Chapter 3 · The Pale Stranger & The Ember (3)

"Because," he said, "a hundred years ago, I watched you die to save my world. And I've spent every day since then trying to find a way to bring you back."

The words hit me like the ocean.

"I don't — I don't understand —"

"You don't have to. Not yet." His thumb brushed my jaw. "But I need you to know one thing, Lynn. Before anything else. I didn't come here to use you. I didn't come here to hunt you. I came here to —" He stopped, and for the first time since I'd met him, he looked lost. "I came here to thank you. And I came here to tell you that you don't have to do it again."

"Do what?"

"Die." His voice cracked on the word. "You don't have to die to save the world. I won't let you. Not again. Not while I —"

He didn't finish. He didn't have to. Because I looked at him, and I saw it — saw the hundred years of waiting in his eyes, saw the weight of it in his shoulders, saw the thing he'd been carrying alone for a century and had never once put down — and the cold thing in my chest burned, bright and warm, and I leaned forward, and he met me halfway.

The kiss was not gentle.

It was hungry. It was a hundred years of hunger — his hands in my hair, my back against the wall, the taste of rain and cedar and something like grief — and I kissed him back like I was drowning, because I was, because everything I knew was falling apart around me and he was the only solid thing left.

His hands found my waist. My hands found his chest — the chest with the scar that had healed itself, the chest that held a heart that had been waiting for a century — and his mouth dragged down my throat, and I gasped, and the sound he made in response was not human.

It was a growl.

And the growl woke something in me. Something ancient and terrible and <em>mine</em> — the power from the café, the ocean, surging up through my chest, through my skin, crackling in my fingertips — and Kael jerked back like I'd burned him.

He had.

There were scorch marks on his shirt. Little black-edged holes, like my fingers had left prints in him.

We stared at each other. Both breathing hard. The rain hammered the windows. My chest was heaving, and the power was still there, crackling under my skin, and Kael was looking at me like I was the most beautiful and most dangerous thing he had ever seen.

"Lynn," he breathed.

"I'm sorry, I didn't — I don't know how to —"

"Don't apologize." He laughed — a low, wondering sound. "You have no idea — you have NO idea what you just did. You woke up. For the first time in a hundred years, the Keeper woke up." He shook his head, dazed. "I've been trying to do that for a century. I've been trying to reach you, to wake you gently, to give you a choice — and you just — you woke yourself up. By kissing me."

"That's — that's not — I didn't —"

"You did." He stepped toward me again, slow, careful, and took my hands — the hands that had burned him — and pressed them to his chest, over his heart. "Feel that."

I felt it.

A heartbeat. Fast and strong and <em>alive</em> — and I knew, I knew with a certainty that had nothing to do with logic, that he shouldn't have one. That whatever he was, whatever had lived for a hundred years and watched worlds end, did not have a heartbeat to give.

But he did. He had one, and it was beating for me, and the power in my chest sang along with it, harmony and dissonance, fire answering fire.

"You're my weakness," he said quietly. "And you're my whole world. And I don't know how to be both of those things at once. But I'm going to figure it out." He lifted my hand and pressed a kiss to my knuckles — soft, reverent, nothing like the hunger of a minute ago. "I'm going to protect you, Lynn Voss. From everyone. From everything. From whatever comes through that door —"

He stopped.

The rain was still hammering. The room was still dark, lit only by the streetlight through the window. And in the mirror above my dresser, frost was spreading — fast, crystalline, wrong — writing words I had never seen but somehow knew:

<b>THE KEEPER WAKES. — L.</b>

The power in my chest surged. The mirror cracked, and the frost was gone, and I was on my feet with my hands raised, and I didn't know how I'd gotten there, and Kael was beside me, changed — his eyes gold, his teeth wrong, his whole body a promise of violence — and his voice, when he spoke, was the roar from the café:

"Stay behind me."

Something laughed outside the window.

Not a person. Not a thing. A sound like two stones grinding together, like the world itself clearing its throat.

"I never left, little lord," said the voice of the Pale Stranger — the dead man, the spider thing, the man whose neck I had heard break. "You can't kill what doesn't die. You know that."

The window frosted over. The streetlight beyond it guttered and died.

And the last thing I saw before the dark took us — the very last thing — was Kael's face, and the expression on it was not fear.

It was grief.

He had been here before. He had been here before, and he had lost, and he knew — he knew — what was coming through that window.

"Lynn," he said, and his voice was steady, and gentle, and broken, "whatever happens next — don't forget that I chose you. Not the Keeper. Not the world. You."

The window exploded inward.