Iridescent (Ember 2) (17 page)

He hung his head and looked at his friend across the island through his eyelashes, trying to get a read on what he was feeling. Nathaniel’s pulse remained slow and steady, and his breathing matched. “Nath—”

“I didn’t come all this way to dredge up old arguments,” he said, cutting Draven off. “I came because I see the way this world of ours is going down the sewers, and I’ve been hearing things.” He picked up the bottle, poured two fingers of liquor into each glass, and turned his piercing gaze on Draven. “Is the gossip true? Did you actually attempt to claim a Nephil as a mate?”

“I had a strategy, and it worked. Payne’s daughter loves Sebastian.”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste,” Nathaniel quipped dryly.

“More importantly,” Draven continued regardless, “Sebastian loves her, enough to play nice on the playground for a change.”

Nathaniel narrowed his eyes, measuring him. Draven caught a flash of gold in the blue of his eyes. When Nathaniel appeared to deduce whatever he was eyeballing him for, he clucked his tongue and handed Draven a glass. “Yeah, that was the other thing I heard.”

Draven realized immediately he’d have to try harder to bury his personal feelings for Candra. If Nathaniel could see it, others would too, and his friend was right: he didn’t need any more complications.

Nathaniel raised his glass. “Here’s to love in its many forms, old friend…and the crazy things we all do for it.”

Draven knocked his own glass against it and poured the warming liquid down his throat in one loud gulp.

Chapter Fourteen

S
EBASTIAN
D
IDN’T
O
PEN
H
IS
E
YES
when he heard the sound of wings swishing nearby. He knew that particular sweep of air as well as his own heartbeat.

“What are you doing all the way up here?” Lofi asked. Her feet crunched across loose stone like a gravelly accompaniment to the resonances of the city in the distance.

“Thinking.”

“So I’m probably disturbing you?”

“Yes.”

He blinked a couple of times and opened his eyes when she sat down beside him, dangling her feet off the side of the cliff ledge. She shivered despite being wrapped up against the cold night air in the thick tie-dyed poncho. The swirls of orange, red and purple weren’t exactly camouflage. They sat in silence for a while, so close their thighs and upper arms touched, and Lofi’s foot brushed against his every time she swung her ankle back and forth.

Sebastian had thought he wanted to be alone with his deliberation. He realized that wasn’t the case at all. He wanted Lofi beside him. She always spoke her mind and wasn’t afraid to slap him back down when he needed it, which was often. He needed her now.

From the ledge jutting out of the mountainside south of Acheron, the speckles of lights from the city were barely visible. They seemed almost a reflection of the endless night sky in water. Just a little farther south, from where dark clouds chased the rain, they wouldn’t be visible at all. The land there dipped to a small valley and an isolated lake with a rocky shore. The landscape was as near as possible to a time before cities. A time before choices about who and what he was, a time when all he had to think about was keeping the treaty intact and existing until the next sunrise. Sometimes, he went there to be alone, but not tonight. Tonight, he wanted to feel connected to the people he cared about, and that meant keeping the city in sight.

Sebastian had been examining himself from a new perspective. He contemplated his own future as it intertwined with another. His relationships had always been weighed in terms of him always being needed, instead of needing. He’d worked on the assumption that if anything happened to him, the world would keep turning, and life would go on. Now, as he saw it, his future had been twisted root deep with Candra’s. The revelations also made him understand how selfish he had been. Before Ambriel had left, he’d always put himself first and everyone else second.

“You haven’t told her yet, have you?”

Sebastian grimaced uncomfortably and glanced at Lofi sideways. He was biding his time, but Lofi bringing up his plan made it seem underhanded in some way. He’d thought making the decision would be the hard part. That turned out to be the easy part. It was inevitable…a logical choice. They couldn’t continue as they were.

“I’m waiting for the right moment.”

Lofi tittered a laugh through her nose. “Oh, yeah, because the perfect moment will make it all better.”

Sebastian combed his fingers through his hair and scratched his scalp. The strands were was still damp from the clouds he’d flown through earlier and refused to dry in the low temperature.

Lofi picked at some of the thick weeds growing around where they were sitting and began to pick them apart, leaving a green slimy mess all over her fingers.

“What are you afraid of?”

“Why does it matter to you if I am?”

Lofi huffed and tossed a handful of tattered weed into the breeze. Sebastian internally cringed at his rebuke. Of course his choices mattered to her, but he didn’t want to think about what Lofi stood to lose. Not yet. That could wait for another night. His stomach curled in on itself, and he swallowed repeatedly, fighting the abrupt wave of nausea brought on by the prospect of verbalizing his biggest fear. He owed her that at least.

“What if I tell her the truth, and she doesn’t want me anymore?”

His friend giggled, looking ahead and swiped her hands against each other in a pointless effort to remove the grunge. “Really, Sebastian, it’s not like you to be insecure.”

“I’m being serious.” He pouted, more than a little put out by her casually brushing off his concern. Despite convincing Ambriel to trust him to do the right thing by Candra, her words had tapped into his worst fears and anxieties when it came to the budding relationship. “Up to now, it’s all been so conceptual. If I tell her the truth, she might change her mind about me and walk away.”

“Candra taking the easy option,” Lofi mused. “Now that would be one for the books.”

He hunched against the wind blowing damp strands of golden hair into his eyes and didn’t bother to push it back again. What a pathetic mess he must look, not much of a leader—not that he ever had been. His confident exterior had been nothing more than a flimsy façade. Once Candra had gotten inside, his carefully-constructed illusion had shattered into a billion tiny shards.

“Candra loves you. I saw it even before she did…before you did.”

“But is love enough?” Was love ever enough? They were more different than alike at times.

Lofi placed her hand on his shoulder. “I can’t give you an answer.”

“I wish we had more time,” he groaned bitterly, ignoring the twinge of guilt at being self-centered again. Regardless, what difference would it make? If he had all the time in the universe with Candra, it would never be enough.

“You know—” Lofi removed her hand, lowered her head to his shoulder, and linked her arm through his “—you don’t have to decide now.”

Sebastian laughed darkly. He felt no humor in the situation. “If only that was the case. We aren’t human, Lofi, and no amount of time will alter the fact. I wish we could date like a normal couple, go off to college together, and make a home…I wish I could offer her a normal life.” His throat ached as if he’d been swallowing bent nails. Just speaking the truth hurt. All that stuff about a trouble shared, it was nonsense. He didn’t feel his trouble halved at all. The opposite, in fact; speaking his fears made them even more real.

“Pftt,” Lofi tutted. “What is
normal
, Sebastian? Does anyone ever have normal? Because I’ve never seen it. It’s an illusion. No one has a perfect life because we are all different and we are all just trying to muddle through together as best we can.”

“I can’t even give her that, not like this.” He waved his other hand up and down his front. “She will change, and I will always be the same.”

“You’ve already changed more than you realize,” Lofi argued softly.

“Not enough. None of us knows the future, but I don’t know if she is ever going to have a chance at something vaguely resembling something close to whatever normal is.” He pressed his cheek to the top of Lofi’s hair. Sebastian had never noticed before how Lofi smelled. Her fragrance was different from Candra’s, and he inhaled the comforting flowery scent. Sebastian frowned, wondering how much more of his feminine side he could expect love to bring forth. He softened more each day, and he couldn’t afford to be soft right now. “I need to do this.”

Lofi squeezed his arm. “I know. My little boy is growing up.”

He turned and kissed her hair. “Thanks.”

He was positive, despite his reservations about the side-effects of his decision, that it was the right one. “Do you think it will hurt?”

“Yes,” Lofi answered without missing a beat.

Sebastian’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He shifted and reached into his jeans to retrieve it, another thing he never used to do. Now he hung on every beep with the warm hope that it was Candra. A message flashed up on the screen. Sebastian read it and groaned as Lofi sheepishly untangled her arm from his.

“I really wish people would stop with all the secrets. For some reason, it’s always me they manage to bite on the ass.”

“You want to explain why the hell Candra met with Lilith in private?” Sebastian demanded.

Chapter Fifteen

L
ESS
T
HAN
A
N
H
OUR
L
ATER
, Sebastian stood in the muted jewel-toned light coming in through the leaded windows in Draven’s library. He focused intently on a small soldered joint in the metal, trying his best not to think of any possible conversations Candra could have had with Lilith. Why would she keep the meeting from him? Although, he couldn’t take the moral high ground on this occasion.

Ananchel had promised she wouldn’t mention their phone conversation the night before, and that should have been enough for him, but it wasn’t. Nothing was ever enough when it came to Candra. He needed just a little more time and wished to pause his life right at that moment. He wasn’t ready to face whatever the future wanted to fire at them next.

“What do you think this means?” he asked aloud.

“Why would I know?” Draven replied from where he sat at one of the nearby matching desks, signing documents under lamplight.

He’d frowned and turned away when Sebastian had shared the contents of the text message he’d received from Lilith, goading him about a meeting with Candra. She’d obviously wanted to rile him, and it had worked.

“You should have sent someone to retrieve her sooner,” Sebastian spat, clenching his fist so tightly, his knuckles cracked.

Draven snorted. “She has free will, Sebastian. You know the rules. I can’t make her do anything.”

Sebastian threw his head back and turned to the insistent scraping of Draven’s pen over paper. “Damn free will. The girl will agree to anything if she thinks she can protect someone she cares about.”

Draven finally lifted his navy eyes and looked at Sebastian. A few weeks ago, standing in the same room would have been unimaginable. Now, Sebastian found himself willing to trust Draven in a way he couldn’t have conceived of before.

Draven’s dark hair fell across his forehead, and he threaded his fingers through it, pushing it away from his face. He seemed weary. The recent months had worn on them all. “If you damn free will, you damn us all. What are we striving for, if it isn’t that?”

“Always so philosophical,” Sebastian scoffed, thinking Draven had already begun to sound like Gabe, the person he considered a wise brother.

He ran his fingertips lightly over the desk, observed by Draven. The surface was flawless. Who would have known Sebastian had pounded his old rival into the dark wood just weeks ago?

“You’ve had it repaired,” Sebastian noted.

Draven put down his pen and proceeded to fix the cuff of his shirt, rolling it up his forearm. “Replaced. Some things are irreparable.”

“It looks just the same.”

“But I know it’s not the same.”

Sebastian tapped his index finger on the polished wood thoughtfully. Yes, it was a universal truth: some things, once broken, were broken forever—like trust. It might be patched up and smoothed over, but it would always be the thing that had once been shattered. Draven had told him before the ball that anything could be forgiven with time. Sebastian still wasn’t convinced. He wondered if Candra would ever forgive him for the choice he had made. It had been different in the beginning, before they had fallen in love; back then, she hadn’t trusted him anyway. Trust had grown over time and had now been ripped apart by both of them keeping secrets.

He bit down on the inside of his lip and tasted blood before he spun in the direction of the drinks cabinet. Sebastian poured two fingers of amber wine after covering the distance in a few long strides. He knocked the contents back, hoping to dull the edge of his frayed nerves, while still holding the crystal decanter in the other hand. The fiery liquid mixed with the salty, metallic tang in his mouth, and he swallowed hard.