The scarring on her stomach distracted him briefly. He splayed his hand against it, looking up, and waited for her to stop kissing the side of his neck before he said, “You didn’t have this when you went away.”

  “Mmmm?” Alice lifted her head, brushing her hair away from her eyes as she looked at him with bafflement. “Went away where?”

  “To school. You didn’t have this when you went away to school.” Her sweater had been pulled up almost to the base of her ribs that day in the forest when he traded his freedom for her life. Looking at her now, there was no question that it had been a fair exchange. He kept his hand splayed against her stomach, feeling her breath through the heat of her skin. “What happened?”

  Alice gave him a look that was half-amused, half-exasperated. “I’m nearly naked and sitting in your lap. Even if you want to tell me you’re not interested, your body isn’t voting with your brain on this one.” She placed a hand on the front of his open trousers, kneading gently. “Do you really think now is the time to quiz me about my scars?”

  “I think you’re leaving for Ann Arbor in a little over five hours,” he said, calmly. “Am I going to get another opportunity?”

  She hesitated for a moment before putting her hand over his, holding him to her. “It was my freshman year. Cheerleaders kept disappearing, so I went hunting. It turned out one of the biology majors had managed to get himself infected with some sort of parasitic slime-monster that kept taking over his body and, well, having a cheerleader buffet. Not alkabyiftiris slime, but close enough to make me uncomfortable. He didn’t want to give up his new bodily roommate. So I shot him. Seventeen times. And he handed me a bunch of my own skin. But it grew back. His skull didn’t.”

  “Ah.” Thomas shook his head, expression wry. “How very retired you were.”

  “At least it was educational. There are a lot of colors inside a possessed biology major.” She lifted her hand to tap one of the tattoos on his chest. “Now it’s your turn. What does this one represent?”

  Glancing down, he said, “Protection against hostile spirits, succubae, and banshees of all varieties.”

  “Yours are more useful than mine,” she said, before kissing the spot she’d tapped. “All mine do is raise nasty questions every time I see a new doctor.”

  “Indeed.” He kissed the side of her neck again, before asking, almost offhandedly, “What happened to your arm, Alice?” How did your father really die? Where are you going tonight when the moon comes up?

  “I cut myself making dinner,” she said smoothly. “Sometimes I’m so clumsy it hurts. Literally, when it puts me in the hospital.”

  “Ah.” You still won’t tell me, then. “I’ll have to remember that.”

  No, I won’t. “I’m not feeling clumsy right now,” she said, and twisted herself to straddle his lap more solidly. “Are you?”

  “Clumsy, no. However . . .” Thomas extricated both hands from the tangle of their bodies and gathered Alice into his arms as he stood. After a single startled squeak, she wrapped her arms around his neck, letting him support her back and knees. “I think this is a conversation better continued elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere being . . . ?”

  “I was considering the bedroom. Unless you had a better alternative?” He paused. “Or I’ve managed to misinterpret our discussion . . .”

  “Thomas, for me to be making more blatant advances, I’d have to be moving an entire army into position around your capital city.” Alice shook her head. “I didn’t think to bring any archers.”

  “And there’s definitely no room in your pants for the cavalry,” he said gravely. She hit him in the shoulder with the heel of her left hand. He smiled. “The bedroom it is, then, before you break out the catapults.”

  “Siege weaponry as a seduction tool isn’t very useful with most gentlemen.” Alice leaned in to kiss him languidly. It seemed to work well, and so she kept kissing him as he walked them across the room, breaking away only when they reached the stairs.

  “I don’t know,” Thomas said, beginning to climb up toward the second floor. “Most men are fond of large weapons. I think it’s more that most women never consider bringing ballistae into the courting process.”

  “Thank God.” Alice put her head against his shoulder, letting herself relax. “We might not be having this conversation if someone else had been willing to threaten you with a frontal attack.”

  Thomas paused to look down at her. She tilted her head slightly back to get a better view and then smiled at him.

  “Actually,” he said, “I think we would be.”

  5.

  * * *

  For the first time in well over a week, tangled in unfamiliar sheets and pressed against Thomas’ side like she was afraid he might vanish at any moment, Alice slept.

  Thomas didn’t.

  They had so little time left, and he wasn’t going to miss a second of it. He already regretted all the questions he’d never get to ask, all the things he’d never get to tell her.

  He lay awake, tracing the scars on her right shoulder with the fingertips of his left hand and trying to keep himself from watching the clock as it ticked slowly down toward time for her to leave for . . . wherever it was that she was actually going. Moonrise. She was leaving at moonrise, and she was wearing a silver ring around her neck, and that was a line of thought he didn’t particularly care to follow any further.

  He knew the Healy attitude toward infection. It never ended well. At least, not if you were even remotely fond of the infected being amongst the living, rather than part of the somewhat larger family memorial wall.

  According to the clock, the moon would rise in an hour and a half, and Alice would be leaving for . . . not Ann Arbor, exactly, but Detroit, or Grand Rapids, or whatever other name he felt like putting on “not here.” The only place he really wanted her to be was “here, with me,” and he knew—from what she’d said, from what she hadn’t said, from what they’d said to each other with hands and lips and years of apparently mutual frustration—that it wouldn’t be fair to even think the words too loudly. For whatever reason, she truly didn’t believe staying was an option. If he pushed her, he might lose even the little time they had.

  She didn’t believe telling you how she felt was an option, either, and look how that turned out, a corner of his mind offered, with traitorous mildness. She knows what she wants, but she doesn’t know how to go about getting it. You could just let her sleep. Let her figure things out in the morning.

  And if she’s a lycanthrope? he asked himself.

  If she’s a werewolf, the gun in the nightstand is loaded with silver. You can handle it yourself. She shouldn’t have to do it alone.

  Thomas let himself consider that as he continued to map her scars. He’d done worse things than killing a lycanthrope who didn’t want to live with her condition—and besides that, death wasn’t the only option. Perhaps it was the most appealing, if you happened to be a Healy, but death closed off all the others. The chance of a cure . . .

  The chance of a cure had been pursued for centuries, and no one had ever managed to find it. No. “Wake me when it’s time?” she’d asked when they both saw that she was drifting. “I don’t want to go yet.” And because he didn’t want her to go, either, he’d promised to wake her up.

  Thomas Price was a man of his word. If he broke it now, she’d never trust him again. That wasn’t how he wanted to end things, not when they’d taken so very long to begin.

  Fingers restlessly tracing the topography of Alice Healy, he settled back against the headboard, and watched the minutes counting down to goodbye.

  6.

  * * *

  Later, the whole night would seem almost like a dream, from unexpected beginning to inevitable end. The knocking at the door—Healy women had always knocked at that door, starting with Enid and running all the way down to her granddaughter, even when no one else bothered—the conversation that didn’t use words, but instead relied upon the ghosts of words that died unspoken; the time on the couch. The journey up the stairs that took a matter of minutes and seemed to take a thousand years. It was all jumbled up, frustrations and longing and fear spilled out too fast upon the floor, so nothing was entirely clear.

  He knew she’d squirmed out of his arms when they reached the bedroom, dropping her feet down to the floor before offering her hands, like she was giving him some sort of present neither one of them fully understood. He knew he’d taken them, and they’d simply stood there for a few minutes, looking at each other.

  Neither of them was wearing anything from the waist up unless you wanted to count Alice’s necklace. Somehow, he was fairly sure her father wouldn’t have approved.

  “Alice . . .”

  “Five hours to go,” she said and smiled. The acceptance in that smile—the acceptance, the resignation, and yes, the love—was impossible to deny, much as he might have liked to. “Don’t you think we’ve talked enough?”

  “Five hours,” he said reluctantly. “It isn’t enough time.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s all I’ve got.”

  “Next time, let’s not wait so long?”

  “Next time, I promise to talk to you while there’s a little more daylight left.”

  And then she was kissing him again, and somewhere between the door and the bed, they both lost what clothing they had left, and fell naked into the sheets, and time . . .

  Time ceased to matter for a little while, until it was three hours to go, and Alice smiled at him again, sleepy under the tangled hayride sheaves of her hair, and said, “Wake me when it’s time? I don’t want to go yet.”

  And because he was an honest man, and a fool, and yes, in love with this stupid, suicidal woman who was plainly expecting to die before morning, he nodded, and kissed her on the forehead, and said, “Rest.”

  And she had.

  7.

  * * *

  “Alice.”

  She stirred in her sleep as he shook her, making a small, protesting noise, but didn’t open her eyes.

  “Alice.”

  She still didn’t fully react. He shook her again, slightly harder.

  “Alice. Don’t make me ask you again.” Three times was a fair effort. If she didn’t open her eyes after this, he . . .

  “I’m awake,” she said blearily as she sat up, raking her hair away from her face with one hand. “Where’s my gun?”

  She woke up and looked for the weapons. Reluctantly fond, Thomas wondered again how the hell he could have believed for a minute that she was actually retired. He should have known better all along. “Depending on which one you consider ‘yours,’ it’s either on the floor, downstairs, or on the nightstand.”

  “Right, I . . . what?” Opening her eyes, she twisted around, and blinked at him. “I’m here.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re here.”

  “Seeing as how I can’t leave this house without unleashing an apocalypse of biblical proportions—or at least exploding or something of the sort—I don’t think that’s much of a surprise to anyone but you.” His confinement wouldn’t last much longer. As soon as she died, the bargain would be fulfilled, and he’d be free to go. Free . . .

  It still wasn’t a fair exchange.

  Alice—who’d never known the exact terms of his confinement, and, God willing, never would—continued blinking. “We’re here.”

  Thomas smiled despite himself. “Yes.”

  “We’re . . .” Alice paused, looking for a decorous term. There wasn’t one. “ . . . really kind of naked right now.”

  Thomas was growing decidedly amused. “You don’t wake up quickly, do you? Yes, we’re naked. This is my house, this is my room, and this is my bed. The gun on the nightstand is your gun, as evidenced by the slightly broken trigger. Which I can fix for you if you can postpone your departure for a while longer.”

  “Departure,” Alice echoed, and looked toward the clock on the wall. “Half an hour.”

  “I thought you might appreciate a little time to get ready before you had to go,” he said carefully.

  “Thank you,” she said, turned around, and kissed him again.

  There had been a certain amount of leisure when he carried her up the stairs, when she removed his trousers—time was short, but moonrise was still far enough away that it could be treated like another country. Now, it was just around the corner, and time was more than short. Time was past.

  His hands found her waist and jerked her across the bed to him, one sliding down to brace against her buttocks, the other up to the middle of her back. Alice responded by hooking one arm around his neck and dropping the other to his groin, breaking off the kiss long enough to whisper harshly, “Ten minutes.”

  “Fifteen,” he countered.

  “Help me get dressed. Buckles are hard.”

  “Deal,” he said, and kissed her again.

  8.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes passed too fast for words to measure.

  The bruises on his back would last far longer than that. So would the ones on her unbandaged arm and right hip, where his fingers had gripped her as if holding on tightly enough could make it so he would never be forced to let go. Pressed up against the borders of a deadline, facing the cold and looming country of the future, neither of them felt the need to be gentle. That time had passed.

  If anything, they were writing their farewell notes to one another, with sweat and bruises to serve for ink, with skin and muscle as the paper to place the words upon. Every scratch spelled out “I’m sorry.” Every “I love you” was a purple-black bruise that would shift slowly to yellow around the spreading edges, like a flower opening its petals. In the absence of more permanent memoirs, this goodbye would, at least, be something to remember for a day or two.

  For those who had a day or two left to remember things in.

  The clock counted down the minutes to farewell, and they burned every second like it was a candle, lighting it at both ends, fanning the flames with lips and fingers on skin, bodies pressed against each other so hard that their muscles were stretched and singing from the strain.

  Thomas wound his fingers into her hair and slammed her into the mattress, leaving her gasping for air as she locked her legs around his hips. “Stay,” he said, voice pitched low.

  “I can’t,” she said, between breaths, and raised herself to meet him. “Come with me.”

  “I can’t,” he said, and entered her.

  There were no words spoken aloud after that; only words written on the canvases of their bodies, his hand on her breast and between her legs, her hand at the small of his back, their lips chafed and very nearly burning where they touched.

  And then there was no more time.

  No more time at all.

  9.

  * * *

  Neither of them spoke much as Alice dressed, beyond her periodic requests for him to pass her one weapon or another, and the occasional request for help with a particularly troublesome buckle. Words would have done no good at all; not until they were armored from one another by clothing and convention. All he had to say to her was “stay.” All she had to say to him was “no.”

  She looked up as she fastened Fran’s gun belt around her own waist, leaving her fingers on the buckle. “Thank you,” she said.

  Thomas raised an eyebrow, pulling his trousers up around his waist and tying the cord. “For what?”

  Alice shrugged, very slightly. “Letting me stay?”

  “If you must thank me for something, thank me for letting you leave,” he replied flatly. He picked up a knife from the bedside table, sliding it into his waistband. “I’d really prefer you didn’t.”

  “Ann Arbor calls,” Alice said, as lightly as she could manage. She studied him for a moment before reaching around to the back of her neck and undoing the clasp on her chain. Her mother’s ring dropped into her waiting palm, draped with the loops and snarls of the necklace it had dangled from. “Here.”

  Eyebrows raised, Thomas looked from the ring to her face. “You’re offering me your mother’s engagement ring?”

  “Until I can come back for it, yes,” Alice said.

  He snorted. “There’s no need to lie on my account. I’m a grown man. I know a woman who’s walking off to die when I see one. Even if she calls it ‘Ann Arbor.’”

  “Or Grand Rapids,” Alice said, still holding out the ring. “I’m not lying on anyone’s account, Thomas. If I can come back—if there’s any possible way to get a return ticket on this trip—I will. I’ll come back here, to you, and get my mother’s ring. But if I don’t make it back, the Covenant gets the house, and everything in it that Naga doesn’t remove before they get here. I somehow doubt they’d give you anything to remember me by.”

  “And here I thought I was only getting bruises out of this arrangement,” he said, taking the ring from her hand. He studied it for a moment before saying, almost distantly, “Your grandmother would have approved of this, I think.”

  “You mean she’d have threatened to shoot you for deflowering me, and then demanded to know when we were getting married?”

  “Just so.” He fastened the chain behind his neck, taking some comfort in the feel of the warm silver hitting at the hollow of his throat. I wish you’d tell me where you were really going, Alice. I wish I could go with you.

  But then, isn’t it the nature of men to wish for what they’ll never have?

  Alice leaned over and pressed a soft kiss against his cheek. “I love you, Thomas Price. Just so it’s been said once, out loud. I don’t want any confusion on that point.”