Lain woke first. For a moment, she couldn’t tell where she ended and Mallow began. The bond hummed between them, low and steady, a resonance below sound. His arm was draped loosely across her middle, heavy with sleep. When she shifted, the hum answered her.
She drew a slow breath. The Tuning was no longer the solitary song she had known during all her time without the wyrm. Now it echoed, doubled back, answering itself in a voice that was not hers. Mallow.
The whisper of his name moved through her, and his mind stirred in response before his body did.
The dawn light traced the line of his jaw, the small scar near his temple. “You feel it too,” she said.
He nodded, eyes still closed. “Like you’re in my ribcage. My own little bird.”
She smiled at the metaphor. “You’re a poet.”
“Only when exhausted. It lowers my standards.”
“It’s the bond,” she said softly.
He opened his eyes. “Does it fade?”
“I don’t know. You’re my first.”
“I suppose I knew that,” he said softly.
They lay in silence for a time, breathing in the same rhythm. Then she felt a sharp sting in his shoulder, the echo of pain blooming where it shouldn’t, her body reacting as if it belonged to her. She frowned, touching his arm. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, but she could feel the pulse of it, hot and ragged, obviously a wound taken the night before.
She sat up, bringing her hands to the place she sensed the injury. There it was, a slash in his flesh, not bleeding but bloody from the previous night, and very fresh. By instinct her mouth opened and out came a melody, a hum in her lower register. The warmth of her palms brightened, a soft glow spilling between her fingers. Mallow tensed.
“Lain, what are you –”
“Shh.”
The glow deepened to a gentle blue. The song stirred within her, vibrating through bone and sinew to move from her into him. The ache she’d sensed began to ease as the pain unwound like a knot loosening on her shoulder and his alike.
When the light faded, mallow flexed his arm in astonishment. The slash had closed. Only a thin silver mark remained.
She examined her own hands, shocked. It felt as if she’d lived in one house all her life, and found a door that led to a secret room she’d never seen before.
He stared at her. “You healed me.”
“I think we healed you,” she said. “It was like… I felt the song, inside our connection. It’s hard to explain.”
He reached for her hand, turning it over, thumb brushing the hollow of her palm. “That’s what this connection means, then? That we share the hurt?”
“And the warmth,” she said.
He held her hand over their heads, admiring her palm. It was then that she noticed a red mark on the underside of his left wrist, like a small almond-shaped eye, but the pupil was split by a vertical cut that dropped a single line downward.
She ran a finger along it. “What’s this?”
“Old tattoo,” he said. A bitter vine coiled in the Tuning. “From an old job I never should’ve taken.”
Lain was curious, but sensed how little he wanted to speak on it, so she let his statement lie.
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A single shaft of morning light fell across the room. Mallow watched her in silence for a long while, as if trying to reconcile the sight before him with something his mind couldn’t quite grasp. The morning light touched her antlers and they glimmered faintly, a living translucence like ice over a flame.
He reached up, hesitant, and brushed his fingertips along one tine. The resonance answered him, vibrating through his hand, down his spine, into his chest. She could feel it as well as he did.
“Saints,” he breathed. “You really are something divine.”
Lain ducked her head, embarrassed. “I’m hardly that.”
He gave a dazed sort of laugh. “The Dagorlind are wasting all their holiness on the wrong side of heaven. Fools, the lot of them.”
The words startled a bright, surprised laugh out of her. It was the first real laugh since yesterday morning, and yesterday morning was a lifetime ago.
Mallow smiled the kind of crooked grin that always gave away the truth before he meant to speak it. “There it is. I was starting to think the world had swallowed that sound.”
She leaned in closer, shaking her head. “You’re terrible.”
“Undeniably,” he said, eyes soft, voice warm. “But at least I’m in good company.”
Their laughter ebbed into quiet again, the air between them thick with the warmth of it. His hand was still at her antlers. His pulse thrummed through his fingers, through the bond, through the lingering Heat that refused to fade.
When he kissed her, it was with the soft wonder of two souls testing the edge of a miracle they didn’t yet understand.
But the Heat understood.
It wasn’t long before that wondrous kiss became something fully animal, all lips and teeth and flexing bodies.
Before Lain could help herself she climbed onto him, and he pulled her close by the antlers, the Heat rushing through them both like a command from heaven. He hardened beneath her, gasping, flexing. She eased her hips back until he slid into her with a full-body shudder. That shudder belonged to her, too, and the Heat moved them until they coiled about as fluidly as otters in a stream.
Her mouth demanded more, and his body gave it. He put one hand to her shoulders, his fingers gripping fast to the line of scales at her spine. Her tail lashed them both, striking with a pleasant sting at his hip, then her own.
She couldn’t rise to her knees the way a human did and Mallow knew this, so when her desire for his strength rushed forward, he flipped her in one swift motion, putting her on her back beneath him. He looped an arm around her leg and rose over her, thrusting again and again, and she knew what it was to do this just as he could feel what it was to be entered so. He adjusted all his movements to ferret out the thing that made the pleasure build and build inside her.
It wasn’t long before the white light bloomed in her vision, before it filled her mind with ecstatic yearning. He rose to that place with her, again that wheel of making turning for them until they both succumbed at once, him emptying himself and her receiving in pleasure and as a vessel.
The gasp that came found them both at once. He collapsed upon her, chest to chest, kissing her with such devotion she felt tears prick her eyes.
“Mal,” she said. “Mallow.”
“Lain. My Lain. My own little bell.”
He huffed at her ear for a time as they descended from their reverie. She felt him smiling against her face.
“What?”
“I was just thinking I should thank whatever Brother was foolish enough to lose you to the likes of me. Or Elder, wasn’t it?”
She laughed. “You’re terrible.”
“Undeniably,” he repeated. He kissed her cheek, then eased to his side. “But at least I’m in good company.” He brushed a thumb over her cheek before standing. “Now come on, Little Hooves. If we don’t eat something before the next climb, you’ll have to carry me.”
They moved with gentle and constant regard for each other, Lain shockingly aware of him, the way he occupied space, the dexterous flex of his fingers as he moved items about in his bag. He dressed and she noted how he put his shirt on first before finding his slacks; he’d never taken off his long socks, which he shuffled up comically before he got one leg, then the other into his underclothing. She watched the way his brow furrowed as he examined the seal on his bottle of ink; her heart fluttered at the care in which he reset the fire, the way his cheeks puffed out as he blew across the coals, the smile that met him when he succeeded. She’d thought him handsome before, if not strange in the darkness of his skin, but now his contrast to her was like the shadowed part of a rose, or an oak tree, beautiful and mysterious and universally attractive.
And as she watched him do these things, she wondered at the living realness of him, at the body that held his heart and took up space, that breathed and beat and carried blood through all his limbs. How strange she had ever thought herself separate from body. How strange she had ever seen people as being spirit caged within their flesh. She was not a spirit in a cage; she was a spirit riding the back of an eagle, living warmly held in the heart of a hearthfire. Mallow was inseparable from his body, a spirit tethered to perfect form.
They ate what little they had left: bread, dried berries, the last of Mallow’s cheese.
They almost made it outside before Mallow brushed her hand and the Heat woke again. She pulled him away from the door and he let out a surprised cry before her mouth was on his, and he folded into her arms like a man succumbing to a hot bath.
They didn’t make it to the bed. He pressed her face first against the wall, turning her head aside so her antlers wouldn’t gouge him as he tugged down her slacks, lifted her tail, and filled her, all while whispering “You need more? You do, don’t you? Saints, you’re such a hungry little thing, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
She was, and she would have her fill.