Page 19 of Dark Mate

A sound tries to climb out of my throat. A scream, or the start of one.

“No—”

I open my mouth to scream and his hand covers it. A low growl rolls out against my hair. “Grrn.” The palm is enormous. It presses my lips against my teeth, reaches from my chin to mycheekbone. The heat of his skin is instant, alive, nothing like the Cage’s managed warmth, nothing like the heated walls or the tea or any temperature I’ve been handed in thirteen years. This heat has weight. This heat is a body. This heat is him, all of him, the thing that made the scratches and moved the stones and breathed through the wall while I pressed my palms to the other side.

A sound rolls out of him, low and wordless. “Mmrh.” It comes from the chest pressed to my back, so low I feel it in my ribs before I hear it. I know this sound. I’ve felt it through the stone for days. With no wall between us it drops straight into my bones. Satisfaction. Knowing. The sound of a thing finding exactly what it came for.

Then his hand closes over mine on the knife. I feel his fingers—each one wider than two of mine—work my grip open with a patience worse than force. Force I could fight. Patience says he’s got all the time in the world and I’ve got none. One finger. Then the next. Then the next. The ceramic handle slides free into his palm.

He doesn’t drop it. Doesn’t fling it away. He turns it once, the little blade almost nothing in that huge hand, and then he closes it away against himself and keeps it. I don’t understand yet what that means, that he isn’t taking the one thing that’s mine, he’s carrying it where I’m going, the way he’s carrying me. The gentleness of it runs through me like a blade of its own.

“Please—” I say it into his palm. It comes out muffled and wet. I don’t know what I’m asking for. Not mercy. The Cage never taught me what to ask a thing like this. The theology gave me words for the divine instruments, sacred, blessed, the will of renewal, and not one of them fits the hand over my mouth or the tail crushing my ribs or the heat of him soaking through the thin cotton into my skin.

The tip of his tail finds the curve below my ear. Wet. Warm. Something presses into the skin there, not a sting, not a cut, a pressure that blooms into warmth the way a drop of ink blooms in water. Nectar. I know the word. The theology covers it in the lesson on divine nectar—the quieting, the readying for the bond. The theology doesn’t cover what it feels like.

The warmth sinks in. Down my neck, pooling in my shoulders, running like heated oil down my spine. My legs go first—the muscles just stop, mid-flex, like someone pinched out a candle. Then my arms. My fingers uncurl against his palm. The scream I was shaping comes apart into a whimper I don’t know, thin and open. “Hnn…” The sound of a body that’s lost the ability to argue.

I’m awake. Every nerve is reporting. His chest against my back, the heat of it, the hard plane of it through the thin shift, the slow swell of his breathing. The coil of his tail around my waist, tighter now, like he owns it, the tip still pressed behind my ear where the warmth keeps spreading. The cold air from the gap hitting my bare feet. I feel all of it. I can’t move any of it.

He makes another sound, quieter, almost gentle. A low huff against the top of my head, his breath stirring my hair. “Hff.” The sound doesn’t match the arms that are taking me. It’s too soft. Too sure. The sureness is the terrifying part—not the sureness of violence, but the sureness ofarrival.He’s been coming here for weeks. He learned the wall. He learned the stones. He waited. He isn’t hurrying now, because this was always going to happen, and the patience of all that planning sits against my spine like a second heartbeat.

He lifts me to his chest with one arm. My weight doesn’t seem to land in his body at all—no shift, no effort, no adjusting. I’m a doll against the size of him, my head dropping against the hard plane of his chest, my arms pinned, my legs no use. His heartbeat’s right there under the hot skin: slow, deep,unhurried. The heart of a thing that planned this for months and is in no rush now that it’s here.

He moves through the Cage in silence.

I feel the turns in my body—left, the weight shifting to my right side; right, the weight shifting back. The corridor’s cold air on my bare legs. The moment we cross the courtyard, wind on my feet, open sky against my closed eyes, the fountain suddenly louder with no walls to hold the sound in. The fountain I’ve fallen asleep to for thirteen years, playing its same recycled-water song while I’m carried through the garden by something that should not be inside these walls.

Neve said don’t go near the east wall at night.

The thought comes up and sinks. Mora will find my cup labeled and empty tomorrow. She’ll find the bed warm where I was. She’ll look at the gap in the wall, three feet wide, stones set aside by someone who came back every night until he knew which ones to move—and she’ll make notes on her tablet.

The break in the east wall. Stone scrapes over his horns above me, and I feel the shiver of it through his chest, and then the night air hits my whole body at once. Unfiltered. Alive. The jungle smell, wet earth, rot, flowering things fighting for light, the whole green roar of a world nobody manages—fills my lungs.

Then up.

His wings open. The sound hits my ears like a sail catching wind, a crack of air, the sharp snap of membrane pulling taut, the deep thrum as they grab. The ground drops away. I feel it in my stomach, the lurch of sudden height, the weightless sick of a body that’s never been off the ground. I’m pressed to his chest. The wind’s cold on my feet, my arms, the back of my neck. The air smells like rain, like growing things, like a world I’ve never once been inside.

I think:the tea settled me this morning. The tea kept me easy. The tea kept me here for thirteen years while this was always going to happen.

I think:I can feel his heartbeat. The wind. The warmth from where his tail touched me. I can’t close my hands.

I think:I don’t know which parts of me are real.

The canopy closes over us. Branches swallowing the moonlight, layer after layer of green and black. The last of the light—a gap in the leaves, a coin of moon—goes out.

Dark.

He goes up. Higher into the branches, climbing, not down toward the far-off ground.

Through the first layer of canopy: broad leaves brushing my bare feet, slick and waxy, the sound of them parting around his body like water closing behind a boat. The air’s warm here. Green-smelling, thick. Something small and fast moves in the branches—a rustle, a chitter, gone. The moon still shows through gaps in the leaves, scattered coins of silver that flicker across my closed eyelids as we pass.

Through the second layer: thicker, darker. The leaves give way to heavier branches, the air going humid, beading wet on my skin. The sound changes—less wind, more creaking, the deep slow groans of huge wood holding up its own weight. His wings fold against his back. His arms hold me tighter, one hand spanning my ribs, the other cupping the back of my head. The shift from flying to climbing happens without a seam, his clawed feet catch the wood, his body works upward through the branches with the easy sureness of a thing that’s made this climb a thousand times.

Then higher still.

Through the third layer: no moon. The light goes out by degrees, each layer of canopy stealing another shade of gray until the dark is so complete I can’t tell if my eyes are openor shut. The smells thicken, from living green to old wood and wet moss, the green rot of leaves caught and composting in the high forks, the cold mineral breath of water pooled deep in the heartwood. The air’s warm now, not hot, a living warmth held close in the wood, the packed heat of the deep canopy that never sees the sun.

His body shifts around me as he feels his way up. I feel every choice in his muscles, the flex of his arms, the grip of his feet, the way his tail unwinds from my thigh to find a branch and anchor, then coils back around me as he lifts us another level. The climb is controlled. Patient. He could open his wings and fly it. He chooses to climb because climbing keeps me still against his chest, keeps the jolt of the height down to something I can bear, keeps the sick lurch of it out of my stomach. He’s being careful with me. The care is scarier than carelessness would be, because carelessness is instinct. Care is a thought.