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“Sebastian,” Hess’s stern commander’s voice cracked through Sebastian’s mind, and he winced. “We need to keep moving. Open my eyes.”
Sebastian opened them. And then he frowned and blinked a few times to make sure he’d really done it. They sat in complete darkness—a cool, dry, quiet darkness.
“The tunnels.” Sebastian pushed himself shakily to his—Hess’s, their?—feet and put his hand on the wall to anchor himself in the nothingness.
“That’s right. We’re not very far in, though. I didn’t get very far before…” Uneasiness and confusion leeched out of the little spot in Sebastian’s mind where Hess’s consciousness was corralled. Uneasiness, confusion, and the sense of being deeply disturbed.
“Before the paralysis set in,” Sebastian finished for him. He took a few shaky steps down the hallway, then a few more confident ones.
“I didn’t know that would happen.”
Sebastian grimaced, and the guilty, frustrated look felt surprisingly natural on Hess’s face. “I’m sorry. It’s a secretion from my barbs. I can’t control it.”
“It’s a good thing I got into the tunnel before I put you in then.”
“Before you…” Sebastian reached up to the back of his—Hess’s—neck and found ragged, torn flesh that stung when he touched it: a hole that wasn’t at all like a torvar slit. “You…put me inside yourself?”
Sebastian felt Hess try to pull away, but there was nowhere for him to go, and his emotions bled out to Sebastian—uncertain vulnerability, the remnants of fear. “There were no other bodies, and you had stopped moving. You were dying. I was afraid you were already dead.”
Holy shit.
Sebastian stumbled over his feet and stood in shock in the hallway, supporting himself with the wall against that world-shaking revelation. No one put a torvar inside their own head. No one. Hess had cut his own neck open and put Sebastian inside him, giving himself over completely.
Defensiveness bristled from the tiny, tightly coiled ball in the back of Sebastian’s mind that was Hess. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I could have killed you,” Sebastian said aloud in his shock.
For some reason, that uncoiled Hess, and Sebastian felt his shoulders twitch to pull back. “You didn’t.”
“I almost did.” Sebastian forced his feet to keep moving. They had a lot of ground to cover.
“But you didn’t.”
They walked on in silence, Sebastian trailing a hand along the wall and feeling for any change in the air that might indicate another passage meeting theirs. But he was so wrapped up in the feel of Hess right there next to him, he was only half paying attention.
Finally, he acknowledged the truth that kept poking at him, demanding to be voiced. “You saved my life.”
Aching tenderness. “Good.”
“Thank you.”
Sebastian could feel Hess’s cynical laugh and feel him almost shaking his head. “Of course, Sebastian.”
Sebastian’s name in Hess’s voice, even when that voice was more a sensation than a sound, still lodged warm fuzzies into Sebastian’s chest.
After a few more minutes of walking, the wall under Sebastian’s hand disappeared. They’d come to a turn. Sebastian ran through his mental maps, then nodded decisively in a way that was far more Hess than him and took it.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Hess asked.
“Yeah.” Sebastian hesitated, debating, then just said, “Safe house.”
Suspicion, and then Hess finally stopped trying to make himself small in Sebastian’s mind. “I can feel you lying.”
“I’m not lying.” Sebastian scowled. He and Hess could barely be in the same room without the tension boiling over. How in the hell were they going to survive being in the same body?
“But you’re not being honest.”
“It is a safe house. It’s just…a little bit more than that to me,” Sebastian admitted. “You’ll see when we get there.”
