The goal was to ensure plenty of airflow and a bright fire.
So that was the way they were going to do it—because none of them knew any other alternative, and although neither Trez nor Selena was a symphath, everybody figured it was best to go with something that had been proven to work rather than run the risk of a homegrown solution that failed.
Upshot was, Rhage was going to fell about sixy-five twenty-foot-plus trees. Then they were going to strip the branches and the bark using a combination of daggers, saws, and other tools, and set the whole thing up on the flat stretch of lawn to the west of the house.
As he worked, with the saw jumping at each and every cut like it was a wild animal barely leashed, he kept going back to his own past with his Mary.
He had been there, right there, where Trez had sat at the bedside of his beloved. He had known that frigid fear and disbelief that life, with all its endless permutations, had come to such a point. He had gone home and undressed and knelt on diamonds that had cut into his knees … and he had bowed his head to the only deity he had known and begged and pleaded for Mary to be saved.
And the Scribe Virgin had come unto him and provided him what he had asked for—but at a tremendous cost.
His Mary would be saved, but in exchange for the gift, she could not be with him. That was the payment for the incredible blessing, the balance to the miracle.
That pain had been a galaxy that had opened in his chest, an infinite wound that was so deep and of such a mortal nature, he had been surprised he had not started to bleed …
Rhage watched as another tree fell to the side in a dead faint to the cold ground.
He knew exactly what Trez was feeling right now.
The difference? At his nightfall, some two years ago, after he had sworn to give her up so she could be saved from her disease … his Mary had burst through his bedroom door alive and well, cured and saved, restored to health.
And able to unite with him.
It was the only sunshine he had known as an adult: Sure as if the roof above him had disappeared and the sun had risen just for him, warmth and light had shone down upon them both as he had held on to his female.
They had both been restored by the Scribe Virgin’s mercy in that moment.
Later, he had learned that because Mary had been rendered infertile due to her earlier cancer treatments, the Scribe Virgin had decided that that was enough to balance the gift of everlife.
And so Mary and he were together to this day.
Trez had not been granted such a miracle.
Selena had not been saved.
It was Tohr and Wellsie all over again.
Even though Rhage wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, he didn’t understand why he and his shellan had been spared. Especially given how the Scribe Virgin had cursed him with his beast earlier in his life for being so out of control.
And yet she had then seen fit to return his beloved to him.
Thanks to the mother of the race, his Mary was now free to exist without death until she chose differently—which would be when he went unto the Fade.
The fact that they had been spared … seemed just as random as why Tohr and Trez had been condemned.
At least his brother had managed to go on.
He could only hope the same for that Shadow.
“Take this,” iAm said to Fritz, “to my condo at the Commodore. Place it on the outside of the glass slider on the terrace.”
“My pleasure, sire,” the butler replied. Except then the doggen’s brows went up. “Is there aught else?”
“No.”
As Fritz just stood there outside the exam room, looking confused, iAm couldn’t figure out—
Oh. Right. He wasn’t letting go of the note.
Forcing his hand to release its hold, he stepped back. “Thanks, man.”
“If there is aught else you or your brother require, please call upon me. I would do anything to be of service, especially now.”
The butler bowed low and then headed down the corridor, disappearing through the office’s glass door.
iAm looked around even though he was still alone. His eyes just needed something to do, and in that regard, he understood why Rhage and the Brothers had been begging for a duty—also why the females of the house who were not out working in the forest had gone upstairs to help prepare a meal of ceremonial dishes traditionally served at mourning meals. And why the Chosen and the Primale had shut themselves into the gym to perform ancient rituals, the perfumed smoke from the sacred candles they were burning permeating the training center with a fragrance that was both dark and sweet.
It was such a hodgepodge of belief systems and traditions, all inter-mingling around the nucleus of grief.
His brother.
And so iAm waited here.
Sometime in the next three hours, the male was going to emerge, naked and dripping in his own blood.
The marking of a male mourner’s chest and abdomen was the very last part of the preparation ritual for a departed female mate.
And as the next of kin to the sufferer, iAm was the one who was going to seal the wounds with salt, making them a forever-in-the-flesh kind of thing.
He jogged the heavy black velvet bag that was full of Morton’s best in his hand. It was tied with a golden rope, and the weight was substantial.
In the back of his mind, he couldn’t help looking to the other side of all of this. To nightfall on the following eve.
To the end of the s’Hisbe’s mourning period.
For quite some time, he’d been mulling over that solution which involved a lifetime of travel. Any debt that had once been owed to Rehvenge had been discharged, and with Selena’s death, Trez was arguably free to cash out of his businesses here in Caldwell and hit the road.
The Shadow Queen could not claim what she could not catch.
And that option was the smartest thing to do.
The problem now … was his thing with maichen.
iAm refocused on the closed door, imagining his brother wrapping up his beloved—and for a moment, he tried to picture Trez being in any shape to hit the road.
Probably not going to happen.
Shit. It was entirely possible that Trez was going to solve the situation for all of them.
By putting a gun to his head.
SEVENTY-ONE
Trez had no memory of being born.
But as he approached the door of the exam room, he felt as though the experience was coming back to him firsthand. After hours upon hours of nothing but pain, dogged by an exhaustion that was existential, he put his palm upon the cracked surface of the panel and realized that, even if there had been no tangible barrier between him and what was on the other side, stepping out was going to require a pushing, a forcing, a constriction that popped him free of the dense time capsule he’d been in.
Lifetimes separated the male he had been when he had come down here with Selena in his arms … and where he was now.
Lifetimes.
And similar to the womb, he couldn’t stay here anymore.
There was one last duty he had to fulfill; not that he had had the strength for any of this.
“Selena,” he whispered.
Her name spoken out of his dry lips was the key that unlocked the exodus … and out he arrived, into a world that was as new to him as it must have been when he had been birthed.
He was no more capable than he had been as a babe.
And similar to his birth … iAm was waiting for him.
His brother looked up so fast, the male knocked his head into the concrete wall he was leaning against. “Hey…”
Those dark eyes did a vertical sweep, and Trez glanced down at himself. His black slacks were stained with his blood as well as candle wax and gauze fibers from the wrapping. His chest was a raw pattern of wounds. His free hand was matted with what was on those pants.
“Salt,” Trez said. “Salt, we need…”
His voice was like a clarinet with a bad reed in the mouthpiece. Then again, he’d been talking to his queen for how many hours straight? So many prayers, and the odd thing had been the way they had come back to him … even though he had neither spoken nor heard the verses or the Shadow dialect in—
What was he doing out here again?
As iAm held up a black velvet bag, he thought, Oh, right.
It was so damn easy to let his Bojangles body fall to the floor, his knees absorbing an impact that must have been hard, but was something that didn’t register.
Leaning his head back, he arched his sternum forward, the pattern of cuts that he’d dug into himself pulling wider, reopening so that the wounds began to weep blood anew.
“Are you ready?” iAm asked over him.
He made some sound that even to his ears could have been a yes or a no or … something else. But his ready position clearly spoke for itself.
Breath exploded out of his raw throat as the salt hissed out of the neck of that bag and hit him on the collarbones. The flow carried with it a stinging pain that was so great his heart skipped in his ribs and his lungs spasmed up—and yet he bore the sensations willingly, telling himself that it was in service to Selena.
After this, he would be forever marked for her.
It was, he supposed, what happened in a mating ceremony—only in his case, his female was no longer with him. And with that sacred joining ritual flipped on its head, it made sense that instead of great joy, he knew only crushing sorrow; instead of becoming one with her, he was marking his solitude without her.
When there was no more salt left in the bag, he stayed where he was, out of choice and necessity. The necessity part was that the muscles in his back and shoulders had seized up on him, maybe in solidarity with his female, more likely because he’d been bent over for the last ten—or was it fifteen?—hours straight. And as for the choice part? As much as he hated the rituals because they were like a loud, screaming she’s dead in his head, he didn’t want them to be over.