Page 21 of Forbidden Protector

Which is when headlights come off the county road doing something no vehicle should do on that surface.

The black F-350 comes into the lot sideways and corrects and stops dead in the middle of it, nowhere near a space. He leaves it running and shuts the door behind him.

He crosses forty feet of ice like it’s carpet.

"How long were you in there?"

"I don't know. Hours."

"Anybody else in that room?"

"No."

He goes past me without slowing and I hear him inside, one circuit, fast. Then he is back out and standing in front of me, and I have not moved because my legs have opinions about moving.

"Look at me."

"I'm fine."

"Look at me."

He does not wait for permission, which I would not have given. His hand comes up under my jaw and turns my face toward the pole light at the end of the row. His thumb is at the hinge of it, and he is close enough that the cold coming off his coat meets whatever heat I have left.

Dark eyes going over my face, and not the way he looked at me in the church. This is the way he looked at the snow with Jacob lying in it.

He reads my pupils in the bad light, one and then the other.

His other hand finds my wrist, two fingers go to the inside of it, and neither of us is breathing correctly.

Our breath goes up between us and gets tangled and hangs there and will not clear.

"Headache?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Since four."

His jaw does the thing I have learned to read and would rather not have learned.

"Nausea?"

"A little."

"You reach for something and miss it?"

I do not answer.

"Tatum."

"Once. A water glass."

He looks down at my hands, bare and going white at the knuckles, and then back up at my bare head.

Something in his face resolves into a number he does not like.

He lets go of me. Both hands, at once, like setting something down.