Until there was only one place left to check.
Hel gave her a serious look.Are you certain?
Yes,Sam nodded, her heart in her mouth as she let the nightgown slip into sea-foam around her ankles. For a moment, Hel didn’t touch her. Wind gusted through the window, raising gooseflesh over Sam’s bare stomach. Her breath shuddered in her throat. Hel swallowed convulsively.
“Hel?” Sam whispered, suddenly aware that she stood in front of Hel, naked in the moonlight. That Hel was looking at her with a sharp almost pain in her eyes. That she wanted Hel to touch her again?—neededher to touch her again. That Hel undid her in ways she’d never known she could be undone, even when she wasn’t trying. Especially when she wasn’t trying.
“I?—yes.” Hel’s clever tongue was unexpectedly tied.
It took everything in Sam to stay still, her coherence fraying as Hel’s fingers drew reverently down her chest, skimming the softness of her belly to trace the hollows of her hips, shuddering with the need to pull Hel to her, to touch her as she was being touched. It was terrifying, how badly Sam wanted her, this brilliant, fierce, infuriatingly secretive woman, who was so good at everything Sam was not. Who could somehow pierce to the heart of her with a look. Who didn’t care about the rules or expectations or anyone’s opinions but her own... and somehow Sam’s.
It left her dizzy with desire, a tremor moving through her body like a whimper. Until at last Hel stopped, her hands tightening into fists, and she stepped back, turning her face away, as if afraid of what Sam would read there.
“What is it?” Sam said, panic bleeding into her voice as she was pulled back to the reason for this whole endeavor. The marks. The ghosts. The Wild Hunt. “Did you find something?”
“There’s no tattoo,” Hel managed, her voice thick. She held out Sam’s coat to her, without looking. “Here, you’re cold.”
But Sam wasn’t cold. Not when she looked at Hel.
“I think,” Sam said, feeling greatly daring as she pushed the coat aside, “perhaps I should check you.”
Hel’s sharp intake of breath was all it took: Sam was lost. The way she gazed at Sam, raw with desire. Sam wanted to devour her, to tangle her hands in her hair and hook her fingernails in her flesh, to take her, wounds and teeth and all. And if that made her monstrous, she no longer cared?—they could be monsters together.
“This is a bad idea,” Hel managed, her voice a ragged ghost of itself. The rawness of it set Sam’s every nerve on fire. She wondered what it would take to unravel Hel’s iron self-control, what she would sound like when that brilliant mind of hers lost the ability for coherent thought. And suddenly, Sam needed to find out.
“The worst.” Sam traced her fingertips down Hel’s cheek to the hollow of her throat, felt Hel’s pulse leap at her touch, her eyes fever bright.
“I’m a monster,” Hel rasped, but she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from Sam’s. The want in her eyes clear and sharp as broken glass.
But Sam needed to hear her say it. “Is that a no?” She withdrew her hand.
“No, it’s?—” Hel grasped Sam’s hand, pulled it back to her.“Please.”It was the first time she could ever recall Hel saying the word. It electrified her, becoming just one more thing she wanted to hear Hel say again and again and again.
“I have to warn you,” Sam said, her voice scraped to a whisper as she knotted Hel’s crimson tie around her fist, pulling a whimper from Hel that threatened to ruin her before she’d even gotten started. “I’m not feeling quite so gentle.”
The helpless look in Hel’s eyes then, as if Sam were a siren, as if Hel yearned to wreck herself on her shores. It was everything. “I’d be disappointed if you were.”
After, they lay tangled together in the moonlight, damp and trembling with exhaustion. But even spent, Sam was unable to stop marveling at the woman bared before her?—at the unexpected softness of her. Reaching out to touch her, to reassure herself this was real. A spray of freckles covered the other woman’s bare back, her skin knotted with scars?—the starburst of a bullet here, the jagged troughs of claws there. Sam traced them with her fingertips, pressing a kiss to the most brutal scars. Hel’s answering shiver coursed through her, intoxicating and addictive. Could it be like this forever? The two of them working together on cases, sharing a bed at night... It was customary for women to take on female roommates. No one had to know. Not Mr. Wright, not Hel’s brother. Aunt Lucy would know?—that much was inescapable?—but Sam felt certain they might come to some sort of arrangement.
“Do you think we might be like this, always?” Sam murmured, heady on the scent of Hel, like gunpowder and rosin. A scent that had come to smell like home.
“What, in bed?” Hel said, curling around to look at her. The curve of her shoulder was bleeding from the glass. They might have moved, but neither one of them had possessed the patience for that. Sam resisted the impulse to lick the blood, feeling unsettled at the strange urge but so unspooled by recent events that she couldn’t bring herself to care overly much. Not even when she caught sight of her shadow’s finger.
It was just a shadow, she told herself. What could it do?
Sam laughed. “A bed would be an improvement. I meant...”
“I know what you meant,” Hel said, turning to kiss the tip of Sam’s nose.
Sam bit her lip. “Stay with me tonight?”
“You know I can’t,” Hel said, shifting in the moonlight. “Van Helsing?—”
That, Sam thought, was very nearly as bad as mentioning her brother. But before she could say as much, her breath caught in her throat.No.It couldn’t be. Her imagination, that was all. Or a vision. She looked out the window, at the dark cloud passing over the moon.
“What is it?” Hel said, all drowsiness fled.
“Hold still,” Sam demanded, pushing Hel back into the position she’d held moments before, not daring to breathe. The wind sighed, the moon slowly unveiling herself until her pale light shone through the window once more?—and there it was.
