“Over the shoulder?”
“Bride-carry, of course!Nothing less than that.”Ryder kissed his temple.
Grayson grinned.“I could take you up on that.”
“Why don’t you?”Ryder asked, gently bumping his arm as they entered the curve of the fountain.“Are you just being stubborn?”
“Maybe.Yes.No.”Grayson laughed.He looped his arm through Ryder’s and leaned heavily against him.Not that it was difficult for Ryder to bear his weight at all.“I just want to walk a bit more with you before sleep takes me and I can’t feel your arms around me.I’ll just have a furry body.I don’t know if I want the bear or the wolf to cuddle all evening.”
Ryder lowered his head.“I am sorry about that.Sorry that we cannot be fully together.But the scent of your blood… sometimes it is too much.”
Grayson nodded.“I like you fuzzy.But I also remember the thirst.When I met Kaito for the first time, it was after my boat had gone down after a storm, and I was beyond hungry.”
Grayson remembered the rumble of thunder and crack of lightning.The dark sky had been ripped apart by light.His boat had been tossed up and down like a cork.They had climbed up waves so steep that without Grayson’s ability to move water, they would have been capsized long before.Riding down them into troughs so deep he thought they would see the ocean’s bottom had been just as terrifying even though neither wave nor water could harm him.
“I tried to keep the boat together.But the timbers of its hull splintered in the end.I could not hold toothpicks together and so it went down,” Grayson told him.
“You were sailing to Japan?”Ryder’s eyebrows rose.
“Daemon sent me to open one of the gates to Lasting from there,” Grayson said, his eyebrows drawing together.“It was locked though… how that was I am not certain.Someone must have locked it because otherwise we could have simply opened it from Lasting.”
“That sounds a mystery,” Ryder said.
Grayson’s lips flattened.“I wish I could remember…” But the more he chased that memory, the farther away it went and he felt his incipient headache become more present.
“Stop thinking so hard.”Ryder slid a finger down his nose.
“How can you tell I’m thinking too hard?”Grayson laughed.“Do you have the Eyros gift, too?”
“You do a certain nose scrunch,” Ryder told him.
Grayson laughed, tossing his head back, even as the headache throbbed.Still it was worth it to laugh.
“So you were in a storm of the century in a little boat,” Ryder prodded.
“Yes, the boat was lost as were the crew, and I was alone in the open sea,” Grayson told him.
Ryder stiffened.“In the ocean with no way to protect yourself from the sun?Or were you close enough to land to seek shelter?”
“I was not.The only way was for me to dive deep and keep well out of the sun’s rays.I swam for as long as I could, but I felt the sun rising and I had to hide from it in very deep water,” Grayson explained.
“That could not have been safe!”Ryder tightened his hold on Grayson’s arm as if he feared the sun might rise on them now in the Ever Dark.
“It was frightening.Exhilarating, too, of course.Especially when my first hiding spot was not deep enough.I could see the light filtering down towards me like liquid gold.It was beautiful.”Grayson frowned then as he recalled staying too long there as the sunlight reached him and his skin began to burn.
“You swam deeper?”
“Of course.”Grayson smiled up at him.“The sea had become like acid.”
“Just checking that you didn’tlinger.”Ryder lifted an eyebrow at him.
“I did.Just a little.But I went deeper.A whole lot deeper and slept.But still even with swimming all night, it took many days and nights to reach the land.I had already been eating lightly for quite a few weeks beforehand so when I got there I was beside myself with hunger,” Grayson explained.
He remembered how his belly hadburnedwith hunger.He’d caught fish, even sharks, and drained what little blood they had.He’d taken large bites of their flesh just to get something in his stomach to fill it.But it hadn’t worked.He needed humans and then he’d caught the scent of one on the wind.
It was almost dawn.He should have been seeking the deep or somewhere on the land that could hide him from the sun’s rays.But the smell of human blood–so rich and enticing–had drawn him like a hungry wolf.
“Kaito was out before the sun getting his boat ready to take out for the morning catch.”Grayson paused by the fountain and dipped his hands into the water, which drew up yet more memories.“I rose up from the water, not hiding anything about me, and he gaped with astonishment,” Grayson remembered.“My silver eyes were like flames.My skin glowed, too.Silvered by the water and whatever we are.I put all my Seduction in my smile.My parted lips showed my fangs.But he did not care.Saito smiled at me and opened his arms.”
