"A little is nothing."

  "Not to me," I said, still keeping my distance.

  "It's not your energy," he said. His eyes were still heated and hungry. "It's mine. And I think it was worth it." He took a step forward. "And I'd think it was worth it, even if I lost more."

  I held out my hand, palm-first. "Stop. Don't come closer. I don't trust you."

  His expression became less aroused and more dumbfounded. "You…don't trust me? I never thought I'd hear you say that."

  "That's not what I meant. Exactly. I mean, I don't know. I don't think you're going to rape me or anything, but you're…uh, persuasive. And you haven't been yourself lately. Ever since you got shot. You've been…I don't know. Risky. Like you're having a mid-life crisis."

  "I'm having a life crisis, Thetis. I don't want to be one of those people who discovers on my death bed that I didn't do anything. Why can't you understand this? You're so quick to encourage Maddie to do exciting things, but you're still trying to protect me."

  "It…it's different."

  "How?" he asked. "Why is it okay for her to take risks but not me?"

  "Because there's a big difference between going rock climbing and sleeping with someone who's going to take years off your life. How long is this phase going to last? You always said it wasn't about sex between us."

  "It's not," he said stoutly. "Not at all. I love you for…so many reasons. More than I can even begin to describe. But I don't want to die never having touched you. Really touched you."

  I stared. He was serious. How could he say he didn't want to die without touching me when touching me would only lead him closer to death?

  "You're only saying this because you haven't had sex in so long," I accused. "You got all turned on and now you're not thinking straight."

  "I am turned on," he agreed. "By you. The woman I love." He took another step toward me but still stayed far enough away so we didn't touch. "I want you, Georgina. So badly it kills me. I know you want me too. How can we go on being afraid of something we never tried? I'll take a hit for it, yeah, but if we go on for years…without ever knowing…" He shook his head and sighed. "Please, Georgina. Just this once. Let us be together—really together."

  I swallowed. He was so earnest. So sweet. So sexy. And so help me, he sounded reasonable. The calm way he spoke almost made me believe it didn't matter, that if I gave in and let our bodies come together, the loss would be small and inconsequential. I looked into his eyes and tried to convince myself of his rationalization, bringing up what Carter and others had said. That it was Seth's choice to make, nothing for me to worry about.

  But, of course, it was.

  "No," I said. "I can't. Please, Seth. Don't do this. Don't look at me like that. I love you too—so, so much. But we can't do this. I'm telling you, you just need to have sex. Go out and find someone—anyone. It doesn't matter. I don't care. It'll fix all this and make it easier for us to go on."

  "You would care," he said, voice deadly calm. "You say you wouldn't, but you would."

  "Not if it protects you."

  "Protecting me doesn't matter."

  "Damn it, it does!" I yelled, lunging forward. I drove my fists—lightly—into his chest, and all the emotion that had been building up throughout this argument suddenly burst out. "Don't you get it? I have to protect you! If anything happens to you—if I'm responsible for anything happening to you—it will kill me. It. Will. Kill. Me. I can't handle that. I can't handle anything happening to you. It will kill me!"

  I stopped my yelling and met Seth's eyes. Neither of us said anything. And as he stared down at me, I knew what he was thinking. Because I was thinking exactly the same thing. I had just given voice to what Hugh had said, what Seth had been worried about. In my outburst, I'd changed the balance of risk. It wasn't about Seth hurting. It was about me hurting.

  Gently, he reached out and caught my wrists. He removed them from his chest and let go. Backing up, still not speaking, he picked up his clothes and began dressing. I stayed where I was, naked and frozen.

  "Seth…" I said slowly. "I didn't mean it."

  "It's okay, Thetis," he said, fastening his pants and not meeting my eyes. "I understand. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I pushed you."

  "No, no…it's not…"

  "It's okay," he repeated. His voice was so, so neutral. So, so steady. It wasn't natural. "Really. But I think I need to go. I think it's better for both of us, and God only knows you have enough going on without me to worry about."

  I felt tears starting to fill my eyes. "I didn't mean…"

  "I know what you meant," he said. He straightened his shirt and finally looked at me. "But seriously…I should leave. We'll talk…I don't know. We'll talk later." He held out his hand, like he might touch my cheek, and then let it drop. With another sigh, he said good-bye and left.

  I stood exactly where I was, still not moving. My heart felt like it had just had acid thrown on it. It was burning and raw. Finally, finally, it all caught up with me. My knees gave out, and I sank to the floor. It was cold and hard against my bare skin. I drew my knees up to me and buried my face in them, wondering what I had done. Part of me screamed to go follow him, to beg him to come back, to tell him we could make love and have everything we had ever wanted. Another part, half-reason and half-pride, held me back.

  It was that same part that had stopped me from going after Andrew that day back in the garden after we'd fought about the Black Death. I'd let him go and gone out of my way to avoid him after that. When the plague finally came to our town, my bishop was one of the first to leave. I went with him and the rest of our household. Just like in The Masque of the Red Death, there was no true place to hide from sickness. Still, some places were better than others, and my bishop took care to keep to the better places. He survived.

  Months went by, and stories and rumors trickled in about the town we'd lived in. By that point, I'd grown weary of Geoffrey and decided it was time for me to move on. I got permission from my archdemon for a transfer to Florence and sneaked out of Geoffrey's house one night to make the long journey. Our old town was along the way, and a week later, I passed through it.

  A plague town wasn't quite like what modern people might imagine. It wasn't as though there were piles of bodies lying in the streets or anything. Not always. After all, Europe had survived the Black Death in the end, and civilization had still functioned through the worst of it. Crops were still grown, houses still built, babies still born.

  But the town seemed quieter and more melancholy than when I'd lived there. Andrew wasn't at the church when I stopped by, and an old man tending the grounds told me that Andrew was off helping some of his parishioners in one of the poorer districts.

  I found him there, inside the home of a brewer. The brewer had a large family—eight children—as well as a couple of brothers living with him. The house was small and cramped and filthy. Everyone in it was sick except for the brewer's wife who wearily tried to help Andrew take care of her family.

  "Cecily?" he asked in astonishment when he saw me. He was kneeling by a teenage boy. Something inside my chest blossomed with both joy and relief. Andrew was alive. He'd stayed, fought disease, and won.

  I strode forward and knelt beside him. The wife, giving water to a small girl, watched me uneasily. I wasn't in silk or anything, but I was clearly from a different class than theirs, and she didn't entirely know how to treat me.

  "You're alive," I breathed. "I've been so worried. So worried I'd never see you again."

  He smiled that gentle smile of his, and I saw more lines around his eyes than I'd seen before. "God didn't want to separate us quite yet," he said.

  I looked down at the boy. I'd figured Andrew was feeding him or something, but I realized then that the priest was actually giving him last rites. The boy wore no shirt, and I could see on his neck and in his armpits the tell-tale dark pustules that had given the plague its name. The plague usually did what it was going to do in about a week, but from his emaciated look, you would have thought he'd been dying for years. His eyes were fever-bright, and I didn't know if he even knew we were there.

  Bile rose in my throat, and I averted my eyes. Standing up, I told Andrew, "I'll let…I'll let you finish this and wait outside." I left the house, going out to where it was warm and things weren't dying.

  A while later, Andrew found me. I didn't ask if the boy was still alive. Instead, I said, "How many of them live? Out of all the ones you stay and risk your life for, how many of them actually survive?"

  He shrugged. "Three-quarters. Sometimes half, if they're very young or very old."

  "Half," I repeated flatly. "That's not very good."

  "If one more person lives because of me, then that's very good."

  I looked at that confident, serene face and sighed. "You're so damned frustrating."

  He smiled. I sighed again.

  "What can I do to help?"

  The smile disappeared. "Don't make light of this, Cecily."

  "I'm not. Tell me what to do."

  And that was how I found myself playing nurse in a small town in backwoods England. Honestly, there wasn't anything glamorous one could do to fight the plague. It was all about basics, keeping the people clean and supplied with as much food and water as they could take in. The rest was in the hands of their immune system and—if you believed Andrew—God. When my patients began declining past the point of no return, I usually stopped helping. I couldn't stand to watch and left them to Andrew and his prayers.

  But sometimes I'd see people come back around, people whom I'd given up on, and then I could almost believe there was a higher power at work. At least, I believed that until Andrew got sick.

  It started slowly at first, a fever and aches, but we both knew what that meant. He ignored it and kept working until the symptoms began compounding. Finally, he couldn't fight it. Neglecting my other patients, I devoted myself fully to him.

  "You should help others," he told me one day. His skin was pink and blotchy, and he was starting to get the dark spots around his lymph glands. Through all the sickness and fatigue, he was still beautiful to me. "Don't worry about me."

  "I have to worry about you. No one else is." It was true. Andrew had helped so many, but no one had come to his side, despite the fact that plague survivors tended not to catch it again.

  "It doesn't matter," Andrew told me, voice frail. "I'm glad they've survived."

  "You will too," I said obstinately, even though the signs were starting to suggest otherwise. "You have to go on so you can keep doing your annoying good works."

  He managed a smile. "I hope so, but I think my time in this world may be drawing to a close. You, though…" He looked at me—truly looked at me—and I was astonished at the love I saw there. I knew he'd been attracted to me, but I'd never expected this. "You, Cecily…you won't get sick. You will go on, strong and healthy and beautiful. I can feel it. God loves you."

  "No," I said sadly. "God hates me. That's why he lets me keep living."

  "God only gives us tasks he knows we can handle. Here, take this." He touched the gold cross around his neck, but he was too weak to take it off. "Take it when I'm gone."

  "No, Andrew, you won't—"

  "Take it," he repeated in as firm a voice as he could manage. "Take it, and whenever you see it, remember that God loves you and knows that no tragedy you face is ever too much for you to bear. You are strong. You will endure."

  Hot tears spilled down my cheeks. "You shouldn't have done this," I told him. "You shouldn't have helped them. You would've lived if you hadn't."

  He shook his head. "Yes, but then I wouldn't have been able to live with myself."

  Andrew lingered a few more days after that. I stayed with him, but every moment of it was agony. I hated watching what happened to him and was more convinced than ever that there really was no benevolent power looking after humans.

  He died peacefully and quietly, much as he'd lived. Another priest came to administer last rites when it happened, and Andrew's final conscious moments reflected hope and absolute faith in what would come next. I stayed to make sure the funeral arrangements were taken care of, not that there was much fanfare or anything. There were no viewings or fancy funeral halls in those days—at least not for men like him.

  I soon left England for the continent, and after a while, the pain of his death began to take on a new form. Oh, I still missed him—still burned and ached and felt like part of me had been ripped away. But added to that, guilt was starting to create a pain of its own. I felt like I should have taken better care of him. I should have insisted on him leaving with me when the plague came. Or maybe I should have gotten my hands dirtier while helping him tend the sick; it might have kept him away from whomever had infected him.

  Florence was a beautiful city, on the verge of the Renaissance when I got there. Yet even while living amongst all that splendor and art, Andrew's death tormented me for many years, the pain of guilt and missing him digging into my heart. It never entirely went away, but it did lessen—it just took a really, really long time. As Hugh had said, a long life simply means having more time to mourn.

  CHAPTER 21

  Five minutes after Seth left, I realized I'd made a mistake. Not about refusing him—that was the right thing to do. But I shouldn't have let him walk out like that. It was no way to end a fight.

  I was still angry after all these years that Andrew had died helping those people. I was still pained by his loss. To this day, I believed my stand in the garden had been correct, but nonetheless, I'd always regretted the separation that followed. Anger and pride had come between us, keeping us apart until it was almost too late. Even disagreeing with each other, we shouldn't have stayed away. We should have talked and tried to find some compromise.

  I refused to let this fight foster more bad communication and confusion between Seth and me. I wouldn't let it take away from the time we could have together. I had to fix things. Resolved, I grabbed my coat and purse and headed out the door after him.

  I half-walked, half-jogged down to the bookstore, where he'd left his car, but it was gone. I'd missed him. I stared at the empty parking lot for a few moments and then went inside. I'd finally bought Carter's stupid Secret Santa present and had left it in my office earlier. But when I went back inside and stuffed the gift in my purse, I found I didn't have the will to head back out. Instead, I sank into my chair and buried my face in my hands. How had things gotten so muddled with Seth and me? Had the shooting really given him such a new perspective on life? Would this have happened anyway?

  Yasmine's signature suddenly filled the room, and I looked up just in time to see her and Vincent materialize in front of me. Immediately, Seth left my mind.

  "Hey, Georgina," Vincent said. "I got your mess—"

  "I know about Nyx," I blurted out.

  Astonished silence hung in the air. I couldn't say for sure with nephilim, but I knew angels were rarely caught by surprise. Yasmine clearly had been.

  And, being an angel, she didn't try to deny anything about Nyx. She simply asked, "How?"

  "Because she's using me to do her dirty work." Their looks of amazement grew. "Only…I'm not exactly sure how she's doing it."

  The two of them glanced at each other, then back at me. "Start from the beginning," said Yasmine. "That's usually the way to go."

  And I did, first telling them about the dreams and the energy loss. After that, it was on to my weird knowledge of tragic events and the residual feelings of Nyx's activities. Finally, I explained how Erik and Dante had pieced it all together, linking what was happening to me with all of those unfortunate news stories.

  Yasmine sat down in a folding chair, tipping her head back as she thought. It was kind of like what Vincent had done in the hospital while ruminating. I wondered if it was one of those unconscious gestures couples sometimes picked up from each other. "Hmm…brilliant. That's how she's doing it without us finding her."

  "I never would have even thought of that," agreed Vincent, pacing. "Which, of course, is the point."

  "You know what she's doing to me, then?" I asked eagerly. The not-knowing was killing me.

  "Yep," said Yasmine. "But let's get the others first."

  "The other—"

  The question faded from my lips as three figures materialized in the room: Carter, Joel, and Whitney. Angelic auras crackled around me. I couldn't help a little envy. It might take me days to hunt down higher immortals, but Yasmine could do it with a thought.

  Carter smiled when he saw me. Joel looked outraged. Whitney looked confused.

  "What's going on?" Joel demanded. He seemed as angry as the last time I'd seen him. It was a good thing he was immortal, or he probably would have died from high blood pressure ages ago. "Why have you brought us to this…this…place." You would have thought he stood in an opium brothel, as opposed to a tiny office with badly painted walls.

  Yasmine leaned forward in the chair, hands clasped under her chin and elbows on her knees. Her dark eyes sparkled with excitement. "We've got her. We found her—or rather, Georgina found her."

  Joel and Whitney appeared flabbergasted. Carter didn't. From the look on his face, I felt like he'd been expecting it.

  "I can't believe it took you this long to figure it out," he joked.

  Whitney was not amused. "Explain this."

  Yasmine did, and when she was finished, the others were as impressed as she and Vincent had been earlier. Even Joel looked a little less pissed off.

  "Ingenuous," he murmured. "Every time she escapes, she always thinks up a new way to elude us."

  I looked from face to face. My emotions were raw after the blowout with Seth, and I was really low on patience at the moment. "Will someone finally tell me how I fit into this?"

  Carter walked over to me. He wore a beat-up blue flannel shirt and a Mariners baseball cap that looked like it had been put through a wood chipper. He was still smiling.

  "You must know by now that Vincent's a psychic. He's attuned to our world and in some ways has a higher sensitivity to supernatural activity than some of us do. It happens with humans sometimes." It was true. Angels weren't omnipotent and didn't possess all gifts. I nodded along, not letting on that I knew Vincent was actually a psychic nephilim. "Normally, he'd be able to find her trail pretty quickly. When she runs amuck feeding off mortal chaos, there's a kind of, I don't know…magical residue left where she's been. The energy she steals only sustains her; it isn't actually enough to obscure her. Someone like Vincent can…"