My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 312

312 /328

Jace

"Give me a moment."

I turned the pages slower now, and I couldn’t find anything in a straight line. The thing wouldn't let me. Every page I turned had me on a different study of it, and each one stopped me before I could get past it. The figure from the back, the long muscles of it laid in like rope under the skin. The skull alone, big as a horse's and shaped like nothing that grazes. A hand again, opened flat, the claw at each fingertip drawn from three sides so you couldn't tell yourself you'd misread it.

Then a run of pages on the inside of the thing, and those were worse. I can't read a word of that book. But a drawing of a heart is a heart, and the heart in those pages was wrong. Too big for the chest it sat in. Ringed around its middle with something the maker had pressed in heavier ink, the thing armored under its own skin.

There were organs I had no name for, set where a man keeps nothing. There was a study of the throat opened up that I stopped on and then turned past. None of it told a clean story. All of it told the same dirty one. Whoever made this had cut the thing open and found a body built to take more than a body should and go on working.

I was wiping my palms on my knees by then, and I hadn't noticed starting.

I went back and forth a long time, the candle burning down, getting nowhere I could say out loud, and then I came to the teeth.

There was a panel of them, one tooth drawn big, sliced down the middle. Inside it the maker had inked fine rings, band on band on band, packed tight toward the center. I knew what I was looking at.

Years back, at a long dull dinner in a city far south of here, I'd been sat next to a duller man who counted whales for somebody's government, and he'd told me between courses more than I wanted about how you put an age to a thing. You cut it open. You count the rings. A tooth lays a layer a year, same as a tree. You sit with a glass and count. The count is the age, and the count does not lie.

So I counted. Lost it twice, my eyes swimming in the bad light, started over. The further into the rings I got, the worse I started to sweat, cold sweat running down my back. The count kept going when it should have stopped. Past where a long-lived beast stops. Past where anything stops. When I matched it to the figures in the column beside the panel they were the same, and the same was a number with no business sitting next to a drawing of something that had a throat to cut.

"What." Fenris was leaning in. He'd been reading my face longer than I'd been reading the book. "What is it? You have gone pale."

I had to wet my mouth before anything came out.

"Are…are these things still alive?"

He went still. Something moved behind his face and settled. He let a long breath out through his nose. When he spoke the flat hardness had gone out of him, and what was under it was tired in a way I hadn't seen on him.