Kieran is smart enough to transport us directly to the medical center, bypassing our usual spot at North’s offices completely. When we arrive, we find Felix sitting at his desk filling out paperwork and Sage in the corner working on some schoolwork that I didn’t even know she was still taking seriously as the world comes down around us.
The moment that we appear, Felix shoots to his feet in shock, lurching towards Sage as if to shield her. When he realizes who has appeared in the room, he visibly relaxes, only for as long as it takes him to see Nox.
“Holy fuck.”
North stumbles away from Kieran, hitting the wall and sliding down it. I hear the motion and see some of it from the corner of my eye, but I force my eyes to stay on Nox.
Gabe attempts to coax me away from him, but even after I let Kieran’s wrist go, I stay in the same position, kneeling at Nox’s side.
This is going to be the difficult part.
My voice is nothing more than a rasp. “Felix… I need you to heal him.”
Felix looks around at the rest of my Bonded as though he’s looking for some injuries, but when he finds them all perfectly intact, he glances back down to me and says, “Who, Oli? Who do I need to heal for you?”
Sage stands up from her own chair, walking around the table as she approaches me, tears brimming in her eyes at the sight of me. I also get the feeling that she knows what impossible task I’m about to ask of her Bonded, and wants to show her unwavering support.
Deep breath. “I need you to heal Nox.”
The room goes eerily quiet, the type of silence that comes from everyone not knowing what the fuck to say back to the crazy lady.
I understand it. If there were any way to explain it to them without getting their hopes up, I would tell them, but I am acutely aware of the breakdown that North is having right now. I also think I might just crack under the pressure if North finds out there’s a chance his brother could be saved, and I need my wits about me.
I don’t want to lose Nox, and I don’t want to compound the grief of his brother by giving him a glimpse of hope only to disappoint us all by failing at this.
I can’t fail him any more than I can look at him right now.
“Oli, I can’t heal someone who’s already died. I would do anything I can for you, but that’s… impossible,” Felix says, and I open my mouth right as the door opens again, another man in a white coat walking through.
I recognize him from around the Sanctuary, but it’s only when Gryphon’s body fills with tension that I know that he isn’t somebody we want in the room during this moment.
“You can’t just transport into the medical center. There’s a protocol that should be followed,” he snaps. Gryphon rises up onto his feet, stepping over Nox to plant himself between the man and the rest of the room.
There’s no one that can get past him when he’s like this, and I feel a swell of pride for my Bonded, the strength and determination to take up for us all and to lead when it’s required.
North doesn’t move away from the wall.
He’s as empty as the void eyes we share.
Both of Gryphon’s hands flex into fists at his sides, and I know he’s teetering on the edge of control. He’s not someone who wants to talk shit out with people. If he gives a command, he expects it to be followed without question. Politics is not his strong suit and having to do it now, with Nox dead at his feet… this man might not make it out of here alive.
“Get out of here, Payne. You don’t make the decisions around here, and this is a private matter.”
As much as I’d like to, I don’t have time to listen to watch Gryphon deal with this man.
I turn back to Nox’s body and let my hand hover over his chest, careful to not make contact but still feeling the chill that’s taken over his body.
I want to scream, but my voice stays level as I murmur, “Felix, I need you to listen to me. I need you to heal him. I can’t explain how or the specifics but… please.”
Sage comes around Nox’s body to sit at my side, careful not to touch either of us but staying close as she mirrors Atlas’ pose as he flanks my other side. Both of them are offering me what comfort they can right now, which is admittedly very little.
I appreciate it anyway.
Felix kneels down at Nox’s other side, looking over his body with the sort of detached calculation that a Healer has to have even when staring at somebody they considered their friend. The type where he’s separated himself entirely so that he can be objective about this and run the numbers.
It occurs to me that I don’t actually know if these two have ever exchanged words.
Nox had once said that he trusted him, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’d had a good rapport or had even really spoken to each other. All of this is useless information that doesn’t matter at the moment, but my brain just can’t stop filtering through the facts and stats of things I know, focusing on things that it can process and conceptualize.
My Bonded being dead is not one of those things.
Felix shakes his head, his eyes still scanning Nox’s body. “I can’t heal a corpse. I know that already, and Oli… I also know my Gift won’t even attempt to heal a corpse, so I can’t just… try it for you. I’m so sorry.”
I want to vomit.
I want to empty what little is in my stomach at his blunt but gentle words, but my bond seems to think it’s possible, and I can’t ignore it. I can’t, even if I wanted to, because Nox’s life might just depend on it.
I have to push.
I eye Felix for a minute and make a quick decision. He’s always kept my secrets, even before we’d known that he was Sage’s Bond. He’d healed me a dozen times before anybody knew what my Gift was or about the bond that lives inside of me. He knew the depths of my powers and what was growing inside of me long before anyone else, and he’d never said a word to anyone.
I take a deep breath and then I make the leap to trust him to act the way that he always has before, to trust that he’s going to believe me no matter how freaking insane this all is. I reach out and take his hand, ignoring the way that every eye in the room shifts to us both. Felix frowns at me for a moment, especially when my grip tightens, but when I nod at him encouragingly, his eyes flash white and his Gift floods me.
My bond is relieved to finally have him in our presence and happily shows him the way to our secret cargo, lighting up like a beacon to take him all the way into the depths of my stomach where Nox’s soul is hiding, safe and secure.
Felix’s hand snatches away from mine as he gasps, his eyes still white. When I open mine back up, I stare back at him, my eyes a complete juxtaposition of his where they’ve voided out.
Then, without hesitation, he leans over to shove Nox’s shirt up his body.
I want to cry with relief, squeezing my eyes shut as I feel Felix’s Gift leave my body and force its way inside of Nox’s empty shell.
I’m the only one who seems to feel that way.
“You can’t heal a corpse, Davenport! Stop that right now, or I’ll have your medical license taken off of you,” Payne screeches, and my bond rears up furiously in my chest, so close to reaching out and destroying him.
But Felix snaps back before it has to, “It’s not a corpse, it’s a vessel,” and shoves his hands against Nox’s clammy, white, dead skin a little harder like he’s trying to get the heart beating again through a massage or something.
I still don’t like him being touched like this.
“Vessel? What the fuck does that even mean?” Atlas snaps, and my bond turns my head to stare him down.
It speaks again, using my voice, but there’s no doubt whose words they are. “I will not lose my Bonded. He has to fix the vessel.”
Gryphon turns his head just enough to look at me, and the bond and I both watch as the cogs in his brain slowly put it together, cursing under his breath. “You have his soul. You have his soul, and Felix has to fix Nox’s body so you can put it back in there.”
My bond speaks once more. “I will not lose my Bonded.”
Clearly Payne is the only person in the room who doesn’t understand what it means that my bond is talking, and he attempts to stop Felix again. “Davenport, I just told you—”
Felix cuts him off. “Take it. I’ll go without a medical license, and I’ll work exclusively for the Draven Bonded Group and my own, because I’m sure that none of them will give a shit that I’m ignoring you and fixing the fucking vessel.”
Atlas moves forward a little to look at Felix’s glowing hands where they meet on Nox’s chest. “Can you do it? Do you actually think you can fix him? Fuck, this is insane, what even is a vessel anyway?”
I can see that Felix is trying to push his power into Nox’s body, but it doesn’t want to do much. “I’m calling him that because Oli’s bond was calling it that. I don’t understand the semantics of it, but her bond is currently housing Nox’s soul inside of her, keeping it alive and safe, and we need to fix the vessel to put it back into it.”
Again, every eye in the room turns to me, but all I can focus on is the glow around his hands that doesn’t seem to be spreading or doing much right now.
Is it going to be too late?
“Can you do this, Felix?” I ask, and even though my bond is still in control, there’s no question that it’s my voice coming out of my body at the moment.
He swallows roughly. “I don’t know. It’s true that I can’t heal a corpse, but to put Nox’s soul back in before we’ve healed some of the damage… I don’t know, Oli. This isn’t something that I have any experience with, and I’m winging it but… I have to try.”
It’s a very reasonable thing to say, and I can’t argue with it.
The longer we watch him struggle to force his power to do what he wants it to do, the more frustrated my own bond gets until finally, I feel it release control of my body again as it goes back into the pit of my stomach after Nox’s bond.
I feel my heart breaking inside of my chest as though it is a physical thing. To think that we’ve gotten this close to bringing him back and failing, failing with everyone in the room watching us and knowing what we were trying to do, is an indescribable pain. The tears that had dried up start flowing down my cheeks again.
Now isn’t the time to cry, girl. Now is the time for something big.
I swallow and shut my eyes again, ready to listen to my bond and hear whatever it is that it’s going to direct me to do, trusting it in ways that I don’t even trust myself.
Except then it moves my hand onto Nox’s chest, breaking that boundary I had been so careful in respecting, my skin touching his. Before I have the chance to snatch it away or berate my bond for doing so, it shoves its way through the connection, pulling not only Nox’s soul, but mine and my bond itself into his body, sealing us inside of a corpse, and then everything goes dark.
Time slips away from me.
I don’t know how long I’m out, or where the hell my soul is, except that suddenly I’m in a living room. I glance around, disoriented, but I don’t recognize the house or any of the furnishings I’m staring at.
I can feel that this is a memory, a sensation that I can’t really describe beyond that, but it takes me a moment to realize that it’s not my own. Every part of it feels familiar and alien at the same time.
It belongs to my Bonded.
This is something that’s been burned into Nox’s soul, something vital and so intrinsic to who he is that I’m watching it in high definition.
It takes me a moment to realize that while I don’t have a body in this memory, I can still direct my vision to where I want it to go, and I find a little boy sitting next to me in a living room in a very luxurious house.
He’s very obviously my Bonded. The dark curls falling like a little crown around his head make my chest ache. He looks paler than I’m used to, more subdued as he stares down at his feet. He’s deathly still, I have to really focus on him to see his chest gently rising as he breathes, and there aren’t the slightest signs of him fidgeting or twitching.
He’s so young to be sitting so still.
I glance around to see what could possibly have him so scared, because there’s no doubt in my mind that fear is the only thing that can make a child act like this.
There’s no questioning that we’re in a Draven mansion.
Not the one that we’d spent so much time in before fleeing to the Sanctuary, but the levels of wealth and luxury in every inch of the space is a clear indicator for the family.
It’s also very clear to me that I’m right, and the boy sitting next to me is definitely Nox and not North.
The brothers have always looked incredibly similar to me, similar enough that it probably should be much harder to distinguish them as children, but I know without a doubt who it is that’s sitting with me. The more that I look around the room, the more concerned that I am.
There are dozens of pictures framed on various different surfaces, all of them in platinum frames or gilded with gold, and some of them go as far as having diamonds and other precious stones in them.
All of them show North and his parents.
There’s no sign of Nox in this room.
I know that the brothers share the same father, the Central Bond in their family Bonded Group, but that they have different mothers. Regardless, it’s alarming that there’s no signs of the youngest sibling or the other Bonded from the Bonded Group in any of them.
My own family photos had always had a mixture of me and my mother and all of her Bonded in them, everyone taking an interest in how I was raised and being a part of my life. I never questioned my place in the family or whether I was loved equally by the adults who were all parenting me in their different ways.
From the look of the room, there is only one child in the family and only really one Bonded.
I startle at the sound of a door opening at the far end of the room, two women walking through. One of them is dressed in a sleek Chanel coat and a pair of designer heels, her hair carefully pinned back and pearl earrings in her ears. This is North’s mother.
The woman who follows her in is almost an exact match of her, their features are so similar that they have to be twins, though she looks far more unkempt than her sister. Her clothes are still designer but she’s not as sleekly put together—they hang from her thin frame. Her hair hangs lank around her long face.
Every inch of her is ghoulish, but I feel guilty for even thinking that.
“You’re not supposed to be here, Emmaline. You promised you would stay away.”
I frown and turn to look at the little boy. But he doesn’t react to either of them being in the room. His eyes stay firmly on the polished toes of his shoes. I take a much more critical look at him, but there is no sign of neglect or foul play on him. There’s no bruises or cuts on him, and at the last moment, I remember to check his fingers.
They’re still straight, so whatever happened to him, it was after this memory.
Still, the unease in my stomach grows.
“I know it upsets the perfect little family that you have established here, Marceline, but Father came to the house. He had a lot of questions about why we were living there. I didn’t know what to say.”
North’s mother turns back to her sister, an ice-cold smile on her face as she shrugs back at her. “Tell him the truth. Tell him that you can’t stand your own Bonded and you ran away. Tell him you did your duty by giving him a son, and then you snatched him away from the family because you can’t stand the thought of your own Bonded being around his son.”
Then she leans in a little closer and murmurs, “You should tell him everything, Emmaline. You should tell him about what you do with that little son of yours.”
I don’t know what that means.
It doesn’t make any sense to me, not even with the dark cloud that hangs over the little boy’s head, but then the memory twists and distorts until we’re in a new setting.
This house is much less luxurious.
There’s dust covering every surface, and when I look a little closer at the walls around us, there’s fingerprints and grime all over them too. Cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling and moth-eaten curtains over the windows, it looks as though it’s some old, abandoned Victorian-style house, though I have no idea why Nox Draven would be somewhere like that.
He couldn’t possibly be living here.
But I find the little boy huddled up in the corner, his head ducked down and his knees pulled up tight to his chest. His hands are covering his ears and he’s rocking gently, a small, self-soothing motion.
He’s terrified.
I look around the room, but there’s nothing there, no signs of something harming him or coming after him. The way he’s acting, I’d imagine someone was beating down the door or waving a weapon around, but there’s… nothing.
I’m drawn to him, drawn in by his pain and desperate to take away his distress. There’s nothing that I can do in this form, it’s a memory after all, but I squeeze myself into the tiny space with him. I jam myself under the window into the tiny crevice where I can be close to him, even as useless as the gesture might be.
There’s footsteps on the stairs, slow and steady, and a small shadow leaks out of the boy’s chest at the sound of it.
Brutus.
The puppy version of him, but he’s also smaller, less powerful than I’ve ever seen him, just a tiny puff of smoke.
The door opens again and his mother steps into the room, glancing around until her eyes fall on him.
She doesn’t seem worried about his distress. She doesn’t move to comfort him or show any reaction to his extreme terror at all. My own mother would have fallen over herself to get to me, to pull me in tight to her and rock me until she healed every little wound on her precious child.
Nox’s mother doesn’t even notice the state her son is in.
And just when I think it couldn’t possibly get worse, she speaks. “Come here, Bonded. It’s time for bed.”
Bonded.
The word enters my consciousness like a bullet, tearing a hole through everything I thought I knew about this family and the strange dynamics of the Dravens, because that word is only ever spoken between Bonds. Between lovers.
Why the fuck is she calling him that?
I glance at Brutus, his void eyes staring at the boy as he waits for the command, and there’s a moment where I think that maybe he’ll tell him to lunge. He has to. He has to protect the little boy, because there’s no way that the sinking feeling in my gut is wrong here, no matter how much I don’t want to believe it.
Bonded.
North’s mother had said, What you’re doing with the boy.
She couldn’t be… to her own son.
But she did.
And I’m forced to watch it all.
Every moment, every trauma and horror and sickening second of it all, until William Draven comes to call and North Draven figures it out, his own rabid shadows tearing the rapist apart.
I watch that memory too, except I watch that part with open eyes and a vicious sort of pride in my Bonded, even while my heart bleeds out for the little boy with a halo of dark curls on his precious, broken head.
