“I’m not Dray or Beaufort. I’ve heard you with them. I’ve heard how much you enjoy the things they do to you. I don’t have that kind of experience.”
“Thorne,” I say sternly. “It’s not about experience. It’s about the person I’m with. That makes it hot. That makes it good. Stars, Thorne, you turn me on so much. Kissing you is like …” I roll my eyes dramatically.
He chuckles.
I take his hand in mine. Just this simple action after so long when we haven’t been able to touch each other, sends electricity skating across my skin and shivers down my spine.
“Do you want …” I start to ask him, all of a sudden feeling shy. “Do you want to go all the way?”
He squeezes my hand like he never wants to let it go.
“Nini, I want to do that so badly, but not here, not now. I want our first time to be somewhere special, somewhere we’ll both remember.”
Anywhere would be special with Thorne, but this is his virginity and I have to respect his choices.
“Then can I touch you?” I ask him. “Can I make you come?”
“Is it weird if I say I don’t want to rush this, that I want to take my time, stretch these moments out and make them last for as long as I can?”
I smile at him. He’s so different to the other men I’ve been with. He wants to take things slow. It makes me feel treasured and wanted and I can’t refuse that request. “No, I think that sounds perfect.”
He calls his shadows back to him and we find we’re alone in the hallway except for one sleeping dragon.
We camp out in the main hall of the fort with Blaze that night, although I don’t sleep well. I’ve obviously become more accustomed to comfort than I realized because I find the floor too cold and too hard. Add to that the sounds of the demons squawking and screeching in the distance, the wind howling around the building and my thoughts about the man I killed, and I hardly sleep.
Are we doomed? We’re miles from the border, deep within the demon realm where only vampires seem capable of surviving. We have no clue where Fox is or even if he’s alive.
Except that spark of his magic in my chest whispers to me that he must be. I lay my hand above my heart now and try to focus in on it, to ensure it really is there and hasn’t withered away. Has it become less virulent or is that simply my imagination – the gloom of this place once again seeping into my psyche?
“Fox,” I whisper softly into the night.
Is he out there somewhere, hoping I’ll come?
I lie awake, reciting his name over and over again as if I can pull him from the darkness, as if I half expect him to answer my call.
But he doesn’t and eventually I must doze off, because I’m woken by Beaufort gently shaking my arm.
“Fox!” I gasp as my eyes snap open and despair and desperation swamp my heart.
“Briony,” Beaufort says. “Wake up, sweetheart. Time to move out.”
I peer up into his silver eyes. “This is hopeless, isn’t it? We’re never going to find Fox and we’re never going to find Bardin.”
“For all we know, sweetheart, the professor may already have returned to the academy.”
I shake my head. “Fly and Clare would have contacted me if he had.” I screw up my eyes, the despair threatening to overtake me. Beaufort tucks his fingers under my jaw.
“Sweetheart,” he says, “there’s the place the old Head talked about yesterday, Crow’s Fault.”
“You said we shouldn’t trust anything he told us.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t, but I found the place on the map.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s nowhere I know of. I don’t think our fighters have ever journeyed that far. But it’s marked on the map. Here, look.” He strides across the room, carrying the map back to me and pointing to a place; Crow’s Fault like he said. A little symbol of a black bird hovering above the name.
“You think we should go?” I ask.
