Page 36

Oh.

"That's a stupid rule and you know it," I said, once I found my voice. "You lose track of what you're doing either way. It's the same risk whichever one of us moves first."

"It is."

"So it makes no difference at all."

"It makes no difference at all," River agreed, still watching the ceiling. "I'm asking you to kiss me anyway."

Then he shut up.

The cold had been pouring off him all night and I'd quit noticing it, the way you quit noticing slight changes in the weather. I noticed it now. It came off his shoulder six inches from mine and crawled down my arm like ghostly fingers. When I breathed out I could see it. A little gray ghost of my own breath, coming apart in the light from the TV.

He didn't move. He wasn't going to, and he wanted me to know it.

So, I looked at his hands. Flat on his thighs, his knuckles pressed white into the denim.

Six inches.

One night ago I threw myself at the strongest witch on this continent across nine feet of gravel and never thought about it once. I've gone through a door at a Kishi demon when I had no magic. I've gone off a cliff in Hell.

We were separated by six inches and I couldn't do it.

I opened my mouth to argue with him.

Nothing came out.

Twenty-six years. Sealed as an infant so I wouldn't die. Glamoured so I wouldn't be seen. Punished in public to serve as an example. Hidden on pack land so I wouldn't be found. Everyone who has ever loved me has done it by deciding things about me in rooms I wasn't in.

And this guy right here wouldn't even lean in first.

"I'm scared," I admitted.

The words came out in my own voice but I didn't recognize them. I have never said that sentence in my life. Not at eleven with my face open. Not in Hell. Not in the ritual chamber while puking my guts out or with everyone pinned on the wall.

"I know," River murmured.

"Of you, a bit. Mostly not of you." Making myself keep going was like walking uphill in sand. "I said a thing to Sissily once. About you. I told her that if I let myself care about you and then you hurt me, I'd never recover from it. That it would kill me. She laughed, because she thought I was being dramatic, and I let her think it. That was easier than telling my best friend I meant it literally."

He didn't say anything. He didn't reach for me either. He stayed exactly where he was with his shoulder six inches from mine and let me get all of it out. Above our heads the lake house people went on renovating in silence.

"It's still happening to you. You're still losing whatever is left of your grace," I said. "Right now. While we're sitting here."

"Yes."

"And nobody knows when it stops."

"No."

"So, whatever this is between us, I'd be starting it with a countdown already running." My hands had started shaking and I pressed them flat against my thighs. "That's the part I can't get past. Everybody else gets to be stupid about a guy. My mother got to be stupid. She met some Fae in a city, fell in love and it killed her, but at least she never saw it coming. I'd be walking in with my eyes open."

"Hazel."

"Which is rich coming from me, I know." The laugh came out wrong. "There's a bounty on my head in every state that has a coven. Thursday, a room full of people decides whether I get to keep breathing. I could be dead before you get a chance to kill me."

The tension got so thick my throat was closing up. River took a deep breath as if to say something.

"Don't." I turned my head and he was right there. The cold coming off him was on my cheek. "Don't be nice to me right now. I'm psyching myself up."