“Everything.”
Everything?
“You got a starting point? Or can you be a bit more specific?”
Ciaran sneered and ran a hand through his hand. “This isn’t easy for me, so I’ll need you to drop the sarcasm.”
Sawyer felt rebuked, probably rightly so. “Sorry. Lifelong self-defence thing.”
Ciaran’s gaze cut to his, pained, haunted. “You don’t need to be defensive with me,” he said, almost a whisper. “Not anymore. I’m sorry how I acted toward you before. I tried to fight this. Sawyer, I....”
Sawyer got to his feet and went to him, the need to touch him as visceral as the need to breathe. He put a hand on his arm. “You’re going to tell me everything,” he said gently. “About thistown, about you. About whatever the hell this is. About why I need you, and why I’ve dreamed about you every night since I got here.”
Ciaran’s eyes flashed with fire again, and it made Sawyer smile.
He put his hand to Ciaran’s jaw. “About why your eyes change and your skin shimmers. About the water, and why that kid on the pier looked familiar.”
Ciaran sighed and leaned his face into Sawyer’s palm. “Promise me,” he murmured. “Just one thing.”
In that moment, after the intense make-out session and the way his heart was thrumming, or maybe it was the pain on Ciaran’s face, Sawyer would have promised him anything. “Okay.”
“You won’t leave.” Ciaran swallowed thickly. “Until you’ve heard everything. Then you can... decide.”
Sawyer wasn’t leaving. Not for five years. And certainly not after finding Ciaran. He’d never felt anything so intense, and he doubted he could leave even if he wanted to. His body—his heart—wouldn’t let him. “Okay.”
Ciaran let out a deep breath, drawing his eyes up to Sawyer’s. “So, you like sci-fi, paranormal, and monsters that aren’t human. How good are you with weird?”
Chapter
Fourteen
CIARAN
“Weird?”Sawyer asked. Then he burst out laughing. Not the reaction Ciaran had expected. “Weird is why I’m here.”
He cocked his head. “What? Why you’re here?”
Sawyer nodded. “Yeah. I saw that kid, on Constitution Dock. He shimmered, and his eyes did this thing. Like a goat.”
What the fuck? “Agoat?”
“Yeah. The pupils are horizontal lines. Not circles.”
“They’re notgoat’seyes,” Ciaran said, annoyed and offended.
“Well, they’re not fucking human, I can tell you that much,” Sawyer shot back. “The same thing I’ve seen your eyes do when you get all worked up?—”
“I don’t get worked up.”
Sawyer ignored that. “And in my dream, Fraser’s back tattoo. It had the same eyes.”
Ice water flushed through Ciaran’s veins. “YoudreamedofFraser?”
Sawyer squinted at him. “Your eyes. They just did the thing. What the fuck is that?”
Ciaran let out a slow, measured breath, grasping for any modicum of calm he could find. “You dreamed of Fraser?”
Then, as if to antagonise and torture Ciaran some more, Sawyer laughed. “Are you jealous?”
