7. Forbidden

(Morrison)

She laid the back of her hand to Maxine's cheek. Maxine flinched from the cold of it. The fever had climbed high and fast.

"This is withdrawal, near enough. She's starving for the one thing I've just forbidden her."

"Then unforbid it."

"I can't. You heard the reason yourself. Feed it twice and it deepens." Ferren straightened, and for the first time in my life I watched her run clean out of answers in front of me. "Deepen the bond and we don't know what she becomes. Starve it and the magic keeps hunting until it burns through something she can't spare. I can buy her hours. A night, if she's stubborn, and she strikes me as stubborn. After that I'd be guessing, and I don't guess with lives."

Hours. She didn’t shield that horrific thought, and it went down in me like a stone dropped down a well. Maxine can’t die. It will be seen as an act of aggression, a blight against Marinescu, the Vampire Kingdom.

Then a fresh wave of it took her, and it took me too, a hot wire drawn straight through the middle of me from somewhere it had no business reaching. She made no sound. I did. Ferren's eyes cut to me, and I understood, distantly, that whatever we'd become, I would be living every hour of this alongside her, and not one working in my whole disciplined life could shield me from it.

The unfappable Ferren looked horrified. The she made a beeline for the door and left to prepare what might buy the hours she'd promised, and for a while it was only the two of us. 

"I'm fine," Maxine said, bright and flat, and the effort it took her to push two words out like she meant them told me precisely how far from fine she'd gone. She had a grip on the window frame that was slowly bending the wood.

"You should go," she added, once the shaking got bad enough that hiding it stopped being an option. "This isn't a flattering look, and you strike me as a man who minds about optics."

"I'm staying."

"I didn't ask for a nurse."

"You're not getting one. You're getting a husband who'd rather not explain to two kingdoms how his bride died on the second day."

The fact that she didn’t have a snarky reply at the ready told me just how far she’s gone into ‘not well’ territory. But she’d gotten up from the window seat and was making her way to the bed.

"Sit down," I said, gentler. "Before you fall down."

"I don't faint. It's tacky."

She made it three steps toward proving me wrong before her legs quit.

I caught her. A simple act, given that I'd been standing close to her for an hour, pretending I wasn't waiting to. She came down into my arms all fever and tremor, lighter than someone this much trouble had any right to be, and her hand fisted in the front of my shirt like she meant to hold herself up by it, or take it down with her.

"Ferren!" I had her against my chest, and my voice came out louder than I meant it. "Get back in here!" 

"Don't." Every ounce of polish had gone out of her voice. She turned her face into my shirt, and when she spoke again it came cracked and low, nothing like the woman who'd spent all day circling my pulse. "Don't call her over. She'll only tell me no again."

Every rule I owned said to call Ferren regardless. Every rule I owned also said not to let a vampire I'd known two days get this close, her mouth at my collar and my magic howling in both our bodies to finish what it had started.

I didn't move.

"I need you," she whispered into my shirt. No performance left in it, no angle.

And this was the part I'd spend the rest of the night refusing to look at too closely: I couldn't tell whether she meant me or the blood under my skin, and I couldn't decide which answer frightened me more. 

People had wanted things from me my whole life. My name. My magic. My vote, my rank, my crown. Not one of them had ever said it like this, wrecked and quiet with her mouth against my heart. The first true thing she'd given me since the island, and it scared the hell out of both of us.