Envious Of Fire (Kissing With Teeth #2)

35. My Whole World on Fire.

—?—

The screaming from the burning banquet hall follows Kyle and Tristan no matter where they run, or how many stairs they fly down, or how many flickering hallways. Sitting rooms with shapeshifting walls. Windows that blink in and out of existence like winking eyes. The fighting and mayhem follow.

My love, I assure you, he is fine .

Kyle stops in the middle of a gallery, enormous paintings hanging on the walls, sculptures of beasts and gladiators around them on all sides, real sculptures that the illusions only touch up in color and detail, the air in the room stifling.

Kyle turns onto Tristan. “Tell me where he is.”

My dear friend Raya has him . She rescued him from the cage, he is safe and sound, and —

“As long as he’s still in this fucking place, he is not safe, he is sure as fuck not sound. Where is he?”

Can we find a place to talk? So that I can explain everything? I can’t bear you leaving here without the full truth …

“Where is he?”

And what is your plan once you find him? Return to Nowhere? To your life with Elias? That isn’t a future . Elias is a mortal .

“Where is my brother?”

He will grow old . He will die someday . You and I … Tristan’s eyes beseech him, growing desperate. We are where it all began . I am the one who will always know you, the true you, the mortal you . Your eyes never lie . I see the hope in them . Please don’t be so rash …

“Rash? You’re gonna school me about being—” Kyle scoffs and shakes his head. “You better tell me where he is before I go and do something to you that you’ll regret.”

Think about it, please, my love …

Kyle grips Tristan’s shirt with his hands, brings their faces close, teeth gritted. “I am not your fucking love.”

Tristan’s misty blue eyes pour with sorrow, with urgency. When we find him, I think I know a perfect place we could all go and hide, you and your brother and me and Raya … at least until the dust settles … and there will be so much dust after this night …

“I’m not hiding anywhere with you,” hisses Kyle. “Not now and not ever again. When I find my brother and get outta here, we are gone for good. You won’t even be a thought.”

This place can really twist a person up . I am a villain in so many stories here . I am a hero, too . Kyle, you’re the only person I’ve ever —

“I swear to you, if you say another word …”

I still love you .

The next thing he knows, his fist has gone swinging, meets Tristan’s cheek, throws him back so far, he flies to the ground at the foot of a magnificent statue of a monster. It is an absolute shock to Tristan, his eyes opening, realizing he has been struck by Kyle. He brings a hand to his cheek, lips parted.

For an instant, Kyle regrets it. Then the anger takes over again, he crouches before Tristan, grabs the neck of his shirt even tighter. “This is not like last time. When you talked. And I talked. And we kissed. And buried feelings were still swimming around.” A tear falls from Kyle’s eyes, a tear he didn’t know was there. He wipes it away angrily, steels his voice from shaking. “I’m saying goodbye to you. Forever. For- fucking -ever. You do not get to come back from this, Tristan.”

Tristan’s eyes shine like two white-blue pools, gazing into Kyle’s, frozen in place, mouth parted, petrified by his words.

“Is it finally hitting you?” asks Kyle, his voice suddenly soft. “That you’ve lost me for good? That you and I are over? That in a world full of things you seem not to care about at all, in all your carefree indifference … the one thing … the one and only thing you may have actually loved … now despises you? You said my eyes never lie, right? Look in my eyes. LOOK IN MY EYES!” His fist squeezes Tristan’s shirt at the collar, nearly choking him. “All I feel … for you anymore … Tristan … ‘ my love ’ … is hatred .”

Tristan’s nostrils flare with emotion.

Tears fill his eyes.

Kyle … His lips quiver. He can’t in any way pretend not to be affected by those words, to play it cool, to make a joke. Don’t you realize … Don’t you realize by now that I’d … that I would set my whole world on fire … to make up for what I’ve done to you …?

“Yes.” Kyle grows closer, quieter. “And it still wouldn’t be enough.”

The words are another punch, right across the face, worse than the real one. Tristan chokes, sucking in a gasp through his clenched teeth, shaking. His eyes shatter right in front of Kyle, despite his efforts to hold back, and tears begin to fall.

Kyle stares into his melting eyes, hating that the first thing he realizes is how beautiful Tristan looks when he’s crying.

He also realizes one other thing.

He has never seen Tristan cry. Truly cry.

His spirit, broken before his eyes.

It’s almost enough to dislodge Kyle from his anger entirely.

He lets go of Tristan’s shirt, stands, wipes tears out of his own eyes, turns away. To the sound of Tristan’s soft sobbing, to the tiny rasps of his breath, to the music of his quiet weeping that Kyle has never heard, he makes the decision to continue on alone. He must seek out his brother on his own, even if it takes searching every room and hallway in this place. The more the illusions fall apart, surely the easier it will become, no more lies of the architecture itself to hinder his way.

But as soon as Kyle starts to go, he hears a voice.

“K-Kyle …”

He stops.

His Reach is arrested by something brighter than sorrow, sharp enough to cut through—something from Tristan. It’s just like bravery, nearly identical, yet cloaked in childlike fear.

Like the terror of a ghost in the night. A monster under the bed. Something primal and innocent and untouched by ego.

Something as naked as a baby’s cry.

It’s Tristan’s voice.

His real voice.

Kyle turns, faces him.

Tristan is still on the ground. Blood dresses the corner of his nose and lip where Kyle hit him. His cheek smarts, red and bright. Eyes shimmering, a tear resting on his cheek like a tiny diamond, hanging on. “K-Kyle …” he says again, with his real voice, not his words from the mind. It takes him great effort to speak the normal way. It sounds different than Kyle expected, too. Raw. Dusty. In a way huskier, yet still somehow carrying Tristan’s familiar loftiness.

Kyle can’t help feeling moved by the use of his true voice.

Another thing he’s never known before. Not once in all the years he was with Tristan, never once has he known the sound of it, let it touch his ears, let it touch his heart.

When was the last time Tristan even spoke?

It could have been decades ago. A century.

“Do … Do not … forgive me,” says Tristan. The difficulty of his speech seems to draw Kyle all the more to his words. Tristan, still leaning against the foot of the statue of a monster, holding his chest, lips hanging between his words, bloodied in one corner. “If it … If it is easier for you, then hate me as well. I … I deserve it. But please know … know deep in your heart, somewhere in your big, beautiful heart … know that I …” Tristan fights through tears, clenches his teeth, sucks in a breath. “I would have allowed myself to turn to ash in the sun that one morning … if it would have made right all the wrongs I have done to you.”

Kyle swallows, staring back at him, wordless.

It’s impossible to be angry anymore. All Kyle feels is a dull stinging in his chest. Despite all his fight to resist it, all he can see before him is the old Tristan. The one he believed to his core loved him. The one he believed would bend worlds in half to make him happy.

That’s what makes it even more excruciating to say goodbye.

Kyle turns away again. Takes a few more steps. Stops again.

Squeezes his fists as tightly as his teeth, until his skull hurts, until he feels nothing, refuses to let go one more tear.

“He’s likely in the infirmary. With my friend Raya.”

Kyle doesn’t turn back around. “Where’s that?” he asks, his voice crackled and weary.

“To the left … the first flight of stairs past a fountain with green glowing light … though I can’t say whether it’ll look the same … or be there at all. Markadian’s power is fading. It’s as if we’re watching his very life fading around us. I don’t think … I don’t think he’ll survive the night.”

Kyle lowers his head. “He set a lion on my brother. To kill him in front of me. To hurt me. Markadian deserves to die.”

“Do you think I deserve to die?”

Kyle doesn’t answer that. To the left, flight of stairs, green glowing fountain. That’s all Kyle will focus on. Finding Kaleb. Getting out of here.

“Do I deserve to die, Kyle?”

“I have to find my family.” Somehow, those words seem to carry more meaning than he intends. He can’t bear staying in this room any longer. “I have to go.”

“Do you want me to stay away from you forever?” Tristan is on his feet. Kyle hears. “I understand if you need time. Lots of time. To hate me. I can’t promise that I … that I won’t keep away from you, Kyle. That I won’t look out for you. That … That I won’t stop loving—”

“I’m leaving.”

“You and I were together for longer than you were mortal. Our time in that cabin … it encompasses more of your life than anything else does. Kyle …” Footsteps. Then silence. “Do you want me to die?”

Kyle closes his eyes.

A hand touches his back.

Then slides around to the front, arms embracing him.

Tristan pressing to his back, holding him closely, his body shaking from tears. Then he grows still, breathing deeply, and nothing is said at all.

Until Kyle, beyond all reason, answers: “No.”

Tristan grows still, too.

Within Tristan, the Reach finds a dark field of endless grass, and overhead, a single light flicks on. Whether it’s moonlight, sunlight, or a literal bulb from a lamp, that little bit of light is enough to illuminate his entire emotional landscape, to breathe life into the shadowy, unsettling terrain.

Then Kyle slips from Tristan’s grip too quickly, disappears around the corner, to the left as instructed, gone.