Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Toivo rolled open the slider. The wintry air washed over him, stinging his eyes and bleaching the air off his tongue. He stepped out, barefooted, into the crisp night, onto the frozen patio. His feet steamed against the icy concrete.

The backyard hardly looked the same anymore. The blanket of snow masked everything from the night Aemilius had staged the attack, but now Toivo knew what Kali had gone through when she said she'd always heard gunfire everywhere after dads died. Now Toivo heard it, too.

Ave sat on the brick ledge, just under where icicles had barely started to form along the eve of the patio cover. He could have shut his eyes and he still would have sensed the charge in her blood, seen her outline through the shadow. Ever since awakening, he always knew wherever she was in or around the house. He could always feel her.

And he could always feel Kali.

He took a seat on the ledge beside her, the shift of the air around him distorting the tendril of smoke from her cigarette. The moon's light reflected off the snow and off her face, gleaming in the amber light of her eyes as he said, "The cold isn't so cold anymore."

Whether or not she consciously did it, she shifted so that their knees touched, so that they were connected somehow. But it was harder for her to tear her eyes from the empty backyard. "No, it isn't. Though it was never that cold for you." She smirked.

He returned the smirk, but then the smoke stung his sinuses and he fought not to wave it away. He tried not to mind her cigarettes, but the smoke in his lungs felt a lot like the days of his job at the steel mill, before workers' rights mattered. "I guess I like the cold. It feels...cleansing, in a way." His hand slipped onto her thigh.

Sometimes he could throw her around on the bed or have wild forest sex with her. Sometimes putting his hand on her leg made him feel like a schoolboy trying to figure out how to flirt properly.

Her hand covered his, and the smirk softened into a truer smile, something he hadn't seen much of within the past few days. "I like it more when you say it like that. Almost like it wakes us up." She took another inhale from the stub, the tip glowing orange. When she exhaled smoke from her nostrils, the moonlight turned the coils silver and ghostly.

He studied the profile of her face. "It still hurts, doesn't it?"

The words alone twisted up the careful structure of her face. "It's not going to stop hurting for a while, right?" She peeked over at him. For once, she allowed the fear to show in her eyes, to furrow her eyebrows and pull at the corners of her lips.

A knee-jerk reaction, his hand pulsed around her leg and he looked away, out across the snowy yard. He could even single out the exact tree where Kali had stabbed Aemilius. "No. It doesn't. Sometimes, it feels like it's never going to stop hurting. Sometimes I can't convince myself I'll ever move on. It's hard."

Her hand gathered up his so that she could twine their fingers, and she scooted closer, until their thighs and hips were together, and he couldn't feel any warmth infecting him through her jeans. "Are you afraid of moving on?"

The weight of the scythe returned to his hands. He wished he could remember what it felt like to have the steel sear his hands, but he couldn't, and his palms had already healed. He wished he could remember what the coals of the house felt like against his flesh. He wished he could remember the waves of heat and the smoke in his lungs.