All Things Devour

eleven

Warmth blossomed against Sonya’s cheek and, in her sleep, she turned toward it, feeling the heat touch and recede over her face. It felt nice, like the first hint of a summer breeze after a particularly chilly spring. When the feeling pulled away, she shifted with it, murmuring. Her hand dragged against the warmth—and it shivered beneath her fingers.

“You’re cold.”

The low, sleep-roughened rumble puzzled Sonya as the sun-warmed hill in her dream suddenly found itself a voice. What in the world?

“Sonya.”

Sonya scrunched her nose and opened her eyes—blinking when the surprisingly comfortable hill she reclined on turned out to be a surprisingly comfortable shoulder, a shoulder attached to an arm slipped underneath her, a hand resting on the small of her back. Her eyes widened as she studied the face by her own, his black hair tousled, lips parted so his breath swept against her cheek. In the dim glow of the forgotten lamp, Sonya could see his thick lashes flutter open, sleepy eyes peering into her own.

“Anton?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“Oh.”

“You sound surprised. Were you dreaming of someone else while in my arms, Sonya?”

She wriggled her hand out from where it’d snuck beneath the hem of his shirt. Goodness, I was practically groping the man in my sleep! “I thought you were a hill.”

A note of discontent left him. “A hill?”

She nodded, unbothered by his pout, too preoccupied with her own embarrassment. “I was dreaming of the sun.”

The hand not pressed to her back stroked her arm, trailing over the bunched sleeve of her jumper. Sonya wondered how they’d ended up there in a comfortable tangle on her bed. That had never happened to her before, and yet she found herself disinclined to move despite her bashfulness. The room was cold, and Anton was warm—much warmer than Sonya would guess one of the undead to be. She wanted nothing more than to sink into her dreams and find that pleasant, peaceful place again, but Anton’s voice stirred her.

“You’ll see the sun again,” he promised. “It will take time, but it will not be forever.”

Sonya hoped so. She tucked her head by his neck again, not quite ready to see his eyes, and considered how she’d come to be there. She’d embraced Anton after he’d spoken to her of Calder, and they’d stayed that way for quite some time, speaking of little, inconsequential things to soothe the jagged edge of their emotions. The candle had burned for hours before going out. She couldn’t remember what occurred beyond that. “We were talking.”

“Hmm?”

“Before. In the morning, we were talking, and we fell asleep. I’ve never fallen asleep so suddenly before.”

“Oh. I think we have to blame the sun for that as well.” Anton shifted to his back—and winced when he smacked the headboard. Sonya sat up—and her head swam, black spots speckling the edges of her vision. She caught herself with one hand on the bed and squeezed her eyes shut until the fit passed. When she looked again, she saw Anton studying her with concern.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, fine. Just—dizzy for a moment.”

He studied her again, frowning, then nodded. He scooted over on the too-narrow mattress and patted the vacated space next to him, and Sonya obliged, if only because it was warmer, and she rather liked lying with Anton. She felt safe there—cared for, vulnerable in a way she’d never truly experienced. He smelled of green things and salt breezes, and when he gazed at her with his silver eyes as he did now, she enjoyed the feeling like electricity humming in her skin.

“What did you mean about the sun? There’s no window in here.”

“It doesn’t have to do with the light itself, but rather the time of day.” He shrugged one shoulder and yawned, displaying sharp teeth. “We are simply weaker and more easily tired when the sun is above the horizon.”

“How odd. Why is that?”

“We’re not sure. At least, not here in Vidarheim. Maybe somewhere else they’ve discovered the answer and decided to keep it to themselves.” He tilted his head in such a way as to put his cheek on top of Sonya’s hair. She held herself still, not wanting him to move. “The vardir tell us when we’re young that the All-Father saw fit to punish Loki for his mockery of Askr and Embla, the first man and woman. Loki had hidden Vidar from Odinn, and when the All-Father demanded his death, Loki denied him. Odinn then had Loki bound in a cave, in darkness, beneath the dripping maw of a great, venomous snake. We’re told the draugar, Loki’s children, gave up the sun in solidarity of the father locked away until the end of time.”

“Do you believe that’s true?”

“Maybe. There are many strange things in this world we’ve yet to see. I find I can’t discount the presence of gods when I cannot otherwise explain where I came from, or how I can do the things that I do.”

Sonya considered what he said as she fiddled with a loose thread from her jumper’s hem. “I guess there’s sense to that.”

“How magnanimous of you to agree,” Anton teased.

She said his name aloud, and when he hummed, she broached a subject that had been on her mind before she fell asleep. “How long do I have?”

“What do you mean?”

“How do long do I have until I become like Dr. Rangel?”

“You won’t.” He said this sharply, hand skating over her shoulder, his fingers pressing closer, almost possessively. “You won’t become like him.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He exhaled, and his fingers resumed their motion, painting tingling trails along her skin. “We have time,” he confessed. “It’s not an exact thing. From my understanding, some deteriorate faster than others. Some…linger. We should have a few weeks. Maybe two months.”

They were quiet after that, lost in their own thoughts until Anton cleared his throat. “And now I’d like to ask you a question, Sonya, if you’re agreeable.”

“Of course.” She could barely wrap her mind around what he said. Two months . Two months to live if she didn’t find her attacker. Sonya felt like the ground was shaking underneath her.

He didn’t voice whatever he wished to know immediately, seeming to think over the words for a minute, his eyes roving away from her toward the ceiling. “I cannot deny my curiosity to know how a woman such as you has avoided attentions in your prior life.”

Sonya frowned. “Attentions?”

“Sex, Sonya. Making the beast with two backs. Riding the serpent, so to speak.”

She stuttered, and Anton clearly enjoyed her flustered expression if his chuckling was any indication. Sonya made as if to get up, and he tucked his arm around her shoulders to bring her back. “Peace, sweet girl, I don’t mean any harm. You don’t have to answer.”

“No, it’s—.” Fine, she meant to say, but her ruddy face had yet to cease its ridiculous impression of a tomato. Sonya didn’t imagine herself a prude; she could discuss sex plainly enough with her friends and enjoyed going to the pub and listening to outlandish stories from their love lives. Something about Anton turning those eyes of his on her and asking about her experience rendered Sonya into a silly, stuttering mess. “I, uh, wasn’t very popular in secondary school.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I’ve always been odd, I guess, in my interests, particularly with my indulgence in science and history and unusual things. I remember in primary school, we found a skeleton of a mouse, and the other girls screamed when I picked it up. One girl actually vomited on her shoes,” Sonya huffed in remembered frustration. “I was only curious.”

“Naturally.”

“And in secondary school, I set off a—minor—explosion in the chemistry lab and was suspended for a week.”

Anton’s brow rose toward his hairline. “I feel there is a longer story here that I’d like to hear.”

Not commenting further, Sonya ignored the request and continued, “They started calling me ‘Mad Marston’ after that.” Generally, the nickname hadn’t bothered her much, but sometimes the laughter of her classmates had taken on a cruel edge, and their teasing could come with pricking barbs. “It always kept a certain…distance between me and others, even after I left secondary. I made some friends as I got older, but not anyone terribly close. I dated a few boys at university over the years, but we’re all odd in academia; we go on dates to the museums and end up more enamored with fossilized bones or prehistoric microbial slides than with each other.”

A thoughtful noise resonated in Anton’s chest. “They must have not been very exciting boys then.”

“No,” Sonya admitted. “But they were lovely in their own way.”

She curled the loose thread around her finger again and again until Anton reached out to ease her nervous fidgeting. “Can you tell me what you meant?” she blurted, pausing to clear her throat. “When we saw Dr. Rangel? Or what was left of him, poor man.”

“Refresh my memory, dear.”

“You said, err, ‘ the type of innocent that you are has very little to do with what has or hasn’t happened between your legs. ’”

“Ah, I did say that. And it’s true.”

“But what does it mean? I’m not innocent , not…entirely. I’ve done, well— you know .”

“No, I can’t say I do.”

“With my, er, own hands?”

She saw the mischievous grin curling the corners of his mouth before he had the chance to speak and she prodded him, hard, between the ribs. “Don’t you dare. This is embarrassing enough as it is.”

“Ouch! Such a vicious little thing!” Anton complained, rubbing the abused area. “Yes, very well, I may have deserved that. I don’t mean to embarrass you. Let me gather myself and answer.”

Sonya did just that, relaxing into the draugr’s side, listening to his steady breathing. The quiet surrounding them was otherworldly for a girl born and raised in London, so quiet, in fact, Sonya thought she could hear the phantom thump of Anton’s heart. It may have been her imagination, but it sounded much slower than her own.

“Sex is corrupting,” he said at length, the blithe cast of his voice less pronounced. “And probably not in the manner you think it is. A very rare few may partake and find themselves utterly unaffected. For everyone else, it…invokes small measures of ruin. There’s addiction in touch, Sonya. A need and a longing that doesn’t disappear when your lover does. To lay with another invites corruption into one’s own self, because it breaks pieces of who you are. It takes you in its hands and makes little bruises on your soul.”

Suddenly, Anton rolled on top of her, and Sonya inhaled, startled and—expectant, her pulse thrumming too fast, aware of how his hips fixed hers to the bed with his weight. Anton held himself above her with one hand by her head, the other hovering like a ghost by her cheek. “The kind of maiden you are has nothing to do with penetration or sex or innocence . It’s about being wholly your own self, about evading all those corrosive little pitfalls in human life that chip away at you until you’re a cracked facsimile of the original. It takes a kind of self-possession and understanding of one’s ownnature most people will never, ever know to be what you are, Sonya.”

His hand touched her—just a fingertip skating along her jaw, her chin, down the dip of her throat to her neck. The bite wound seemed to burn under his skin.

“So let them call you Mad Marston . They cannot understand what is beyond them. Let them wallow in their envy, as I will, in my envy of those foolish little boys who had a chance at your heart and squandered the chance.” He lowered his face near her own, blotting out the light, and Sonya held her breath, trembling. His nose brushed hers, and she felt his breath against her lips when he crooned, “How dearly I’d like to corrupt you, sweet Sonya, if you’d let me….”

Her heart raced, thumping much too loud in her chest. She would let him. Anton fascinated her, and set a fire under her skin those well-meaning lads in university hadn’t been able to elicit. Sonya had regrets in her life—from her former life. She regretted being too odd to make close friends. She regretted having to leave her parents behind. She didn’t want to regret pushing Anton away.

His hand caressed her cheek, their breath mingling.

Then—.

“But not today.”

He pressed a chaste kiss on her mouth, and his weight disappeared. Sonya blinked in confusion at the smirking, unaffected draugr tucking his loosened shirttails back into his trousers. He patted her knee. “Tut-tut, Sonya. We’re going to be late for breakfast!”

Convinced she was going to melt into the furs underneath her, Sonya scowled and threw her pillow at him. “If I had not already died, I would say you’re going to be the death of me, Anton Morvell!”

Anton just laughed.