about love and how you nourish it and feed it. I asked her about her mother, about what she was like, and she said that was a ridiculous question because she thought I was her mother. And when I told her I wasn’t, she stopped talking entirely and went to sleep.”
His jaw set and his chin tilted down, those soft lips morphing into a deep frown. “She gets worse as the days pass. The cold season was difficult for her. Before it, she was healthy and…there. Her mind was stronger.”
“You care for her,” I guessed.
“I care for all those in my horde,” he told me. “But Lokkaru…”
He went quiet for a brief moment.
“A few years ago, I was having a difficult time,” he told me. “The Ghertun had attacked a Nrunteng colony and when I journeyed there with a few darukkar, there were so many dead. We helped bury them, gave them back to the earth, back to Kakkari, but even still…that night I swore I saw them again. Rising up. Shadows in the night all around me.”
I tensed, which he could feel. Air whistled from his nostrils and he stroked me, as if to calm me and to calm himself.
“When I came back to the horde, Lokkaru saw me, saw something in my eyes, and she told me that sometimes the dead have a way of returning. After that, there were a couple days I don’t remember. Lost time,” he said gruffly. “But when I woke, she was tending to me.”
My heart ached for him, heavy and full in my chest.
“No one really knows what I see,” he admitted to me. “Very few in my horde do but she was the first being that I felt truly understood what haunts me.”
“Davik,” I whispered. “You’re not mad, you know that, right?”
His brow furrowed.
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
He breathed in my words but I knew that he didn’t believe me.
“I have always been this way,” he said, dismissing my words. “My sister called them my demons. My demons in the dark. She was always afraid they would get her too.”
I wasn’t surprised by what he was implying. “You’ve seen them your whole life?”
I knew his answer though he didn’t speak it.
For some reason, though I tried, the words wouldn’t come out. That he wasn’t plagued by madness but that he had a gift. Like me. Perhaps an unwelcome one.
His hand trailed beneath the fur, his fingers brushing me between my legs. A distraction? A diversion?
“Will you tell me something?” I whispered, my breasts growing heavy as familiar heat began to bloom from his expert touch.
“Neffar?” he grunted, stroking the seam of my sex, finding his seed still coating me when he dipped his finger inside.
“What happened?”
My question made him still. His eyes flashed up to mine.
“Nik,” he rasped, shifting.
For a brief, agonizing moment, I thought he would pull away from me again but he only moved so that he was hovering over me, pulling the furs away to reveal my nude body underneath. His hands went to my legs and spread them wide as he played with me. My lips parted, the familiar coils of desire and lust beginning to spiral.
“Not tonight, leikavi,” he rasped, looking down at me. His expression wasn’t angry—I’d dared to ask such a private question—and I knew he knew the one I’d asked. “You owe me a story first since I told you one this night.”
He leaned down to kiss me and when I gasped, he delved his tongue inside and stroked my own, making the world go hazy.
Against my lips, he murmured, “Besides, maybe you will dream it.”
My eyes shot open.
As he slowly began to press into my body, as my walls stretched tight around him and his chest filled and expanded with the pleasure, he rasped, “Though I pray to Kakkari that you do not.”
I did dream that night. But not what Davik feared. And it was a strange dream.
A very strange dream.
Davik and Devina were sitting together on a grassy hill, looking over a breathtaking view of valleys and waterfalls. I knew that I was dreaming a memory—his memory—but I was myself. I wasn’t seeing it through his eyes—I was an outsider looking in. Though I stood right beside them, they didn’t see me.
I knew they weren’t in the eastlands, for this place was far too lush and beautiful to be in the east, and as I drank in the view before me—all loveliness in the silvery moonlight—a breeze brushed over my cheek