And You’re The One With The Cigarette Between Your Lips

Something of a companion piece to https://theprose.com/post/194714/i-can-taste-your-lies-on-my-tongue-like-secondhand-smoke

"Nyx."

"Hmm?"

Cory watched her, stared at the waterfall of silver-gold hair down her shoulders, and the shift of the curve of her spine as she walked. "Nyx, I'm scared."

That made her pause, and she turned enough to look at him over one pale shoulder. Her eyes were the color of cherries this time, and Cory did not like them. She smiled like glass (brittle, transparent), and brushed a strand of Cory's hair behind his ear. Her thumb lingered against his cheek. He could feel the sharp of her nail against his skin.

"What is there to be scared of, Cory?" She asked, as if she didn't know. "You know you have no need to fear the demons in the dark."

He knew no such thing, not truly. He knew the girl with the silver-gold hair needed him for something, and he knew the shadow at his shoulder would not injure its host. He knew he could no return home so long as the Sunwatch stood, now that they knew he wasn't entirely human. But he knew nothing at all about the demons in the dark.

He voiced none of this, but Nyx seemed to know his mind better than he did, and he once again wondered if the reading of minds was the gift she'd been given by the demons in the dark, as she told him again that he had nothing to fear; that the night would not harm him so long as he had a shadow at his shoulder.

Cory still did not understand, nor trust, but it wasn't like he had a wealth of other options. He was standing in an ashy field wearing nothing but a muddy hospital gown. He had no shoes, no coat, no food, no water, and no home. At his back was a Sunwatch cell with his name on it and a lifetime of fearing the night; in front of him was a forest and a great unknown that he'd been raised to fear with all his heart. And a girl with silver-gold hair who needed him for something she would name, but who had never lied to him.

Calder looked back at the Sunwatch wall, at how oddly small it seemed, from this distance. The shadow at his shoulder was quick to block his view: it did not like him looking backward, and not just in the physical sense.

Nyx released his cheek and instead grabbed his hand in both of her own, wrapping his fingers around her throat.

"Brother," She said, and he turned back to look at her, at his hand around the defenseless line of her neck. "Brother."

"I am not your brother," He said by rote, mechanical. Trained. Who was he to say he wasn't? He did not know his father. He did not know what constituted 'brother.'

They looked nothing alike, but whatever he was, she was the closest to it he'd ever found.

She smiled, doubtless tasted his doubt on her black tongue, and took a single step backward through the grass that painted her legs in soot. His hold on her throat forced him to follow, and he felt like he was the one being strangled.

"Brother. You have nothing to fear from the demons in the dark."

Another step.

He did not look to the side, or up, or down. Only at his hand on her throat.

"Okay."