresses. Knowing that he would not be welcomed back.

Elias followed that with resignation, tight and heavy, centered in his chest, the tragedy of helplessness and the horror of that struggle.

Then, after a brief pause, like Elias was thinking, he sent him regular sadness again. But this time it felt like rain, like disappointment, refreshing in its regularity.

Victor grabbed tight to this feeling and held it inside himself, arms wrapped around his chest. He felt his own sadness reaching up to meet it. Twined around it until they were enmeshed together.

“I’m sorry,” Victor said out loud. Trying the words out for size. Tasting them.

Elias’s sorrow retreated and something else was filtering through: satisfaction. But not the satisfaction of a job well done, the sticky dark satisfaction of revenge well had.

A hysteric thrill welled inside him, and Victor got the sense that he was being laughed at. The combination of the two was so immediately terrifying that Victor sat up and scrambled for the talisman. He shoved it in his mouth, tucking it under his tongue, where it seemed to work best.

The feeling abated, but his heart still raced.

Elias felt deeply. The way he felt his emotions was stunning. So much so that Victor had begun to think of him fondly in spite of their pain. He didn’t know if you could have another that close to your heart and not ache.

But this was a crisp reminder that that was a mistake. Victor didn’t know him. They were enemies. And that was Victor’s fault.

Victor let out a long breath and wrenched a hand through his hair. He wiped the tears from his cheeks and the spit from his chin and got out of bed.

Trad

Never in his life did Elias imagine that he would travel this far.

The English in Scotland had been impenetrable. The few people who spoke English in Germany had round accents that made it simpler to tell what they were saying. Here, it may as well be Arabic.

And people here didn’t collect languages either. It was unsurprising to run into an Italian man with some German or a French man who spoke it either, for that matter. But here it was English, or a language that sounded like birds underwater. Occasionally a word would sound familiar to its cousin in German, but rarely did the speaker slow down enough for it to matter.

Here, Elias felt more adrift and more alone than anywhere in the world.

Finding his way to Ayan’s house was more challenging than anything Elias had ever done. Normally, he could just walk up to someone and start asking questions that would give him enough to be able to walk up to someone else and ask better questions.

It took him three hours to figure out that Ayan was a forgemaster and another two hours to be pointed to the correct forge. Then no one would rent Elias a horse because there was none to be had, so he was forced to walk. He was starting to feel ill as he was running low on pine and the great infusions of strength had slowed to a trickle after his bath in France. He’d seen some trees, but they were in very populated areas and he didn’t want to be a strange foreigner snatching at foliage. He would come back after dark.

Ayan’s home was rustic. Whitewashed walls and thatched roof stinking deeply of smoke and ash. The grassy area around it was bare in patches, and there were pieces of metal and wood scattered around rusting and rotting.

It was . . . comfortable. It reminded him of the forgemaster he’d known. A distractable man called Guern with one large muscular arm, who made little figurines with scrap metal for yule.

Elias ran over the words for his speech in English then knocked on Ayan’s door.

It was opened immediately. Ayan McClean was as wide as the doorframe, red haired and covered in soot.

“D’nna needanying,” he said, and closed the door in Elias’s face.

Elias stood there, surprised. Alain and Colombo had ushered him in immediately. He hadn’t prepared for a door simply being closed. Elias thought for a minute and reached into his coat for the blue book. He flipped to a page with a circle drawing on it and knocked again.

Ayan snatched the door open. “Ayesaayed, we d’need—” he started then paused.