Pearl Before Swine ch 25: Smoke and Starlight
~THE PEARL~
Silence festers like a wound left open. No matter how I prod at it from my side, Jun’s remains untouched. As I follow him, his mouth forms a rigid, unbroken line. His strides fall quiet but quick. With its tie gone, his hair hangs over his shoulders like a cloak of night, concealing his profile.
“Jun, how can we talk if you do not speak?”
On the stairs, his eyes flick to me, narrow as a blade’s edge, but still he boycotts sound.
When we reach the flat roof of the dormitory, my expression mirrors his. He wastes no time or movement as he covers the gravel with a brightly striped quilt. It lies as smooth as a calm sea, and he attends to a pile of sticks alongside it. Soon, a polite gathering of young flames dances over the wood. I sit on the blanket, knees to my chest, and watch him open a box of ice and meat.
“This is still not talking.”
His sure motions hiccup as he skewers the game. “I’m going to sound like a fool.”
“Never, Jun. You are wiser than I.”
He pulls in a sharp inhale, and his lip catches between his teeth. “Are you a Creature of the Sea?”
“No.”
His eyes remain on his busywork, the darkest blue against the orange of the fourth sunset. From here, the forest stands as a diminutive assembly, and the ocean stretches to infinity, clothed in clouds.
“I am not a Creature of the Sea, but I am a Creature of Essence.”
“Like he said.” It is less than a whisper or breath. He angles two rods against one another so the food leans over the fire.
Embers crack, and thin ribbons of smoke coil around his wrists.
“Like who said?” I reach toward him.
He snatches my hand and finally looks straight at me. Every line of his face is jagged. “I don’t want to believe you.”
His palm cradles the back of my hand in a deceptively gentle hold. Though I flinch, my arm does not return. He keeps it captive, waiting beneath a knife.
Indecision fills him with subtle tremors. He is as I was on the beach at sunrise, pressing a broken shell to Sal’s neck. One slice to reveal the color of my blood and know for sure. The same slice to sever all trust.
I take that blame from Jun, running a finger along the blade. After a moment, smoke the color of starlight wafts from the cut, not gold like Sal said or like the ichor that paints my blue-eyed islander. Still, it is most definitely not human.
His breaths halt. Five seconds pass, swelling into ten, then fifteen as the tiny wound scabs and vanishes. His eyelids fall like curtains, dark, gold-dusted lashes in high contrast to cheeks draining of all color.
I squeeze his hands. When that begets no response, I tug him toward me and capture his lips with mine. Juniper Oakson has become a tree, but one with bark as smooth as paper. I am ink, seeping into him, kissing unheard words across his skin, and hoping he can read them.
His throat bobs, and as if this unstops a bottle, he pulls in air. His fingers untangle from mine, and he pushes me back. His eyes open but remain unfocused behind a glossy wall. One by one, each feature droops: brows, cheeks, lips.
“What do you want with me, Pearl?”
Is this the first time he has called me by name? It is a heavy, round word in his mouth, a rock too hard to chew and too big to swallow.
“I want you to be happy, Jun. I want you to grin and smile and laugh. It forms a song for me, and I want to hear every note.”
His chin lowers, and he pulls in another breath. It trembles. “And you don’t belong to Mare?”
I shake my head with enough force to send my loose hair flying. “She believes I do, but I have never belonged to Mare, and I never will.”
“So, you came here to seek the fourth Essence’s assistance in your fight against the Sea.” His voice is flat, only a hitch at the end hinting at a question.
“You and Pike brought me here.” I stare directly into his eyes, and my throat tightens.
Is it not odd for the Swine to have traveled with a Koa? If he means to sabotage me, why bring me to a place with many humans? Unless he did not think it would matter, and his plan somehow involves me choosing Jun.
My islander’s jaw locks. “Why did you pretend to be human and follow us in the E’er Wild Woods?”
My voice cannot squeeze past all the jumbled questions on the back of my tongue. Five words fall, heavier than mountains but alighting like dewdrops. “Jun, do you love me?”
His brows lower, and in their shadow, his blue falls to the night. “Answer me.”
“Mare wants me for her necklace, but I challenged her. I have three days left to convince a human to love me.”
For a long moment, he does not move. Juices drip onto the fire and sizzle, filling the air with the aroma of umami. He tends to the food, rotating it as it glistens and darkens on all sides, careful never to look in my direction.
“Jun?”
I will him to speak my name again.
He pauses and partly fulfills that wish. “You’re a literal pearl, then?”
“A sea stone.”
“A pebble.” It contains a chuckle, and he peeks at me for the slightest instant. “A sea stone without the sea is a pebble.”
I share in his laughter, not daring to let mine be louder than his, so it remains a quiet thing, like the lullaby a breeze sings to the flowers.
His heartbeat provides the rhythm for that song, loud despite the distance between us. Perhaps it is because his jacket hangs open, and only a thin white shirt protects his chest.
I want to press against him as I did in the forest. I want him to gasp and chase me, to light aflame and dance like light and shadow, to fill and fuel me with his awe.
He will do none of that if I leap upon him.
“Jun.” I place a finger beneath his chin and gently level it. “Will you answer me?”
He searches my face, breaths short and shallow until one finally fills his hollows, and he holds it. Determination stills him. “Take me.”
Without even a touch, he steals all movement. This should be good news. Jun knows the truth, and instead of fleeing, he asks to remain by my side. I have won the bet, so why does a vacant chill shove aside all else within me?
The moment stretches, a river overflowing its banks, and red spills across his cheeks, bleeding the last of the color from the sunset.
“I’ll be yours, do a-anything you want. When you return to Mare, take me with you.”
No, this is not right. He offers to be mine, but his voice wavers with fear of what that means. His tongue stumbles over the limitless nature of “anything” like an accusation that I will ask the worst of him. As if my company is something to be endured, not enjoyed.
Despite the gnawing desire to touch him, I increase the space between us. “You have not said you love me.”
“I won’t unless I fully mean it.”
What is this weight fastening my limbs to the floor? Want tears me in two—one half in a rush to flee, the other desperate to crush into him until he changes his mind.
I do neither, voice one part whine, one part growl. “Pity drives you then? Pity will not win my freedom. It will place me on Mare’s palm.”
And you as well.
“I’m going to kill her.”
A hundred thousand stars peek through the sky’s onyx blanket, witnessing this awful vow. Each one commands a needle stabbing me from within.
Sal’s face on the beach returns. He guessed that humans plan to kill the Essences. His worry was not for them but their creatures. For me.
An exhale shapes two words. “You cannot.”
Jun’s brow rises, distorting the scar across it. His stare, like a bridge made of all the world’s steel, affixes us both in place. “Everything alive on Lemuria came here through the Great Swallowing, except the Essences and their creations. They’re a response to our presence, this world’s resistance to our supremacy. Over centuries, they stole the allegiance of flora and fauna that was naturally ours, and we need it back.”
I recall my first trek through the E’er Wild Woods, carried by a stranger who will forever remain nameless. The birds shied from him, and the trees whispered of his wrongness. Yet, their ancestors hailed from the same place as his. They did not belong on Terra’s land any more than that man did.
The same holds true for the bear that attacked Jun and Pike. Death attended their meeting and refused to leave without a victim.
My fingers curl into the quilt and the gravel beneath it. How very different would things be had I not interfered, had that incident claimed Jun instead?
Perhaps that was Pike’s plan. I would know nothing of Southern Shores University. Whatever peace among the humans that relies on Jun’s safety would have shattered. This islander’s ambition to destroy the Essence of the Sea would die with him, and I would not be tempted to help him.
His gaze abandons me, face of straight lines too sharp in the firelight as he checks the food. He removes it from the flames and swivels back to the shadows to offer me a skewer and its dripping morsel. “Creatures of Essence are always hungry. Eat.”
I take it, fingers sizzling, too close to the meat on the slender beam, but its heat cannot penetrate the greater inferno within me. “You cannot destroy one without hurting the other. There must be balance, like light and darkness. They never dance alone.”
“You call what Mare does balance? We live in fear or not at all.” His voice cracks, and his fingers brush the scar on his forehead. With the fire behind him, he is a silhouette except for the faint glow that remains in the blood spattered on his front. “You want freedom? So do I.”
“Jun—”
“Please, let me choose this.” Though he has yet to partake of it, he sets down his portion and crawls to me. Only a hairsbreadth separates us, his nose alongside mine. His lashes skim my cheeks as his eyes fall to my lips. “I’ve said I’ll do anything, so take your price.”
Salt and sweet glide across my tongue, imbued with the tang of fear this time. It resembles that of all the prey I have witnessed fall, only deeper, richer. This is the flavor of his ambition, and I want it.
I have never taken live prey before, but tasting him is fun. How easily addicting.
I savor the kiss this time, slow, hands on his face holding him back. The gold smears.
“Tell me where the blood on you came from.”
His fingers tremble as they slide up my arm, solar flares beneath my skin in their wake. “I killed a Sea Swine. That’s how I know our new weapons will work.”
I shove him back. “You killed Pike?”
“He’s one, too?”
Can there be more than one Swine here? There are several Creatures of the Sky and now a Creature of the Land, so why not?
Or Pike’s tale of being raised on ships by a pirate queen might be true.
If Pike is not the Swine that Jun attacked, then who?
“Perhaps.” With a horrible thought, I pick up my fallen skewer. “This is not—”
Wary as if I might pounce on him, Jun says, “It’s rabbit.”
I see the truth of that in the shape of the meat and sigh.
Jun does not relax, breaths full but quick. He is as the gears and springs in the walls below us, waiting for steam to release his coiled energy. The knife rests on his fingers.
I extend my hand. “Come.”
After a moment, he complies, stopping when his chest bumps my raised palm and his knees line either side of mine.
The knife remains in his hand, idle by his side. The shine in his eyes reflects the sliver of tonight’s moon.
“Are you afraid?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“I will not take you to Mare unless I know I can protect you.”
He draws a breath to protest, but I barrel on.
“I will not watch her kill you, and she will if I cannot stop her. So, tell me the beginning of the story. Tell me why she hates your family.”
“My ancestor loved her. Somehow, monster that she is.” He turns his head in the direction of the sea, though the darkness holds it completely. The wind still whispers of it, carrying the faintest crash of waves.
“Love was so offensive? Or did he do something else?”
“He aged.” As if convinced nothing will leap from the water and smite him for telling this tale, he finally lowers his shoulders. “Humans have short lives, a hundred years if we’re lucky, usually a lot less. Legends tell of ones living much longer on our original land, but never here. Lemuria must draw on our energies somehow, perhaps to feed the Essences. Smythe wants to study that.”
Keeping a plethora of Creatures of Essence around fits perfectly into that purpose. Could the dean’s goal be to take that energy back?
It is not far off from Sal’s field of study either.
“Mare came and went as she pleased,” Jun continues, “sometimes disappearing for years. After one of these long absences, she returned to find her islander had become an old man. She wouldn’t believe it was him, and when he proved he was, she concluded that he had marred his beauty to punish her. He pointed to his peers, also old, but they had aged with their loved ones. She claimed that if his love had been real, it would have sustained him. He would have stayed looking his best for her.
“She’d been gone for forty years. No one expected her back. He had a family. She grabbed his youngest son and”—he swallowed—“she ripped him apart. It was bedlam after that. The village was destroyed, and there were only survivors because Terra interfered. We forbade her to come on our land. She forbade us from entering her oceans.”
Tears dribble down my cheeks, but my arms are too heavy to wipe them away. I am an idiot, and Sal was right. I am like Mare.
I want my blue-eyed human despite how he fears me, and I want him forever.
He is shadow, hair covering his face, though his gaze finds me like day’s warmth. “That’s the story. There are several versions, but that’s the true one.”
“Thank you for telling it.” Slowly, I regain the strength to lift my arms. They fly around him, and his heart stutters beneath my ear.
“D-do we…We have a deal, right?”
I do not answer with words because I cannot say the ones he wants to hear. I will not take him to Mare. Instead, with the stars watching on, I kiss him as if this will be our last.
Continued in chapter 26
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