But maybe it was time to lay down the rope. Maybe that’s what he’d really wanted all along.
“Gabe?”
He turned slowly, as if moving too quickly might banish her, a candle flame snuffed by a flash of movement. But no, there she was—Lore, standing up the beach, dressed in the same billowing white he wore. Her hazel eyes were wondering and her brown-gold hair streamed behind her, the scar on her temple only serving to add an edge to how soft she was. One of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen.
Lore looked scared to see him here, just a momentary flash of apprehension across her face. As if she wished he couldn’t come, as if his arrival was the harbinger of something bigger.
Gabe didn’t think. He just ran for her.
Whatever fear she’d felt was gone as soon as it’d come; she met him halfway, and his arms closed around her, lifting her up and crushing her against his chest; he was kissing her before the thought moved across his mind, her lips, her cheek, her forehead, whatever he could reach. Lore clung to him like someone drowning might hold fast to driftwood, something to keep them from slipping, something to keep them alive.
Even when Gabe put her down, he kept her in the circle of his arms, her forehead against his sternum. Lore was soshort; not small, though, not petite. She was rounded and generous, and hewanted to keep touching her, never wanted to let her move too far away for him to feel.
She rested there, the beach silent except for their breathing, the waves making no sound at all. “I’d hoped that maybe we would all be here,” she said softly. She didn’t meanall, though; he knew that. She meant him and her and Bastian, the three points of their triangle.
He felt her tense as she said it, as if she hadn’t meant to let the thought go. As if she were afraid he would take it as a wound, as her making a choice that he knew, now, she didn’t want to make.
He didn’t want to make it, either.
“Too much to hope for,” he murmured into her hair.
Tension bled out of her, a softening relief. “I guess I should have learned my lesson with that one already.”
Gabe twisted her hair in his hands. She sighed, leaning farther into him. Experimentally, he gave a tug.
Her sigh turned breathier, more of a gasp. Her chest heaved against him, and gods, he wanted her so badly.
Another gentle tug, guiding up her face. Gabe kissed her, tongue tracing against her lips. And for a moment, he thought this would finally happen, and everything in him turned liquid fire.
But then Lore flickered in his arms, going ghost before solidifying again. They didn’t have much time.
Her heat-addled eyes cleared; defeat crossed her face.
“Soon,” Gabe said, tightening his grip in her hair, strong on the back of her head.
She leaned into it. “Soon,” she agreed.
Then Lore took a deep breath, looking up at him with a determined tilt to her chin. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “Two somethings, really, and it seems like I need to hurry.”
Gabe nodded. There was no time to be together physically, and no time to justbe, either. He wanted that even more, really.
“First,” Lore said, “you know what this place is, right? At least, why we’re here?”
“Something to do with the gods in our heads, I’d imagine.” The beach looked familiar, in a way. Not like he’d been there before, but like it was somewhere that had been described to him.
Though he had the fleeting feeling that hehadbeen here before. Ephemeral and hard to hold on to, maybe a dream. The feeling of familiar fingers brushing his jaw.
“It’s the Mount. Before the Godsfall.” Lore looked over her shoulder, at the cliffs rising up to the blue sky. “It looks like what I saw in Nyxara’s memories.”
It should awe him to be here. But Gabe’s capacity for awe was at its limits these days.
“We come here when we use our power,” Lore continued. “At least, that’s what Alie told me, when she and I showed up at the same time. And I only dream myself here on days that I’ve used quite a bit of Spiritum.”
He arched a brow. “Not Mortem?”
Lore worried her lip between her teeth. Then, with a sigh, she held up her hand.
Gone were the charcoal-colored stars that had marred her palms that day after the explosion on the dock, when she knit the life back into nearly every courtier in the Citadel. Her skin was pale and unmarked, other than the eclipse carved into her hand.
