Desire in His Blood

I whistled out a long breath, my mind catching on the possibility and realization that I had. And the knowledge of that alone made me nearly forget the storm raging beyond his wings entirely.

“I think I have,” I said softly. I remembered when I’d been exploring the keep those first few days, of feeling not entirely alone. “Even just now. Tonight, when I was coming to the library.”

The chill on the back of my neck. A touch like a whisper.

Azur inclined his head. His black hair was shoulder length. Usually it was tied back, but now it brushed my cheek. I felt his exhale float between us.

He was different tonight. Calm.

“The Nyaan and the Alara,” I repeated, feeling the words over my tongue.

“There is a third realm,” he told me after a moment of tangible hesitation. “Zyos. We don’t usually speak of it.”

“Why?” I asked, wondering if it was similar to some humans’ beliefs of heaven and hell.

“It is the realm of the lost. Or even the forgotten,” Azur said, his voice tightening with his arms around me. “Those whose souls have been stained. Or taken. Souls that need to be guided back to Alara, or else they face an unfathomable eternity.”

I shuddered. “An eternity of what?”

“Of wandering. Of despair. Forced to relive their darkest moments. Over and over again until their souls are pieced back together and they are guided back to their families. To their blood,” Azur told me.

“And that’s possible?” I couldn’t help but wonder.

“Yes,” Azur said. There was an unreadable tone in his voice. “It is.”

In the silence that followed, I heard the moon winds grow stronger, raging against the keep. I couldn’t fathom that the Kylorr enjoyed flying in such utter violence.

Had he been trying to distract me? By telling me about the realms?

“I don’t like storms,” I said again, staring at the thickened membrane of one of his wings, reaching forward to trace the veins, feeling it flutter beneath my fingertips. My hand dropped. I didn’t know why I said it, but the words came tumbling from me all the same. “My mother died in a storm.”

Azur stiffened beneath me, tangible and sudden.

His reaction made a thick lump rise in my throat. And I told him something I’d never even voiced out loud.

“She drowned herself actually. In a lake behind our estate. Five years ago,” I whispered raggedly. “We found the stones in her dress when her body was discovered the next morning.”

“Raazos’s blood,” Azur murmured.

“We didn’t let my sisters see her like that. Only my father and me,” I confessed. “I’m the eldest. Mira was only eighteen at the time. Piper was fifteen. We thought it best.”

“Instead, you bore that burden, that grief in seeing her like that,” Azur said. “With no true outlet for it.”

“I would do anything for my sisters,” I told him, suddenly tired. “You know that.”

“Do you know why your mother did it?”

I remembered that night like every breathless moment was imprinted in my memory with the finest of details. I couldn’t forget it even though I wanted to. Five years had done nothing to soften the torment of that night.

Mother had been drinking. She’d just gotten a treatment from the doctor, a fresh implant under her skin. I remembered the storm blowing in with a deep, booming rumble of thunder. I remembered her beautiful voice, singing through the halls, a haunting melody that didn’t have a predictable rhythm. She’d been matching her pitch to the storm.

When she’d gone outside, it had been me who’d told my father. I’d seen her twirling and dancing in the downpour, stumbling over the grass, laughing into the wind. I’d been scared. I’d never seen her like that.

And perhaps in my own selfishness, I’d been too wrapped up in my own ridiculous sorrow. My twenty-fifth birthday had been a week before. I’d just slept with Petyr and awakened to find him gone. I would never marry. I would never have a home, a family of my own. I would likely grow old caring for our crumbling estate in the Collis and trying to manage my parents’ drinking.

Perhaps I had turned a blind eye to my mother’s own sorrow. Because looking back now, it had been apparent she’d needed help.

And we’d failed her.

I’d failed her.

Father had gone outside in the pouring rain, trying to drag her back inside. They’d fought in the front garden. My mother had been screaming words at him that I couldn’t make out as the wind howled against the panes of glass, as I’d pressed my face against the windows to see them better. Then Mira and Piper had woken up and I’d done my best to shuffle them back to their rooms.

Father had come back inside. Alone. Soaking wet. He’d been furious, a red tinge on his cheeks that told me he was in a foul state.

“She’s in one of her moods again,” he’d told me bitterly. “Ignore her. She’ll come back inside once she gets cold. I’ll call the doctor in the morning to get her dose adjusted.”

One of her moods.

That was what my father had always called her depression. She’d struggled with it her entire life. It had only seemed to get worse after Father had returned from the war, even though we’d moved to the Collis, even though she’d had everything her own father had ever wanted for her. Money. Children. Prestige.

The horror of the next morning…how could I ever forget it? I hadn’t found her. Father had discovered her, and I’d woken to a deep roar of grief that had nearly shaken the entire house.

Our lives had changed that night. We hadn’t known it at the time. But as we’d slept, as a storm had raged outside, my mother had filled her pockets with rocks and stepped into her beloved lake, where she’d taken her afternoon swims. She’d never surfaced alive.

I told Azur all of this.

I wasn’t even sure why.

Once I started, I couldn’t stop.

It was like draining an oozing, pus-filled wound until it ran clear again. Getting all the rot and muck out of my brain that had been festering for years.

I hated my father. I blamed him for that night. But I hated myself more. For not going outside in the rain to retrieve her, to make sure she was tucked in her bed and warm. How many nights had I stayed awake, sobbing into my pillow, thinking that if I could just go back to that night I could take five minutes to save my mother’s life?

Instead, I’d hid.

“Don’t, Gemma,” Azur said, his voice cutting through my words when I told him why. “You will gain nothing from thoughts like that. They will eat you alive and never stop feasting until there is nothing left.”

He sounded certain in his proclamation. As if he knew exactly what it felt like.

But whatever that might’ve been…he didn’t tell me.

“I thought she would get better,” I whispered, drained and tired, my throat raw from talking and my emotions strung out. “We were happy once. Before the war. Even when my father was gone. She felt present. She felt there. But it was always lingering just under the surface. I can’t imagine the pain she must’ve been in.”

Azur was silent for a long time. I felt calm, strangely, considering what I’d just told him. Before tonight, every time I’d encountered him in the keep these past few days, I’d glared and turned away. Still stung from his words in his office.

But right then…my ire felt silly.

“I’m sorry, Gemma,” he whispered against my temple. “I’m so sorry for your mother. I’m sorry you lost her much too soon. I’m sorry you had to deal with her death when you yourself were still so young.”

I recognized that he was trying to comfort me. My foolish, prickly heart was begi

“Thank you,” I said quietly, turning my face into his chest. I sighed, relaxing. “Thank you, Azur.”

“But please,” he said, “recognize that your mother was her own person, too, with flaws and hurts and pains. Recognize that her death was a tragedy, but please do not put that burden on your shoulders. You don’t deserve that, Gemma.”