The Shadows

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.”