“What exactly did you do to me?” he demanded.
* * *
Sitting on Rahvyn’s hospital bed, his legs dangling off the side, one hand braced on the mattress, Nate was aware of feeling different in his own skin. It was hard to put a bead on exactly what was so off. The closest he could come to defining the sensation was what he’d experienced in the nights immediately after his transition.
He was supercharged. Vibrating with energy. Not just alive, but… awakened.
And his brain was crackling with thoughts and memories—although that could be a result of his confusion over this whole thing with her. He kept thinking back to going out into the field behind the house with Shuli to investigate that celestial show and impact. Rahvyn—or Elyn, as he’d known her at first—had been back there in the forest, standing apart from the others who had likewise come to check things out.
Then he could remember when he’d spoken to her the following evening, and fireflies had circled her, the little sparks of light casting a beautiful illumination on her delicate face.
At the time, he hadn’t questioned where the insects had come from. But he’d never seen them before out there in the cold and hadn’t seen them since.
If he was honest… he wasn’t sure what the pinpoints of lights had actually been.
And then he recalled that moment in her bedroom when she’d looked into his eyes and he’d felt a strange draining feeling, as if she had been reading his mind. The horror that had come into her face had sure as hell made it seem like she knew all the details of his past, everything from his time in that lab, and all the pain and the fear he’d suffered as he’d been experimented on by those humans, to the death of his mahmen there and his impossible rescue.
“I was at the door unto the Fade,” he heard himself say. “And I didn’t just stand in front of it, I opened it and I stepped through. I was on the other side…”
Hazy memories, of a white landscape and then something so beautiful he didn’t have the words to describe it, flooded his mind, blinding him to the hospital room, even to her. But he came back from the vision of eternal glory.
Just as he had come back from what had been his death.
“I was dead.” He focused on her. “And you did something to me, didn’t you.”
The female he had been thinking about nonstop—ever since he’d seen her at the meteor strike—whose presence he’d sought out and tried to be cool about at Luchas House, whose face he had fantasized being close to his own as they’d shared a first kiss… was suddenly a stranger.
“Who are you.”
As she lowered her head, her white hair fell forward, her features obscured by the waves. When she finally spoke, it was with sadness.
“You shall ne’er worry for death’s cold hand coming to land upon your shoulder. You are free of the mortal burden of the grave. You are… immortal, Nate.”
The impact of the words was delayed, his brain reexamining the syllables like they were an archaeology site, sure that on the first pass he’d misinterpreted a few. Most.
Try all.
“I’m not hearing you right,” he said numbly.
“You are released from death’s leash, ne’er shall it come to claim you.”
“How…” He rubbed his face. “I don’t understand.”
“I could not let you die.” The dewy, salty scent of tears wafted up and she brushed her eyes with hands that trembled. “Your parents were weeping over your body, the Brothers were outside your door… and it was my fault. I was the reason you were hit—”
Nate recoiled. “How was it your fault?”
“I halted by the human and thus so did you. Or mayhap I set it all in motion even before that.” She sniffled. “If I had been able to withstand more of the chaotic interior of the club Dandelion, we would not have departed then. You would not have been shot. You would not… have died.”
“None of that makes it your fault.”
Rahvyn tucked her hair behind her ears and her eyes were luminous as they looked at him. “Nate, I am sorry. I have given you no gift. It is a complication with heartbreaking implications.”
Like someone who was lost in an unfamiliar territory, one that might or might not be threatening, his senses came alive and he glanced around the room on reflex. Oh, they’d had this conversation in front of an audience: His parents and Sahvage were in the room with them. And unsurprisingly, the adults all looked grave and serious. Then again, this was pretty unparalleled.
If what she said was true, no matter how unbelievable it sounded, then he had been reborn in a way that went against the natural order of things.
And she was something altogether different than just a civilian female of unknown origins who was related to a member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood.