It had been a cold night (even though the snow was gone, nothing but a strange memory that might have been a dream) but it wasn’t anymore, not with them pressed together, father-and-daughter, a pair. That felt right, too, though it did make him wonder how it might have been, if they all lived together. Made him wonder what all he was missing out on, choosing instead to make his life in the crooked back alleys of the Night Court capital.
(Though in all honesty it was probably for the best - he and Bexley could still be flint and tinder and if they were together too long they would burn everything down around them. And Solterra - all of Novus, really - was so weary of ashes.)
Just wandering, she says. Couldn’t sleep. And Acton grinned then, too, though he pressed that smile into her dark cloud of mane (so like his own!), because he knew exactly how that felt. It was easy, with their shoulders pressing together and their edges all silver beneath the moon, to forget the strangeness of her, that third eye in which the buckskin could only see Fate.
Maybe she hadn’t inherited his childhood superstitions.
She turned the question on him and he shrugged a boy’s shrug, careless and laughing both. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought the Mors might make a pretty place to watch the sun rise.”
Once, the only reason he would have been in Solterra was to spy, to plan, to bring again that blood-rush like bright fire in his veins. Now there were no enemies here. Now when he savored the way the wind tasted at night, moaning off the dunes, scrubbing clean the stars, there was no undercurrent of loathing with it.
What he didn’t say was that all of Novus was home, these days.
But he came close enough, when he whuffed a warm breath into the curve of her golden neck and said, “I used to think I would have made a good Solterran.” A laugh, soft and low, as he remembered first meeting Seraphina in the canyons, years ago. Oh, he’d felt like a new forge then, ready to destroy, ready to rebuild. “But your drink isn’t strong enough, and your merchants have no sense of humor at all.”
@
these violent delights have violent ends
