THE MOON IS MY SUN
THE NIGHT IS MY DAY
THE NIGHT IS MY DAY
T
he girl’s temper is as irascible as a Vectaeryn dragon’s, and Caine is not the least bit remorseful. Her words, as sharp as rose thorns, glide harmlessly off his skin like rain against a glass window. If anything, he is impressed — no one has ever spoken to him quite like this, and he is enjoying himself a tad too much.
Perhaps it is time to make his amends, though, before he is dismissed as nothing more than a shallow prick. Limited as his interactions with… the living are (as evidenced by how well their conversation has gone), Caine prefers to keep his list of people he has wronged as short as possible. Gods knows how difficult his occupation makes that task already — and it is precisely because of that occupation that he even bothers.
“If I have offended you,” he begins, silver eyes softening to a shade of starlight, “then I apologize. It might be hard for you to believe, but I do possess some semblance of decency.” A glittering lie — decency belongs to knights and princes, and shatters at the feet of wraiths and deceivers — but she will never know. His act is as convincing as a magician’s sleight of hand, and that has always been enough for those who choose to be fooled.
Is she a fool? A fragmented part of him hopes that she isn’t.
“To take another's life in your hands is to be bold, isn't it?”
With difficulty does he keep his jaw from tightening at those sinless, noble words. They pierce him in a way they had not been able to before… how much of the light she must walk under, to say such a sentence and invoke nothing but goodness in his mind. He can see it wafting from her, sparkling like crystals under the moonlight. How much a dark part of him wishes to be able to say the same, without it turning immediately to blood and gore and death. Bold — did taking a life in his hands and squeezing it until it beat no more, count as bold?
Should he be concerned at how unaffected he is by it all? At how callously he wipes the blood from his hands, at how easily he slips the smile back upon his lips, after he has sent another life to its death? He does not know. He does not know, and it is a dagger in his chest that will not stop throbbing.
For the first time that night, he does not answer her.
His wings beat against the table in steady thrums, as they often do when he is agitated and cannot reveal it. When Caine sees the girl’s golden eyes widen in blooming horror, then, he freezes. What has he done to cause that fear? Still he says nothing, his wings settling once again against his sides as he stares at her.
“I should put these up.” The silence is broken by her voice, and it displeases him how much it trembles. Her fire of before, such vibrant, bright fire, has vanished without a trace, and Caine is left more puzzled than he has been in a long time. Emotions are such fickle things, he thinks with a sigh.
“Let me,” he says, and he is behind her before she has the chance to rise. “As a show of my good manners, that I insist do actually exist.” His accent, normally subdued to fit the Novus tongue, emerges in full now as his words become as lyrical as a siren’s song. The accent of a Taeryn far from home. Black wings surround the crimson girl in a cocoon of onyx feathers as he plucks the books from her grasp, and moves them towards a high shelf with a tilt of his head.
He is not aware of how close he is to her, too focused on slipping each leather-bound volume carefully into place. He is not aware of her trembling, too engrossed in his telekinesis to care.
He is not aware, and it is another mistake in a night that flows with them.
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