I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

The desert is a little better after dark. 

Gone is the punishing sun, the hard stare that makes sweat bead down his back regardless of the breeze, that makes him wonder if Solis is still there and watching. (Surely not, surely if any of the gods still cast their eye over Novus one of them would have spoken by now, struck them all down). 

In the dark it feels almost as cool as Denocte, though even when he closes his eyes it is nothing like home, not without the scent of salt over everything and the distant sigh of the sea. He misses the alleys he’d known, the cast of each shadow memorized, the torchlight and the bonfire-smoke. At least in the darkness he can forget his name. 

For tonight he is only an enforcer, only one more of Raum’s followers. He stalks the windswept streets and most of them are empty. It is hard to argue with a Ghost, he thinks, and harder to argue with a monster - even the thought of the basilisk sends an instinctual shiver wending up his dark spine. 

He finds as he walks that he is learning each corner, each intersecting street. He finds as he walks that he doesn’t mind the silence, even with the way the wind moans as it follows him, the way it tugs his hair like a mother might. 

Abel rounds a corner and there she is: tall and slender with a face pale as a moon. He can tell from here how young she is (never mind that he is only a boy, too - he has not felt like a boy since he was weaned). The bay lowers his head with a soft huff of breath, stirring the sand beneath his feet, silver as powdered glass in the starlight. And then he makes a beeline for her, his silver eyes empty empty empty, and stops just short of her shoulder.  

“It’s after curfew. You shouldn’t be out.” Even Abel is not sure if it is rebuke or warning. 

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

Abel could tell her how not to be afraid. He would say: expect the worst. He would say: give up, go along, bend your head like a reed in a storm and the storm will pass in time. But he would know at the same time that it might not help, in the end; hadn’t the last storms flattened everything, hadn’t they ripped the roots from the soil and baptized them in saltwater?

He can see the dried tear-tracks that gleam on her cheeks; he remembers their trails from his own. The little paths they carved, the taste of salt at the corner of your mouth, so that when you licked your lips later you had a memory of weeping.

Now his eyes are dry as sand. Now his mouth is a canyon carved in rock.

There is something strange about her. He has learned the desert night is cool, here on the cusp of autumn, but when he comes near to her the temperature dips, a kiss of winter. Yet Abel does not shiver, only blinks, slow, and pictures himself home, a trembling dawn, the first frost of winter on the grass. His body leans toward her, unbidden; stiff-legged he steps away.

Dreaming, she says, and he wants to ask Why? Of what?

Instead he bends his head away from the cool breath of her whisper, which makes him think too much of Denocte. They are alone on the streets; moonlight cools the cobblestones, makes the stark walls of the city softer. Lamplight trembles, caught in glass. Abel knows there is harm in dreaming.

“It is not dreams that walk the desert tonight,” he answers at last, and his voice is tight and grim, and that is how he knows he feels sorry for her. The boy shakes his head without looking up at the stars, constellations telling stories of dead heroes and dead monsters. “Yes. For as long as it takes me to escort you home.”

Escort. Like they might be courting, just a boy and a girl walking together beneath the starlight on a desert night. Just dreaming.

Here is where he should show his teeth, or press the hard ridge of his nose to her shoulder and push. But Abel does not touch her; he still hovers just out of reach, eyes pale and pitted as the moon. Shadow and light and dead barren ground. “Let’s go.”

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

If she is a torrent of feeling, an ocean of grief and of loneliness and of want, then Abel is a dead temple in the desert. Cool floors scoured smooth by sand, cool shadows waiting below a staring moon, only dust and bones and insects within.

Once, oh once, he had thought his feelings might swallow him whole - the sorrow and the rage and more than anything the way he didn’t understand. Why him, why his people, didn’t Caligo love them? Didn’t she watch them, didn’t they praise her, shouldn’t she keep them safe?

Was that not the whole reason for a god?

Now he knows there is no reason. Now he understands there is only knitting the darkness and chaos into a pattern you can use, one that keeps you fed and whole, and maybe that is why he follows Raum like a good dog.

While she hides he waits. Abel leans a little away, wary of the way cold seeps from her as from the last melting snowbank of spring, wanting that coolness and denying himself. Her eyes are luminous on him, her pale face stark against the shadows of the night. He, on the other hand, is nearly one with the shadows, save for the banding of his back and his legs like stripes of moonlight through iron bars.

He is glad to find the streets still quiet. Most listened to Raum, or maybe it was the monster at his back they obeyed; either way he is grateful they are alone. It makes it easier to meet her fever-bright eyes, easier to lean in to catch her whisper, frail and cold as a lace of frost that dissolves on his skin. We all have, he does not say. You will see more, he does not caution.

But when she pushes against him his dark lips curl back from his bright teeth. Abel does not care to be touched (Abel longs to be touched; he tries to forget the way his mother would rest her chin on his withers, would fold him into her embrace and how it would feel like a summer morning). Suddenly she is not a scared girl, not a fellow-orphan that might have been another hungry shadow running beside him in Denocte.

“Then I will take you somewhere else,” he says flatly, and all the ice in her gaze does nothing but make him cooler and more distant. She is taller than him but he doesn’t seem to care with the way he leans back against her, shoulder to ribs, and skates his teeth along her back. Abel stops thinking of anything but the road he must take to the prison, which has become a detention center, which keeps the unruly Solterrans from scheming rebellion in the dark. His gaze takes the eulogy of hers and swallows it up. Abel is always hungry, always lean.

”I can make you,” he says, but for the moment it takes the moon to pass beneath a field of cirrus clouds his gaze says don’t make me make you. Because of course it wouldn’t be Abel at all, it would be Raum, and the Ghost cared nothing for how a girl looked alone beneath the starlight, or how she felt like a breath of winter in the yawning expanse of the desert.

With a snap of his tail he presses against her, trying to push her, to turn her toward the heart of the city where a prison was also a shelter. At the same time (still with his feelings tucked away, like seeds beneath the frozen ground that would die if they were not hidden) he reaches for her ear, to take between his teeth, to remind her I can, I can, I can.

“Please don’t refuse,” he says, not quite whisper and not quite growl, but something low and soft with gravel in it.

He does not think about how he has no magic, how he is not tall or fearsome, how he has no horn or weapon with which to threaten. He has intent, and he has learned that sometimes that can be enough —

and if it isn’t there may be punishment waiting for them both.