The Shadows

To the end of the s’Hisbe’s mourning period.

For quite some time, he’d been mulling over that solution which involved a lifetime of travel. Any debt that had once been owed to Rehvenge had been discharged, and with Selena’s death, Trez was arguably free to cash out of his businesses here in Caldwell and hit the road.

The Shadow Queen could not claim what she could not catch.

And that option was the smartest thing to do.

The problem now … was his thing with maichen.

iAm refocused on the closed door, imagining his brother wrapping up his beloved—and for a moment, he tried to picture Trez being in any shape to hit the road.

Probably not going to happen.

Shit. It was entirely possible that Trez was going to solve the situation for all of them.

By putting a gun to his head.

SEVENTY-ONE

Trez had no memory of being born.

But as he approached the door of the exam room, he felt as though the experience was coming back to him firsthand. After hours upon hours of nothing but pain, dogged by an exhaustion that was existential, he put his palm upon the cracked surface of the panel and realized that, even if there had been no tangible barrier between him and what was on the other side, stepping out was going to require a pushing, a forcing, a constriction that popped him free of the dense time capsule he’d been in.

Lifetimes separated the male he had been when he had come down here with Selena in his arms … and where he was now.

Lifetimes.

And similar to the womb, he couldn’t stay here anymore.

There was one last duty he had to fulfill; not that he had had the strength for any of this.

“Selena,” he whispered.

Her name spoken out of his dry lips was the key that unlocked the exodus … and out he arrived, into a world that was as new to him as it must have been when he had been birthed.

He was no more capable than he had been as a babe.

And similar to his birth … iAm was waiting for him.

His brother looked up so fast, the male knocked his head into the concrete wall he was leaning against. “Hey…”

Those dark eyes did a vertical sweep, and Trez glanced down at himself. His black slacks were stained with his blood as well as candle wax and gauze fibers from the wrapping. His chest was a raw pattern of wounds. His free hand was matted with what was on those pants.

“Salt,” Trez said. “Salt, we need…”

His voice was like a clarinet with a bad reed in the mouthpiece. Then again, he’d been talking to his queen for how many hours straight? So many prayers, and the odd thing had been the way they had come back to him … even though he had neither spoken nor heard the verses or the Shadow dialect in—

What was he doing out here again?

As iAm held up a black velvet bag, he thought, Oh, right.

It was so damn easy to let his Bojangles body fall to the floor, his knees absorbing an impact that must have been hard, but was something that didn’t register.

Leaning his head back, he arched his sternum forward, the pattern of cuts that he’d dug into himself pulling wider, reopening so that the wounds began to weep blood anew.

“Are you ready?” iAm asked over him.

He made some sound that even to his ears could have been a yes or a no or … something else. But his ready position clearly spoke for itself.

Breath exploded out of his raw throat as the salt hissed out of the neck of that bag and hit him on the collarbones. The flow carried with it a stinging pain that was so great his heart skipped in his ribs and his lungs spasmed up—and yet he bore the sensations willingly, telling himself that it was in service to Selena.

After this, he would be forever marked for her.

It was, he supposed, what happened in a mating ceremony—only in his case, his female was no longer with him. And with that sacred joining ritual flipped on its head, it made sense that instead of great joy, he knew only crushing sorrow; instead of becoming one with her, he was marking his solitude without her.

When there was no more salt left in the bag, he stayed where he was, out of choice and necessity. The necessity part was that the muscles in his back and shoulders had seized up on him, maybe in solidarity with his female, more likely because he’d been bent over for the last ten—or was it fifteen?—hours straight. And as for the choice part? As much as he hated the rituals because they were like a loud, screaming she’s dead in his head, he didn’t want them to be over.

Each moment that passed, every minute under his belt in this new reality was a step away from her. And these small increments, with enough of them strung together, soon would turn into nights, which would become weeks and months … and that passage of time was the measure of his loss.

It was taking him away from her.

While he’d been caretaking her in the final way, part of his mind had been obsessively playing back everything. From that black-robed figure coming and finding him at his club, to him picking Selena up from the bright green grass of that other place, to them fighting for her life that first time she was here. And then the collapse upstairs in iAm’s bedroom.

The first thing he was going to do, after the final part of all this was done, was race upstairs to see exactly where her knees had been on the carpet.

“Tell Fritz not to vacuum,” he blurted.

“What?”

He forced his head level and opened his lids. “Tell Fritz—he can’t vacuum your room.”

“Okay.” The word was said with the kind of calm-down someone would use to a jumper on a ledge. “All right.”

Trez looked down at his chest. There were granules all over him, some white, some pink or red from his blood.

He prayed that the doggen hadn’t been efficient about cleaning tonight. He just needed to remember exactly where it had happened. He needed to … remember the trip down to the clinic, and where the chair beside the exam table had been, and what he’d said to her. What the needle with the shots had looked like. How … everything had happened.

It wasn’t out of some morbid fascination. It was more the conviction that he didn’t want to lose anything of her.

Not one memory.

Struggling to his feet, he mumbled, “Need to build a—”

“It’s done.”

Trez shook his head and motioned with his hand. “No, no, listen. I need an ax … or saw…”

“Trez. Listen to me.”

“…and some gasoline or kerosene…”

“Here, why don’t you give me that.”

“What?” As his right wrist was gently captured by his brother, he frowned and looked down. He still had his dagger in his hand. “Oh.”

He ordered his fist to release.

When nothing moved, he tried harder. “I can’t let go.”

“Turn your hand over.” iAm pried the fingers loose one by one. “There you go.”

As the male tucked the weapon into his belt at an angle, Trez tried to get his brain to work. “But I might need that for—”

“The Brothers and their females have taken care of the pyre.”

Trez blinked. “They have?”

“They’ve been building it for the last three hours. It’s all ready.”

Swaying in his loafers, he closed his eyes and whispered, “How will I ever repay them.”

“Here, put this jacket on, you must be freezing.”

Rhage looked down at his Mary. “I’m sorry? What did you say?”

She held up a parka. “Rhage, it’s thirty-two degrees out here. All you’re wearing is a muscle shirt.”

It wasn’t that he doubted her, but he glanced at his bare arms. “Oh. Guess you’re right.”

“Let me put this on you.”

He was very aware that she was treating him like he was a child, but somehow that was okay. And when she threaded one of his arms through a sleeve, and then wrapped the body of the coat around him, he let her do as she wished.

Coat. No coat.

Didn’t matter to him.

His eyes drifted over to the pyre. It was higher than he’d anticipated, rising up like a small house off the flat section of lawn beyond the gardens and the pool. They’d had to construct a stair-like rise so that the top level could be reached, and after a discussion and following Rehvenge’s advice, they had doused the base in gasoline.

Along with everyone else, he was standing upwind of things.

Quite a crowd, he reflected. Everyone who lived in the house. All of the servants. Also all of the Chosen.

“And I brought you some gloves,” his Mary said.

As she reached for his hand, he shook his head. “I’ll just bleed into the insides of them.”

“It doesn’t matter. You may already have frostbite.”

“Is it that cold?” Wait, hadn’t she already told him what temperature it was?

“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s unseasonably cold.”

“Seems right. I don’t think it should be warm … that wouldn’t be … I think we should hurt, too.”

Which was why he really would have preferred to be without the parka. But he was incapable of denying his shellan—