Page 19 of Beds and Blades

I imagined him there. Armor gone, firelight painting every hard ridge of muscle across his chest and abdomen.

I pictured the two of us on that bed. Me on my hands and knees in front of him. His hands on my hips with that same authority he brought to military command. The heavy oak frame creaking steadily under the force of each thrust.

My body registered its opinion of this mental image with enthusiasm.

I dragged my attention away before my imagination could continue embarrassing itself.

Compose yourself, Meghan Callahan. Right fucking now.

“Noted,” I said, in a voice I considered reasonably professional.

He moved through the keep.

I kept up.

He then stopped at a door on the upper level and pushed it open.

The room was small and warm and honest. Stone walls with the same dark, worn quality as the corridor. A hearth—smaller than the ones downstairs but present, already lit, doing its job. A bed that was narrow but real. A window facing east.

“It’s modest,” he said, from the doorway.

I looked at the hearth. I looked at the bed. I looked at the desk with its single candle and thought about the field I had woken up in four hours ago.

“This morning, I only had a field. This is wonderful. Thank you for this.”

“You are welcome. If you need anything,” he said, “tell me.”

“I’ll make a list,” I said as playfully as I could.

“I imagine you will,” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting. “I will have someone bring you clothes later.”

***

With Skip gone, I had some time to myself in my new quarters. More importantly, I finally had time to think.

The more I thought about my situation, the more it resembled the world I had spent the last three years studying.

I had spent three years studying ancient military history in a world that had evolved past everything I had studied. Drones. Satellites. Hypersonic missiles. Cyberwarfare. A soldier in Nevada could ruin a terrorist’s day from six thousand miles away while drinking a Mountain Dew.

My knowledge had been a love of the past. I found dead generals more interesting than living ones and had constructed an entire academic career around this premise.

Here, the dead generals might actually be useful.

I sat with that for a moment.

Then I became aware of how tired I was.

The adrenaline that had carried me through the day was finally running out. I had been transported to another world, interrogated by a magical truth-reader, briefed on a forty-year vampire war, and introduced to a man who looked like he had been engineered in a laboratory for the specific purpose of distracting me.

I decided sleep was the appropriate response.

The sweater came off first. Then my jeans.

I folded them with automatic neatness—a childhood habit that had apparently survived interdimensional travel.

They were the last things I owned from my world—the red sweater, the jeans, the dead iPhone, the notes, the steel Casio on my wrist that had stopped working, and the glasses I had straightened by reflex approximately forty times today.

I set them on the desk.