“Nox was on fire for you. More intense than any bloodlust he’d ever experienced.”
Nox was on fire for you.
They’re the kind of words I could suffocate on.
“And then I left,” I whisper.
Farin frowns. “And then you left, and it was like being rent in two.”
I notice that he didn’t say “and it was like Nox was being rent in two.”
The unease in my belly begins to sour. “Why did you and Abra have a falling out?”
Farin’s eyes glisten. “Changing the subject, are we?”
“I don’t think I am.”
Farin stops pacing and traces a circle on the ground with his foot. “Ah.” There’s almost shame in his posture, in the way his shoulders slump with his hands tucked into his pockets, the way he refuses to look at me.
When he speaks, his voice wavers, so slightly I might not have noticed when I was human. “You must understand, I felt everything he felt.”
My heart stutters. “Everything?” I breathe.
He finally glances up at me, his pale-white eyes practically pinning me in place. “Everything.”
“But…but you killed Gunter. If you felt everything he felt, surely you would have felt something for him. For the only father—”
“The bloodlust drove me to that murder. It was made of nothing other than a need for blood. I…” He glances back at his boots. “I must say, I feel regret over Gunter’s death. He was kind to Nox during difficult times. He treated him better than a son…” He clears his throat, and it’s so unexpected, I nearly jump.
“If your bloodlust is so strong, what’s stopping you from chasing me up a staircase right now?” I ask. “Or have you satiated your hunger well enough on the village people?”
Farin frowns. “Now that you have Turned, I no longer crave your blood. At least, not by way of hunger.”
A chill snakes up my spine as I remember Nox describing what it felt like to partake in the bloodsharing ritual.
Like there was a cavern in me begging to be filled, and sharing my blood with you was the only way to seal it.
I find myself shifting my weight back and forth between my feet. “Is this your way of convincing me not to kill you? Tell me that you’ve blossomed actual feelings so I’ll feel pity for you?”
Farin shakes his head. “I am many unpleasant things, Blaise, but I am not naive.”
“Stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop saying my name like you know me.”
Hurt flashes across his face, but his reply is accommodating. “Very well. As we were discussing, my mind, though locked in the shadows of Nox’s, was not immune to his emotions. When I woke in Nox’s body, this time not as the byproduct of bloodlust, but of my mother’s witchcraft, I recognized then that I was…different.
“When I woke, it was not the suffering, the screams of others I so desperately craved—though that craving has not fully left me—but your presence, your—”
“I’d rather not hear what exactly about me you were craving,” I hiss.
Farin’s face falls, and it’s such a Nox-like expression, I feel as though I might die.
“My mother was overjoyed to have me back,” he explains, fidgeting with the sleeves of his robes, “but she was too blinded by her own desires to foresee what she had done to me. That she’d simply transferred me from one prison to the next.”
“You don’t look trapped to me. It’s Nox that’s a prisoner, not you.”
Farin sighs, and when he runs his hands through his hair like Nox used to do, I feel as though my lungs are being flayed with a serrated blade.
“I’m not claiming that my Fate is any worse than Nox’s. But it is my Fate, nonetheless. Blaise, you must understand, my spirit was confined to the ashes for centuries—”
“Of your own doing.”
“I can’t deny that. But the fact remains—my spirit continued on, untethered to this world. And then when I woke, it was only halfway. Like being aroused from a fever dream only to be so ill, the world does not entirely make sense. And then there was the bloodsharing ritual, and then there was you. An anchor that harbored me to the world, to the person I once was.”
“Sto—”
“Please, just allow me to finish.”
I don’t know why, but I snap my mouth shut, my heart pounding in my chest. “So I watched. I listened. I felt. I grasped onto that anchor that was you with all my might. And I schemed. I plotted not against you, but for you. Do you know how many hours I spent in the shadows of Nox’s mind, dreaming that one day I might be free? Do you know how many times we…
“I felt them, Blaise. Every stolen glance, every brush of your hands, every—”
“I don’t want to know what you felt,” I practically scream. “They weren’t yours to feel, they were ours, mine and Nox’s, and to act as if they had anything to do with you—”
“I didn’t,” Farin pauses, his voice dropping an octave, “ask for any of this. I didn’t ask to be locked inside the mind of another. I didn’t ask to have these feelings pushed upon me. When I awoke, do you know the first thought that came to my mind? Not that, after centuries of death, I was finally free. All I could think was that I’d awoken from a dream into a nightmare. A nightmare where I’d been forced to steal the body of the male you love. That for my immortal existence, you will only ever look at me and see him. Do you know how many hours I spent planning how I would win your affections? How honorable I intended to be when my mother finally found an escape for me? The ways I intended to change, to prove to you my love was genuine? But my lovely mother couldn’t see that, and so she trapped me in the body of the male you love. If there was ever a chance at all of winning your affections, she took that from me. Don’t you see?
