When the Sea is Rising Red (24 page)

What do I say to him? And worse, what if I have to try to explain myself to his mother or some other family member.

It’s useless. And I feel like an even bigger fool for having come here like a beggar.

I’m turning to leave when the door above me swings open and a familiar voice calls out. “Felicita?” He sounds uncertain, like he thinks I’m just a boggert haunting the steps.

Maybe I am. I don’t even have the energy to correct him. Who cares what he calls me now. I nod. Jannik takes the stairs two by two. “I thought it was you,” he says. “I saw you from my window.”

The rain is almost horizontal now, and my wet petticoats and dress slap against my legs, whipping me toward him.

“Get in out of the cold,” Jannik says. “I’ll find you something dry to wear.”

The door shuts. In the sudden quiet, I can hear my teeth chattering. My tears are warmer than the rain, and now I can feel the difference and I hate knowing that I’m crying over Dash.

“Your lips are blue.”

I’m not really surprised. By now I’m certain that every extremity is blue. Hugging myself for warmth, I follow Jannik up to his rooms, where he gives me a thick warm towel to dry myself and a long cotton nightshirt. The nightshirt is soft as a kitten’s fur and faded to a dull gray. It must be his, a favorite. The kind of sleepwear you keep because it feels safe.

He leads me to a washroom and gestures for me to change.

When I’m alone, I peer into the oval mirror above the porcelain basin. The rain has plastered my hair against my head, and my eyes are puffy and red. It’s obvious that I’ve been crying. With a sniff, I rub the towel over my face and hair, as if I could scrub all the misery away with the rainwater. Then I strip out of my wet clothes and dry myself with a numb ferocity. I want to punish my skin.

Finally dressed, I glare at the mirror. Now I look like a child with my face pinked and the old nightshirt softening my body. And I want that—I want to go back to childish things and start over again.

Jannik is waiting for me outside. “Better?” he whispers.

I nod.

We go to his bedroom, padding as quietly as we can on the thick-carpeted floors.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

We’re sitting on his bed, me cross-legged and him with his legs stretched out. His feet are bare, and his shirt is buttoned askew. He must have been in his nightshirt when he saw me, and dressed quickly. His feet are chalk white and narrow. Elegant. He notices me looking at them and shifts so that he’s mirroring me, cross-legged, his feet tucked under his knees.

“Nothing happened,” I say.

He stares down at his lap, at his interlaced hands. “So what are you running from?”

“I’m not running from anything,” I snap back. I can feel the burn of tears threatening to spill over. I will not cry over that useless manipulative shit.

“From who then?”

“Oh Gris.” I bury my face in my hands and take a shuddering breath, trying to stop the tears from falling. It works, mostly, and I wipe the moisture from my face and blink. “Nothing happened. I thought I was … well … involved with someone. Turns out that I’m not.” Anja was crying too, I remember, and guilt threads through my belly, stitching the ache deep. Dash said it wasn’t what I thought.

I snap the silk thread. Dash hates me, hates my family. I can’t trust what he says.

“Oh.”

“Yes,
oh
.” I manage a twitchy almost-smile. “It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t that serious.” These are the things I need to tell myself. It means nothing that he was my first—someone had to be. “And I really didn’t know him as well as I’d hoped.”

“You’ll meet someone else,” Jannik says. “Someone who’ll treat you better.”

I want to laugh hysterically at the bat’s inane platitudes. “Oh, and just who exactly? I’ve destroyed my life. I can never go back home. I’ll probably end up living in Stilt City married to a drunken river-Hob and producing half-breeds like maggots.”

“Charming.” He shifts so that he can lean back against the wall. He’s sitting kitty-corner to me now, and he’s not looking directly at me. It means I can study him. In profile, he’s awkward, his nose too long and straight for his face. But other than that, he’s handsome enough. If he wasn’t a bat, he’d be plain. It’s the coal-dark hair and the pallor of his skin that make him so striking. So interesting to look at.

I used to think he was ugly.

He turns, and our eyes meet. The unearthly indigo is the color of the sky as the first stars rise, and my heart stutters for an instant. This is not the sea green and coppice brown of Hobs and Lammers. It is something wild and strange and subtle. For that one lost heartbeat, I see Jannik as he is.

“What about you?” I say. “What’s going to happen to you?”

Jannik laughs. “I’ve no idea, but I’m quite certain that it’s not what I want.”

“What’s that then?”

“The usual. Meet a nice girl, fall in love, have two children, keep the books balanced, perhaps publish some small collections of verse.”

“That’s horrifically dull,” I say, when in fact I am oddly entranced by this marriage of poetry and mathematics and the contradictions it implies. “Why two?”

“It’s neat. Orderly.”

“I always wanted six.”

That makes him turn to face me. “Are you insane? Why would anyone want six children? It’s like a bloody litter of dragon-dogs.”

His expression—part genuine shock and part curiosity—surprises a laugh out of me. “Because I grew up practically an only child, and I always wished for more brothers and sisters to play with. I thought it would have been wonderful. We could have had all these adventures…” I smile, remembering my childhood, playing games with the imaginary family I created for myself. Poor Ilven, constantly having to remember all the names of my vast, nonexistent clan of playmates.

“It’s really not all that wonderful. I’m the youngest of four, and I don’t think I’ve ever exchanged more than a sentence or two at a time with either of my brothers. And my sister barely speaks to us. Just because you are family doesn’t guarantee you’ll be friends.”

I don’t want to talk about family.

The room is very still, and the smell of the leaves outside the window, clean and green, mingles with the distant ocean musk. This far up, I can’t smell the rot. I close my eyes. Like this, with everything calm and quiet, I can feel Jannik’s magic filling the space around me. It is insubstantial as mist, and just when I think I have a lock on it, it thins and disappears. “You’re magic,” I say softly into the dark, finally acknowledging why he fascinates me.

I can hear him shifting, feel the way the air is displaced, and a fresh wash of the strange power laps against my skin.

“In a manner of speaking,” he says.

My eyes flick open. The room is layered in grays and blues. Across from me Jannik is staring narrowly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” When he doesn’t answer I press on. “It’s illegal. Only the high-Lammers are allowed magic, the sharif could have you killed—”

“We can do nothing with it,” he says. “Do you kill the unicorns because they are magical? The sphynxes? No.” He shakes his head, a very controlled movement, barely there at all. “We’re just animals, after all.”

“You’re telling me that you have all this magic inside you, and you can’t access it?” It sounds eerily like the high-Lammers. “There must be a way to tap it—scriv, perhaps?”

“No.” He leans back, away from me, forcing a physical distance between us. “There are a handful of feyn—women in our family line—who can use magic, but as for the rest of us…” Jannik’s staring at me again, a careful look. “Think of us as carriers of a disease.”

“So that’s why the women are more important,” I say. “You’re just—”

“Breeding stock.” He grins, flashing his sharp teeth. “I come from a powerful line, but even that’s not enough. There are too many wray for it to matter.”

“So you’ll just end up”—I wave my hands in the air, skimming for some kind way to put it—“as some kind of glorified servant?”

“Essentially.” His grin hasn’t slipped. “Mother will keep me in reserve.”

“Alone.”

He nods.

I feel awful. I wonder which is worse, being condemned to a marriage you don’t want or being forced into solitude in case your bloodline is ever needed.

“In MallenIve, most of the wray are indentured whores,” Jannik says. “So I shouldn’t complain.”

“There are free vampires there,” I argue. “There’s even a marriage between one and House Guyin. It can’t be as bad as people say.”

He stares at me unblinking.

“So run away.” I feel like I’ve made up my mind on his behalf. I grab at his wrist and hold fast despite the sharp prickle of magic. “Do something—”

“And what then?” He pulls his arm free and with a quick twist catches my own. His thumb is against the blue vein on the inside of my wrist, pressing down on my pulse. I feel sudden warmth, my skin throbbing in time with my speeding heartbeat. “What am I supposed to do out there?” He nods at the window, at Pelimburg slumbering. “I’d be even more alone. You know nothing about us, your people are scared of us.”

“I’m not scared.”

His grip tightens on my wrist, and I force myself to not pull away. “Yes, you are,” Jannik says, and he lets go. “You still think I’m going to bleed you dry.” His head is lowered now, he’s refusing to look at me. “And I wouldn’t do that. When we hunt, we feed off nillies. Feeding from people is different, it’s not really about food.”

“So explain it to me.”

“No.”

Impossible damn bat. I shiver and hug my knees. I think I’ve overexerted myself tonight and that’s good because maybe I can sleep and not think about Dash, not think about Anja, who was crying against him. I can forget about his hatred for my family. I’ve decided it’s all lies, that everything that came out of his mouth was meant to wound. He does everything with a reason, and he made me trust him just so he could break me harder.

He’s worse than my brother.

Jannik’s voice intrudes, disrupting my thoughts. “What if I told you that there is a bond in blood, that it’s more than a Lammer’s paper marriage, that it’s about magic and death?”

I sigh. “I’d say you were being overly dramatic and that you should take up a permanent table at the Crake.”

“If I feed too long from one person, after a while I start to know where he is. Then I know what he’s feeling—”

“I’m tired.”

“And then what he’s thinking.”

“Jannik, I don’t want to hear this.” I rub my knuckles into my eyes. Maybe if I don’t look at Jannik, I can pretend that what he’s saying has no relevance.

“Go to sleep,” he says after a while. “I’ll take the floor again.”

“You don’t have to.” My eyes are still shut tight so I can’t see his expression, but the air in the room feels different, almost expectant. “It’s a big bed. We can both sleep in it and barely know the other one is there.”

“All right,” he says carefully. “If you’re certain.”

I’m really tired now, so I grunt noncommittally and crawl under the duvet. After a few minutes the weight on the end of the bed shifts and I can feel Jannik leave. He must have gone to sleep on the floor.

Then the covers lift and I realize that he’s changed out of his clothes and taken up my generous offer of allowing him to sleep in his own bed. He’s far from me, careful that we do not touch.

“Good night,” he whispers, and I manage to pull myself out of my half sleep enough to murmur something back. Then the night closes in on me, blanking out my memories.

17

M
Y ARM IS CURLED
loosely around a warm body, my face against his neck. His hair is tickling my nose.

At first I think I have woken up in Dash’s room—that last night never happened—and then magic flutters against my cheeks. I lie perfectly still, feeling the insect tickle as the glamour tracks across my skin. It’s nervous. Uncertain. My breath is held; I did not think magic was sentient.

There is an ache in my chest, so sharp and hard, so tight and cold.

The patter stops, and I let my breath out in a soft
whoosh
. The bat magic isn’t alive any more than scriv-fueled Lammer magic is. They are so very different in feel though, and I put it down to bats’ magic being organic, part of them, the way a uni’s is. It’s addictive though, this brush of the
other
. Why don’t I feel disgusted lying next to a bat, its magic crawling over me? I should feel filthy, should want to scrub the touch of it from my skin. Instead, I brush my fingers along Jannik’s shoulder and feel the faint pulse of the magic through the cotton of his nightshirt. The thrill that shudders through me is not from his magic but from something warmer, something more real and
now
. I keep my fingers resting against his back, not wanting to break this illicit contact. The longer I stay like that, the harder it is for me to pull away. I study the curve of his ear, the line of his cheek. A lock of dark hair is tucked behind his ear, the black tip like an ink brush drawing shadows across the white of the pillowcase.

This is wrong.

I swallow and draw my hand back. Clutch it between my breasts and wait for the rhythm of my heart to return to normal.

Careful not to wake him, I roll away. The sheets here are cold, chilling my skin and dragging me to the present.

Last night comes back to me: the look on Dash’s face when I saw him, the feel of the rain beating against my skin like tiny silver-cold hammers. I bite my lip.
Stop it, Felicita. Don’t think about it.

“You’re awake?” Jannik says, his voice muffled by the pillow. He doesn’t turn to face me.

I wonder how long he has been lying there, listening to me breathe, feeling my fingertips against the sweep of his shoulder blade.

Through the window the sun is bright, and the birdsong coming from the branches of the stately oaks planted along the avenues is loud. I’ll be late for my shift at the Crake. If I even still have a job there. And I don’t care. I stretch my arms above my head and point my toes, feeling tired muscles crack and ease.