Page 47 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Not the same thing. This one has weight behind it. It comes up out of me and pushes outward, holds there while I stand in the dark with my hand shut around a piece of cut rock the size of my palm. The rock is warm, has no business being warm down here where nothing else is.

I should put it in the pack and go. I stand there holding it instead.

“Valen.”

“I have it.”

I set the feeling aside but i

t doesn’t go all the way.

We climb back out. The piece goes in my pack, the pack goes on my back. The warmth comes back into the walls the higher we get, roots threading in through the rock again, the charge picking up against my hands. Daylight is still coming down the stairwell when we reach the top.

The thing in my chest hasn’t settled by then. It’s gone down to a hum. It runs under everything I’m doing the whole way through the upper halls, low and constant, keeping time with nothing. I’ve got no name for it. I’ve got no use for it either, which is worse.

She’s quiet again on the way up.

“You want to say what’s bothering you?”

“It’s nothing.” She says it fast and

I let it stand.

Back in my room the midday light comes through the window, the whole valley is bright behind it. She shuts the door and stays right there in front of it, an arm’s length away.

I drop my pack by the wall, the piece still in it. The hum comes up a notch when it leaves my back, then settles again.

She doesn’t move.

Last night was hers. She knocked on my door because she wanted to. It doesn’t carry over to today.

Then she crosses the room and sits down on the floor against the far wall, in the block of light coming through the window. Her head goes back against the stone.

The light puts her face where I can see it.

There’s no color in it. There hasn’t been since we landed in this realm. Her hands are in her lap, one inside the other, which she does when she wants them still. She looks like a woman running on nothing and standing up anyway.

“You haven’t fed.”

“No.”

“Since Vampiria.”

“I got about a third of what I needed in that quarter.” She keeps her head against the wall. “I’ve been running on that ever since.”

I go over and sit down on the floor across from her, because I’m not going to have this conversation standing over the top of her.

“Drink from me,” I say.

Her head comes off the wall.

“No.”

“You’ve hauled me through the dark four times. Every one of them took more out of you than you’ve put back.”

“That isn’t why the answer’s no.”

“Then tell me why.”