The Sweetest Dark (12 page)

I allowed the crickets to fill the silence, ardent behind the glass. Jesse's fingers wove in and out between the flower petals; he was shaping the braid into a half circle upon the table, smearing the water beads. He did not glance back up at me or smile to let me in on the joke.

“You're not human, Eleanore Jones. I think that somewhere inside you, you must know that. You must always have known. You're not made of ordinary bone or blood but of something else completely.”

“Really. What am I of, then? Kelp and jellyfish, I suppose?”

“You are made of magic.”

He said it in an absolutely unremarkable way, as if instead he'd just said,
I had coffee this morning
or
the floor needs mopping.

His hands stilled and finally he looked up at me. No smile. I saw nothing but that infinite patience etched on his face.

He wasn't joking.

Everything seemed to slow down, the seconds dragging out into a creeping crawl. My pulse slowed, and the dance of the candle flame slowed, and the wind outside slowed. I could not move or even swallow.

I wanted to respond with something cutting and urbane, something Sophia might muster at the drop of a pin—
You are stark mad, Mr. Holms
—but my mouth felt frozen shut. My whole body, in fact, had gone ice cold. I had become crystalline, see-through.

I wasn't driftwood but an icicle, and the wrong words, Jesse's next words, might shatter me to pieces.

Whatever they were, I didn't want to hear them. Yet I couldn't move.

Perhaps he understood. He watched me closely but didn't try to approach.

“Think about it. Don't lose your nerve now, just think. Where did you come from? Who is your family? You've known all your life you're not like any of the creatures around you. You hear things, you sense things no one else does. You can
do
things that no one else can. Those weren't the delusions or even the hopeful fantasies of a lonely child. It was the hidden part of you seizing the truth. Using it. An ancient magic created you, a powerful magic. It twines through you, growing stronger with every full moon. This is only the beginning. It's going to consume you eventually. That voice inside you—”

“What?”
I did lurch back a step then.

“The voice inside you,” Jesse repeated, gentle. “It's not truly a
voice,
is it? It's more
feelings
than that. Instinct. Animal. Bestial.”

“Are you—did you just call me—”

“A beast, yes. You are. Better than that, though. You're better than all the other beasts in all the rest of the universe.” He paused, a smile breaking through at last. And it was a dazzling smile, one to melt hearts and lies and all manner of icy-cold things. He came to his feet and crossed to me, stopping a handbreadth away.

His eyes captured mine, summer green darkened to dusk. His voice became a whisper.

“Lora, beloved. Lora of the moon and sky.
You
are a dragon.”

Ah,
sighed the fiend, swelling with delight inside me, filled with an awful, awful recognition.
Ah, ah! AH!

“That is
enough,
” I shouted over them both; rather, I tried to shout, but my voice was so strangled it came more as a gasp. “I don't know what you're playing at, but I don't appreciate your games. I—I came here to tell you to stop pestering me, and leaving me gifts, and
smiling
at me—”

“You dream of flying,” Jesse said, which cut me off mid-sentence.

“Aye.” He nodded, shadows and gold, tall and warm and much too near. “I know all about it. I know all about you. You have wings at night. You lift as smoke. And you come to me, don't you? Always to me.”

I could not reply. I could barely take a breath.

This is a dream, this is all still a dream, it's just a new part to the dream, that's all—

“It's why you're here now, tonight. You're drawn to me, as fiercely as I am to you. You didn't even have to follow my song this time. I muted it, didn't you notice? And you came anyway.”

For a long, long moment, I gave up on breathing. For a long, long moment, all I heard was my heartbeat and his, and a gull crying miles away, and the distant thunder of a German bomb exploding on innocent ground.

Jesse lifted a hand and placed it on my arm. His palm felt hot against the cotton of my sleeve, his fingers felt firm, and that rush of longing and pleasure that always overtook me at his touch began to build.

“Lora,” he whispered again, so quiet it was barely a sound. “Inhale.”

And when I did, he bent his head to kiss me.

...

He tried to be careful about it. He tried to limit himself to a barely there touch, just his mouth to hers, nothing alarming, nothing assumed. But her lips were even softer than he'd dreamed, and with their bodies this close her scent wrapped around him in a heady rush. Jesse felt like he was drowning in flowers and fever and delight.

He
wanted
to drown. This was so much better than he'd … ever …

It spun out longer than he'd planned. It was still a joining of near chastity; the as-yet-contained part of him was afraid to move, afraid to lift his hands to her face, as he desperately wanted, to discover the contours of her with his fingertips. To feel her bare skin.

But he didn't want to frighten her, and he didn't want the kiss to end.

When he pulled from her at last, they were both sleepy-eyed and breathing hard. She looked stunned, so flushed and so beautiful and so very much at the edge of what he knew her to be that he nearly smiled, which would have been a drastic mistake.

When her gaze met his, her irises were luminous, pooling bright silvery purple, a definitely inhuman glow.

He'd awoken the beast in her.

Good.

“What
are
you?” she whispered.

Jesse took a step back to clear his head, to free himself from the tendrils of her sorcery. It'd be easier for both of them if he could think straight.

Right. He needed to focus. He'd waited his lifetime for this moment, but, even so, the words came with difficulty.

It was never painless to bare a soul.

“I am both less than you and more,” he said. “An alchemist, an amalgamation of two opposite realms. I'm the fabric of the stars.”

Chapter Fifteen

There are certain moments in life when hard, hot truth shines at you like a spotlight from heaven, like the focused beam from a lighthouse on the shore of yourself, and you find yourself stripped naked in its light. You can't hide from it. You can't close your eyes and wish it away. It's truth; easy truth or unbearable truth, either way, it won't be vanquished. And there you are for all to see, stuck in its merciless glare.

One of those moments for me came that night with Jesse, there in his cottage in the island woods. I was caught in the glare of not one but three impossible truths:

I wasn't human.

Neither was he.

And he had kissed me. On the lips.

One of those truths—I couldn't even tell which—kept me standing in place before him with a hand pressed to my mouth, as if I could hold in the soft, lingering sensation of that kiss, the cinnamon-vanilla-rain taste of him. The last bit of heat from his body, which I was already growing cold without.

My eyes were wide as saucers as I stared up at him, so I shut them, opened them again.

I was a … what?

He was
of the stars
?

The candle flame continued its merry little dance, undaunted by anything but the breeze. A cricket hopped close to the door, right up close, and chirped a few bars before leaping back into the dark.

Jesse was looking down at me with that patient expression, a suggestion of worry now mixed in. This time he was clearly waiting for me to say something, so I said, “Oh.”

Brilliant. I still couldn't bring myself to lower my hand, so I'd said it around my fingers.

“Are you breathing?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I can prove it,” he said. “My part, at least. Not yours.”

He didn't need to prove it. I believed him. It was crazy, as wildly insane as anything I'd ever heard at Moor Gate—but I believed him.

Yet the words remained stuck behind my closed lips.

He walked to the piecrust table, threw a glance over his shoulder at me through the fall of his hair to make sure I was still paying attention. As if I'd be looking anywhere else.

He needs a haircut,
I thought, my mind clinging to any sliver of rationality.
He needs a haircut, but it looks so good like that.

“You don't have to come closer,” Jesse said. “In fact, you shouldn't. But watch.”

His arm stretched out. His hand reached down, index finger pointing, the others slightly tucked, a familiar contour both elegant and timeless, like that Michelangelo painting on the ceiling at the Vatican. He touched a single petal of one of the white flowers that he'd shaped in that half circle on the wood. Touched just the very tip of it.

And
light
poured out of him at the touch. Light
,
golden as he was but shimmering brilliant, a shower of sparkles, of glittering diamonds or gold-leaf confetti—I was processing what was happening but wasn't; for heaven's sake, he was shooting
light
. In an instant it engulfed not only the flowers but his hand, and then his arm, and then all of him, and Jesse Holms became the spotlight that I could not bear to see, and I had to turn my face away from his brilliance and truth.

Shadows cut crisp and black around me. The table, all the chairs, every tuft of the rug, every wooden plank of the floor, illuminated. I heard the air leave my lungs again. The thin
whoooo
of my breath, hollow as could be.

I sucked it back in, and the golden light faded.

His back was to me. His shoulders were bowed. He stood for a moment without moving, but there was something about him anyway that read
pain
. He stood as if he hurt, his body held smaller, tighter, than it'd been before. His face was a pale mask in the reflection of the window. His eyes were closed.

“Jesse?”

“Yes. I'm all right.”

I guess to confirm it he straightened and returned to me, graceful as ever, offering me the flat of his palm.

He had the braid of flowers balanced there, still in their half circle. But they were changed now. They weren't white any longer or even alive.

They were made of gold.

Actual gold, because they sang to me, just like the circlet of roses had. Just like the regular rings and earrings and bracelets and stickpins of all the people I'd ever known.

Jesse had turned the living flowers into metal.

He lifted my arm and slipped them over my wrist. Rigid in their golden death, they hugged the bones of my arm snug like a cuff, like they'd been made specially for me.

Which, I supposed, they had.

I'm not proud of what happened next. In my defense, it had been a long, strange day followed by a sleepless night, and I was more than a little unnerved from—well, from everything. The tea, the duke's ruby song, Armand and Chloe and the bombs and then Jesse and the night and the
kiss
and not being human.
Not being human.

All I remember is that I was looking down at the cuff, at the perfect composition of the flowers, how they connected petal-to-petal in the most miraculous way, humming warm against my skin. I thought that the king's own jeweler could not have designed a better bracelet and how funny that was because I was surely as opposite the King of England as a person could be.

Anyway, I wasn't anticipating it: The shadows from the floor rose up in a rush and clasped me in opaque arms. They encased me and Jesse and the entire room.

Yes, I fainted.

Even as I fell, I realized how humiliating it was. My very last conscious thought was,
Please let me wake up alone in my own bed.

And I did.

...

You're wondering if I awoke with the cuff.

Because if I didn't, perhaps it had all been nothing but a dream. Or my own particular brand of insanity, my notoriously hysterical imagination. Even before we're out of short pants and pinafores, we're taught to dismiss both dreams and imaginings as if they count for nothing, and without the cuff, I would likely have done just that. With every fiber of my being, I yearned to be normal. To glide through my days at Iverson without incident. The last thing I wanted was to indulge in my differences from everyone else.

But
with
the proof of those braided flowers, I'd have to face the fact that my life was about to unfold in a very, very different way than I'd ever envisioned.
Normal
would become forever out of reach.

The answer, of course, is that I awoke with the cuff.

At first I didn't even feel it. At first, with the light of day creeping over me—a gray light, a cloudy light, because even though the sky last night had stretched so limpid, by morning a rainstorm was rolling in—I felt only grit in my eyes and the gnawing awareness that if I didn't get up soon, I'd miss breakfast. And I was hungry.

I staggered out of bed and over to the bureau, yanking open the drawer that contained my Sunday blouse and skirt. It was only then I understood that the heavy thing about my wrist was Jesse's flowers.

It stopped me cold.

I remembered it all, everything at once in a sickening flood.

I was a …

I was …

The beast in my heart said nothing. Ever since Jesse's revelation, it had gone still as death. I had to finish the thought all alone.

I was a dragon.

Reflexively, I ran my hands up and down my sides, feeling my ribs, my hips, my legs. Except for my boots, I was still wearing every bit of last night's clothing—
thank you, Jesse
—and it didn't take long to tear it all off entirely so I could examine my skin.

No scales, no plated spine or new, hideous claws where my toenails used to be. No hint of anything dragonish at all. Even when I twisted around practically in half, using the looking glass to try to glimpse my backside, I still looked … ordinary. I still looked just like me.

But there was the cuff on my wrist, singing a soft, soft melody. And what had happened with the piano. And how I'd made Malinda choke. And all those years of all those silent songs.

This is only the beginning.

There was only one person who could explain it all to me. I had to find Jesse again, had to find him right now—

Downstairs a door slammed, followed by startled laughter. The exodus to breakfast was well under way.

Damn. It killed me, but Jesse would have to wait. If I didn't show up for breakfast, Mrs. Westcliffe would send Gladys or Almeda looking for me. I'd heard that the only excuse for missing chapel or meals was illness, and if you were ill, you could expect a sizable dose of cod-liver oil and bloody little else.

I tugged on my clothes and hurried down the tower stairs, only just managing to join the final stragglers darting past the dining hall doors. I made my way to the tenth-year table, hardly registering the customary tittering that churned in my wake.

“
Lovely
coiffure,” commented someone beside me. “Was the price of a few hairpins
really
too dear?”

I glanced to my right, where Chloe stood with a hand atop the back of her chair. The runny-nosed girl slouched beside her. Both of them were smiling small, malevolent smiles.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Your
hair
.” Chloe pulled out her chair, turning away. Her ladyship was already bored. “Quite the rat's nest, isn't it? Either you can't afford even cheap pins or else you simply don't care how you look. Either way, it's an obvious indication of inferior blood.”

“Obvious,” echoed Runny-Nose, pulling out her chair, too.

I had forgotten. I'd gotten dressed and even ensured I'd picked the skirt without the rip, but I had forgotten all about my hair. It hung loose and tangled down my back, and in my haste I hadn't noticed it at all.

Chloe was shaking out her napkin, her back to me. Snug against the laden table, snug amid her bootlicking friends, she had all the power and she knew it. “Run along, guttersnipe. Your stench is truly overwhelming. I swear, you're already curdling the milk.”

Blood rushed to my cheeks. I came closer. I placed my hand on her arm.

“Listen—” I began.

I don't know what I might have done just then. What I might have said. I was angry and mortified and angry that I was mortified, and the darkness in me–magic or dragon or whatever it was–was rising in my throat like a black vicious bubble. It was
my
power and I was going to use it. But then two separate things happened, and I never got the chance to finish my sentence.

Mrs. Westcliffe walked by, so near her skirts brushed mine.

And Chloe spotted my cuff.

“Why, what a cunning
bangle
!” she said, in a far louder voice than any of the nastiness before. “Didn't you think so, Mrs. Westcliffe?”

The headmistress dutifully stopped and turned around.

I made myself still. I made myself swallow the black bubble and keep my hand at my side instead of jerking it behind my back, as I wished to do. It wouldn't matter that it wasn't technically a bangle; it was precious and I was poor, and that would be reason enough to raise suspicion.

Yesterday's brooch might well have been borrowed. Yesterday I had been Cinderella, and the roses pinned to Lady Sophia's dress hadn't raised an eyebrow.

Today I was plain cinders again.

“A bangle?” Mrs. Westcliffe moved her hawk-sharp gaze to me.

“I only just noticed it myself,” Chloe said, all innocence. “Rather interesting piece, so
modern,
especially for an Iverson girl. Of course, since
you
approved it, Headmistress, I'm sure it's fine.”

I didn't wait to be asked. I lifted my hand and allowed the flowers to show against my wrist, gleaming their delicate gold. Mrs. Westcliffe bent down for a better look.

“I was going to bring it to you after chapel,” I improvised. “I didn't want to bother you before breakfast.”

“Ah,” was all she replied. And then, “Where did you get it?”

“It was a gift.” I turned my gaze to Chloe. “From Lord Armand.”

The effect of this little burst of brilliance was truly gratifying. Her eyes bulged. Her mouth fell open. No sound emerged.

“Oh?” said Mrs. Westcliffe, in a very different tone.

“Yes.”

“Liar!”
exclaimed Chloe, apparently unable to stop herself.

“Lady Chloe,” said Mrs. Westcliffe at once, “I'll thank you to remember who and where you are and maintain a civil discourse.”

“But—he …” She trailed off, biting her lip, her face growing brighter and brighter.

“Ask him,” I said to both of them, to everyone listening—which by now was everyone within earshot. I wasn't thinking about the consequences of pulling Armand into it or of a single moment to come beyond this one. I was brimming with the confidence of my lie, skating fast and happy on Chloe's bitter chagrin.

Who's curdling the milk now?

“He gave it to me during the tea yesterday. I tried to refuse it, of course, but Lord Armand insisted, saying it was a welcome gift and that he would be insulted should I not accept it. And I thought, well, as a guest of the duke, as a student of the school, I could not graciously continue to decline.” I looked straight into Mrs. Westcliffe's eyes. “Was it the wrong thing to do, ma'am?”

Her head tilted, just slightly. I was mightily aware of being judged, of my words, my sincerity, being weighed. I was a nonentity compared to Chloe Pemington; all the sincerity and credibility in the world be damned, she was a member of the peerage and I a nameless orphan, and nothing would ever change that.
But
throw in the backing of the school's noble patron and his son …

“No,” Mrs. Westcliffe concluded at last. “From your description, it appears you behaved correctly, Miss Jones.”