Chapter 3: The Exception in the Rain (2)

"I don't care what you think."

"I think you've been alone so long you forgot the difference between wanting to kill someone and wanting to touch someone. And I think you brought me in here because for the first time in a thousand years, the curse lit up for a reason you didn't hate." She reached out, very slowly, and let her fingers hover a half-inch from the black cracks on his wrist. "What happens if I touch it?"

He went rigid. "Don't."

"Why? Worst case, my hand catches fire."

"Iris." Her name came out of him like a warning shot, rough and almost desperate. "If I feel you touch me, the curse will—"

She touched him.

Two fingertips, light as a falling leaf, on the black cracks at his wrist.

The effect was instant and terrifying. The cracks blazed — black lines turning white-hot, arcing up his arm — and he made a sound that wasn't quite a gasp and wasn't quite a growl, a raw, broken noise that told her more about his thousand years than any confession could. He spun, caught her wrist — not hard, not hurting, just stopping her — and his eyes were silver fire, and his breath was ragged, and they were inches apart, the rain streaking the glass behind him.

"You're going to get yourself killed," he said, voice wrecked.

"Statistically, I've been getting myself killed since I was eight." Iris didn't pull back. "But I've got a new theory, Kael Thorne. I think the curse doesn't punish you for feeling things. I think it punishes you for being afraid of them. And I think you've been afraid of me since the second you smelled my blood."

He stared at her. The black cracks were climbing his neck now, and he was breathing through the pain like a man who'd had a thousand years of practice, and his thumb pressed against the inside of her wrist — once — before he wrenched his hand away and backed to the window like she'd drawn a blade.

"You should sleep." His voice was flat again, but it cost him. She could hear it cost him. "Tomorrow we go to the seam. The stone opens the lock. We see what your ancestors left under the mountain, and then you leave, and I stop being the exception to my own life."

"Fine." Iris walked past him, paused at the bedroom door, and looked back. "But for the record? You said my name like it hurt. It didn't sound like hate."

She closed the door on his silence.

Iris didn't sleep. She lay on the too-big bed in the too-quiet lodge, listening to the rain and to the man on the other side of the door, who was doing something she recognized — pacing. Pacing the way people do when they're trying not to want something.

At some point past midnight, the pacing stopped.

She was at the window before she knew why, parting the curtain an inch. Kael stood outside in the rain, at the edge of the lodge's small porch, staring into the fog. And there, at the tree line, a figure stood in the dark — tall, white-dressed, watching him the way he watched the valley. Not hostile. Patient. Like a debt collector who had all the time in the world.

The figure turned its head, looked directly at Iris's window, and smiled.

Iris's blood went cold. It was a woman's face, beautiful and wrong, and the smile said I see you with perfect, terrifying clarity.

The fog sighed.

"Iris…"

Kael moved before she could react — one heartbeat, and he was between the tree line and the window, his voice hard as stone: "She's not yours, Luna. Walk away."

The woman's voice drifted through the rain, warm as honey: "She was never yours to give, Kael. The stone is awake. The valley remembers her. You can't hide her from what she is." A pause, and the smile again, directed at the window. "None of us can."

Then the figure was gone — not walked away, just gone, like fog thinning.

Kael stood at the tree line for a long moment. Then he turned, came back to the lodge, and Iris was at the door before he could reach it.

"Who was that?"

"A debt," he said, and his voice was quieter than she'd ever heard it. "One I've been paying for a long time. Go back to bed, Iris. Tomorrow, we go to the seam. And I need you to do exactly what I say."

"Why?"

"Because the thing under the mountain has been calling your name for a thousand years." He met her eyes through the rain. "And it's never been closer to being answered."

— End of Chapter Three —