Page 11

And he’s beautiful. His face looks like someone carved it with a lot of patience: high cheekbones, a straight nose, a serious mouth. His eyes are pale silver-gray, and they’re on me.

“William,” Lenart says. “Tara Iverson.”

William crosses the room without a sound and holds out his hand.

I take it, braced for heat after Merek, for strength after Tav. Instead his skin is cool and smooth, like stone that’s been sitting in the shade, and when his fingers close around mine, everything in me goes quiet. The noise in my head, the hundred questions on my legal pad, the vampire and the demon and the minotaur. All of it settles.

Then his hand changes.

I feel it happen under my fingers. The faint give of skin goes out of it. His palm turns hard and cold and grainy, and the gray of his knuckles darkens and dulls, spreading up past his wrist. Within a couple of seconds I’m not holding a man’s hand. I’m holding a carved one.

He looks down at our hands as though they belong to someone else. A muscle moves in his jaw. Slowly, deliberately, I watch him take hold of himself, and the stone loosens again into skin.

I take my hand back. He lets it go.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he says. His voice is low and careful.

“Why? You weren’t there.”

“That’s why.”

I look at his hand, hanging at his side, gray skin again. Then I hold mine out, palm down, between us.

“Does it happen every time?”

He doesn’t move. Behind me, Merek swears.

“Ms. Iverson,” Lenart says, in the tone you’d use on someone reaching for a hot stove.

I don’t take my hand back. After a long second, William lifts his, and I touch one fingertip to the back of his knuckle.

The stone comes up under my finger like frost spreading across a window. It runs over his knuckles and down between his fingers and up past his wrist, and he stands there and lets it, perfectly still, watching my face the whole time.

“Yes,” he says.

I lift my finger away. It takes him longer to bring the skin back this time.

He steps back to the wall beside the bookshelves, folds his clawed hands in front of him, and goes on watching me.

Lenart has gone back to his chair, but he’s sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, and his jaw is tight. Merek is leaning against the desk with his arms crossed, and the lines on his arms are still glowing. Tav has squeezed himself into the corner by the bookshelf, where he has the clearest view of the door and of me. William hasn’t moved from the wall.

“You knew,” Merek says to Lenart. “Last night. You knew, and you didn’t call me.”

“I said we’d discuss it later.”

“You could have warned us.”

“And said what, precisely?”

“Anything,” Tav says from his corner.

Lenart closes his eyes briefly, like a man counting to ten in a language with very long numbers.

“Later,” William says quietly. It’s the first thing he’s said to any of them. Merek opens his mouth, looks at William, and shuts it again.

I’ve been a bartender long enough to know when four men are having an argument they don’t want me to hear.

“Okay,” I say. “What was that?”