Magic flooded the room, rich with the scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, old scents from an ancient world. His words held a power I hadn’t expected, but I felt them, felt their touch wrap around me, lick across my human skin and sink inside. Pleasure spilled through me, arching my back and briefly silencing all thought, all fear. It rolled on and on, sinking to my human core and knotting tight.
I staggered, reeling from the embrace. The threads of the binding tightened, combining with my humanity. Heat strummed through me, heat and power and desire, until in one sudden compounded moment, it snapped. The chamber came back into startling focus. Tingles danced across my skin and tiny sparks traced my tattoos, leaving needle-like shivers behind.
I blinked, breathless. Somehow, I’d stayed on my feet, which seemed like an enormous triumph. Kneeling, Talen looked up, almost composed. Almost. The hand pressed over his heart trembled, and his breaths came in short and sharp between parted lips. If he had felt half of what I’d just gone through, then he did well to stay as composed as he was. What we had shared, I’d never felt anything like it before. No saru had.
I nodded, afraid my voice would betray how racked I was.
He bowed his head, collected himself, stood, and returned to his cot where he woodenly lay down, closed his eyes and sighed.
Now I could trust that Talen would never hurt me.
Chapter 24
Talen and Kellee argued about returning to Calicto. Kellee refused to take him, probably because Natalie now watched the fae as though waiting for the first chance to attack. And I wasn’t allowed to go because I wasn’t ready. It was too risky. There was no point in all of us getting caught in one shuttle should the fae come looking. That last one, I reluctantly admitted, was a good point.
So Kellee left with Natalie and my improved comms in his pocket, promising to return in a few days.
“I know you killed Crater,” Natalie said under her breath, passing me on her way to the shuttles.
I smiled at the absurdity of her claim. It was so long ago and a lie. She had me all wrong. I hadn’t killed one activist miner. I was the Wraithmaker. I had hunted my fellow saru for sport and then helped annihilate a civilization. When she glanced back, I flashed her a smile worthy of a mass murderer.
“You’re making it worse,” Talen remarked under his breath. He stood beside me, calm and collected.
“I don’t think it can get much worse. Do you?”
The prison felt colder without Kellee. During the next few days, I jogged alone, avoiding Talen the same way he avoided me. On one of my circuits, I found a storage room and poked around inside, digging out spare tek parts.
Talen observed me collecting the equipment on the floor in the main chamber without comment, until his curiosity got the better of him and he crouched beside me on the floor. In front of us was a spread of what looked like scrap metal, but to me, it was a hundred possibilities.
Talen watched me work, and rather than find his focus on me uncomfortable, I welcomed it. Knowing he couldn’t hurt me allowed me to relax in his company, something I had never been able to do among the fae, not even in the palace when the queen had favored me.
“What’s that one?” Talen asked, pointing to a compact silver box.
“A sub-band communications device.” I picked up the box and turned it over. “It’ll send out a low-range frequency the fae won’t think to look for.” Picking up a second box, I weighed them both in either hand. “It will talk to its partner, over several hundred thousand miles. Kellee mentioned his communications problems, so…” I shrugged. “I fixed it. I just need two good power sources for them to work.”
“And that?” Talen pointed to a string of metal links, all hooked in a line.
“That”—I tugged on one end and the links magnetically followed one another, slithering across the floor like a metal snake—“will be a new whip. I can’t charge it with fae magic, but it will still make an effective weapon.”
His fae eyes brightened as he ran his gaze along the whip. “How did you come to wield it so well?”
“Necessity.”
He looked up and likely imagined all the things a saru had to do to survive. His ideas probably only came half as close to the reality.
“They—the chief saru trainers—weed out the weak ones early on. They employ many methods, but the first is leaving newly harvested saru inside the delivery crate.” I searched his eyes, wondering if he had seen the vast crates the children were harvested into. I doubted it. But like always, his expression remained neutral, although the glisten in his gaze betrayed a little of the emotion he otherwise hid well from view. “They told us only ten would be spared. Twenty-one of us were harvested from our village. Ten left the crate. I strangled one with his belt and kicked another in the face until she stopped moving.”
Talen looked away, thinking I wouldn’t see him flinch. “How do you not despise me for what I am?”
Everything would be so much easier if I did. “Saru don’t despise the fae. We can’t afford to. Our villages, our homes, our food, it all belongs to Faerie. We understand that. We don’t hate you, we love you. Without the fae, there are no saru.” I ran my hand along the whip’s metal links. The words had been bred into me, into saru life. A large part of me believed them and always would, but I had also harbored a forbidden seed of doubt. I still did, buried under all the lies. A seed Aeon had planted, before I’d killed him.
“I can help you charge the whip,” Talen said, suddenly enthused. “Not directly, the tek will repel me, but through you.” He looked up, lips pressed into a determined line. “Through our bond.”
“You would share your magic with a saru?”
“Yes. It costs me nothing and…” Whatever he had been about to add, he stopped himself. “It can help you.”
A flutter of excitement brought a smile to my lips. Ever since Eledan had taken his mother’s magic, I’d felt as though a piece of me had been stripped away. The thought of having that back, or at least something like it… “Will it hurt you? I don’t want—”
“No.” His lips curved. “I can show you if you like.” He lifted his hand. Liquid golden swirls spiraled around his fingers. The humanity in me immediately reacted, spilling want and need through my veins. The desire wasn’t something I could stop, but its sudden appearance reminded me how Talen wasn’t without his weapons.
I pulled back and shut down. “No, I don’t think so.”
He frowned, puzzled. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I know.” I touched my hand to my chest and felt the fearful flutter against my ribs. “He… He took Mab’s magic from me. From inside…” I remembered the terrible pulling and how every second had dragged like hours as he’d drained me. “I don’t want to have it only for it to be taken away again.”
“I assumed as much.” Talen lowered his hand and considered my words during one of his thoughtful silences. His gaze roamed over the tek scattered around us. “What you do, it’s a talent, Kesh. You should be proud.”
“Proud?” I did what I did to survive. Why would I be proud of necessity? I wasn’t proud of killing my fellow saru and I wasn’t proud of what I had become or what necessity had made me. No, that was a lie… I had survived. I was proud of that.
“I have lived a very long time and all of this…” He gestured at my tek experiments. “I don’t understand human tek. I resist it, endure its endless gnawing on my senses, but that is all. But you shape it and control it. You create where nothing was there before. Tek is your magic. It’s… fascinating. You’re fascinating.” He said it matter-of-factly but his words burrowed in, breaking open some long-neglected part of me that craved the praise of my fae masters.
I wasn’t sure what to say, or even if I could reply. Only one fae had praised me before, and to hear such words from Talen? It felt… peculiar. Like I couldn’t possibly deserve it or that I’d stolen the praise from someone worthier. Saru weren’t meant to be praised.
You are a nothing girl. A ghost.
His voice whispered poison into my ear.
I turned my face away, clinging to the pride Talen had given me, even as it slipped through my fingers. Just the messenger. You are what we made you.