A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes #2) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,126
family other than to tell me that they are gone. At least I had a family. He has had nothing and no one.
My fingers tighten on my armlet, and on impulse, I pull it off. At first, it is as if it doesn’t want to come off, but I give it a good yank, and it releases.
“I’ll be your family now,” I whisper, opening Keenan’s hands and placing the armlet on his palm. I close his fingers around it. “Not a mother, father, brother, or sister, perhaps, but family nonetheless.”
He breathes in sharply, staring down at the armlet. His brown eyes are opaque, and I wish I knew what he felt. But I allow him his silence. He pulls the armlet onto his wrist with slow reverence.
A chasm opens up inside me, as if the last bit of my family is gone. But I take comfort from the way Keenan looks at the armlet, as if it’s the most precious thing he’s ever been given. He turns to me and rests his hands on my waist, closing his eyes, leaning his head against mine.
“Why?” he whispers. “Why did you give it to me?”
“Because you are loved,” I say. “You’re not alone. And you deserve to know that.”
“Look at me,” he murmurs.
When I do, I flinch, pained to see his eyes so anguished—haunted—like he’s seeing something he doesn’t wish to accept. But a moment later, his expression changes. Hardens. His hands, gentle a moment ago, tighten and grow warm.
Too warm.
The irises of his eyes brighten. I see myself reflected within, and then I feel as if I’m falling into a nightmare. A scream claws its way out of my throat, for in Keenan’s eyes I see ruin, failure, death: Darin’s mangled body; Elias turning away from me, impassive as he disappears into an ancient forest; an army of fiery, enraged faces advancing; the Commandant standing over me, drawing her blade across my throat in one clean, deadly stroke.
“Keenan,” I gasp. “What—”
“My name”—his voice changes as he speaks, his warmth souring, twisting into something foul and grating—“is not Keenan.”
He jerks his fingers away, and his head is flung back as if by an otherworldly fist. His mouth opens in a silent howl, the muscles of his forearms and neck bulging.
A cloud of darkness breaks over us both, knocking me back. “Keenan!”
I cannot make out the crisp whiteness of the snow or the undulating lights in the sky. I lash out blindly at whatever attacks us. I can’t see anything. All is obscured until the blackness curls back from the edges of my vision, slowly resolving into a hooded figure with malevolent suns for eyes. I take hold of a nearby tree trunk and grab for my knife.
I know this figure. The last I saw him, he was hissing orders at the woman who frightens me most in this world.
Nightbringer. My body trembles—I feel as though some hand has taken me by my core and now squeezes, waiting to see when I will break.
“What in the bleeding skies did you do with Keenan, you monster?” I must be mad to scream at him so. But the creature only laughs, impossibly low, like boulders grinding beneath a black sea.
“There was no Keenan, Laia of Serra,” the Nightbringer says. “There was only ever me.”
“Lies.” I clutch my knife, but the hilt burns hot as fresh-forged steel, and I drop it with a yelp. “Keenan has been with the Resistance for years.”
“What are years when one has lived for millennia?” At the look of dumb shock on my face, the thing—the jinn—lets out a strange sound. It might be a sigh.
Then it turns, whispering something into the air, slowly rising up, as if to depart. No! I lunge forward and grab on to him, desperate to understand what in the skies is happening.
Beneath the robe, the creature’s body is burning hot, powerful, with the warped musculature of a demon instead of a man. The Nightbringer tilts his head. He has no face, only those damned fiery eyes. Still, I can sense him sneering.
“Ah, the little girl has fight in her after all,” he says. “Just like her stone-hearted bitch of a mother.”
He shakes me, attempting to free himself, but I hold tight, even while squelching my revulsion at touching him. An unknown darkness rises within me, some atavistic part of myself that I did not know existed.
The Nightbringer, I sense, is no longer amused. He jerks away hard. I make myself hold on.