The fire hissed, low and patient.
He spoke, finally, in the same voice he had used the first time he said my name:
“I have been thinking since yesterday.”
He stroked a hand down the length of my spine.
“I am going to close the observatory.”
He paused.
“I am going to seal the silver lake.”
Another pause. His other hand traced the curve of my head, a steady, repetitive motion, as if by touch alone he could memorize the shape of me.
“I am not going to wear another being’s face again, not even when politics demand it.”
He shifted me, until my cheek was directly over his heart.
“I am going to be only myself, only here, only with you. I have wanted to give it up for centuries and I never had a reason. I have a reason now.”
He said it like a vow.
I made a sound, not a word, not even a syllable, just the small honest noise of a person who knows she has been chosen and does not want to break the moment with language.
He kissed the crown of my head.
He did not move for hours.
The shimmer at his cheekbone stayed gold, the only-her gold, through the whole long night. It did not flicker. It did not fade. I closed my eyes and slept, with my face pressed to the promise of it, and woke, at last, to the feeling of being looked at—not as an object, but as the only thing he had ever wanted for himself.
Chapter 7
Iwokeinhisbed,in his shirt, in love.
It was not morning, or night, or any measured hour—only the amber from the fire in the grate, slanting its warmth through the grain of the old wood. The shirt was soft at my skin, the sleeves rolled to my elbows, the collar open and wide at the throat, still holding the shape of his body and the trace mineral heat of him. My legs were bare, crossed at the ankle, and the top sheet had casually twisted itself around my hips: you could have carved the scene into a lintel and called it domestic.
He was not in the bed.
He was in the chair by the fire, his left side to the hearth, both hands steepled at the bridge of his nose. Fully dressed. The black of his coat cut a sharp line against the honey-warm light, and the shimmer at his cheekbone was a blue-tinged gold.
I rolled up to sit, feet flat to the floor, arms loose at my knees. The bond at my wrist pulsed—slow, confident, deeper than it had ever been—and I felt it not as a leash but as a fact—a physical thing, as obvious as a heart or a bone.
He did not speak, but he did look.
I watched him watch me. He was very still. The fire caught in the mirror of his eyes, and for a half-second I wondered what I looked like from his vantage— human girl in the aftermath of a demon’s correction, bruised and raw and finally, unmistakably, awake. My body was quieter than I had ever known it. The old tension—the one that had lived behind my jaw, at the back of my spine, under the ridge of my left shoulder blade—was gone, or else it had been rerouted somewhere the air couldn’t touch.
Something surfaced in me—something that I had barely thought about since I left Brooklyn. I thought of her, Margot—the woman who’d worn my creativity as her own for so long. I wondered what she was doing now that I was gone. I had changed so much—was she still living the same life? Had she found someone new to suck dry?
He waited, and through the bond, I knew he could sense my disquiet, my curiosity.
So I said, “I want to see what’s happening on Earth.”
My voice was strong, full of a new authority, a new certainty.
He did not blink.
He asked, with a smile, “What, specifically?” Of course, he already knew.
