gift, one of the greatest. What sacrifice do you make for it?”
For a long minute, he was quiet. Finally he said, “I’ll strike you a deal, dragon-girl. You listen to my story now, and I’ll tell you of the sacrifice later.”
“Later? When?”
“When you truly need to know.”
“I think I bloody need to know right now.”
“I’ll tell you later, I promise. But now—we’ve only an hour or so before the maids are up. So, please.” He leaned forward, pressed his lips swift and cool against mine, and, even though I didn’t mean to, I stiffened, surprised. “Just listen. And relax.”
I nodded and Jesse drew away, almost smiling. I lay back on the blanket and closed my eyes, clutching the leaf. Between the sting of pleasure that lingered on my mouth and the tinkling leaf song in my hand, I felt anything but relaxed.
Once more, his low, measured voice filled the cavern.
“Once upon an age, there were no humans on the earth, only Elementals, beings of pure form and intent, very powerful. We would call them spirits today, I suppose, or gods, except there were no people around to worship them. Yet the humans did come eventually, and the Elementals discovered they could not compete against pragmatic mankind. One by one they ceased to exist, until finally there was but one left. A goddess.”
“What did she look like?” I wondered aloud, not opening my eyes.
“She was too compelling to look at directly. Bright like the sun, bright and terrible. Only one other being could look upon her, and that was Death. And so … they became lovers.”
He said the word like a caress, like velvet again, and my face began to heat.
“Together they forged great and hellish things,” Jesse murmured. “Lightning and waterfalls that churned into clouds off the tip of the world. Chasms so winding deep that daylight never traced their endings. They dreamed through golden days and silvered nights. All the other creatures envied or adored them, because Death and the Elemental were destruction and creation joined as One. In the natural order of things, they should not have been stronger joined. And yet they were.”
He shifted, coming closer to me. A hand settled lightly atop my chest, directly over my heart. At our feet the seawater splashed a little, as if disturbed by something rolling over in the dark, distant deep.
“Centuries passed, and mankind began to devour the earth, even the wildest places. They had tools to invent and wars to fight and grubby, short lives. Nothing about them dwelled in the magic of the ancient spirits. So although Death, the Great Hunter, prospered as he sieved through their villages, the Elemental, strong as she once was, thinned into a web of gossamer. Human lives simply tore her apart.”
His hand was so warm. Warmer than I, warmer than the air, and still just barely touching me. The light behind my lids never lifted, so I knew he wasn’t glowing, but it felt as if he held a tame coal to my skin. It felt like something painless and ablaze, drawing my heart upward into it.
“The time had come for them to divide. Like all the rest of her kind, the goddess would cease to exist; she had no other course. So Death and the Elemental severed their joined hearts. For a few generations more, she drifted alone through the last of the sacred places, deserts and fjords, lands so savage no human had yet desecrated them.”
Jesse’s voice dropped to a whisper. Without moving his hand, he bent down, his breath in my ear. “And Death, who had tasted her brightness, who would never cease to crave it—who knew her better than all the collected souls of all mankind’s weeping dead—became her Hunter.”
I was hot and strange. I was light and lighter, and curiously my breath came so slow.
“Until at last, one starry night beneath the desert moon, she surrendered to him. She allowed him to come to her, to make love to her. To unravel her …”
• • •
It was happening. He sat next to her and bore witness to her change, her pulse slowing, her skin blanching, the fans of her lashes stark against the contours of her face. He kept his palm there against her chest, up and down with her respiration, and watched the smoke begin to curl around his fingers.
“And by his hand, in the bliss of her unraveling, she touched the stars.…”
Lora’s breath hitched. Her heart skipped—then stopped.