They Drugged Me Into Darkness, Now I Am Its King novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: What the Blood Was Hiding

Temik caught Aquas's wrist before he could reach the training vault door, and something damp and warm pressed into his palm.

A cloth. Dark with something that was not water.

'You have been feeding me your blood,' Aquas said.

The words came out flat, and he was surprised by how calm he sounded, because the knowledge had only just finished arranging itself in his head: every session, every time he woke dizzy and steadier than he should have been, the copper taste at the back of his throat that he had blamed on the vault air.

Temik's fingers tightened once, then let go.

'I have been trying to keep the backlash from killing you,' Temik said. 'The light is burning through you faster than your body can rebuild. My blood slows the burn.'

Aquas stared at the cloth in his hand.

'And you did not think to tell me.'

'I thought you would refuse.'

'So you took the choice from me.'

Temik's jaw worked. He was not smiling, and that was the worst part, because Temik always smiled when he was cornered, showed his fangs and turned the moment into a joke.

Now he just stood there, pale and sharp and honest.

'Your body is not yours alone anymore,' Temik said. 'The light is eating you from the inside. Every time the fracture flares, you lose a little more of yourself. I could not stand by and watch.'

Aquas shook his head.

'No one has explained anything to me,' he said. 'Not the light. Not the danger. Not what it means that my skin burns the man I married. You all decided I was too fragile to know.'

He stepped closer, and Temik did not back away.

'What exactly have you been testing, Temik? How much of my body you could change without my permission?'

The door to the vault opened behind them.

Lucien stood in the gap, and his shadow came through first, a cold black tide that made the torches gutter.

'What is this,' Lucien said. Not a question.

Temik turned, and for a moment the two of them faced each other, old friends with something new and jagged between them.

'Aquas was asking me the same thing,' Temik said. 'I have been giving him blood after training. To keep the light from consuming him.'

Lucien's eyes went to the cloth in Aquas's hand.

Then to Aquas.

'You knew nothing of this.'

'No,' Aquas said. 'I did not.'

He let the cloth fall.

It landed on the stone with a soft, wet sound, and the three of them looked at it, and no one moved.

'I want an answer,' Aquas said. 'From both of you. Why is my body a thing to be managed in secret? Why does everyone know what I am except me?'

Temik opened his mouth.

Lucien spoke first.

'Because we were afraid.'

Aquas turned to him.

'Afraid of what the truth would do to me.'

'Afraid of what you would do with it,' Lucien said.

His voice was low and even, and his shadow had settled behind him like a cloak, waiting.

'You burn,' Lucien said. 'You burn bright enough to char stone, and you do not know how to stop it, and every time it happens you come back to me smaller. Thinner. Further away. I will not watch you burn out because I told you too much too soon.'

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