Title: Snake Singer
Authors Notes: Thank you so much to TallemeraRane who helped with the editing of this chapter.
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, but the plot belongs to me.
The moon was still hanging beautifully between the dark blue clouds of night when Zane and I entered my bedroom in the Hawks Keep. Before anything else and without a word to me, Zane placed my father's sword gently down on the cedar chest at the foot of my bed. His gesture almost ceremonial, as though he were putting a great doubt to himself to rest and a ghost that had been haunting him to rest as well. Both of us were exhausted and however minor Zane made it seem, he was wounded. I sat him on the edge of my bed gently and tended to his wounds. Placing my hands at either side of his face, letting my fingers dance over the smooth skin against his cheeks I kissed the scratches and swollen surfaces there. I brushed his dark black hair away and I cleaned each scratch and torn surface and then placed a small bandage there to ward away infection and disease.
After his face was cleaned, I moved to the more serious wound on his back shoulder blade. Gently I removed the torn white shirt that was already half soaked with blood from his skin, helping him pull its fabric away from his flesh without flexing his back and causing him pain. I left his side only for an instant as I pored clean water from my commode into a bowl and grabbed a towel from its side hinges. When I sat back on the bed I positioned myself behind him and dampened the towel slightly. Then I brushed its soft surface across the wound. I felt Zane wince from the stinging pain and I quickly kissed the back of his neck to ease that pain.
His back was filled with scars that I had never seen before. Some small and minute, while others, especially one, stood out as a long unhealed gash about four inches long went up vertically from one of his sides. I traced its swollen line with my fingers wanting to learn the feel of it but I dared not ask how it was received. I knew that the Underground Municipality was a horrible place that housed all of the most dangerous criminals from all of the shape shifting races and that no law or rules prevailed there. No doubt Zane's identity as leader of the Serpiente had been discovered and he had been punished for it.
When I was finished cleaning the wound with water, I pulled loose a large line of material from the hem of my nightgown, making it into a make shift tourniquet and wrapped it around his shoulder and the wound to help stop the blood flow from it. When I had finished tending to all of his wounds I pulled from my wardrobe a plain off white shirt that belonged to him and helped him put it back on to guard against the cold.
Zane and I then laid down together, our arms our shields as we wrapped the other tightly within our embrace. "Everything will be all right now," I whispered gently as I kissed his forehead, the smell of his skin an intoxicating aroma that I found myself lost in. Zane said nothing back to me, just held me tightly. Zane had in fact not spoken sense he had decided not to kill Vasili. I knew that what Vasili had said weighed heavily on him, and that he took to heart the untrue words that he had spoken about our future, as though it were a plague or a curse on happy days that we would have someday. "It's not true, Zane," I said, not needing him to tell me that that was what was bothering him. "None of it is true, he just said that to mess with your mind, our future does not hold those actions." My words were not enough; he still said nothing and didn't move. I wished that I could do more, but there was nothing left for me to do except lead a life with him and show him that what Vasili had said was not true. It wasn't!
A knock form the other side of the door burst us both from whatever thought or dream we had strayed into for comfort. "I'll go," I said, my voice telling him without words that I didn't want him to move in case it would further irritate his wounds. When I got up from the bed I realized that I was just in my nightgown and I swiftly pulled a shawl from the wardrobe over my shoulders and chest and draped it around myself.
When I opened the door it was Rei who I found at the other end. He was breathing heavily, like most humans breath after they've run great distances without stopping, but I knew that Rei had changed, the energy from the change into his bird counterpart thick and I could feel it like a strong smell. I turned back to Zane and saw that he was beginning to lift himself off the bed, the duty difficult with one of his shoulders in a Tourniquet.
"Do you have news about Vasili?" Zane asked, the first words that he had spoken in over an hour.
"Yes...may I come in?"
I stepped aside, allowing Rei to enter our bedroom with no difficulty. Without knowing the depth of the information that he was about to share with us I shut the door, not wanting some piece of gossip going around the Keep that didn't need to be known to anyone else besides the people in this room. Before Rei spoke I wrapped the shawl around myself tighter, as though it were a shield that could protect me from whatever weapon that was pointed at me.
"My soldiers and I tracked Vasili from the air, most of the Royal Flight going out with me as we searched the surrounding areas. Finally we found him on Serpiente land and then eventually he got to the Serpiente Keep."
"My sister?" Zane interrupted with a desperate voice.
"The lady Irene and her family are well and looked after," Rei reassured him and I watched as Zane let out a sigh of relief. "As I said," Rei continued, "we followed Vasili to the Serpiente Keep. He went to Adelina. There was a fight. They both killed each other in their rage."
I was shocked, and I could tell by the look on Zane's face that he was shocked as well. Both of our former lovers, ghosts which had haunted us for so long, fuming flames of the past had both been extinguished together. It was as though a great weight of duty and reasonability had been lifted from our shoulders. But I knew that Vasili's death wouldn't halt his voice in Zane's head, even now after his death sowing seeds of doubt in Zane's mind.
"Thank you for this news commander," Zane said, his voice dry and lacking any real gratitude of truth.
Rei turned, sensing Zane's distance and my hope to bring him back. "Good night," he said before walking back across the room and leaving.
I stood where I had been when Rei spoke; I was silent, and I watched Zane as he processed this unexpected news. His head was lowered, his eyes half shut and silhouetted by the candlelight. His exposed chest glistened in the dim glow, and his hair hung like a veil over the scratches and scrapes on his cheeks and face. "Are you all right?" I asked, I knew that Zane and Adelina had had a complicated past, though I was not entirely sure of everything that had happened between them.
Zane was silent, and kept his head down, shadowing any emotion that I might be able to read on his face.
"It is unexpected news, and she is a loss to you. However great or small that loss my be, you are still right to mourn her." I felt like swallowing my own words; the taste of them stung in my throat. I hated Adelina, and worse I hated Vasili and I was glad that they were both dead and gone from our lives for good.
I smiled, hiding the feelings that I was feeling and I went to him. Sitting beside him on the bed I wrapped my arm around his shoulders, being careful of his wounded shoulder blade and kissed him at the base of his neck.
"I do not mourn the Adelina that you know," he said gently, the first words that he had spoken to me in so long and as he lifted his head up and leaned it sweetly against my head he continued: "I mourn who she once was. The days were not long ago that I valued her as a friend and an ally. But then she became my enemy and under that yoke she has died. I never wanted death for her, I couldn't give her death after she killed my mother and I would not have chosen it for her now - had I the choice -"
His words were meaningful and in a way I understood them. He was not morning her for the villain who had murdered so many and destroyed so much but for the woman that he knew long ago who was only honorable and steadfast. It was much the same way that I saw Vasili. In the days that he had held me here I did see glimpses of the old boy that I had grown up with, and for a few seconds I thought that he could go back to that. Reform. Change. But now I will never know. I will never know if Vasili had any of the old parts left in him, or if they had become the only casualties on the battlefield that day that I thought that I had lost him. "To regret is to be human," I whispered to him.
I felt Zane pull away suddenly and lift himself off of the bed. He stood turned away from me for a moment and I watched as he turned back and said: "Human! Are we human Danica?"
I stood up, taking hold of his hand: "Of course we are human. We are born and we die. We love, and we hate. We wish and we regret. We are human Zane, and even if you do not believe it, I have to. I have to believe that we are more then the animals that posses our bodies." He took hold of me, his arms sweet and loving. I felt his warm lips crisscross against the back of my neck and up my jaw line. I wanted so much to be with him. "We will never be apart again Zane, never."
He pulled away again, and I was left hurt and alone where I stood. "What is it?" I asked, my eyes furrowed as to why he feared my touch so.
"Danica!" He said, the emotion in his voice commanding my attention. "The sun will still rise and set if I am not at your side."
He turned away from me again, and I approached him lightly. I placed my hand gently on his wounded shoulder and he allowed me to lean my face against the opposite side of his back, the top of my head coming up to the top of his back. "The sun may continue to rise and set," I said, "but I will not rise, only set." I felt a tear swell from my eye and then roll silently down my cheek and then down his back like it was a great river overflowing from its banks. He turned back to me, lacing his arm underneath my crop of golden hair and rested it against the feathers on the back of my neck. He held me like a dying child, so gentle, so loving, as if the slightest ruff touch would break me into a thousand tiny pieces and I would never recover. He leaned his face down to me, brushing his ample lips across my own until our mouths were intertwined with desire.
"Come," he whispered to me, "lets go to bed."
The sun had already risen and shown through the open balcony doors wildly. Its beads of sun and light crowding the room like a thick smoke. I breathed its delight in. For the first time in so long I felt truly free in the place where I was and content within my own skin. I shifted my body hoping to find Zane on his usual side of the bed. Perhaps I would wake him to see the beauty of the morning for himself. Perhaps I would watch him sleep, basking in the joy of having him so near to me again.
"Zane?" I whispered turning my head toward him, but he was not there. I lifted my torso off the bed quickly, my eyes searching the room franticly. Had everything last night been a dream? I said a swift silent prayer. "Zane?" I whispered again, feeling the choke of tears swell in my throat. "Zane?"
I slammed my hands down on the mattress, preparing to lift myself up from the bed and search the room but as my hand hit the blanket below me I felt the hard crisp feel of folded paper there. I looked down, my eyes seeing a small white folded piece of paper against my palm and in small black letters-Zane's handwriting- the name Danica etched on it. I lifted the letter apprehensively, feeling the curl of the thick parchment underneath my fingertips.
Swallowing my tears of anguish that I had been prepared to shed a few moments ago, I pulled open the folds of the paper, its words startling me as I read them:
Danica,
Forgive me, there is no future for the both of us as long as we stay together. Know that my heart will always burn with love for you, and that there will never be another, but we can never be together again. Live, and be prosperous.
Yours Forever,
Zane.
The End.
This story in its entirety is dedicated to the memory of:
Jessica Jordan Blue
1986-2003