Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
I meet his eyes with my own.
Thirty-Six
A Man to Die For.
My gasp seems as loud as the bird of prey’s call, and I grab on to the front of Merc’s surcoat, prepared for an assault that, though it will not kill my body, I know without a doubt will kill my soul. Bracing myself, moaning, kicking my feet into the pebbles, I prepare my weak body for what he’ll feel as he dies—
His one uninjured eye is dark. So dark that, with the sunlight streaming in behind him, I can’t tell where his pupil ends and his iris takes over. The other side is the opposite, so white that there is only the faintest hint of a ring around the faded center.
The slashing scar is nasty and jagged, and surely what would have killed a lesser man.
“Sorrel.” He says my name roughly. “I need to get you out of the sun—”
As I reach for his face, he falls silent and I know now is the time. It’s coming, the flash and the agony, the knowledge I don’t want, shouldn’t have, can’t change. My curse, showing up here to spoil—
The world recedes as I become lost in his gaze, that midnight darkness enveloping me as the white expanse pushes me away … but instead of driving cold, or creeping terror, or crushing suffocation, I feel cocooned. Safe. At home with this stranger who knows only violence and solitude.
After he was a humble farmer who loved the land.
It’s as all this occurs to me that I realize: Time is passing. And still I hold his eyes with my own. I see nothing, other than the two universes that stare back at me. I feel nothing, outside of warmth and reassurance. I know nothing, apart from him leaning over me while I lie on the hard pebbled ground, the blue sky stretching over us, a cloudless blanket of daylight that will usher in danger when it fades into the very color of half his gaze.
A sense of utter disbelief causes me to recede from him, and that means the death vision is finally coming. Any moment. Yes, right … now …
The death vision, the moment of his demise—and all the physical and emotional sensations that go along with it—is going to take me over, and make me writhe, and cause me to know that which I can never, ever share—
Hide.
“Sorrel.” Now he’s sharp with me. “Can you hear aught?”
As I reach up, he captures my hand and gives it a squeeze. “You’re bleeding—”
“Shh.”
When he falls silent, I go for his face again. My fingers make contact with his temple and then the scar that intersects his pale eye. His skin is warm, and where he might have a beard it remains smooth, though I don’t think he shaved this morning. More than this, I notice his eyelashes. They’re thick and long on the top, thick and short on the bottom, and the frame they make serves to emphasize his deep-set, intense stare.
And that is all.
For the first time in my life, I have the details that every other person registers in the normal course of things: Eye color, placement, lashes. And where the individual’s stare is directed.
Merc’s is not leaving mine.
“I’m getting you to shade,” he says brusquely.
When he goes to pick me up, I stop his hand with a light touch. “Your blade. Let me see it.”
“What—”
“Please, I need to … see myself.”
He’s impatient with the request, but he unsheathes the heavy weapon, and though we shouldn’t garner more attention from things that come out of the sky, I have to know.
Directing the blade, I angle it to my face.
And meet my own eyes.
All I see—all I’ve ever seen—is their strange pale irises and the pupils in the center. I’ve never gotten a hint of my own death, and it’s been something I’ve always been grateful for.
Like the host must not know of its own demise.
“Let me check the back of your head.” Keeping the sword steady, Merc lifts my torso up gently and cranes around behind me. “No blood.”
The relief in his voice warms me, but I can’t dwell on it. My brain is scrambling as it tries to frame within my previous experience the lack of—
The broadsword is sheathed, and I feel his hands go behind my shoulders and under my knees. I’m lifted with care from the rocks, and Merc’s long strides take us over toward the dead bird. He goes around the now-tumbled boulder pile, and finds a wedge of shadow to put me in.
“Look at me, Sorrel.”
I take a deep breath. Maybe I got nothing because I hit my head? Or the chase has exhausted me? And I could always resume my normal course and avoid his gaze, except then I’d never know whether the anomaly is this situation or him.