19. Chapter 19
Kalli
We drive out of Aurora at nightfall, and the towns get smaller until they stop.
For the first hour there are still lit windows and gas stations and a man walking a dog along a verge.
By midnight it’s one pump under a bulb with moths in it.
After that there’s nothing. Road. Trees.
Dark with no other light in it anywhere.
I’m not used to traveling the way he does. My clan flies in daylight because you can see weather coming, and every trip I’ve ever taken started in the morning and ended before dark. Now the sun is the thing we’re running from, and I’m learning how to deal with a day built backward.
“You do this every night?” I say.
“Drive?”
“No.” I pick my words. “Treat the nighttime like daytime.”
“Whenever I’m working.”
“And when you’re not working?”
“I’m still awake at night. It’s how my kind functions.”
I glance at his profile, the straight nose and broad forehead in relief against the darkness.
“Don’t you miss the sun?”
He nods. “Sometimes. But you get used to it. And I guess it’s a fair trade-off for immortality.”
I’m still looking at him. At the unlined features and the thick dark hair. A face that hasn’t aged in decades.
“You live forever.”
He shrugs. “If nothing sets out to kill me first.”
“You said there was a list,” I say. “Of things that want to kill you. Were you joking?”
He chuckles. It’s a good sound, warm and rolling. “When you live as long as we do, you’re going to piss off something at some point. And I’ve probably pushed my luck more than most.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?”
He shakes his head. “No. I might be young as a vampire, but I’ve lived a good long life by human standards.” He shoots a look at me. “You should understand that. Dragons practically live forever, don’t they?”
“Not forever. But we age different. Slowly. I think it’s why some of us don’t realize that we need to keep the clan lines healthy until it’s too late.” I push down a shudder as I remember Ilmar Vex and his paper-thin skin.
He looks at me as if he knows what I’m thinking. “We need to stop for fuel.” He nods toward a gas station coming up ahead, guiding the truck off the road toward it.
He stops at a pump and climbs out. I sit back with my feet on the dashboard and roll my neck from side to side. A truck comes in behind us and sits there with its engine running.
Gideon doesn’t look at it directly. He fills the tank, pays, gets in, and takes the next turn instead of the one on the map.
“Was that anything?” I ask.
“Probably not.”
“You took the wrong road for probably not?”
“If it might be something, I take the wrong road. Every time.” He checks the mirror. “There’s one reason to sit at a pump at one in the morning with your engine running, and it isn’t fuel.”
“He could be sleeping.”
“He could be. He wasn’t.”
Nothing comes of it. My whole body stays lit up for an hour afterward, waiting for something that never arrives.
“How do you tell?” I ask when the road has been empty long enough that I believe we’re not being followed. “Between somebody who’s dangerous and somebody who’s just curious.”
“Mostly I don’t, at first. I watch what they do next instead of what their face is doing.” He checks the mirror again out of habit. “A man who’s only curious goes back to his own business inside a minute. A man who’s dangerous finds a reason to stay in your space.”
“You know a lot about this.”
“It’s why my maker picked me.”
“And you like it?” I’m staring at his profile again. I like the shape of his lips.
“It’s the only thing I know,” he says.
“Why don’t you try other things?” I ask. “It’s not like you haven’t had time to find something else to do.”
“What?” He looks at me. “You mean like a lifeguard?”
I snort out a laugh.
“Or a professional surfer?” he says.
“Or a swimsuit model.” I start to giggle. “You’d do well at that.”
“Thank you.” He flutters his eyelashes at me. They’re really long for a man. And I’m staring again.
“You have a good sense of humor,” I tell him.
“Have I?” He glances at me. “I’ve never thought about it.”
“Maybe you don’t notice because you work alone so much.”
“Yes.” He frowns slightly. Then he’s silent, and I wonder if I said the wrong thing.
The sky starts going gray somewhere in the last hours before light, and he pulls off into a motel with eleven rooms and nobody at the desk.
He pays cash through a slot, and comes back with a key.
The room is small but clean. A framed print of sunflowers on one wall, and curtains that were probably cheerful once.
“This will do,” he says, glancing around.
Then he takes a roll of tape out of his bag, and goes round the room and tapes the curtains to the wall down both sides and across the bottom.
He pushes a towel along the gap under the door, and does the bathroom window too.
It takes him four minutes. He’s done it a thousand times; I can see that from how little he thinks about it.
“How bad is it?” I ask. “If it gets in.”
“Depends how much.” He sets the tape down. “A hand’s worth through a gap, at this angle, is a deep burn that won’t heal well. Full sun with nothing in the way of it, and there wouldn’t be anything of me but dust.”
He says it casually.
I sense the change outside as the sun comes up; the birds coming alive and the increase in traffic. People moving about.
“I’ll rest until night,” he says. And then he goes down. I’ve never seen it. It isn’t like sleep. He’s sitting on the end of the bed with his boots still on, and then he tips back against the pillow, and he’s gone.
I sit on the floor with my back against the door for a long time, because there’s nothing else to do and I’m not tired at all.
It’s the first time I’ve been able to look at him properly.
He doesn’t breathe. I knew that; I sensed it from the start. Watching it is different. His chest doesn’t move. Nothing on him moves. The line of his throat, the hand fallen open on the blanket, the mouth I’ve been trying not to look at—all of it is completely still.
He is the least alive thing I have ever been in a room with.
I want him anyway.
That’s been true since the moment I set eyes on him, and it doesn’t get any less true at nine in the morning with the curtains taped shut.
I get up and check the tape again before I lie down.
I sleep badly, and when I wake, the strip of light along the bottom of the curtain is gone. He’s sitting on the end of the bed pulling his boots on.
“Ready?” he says. I nod, and we head out to the truck. We’ve settled into an easy rhythm now. I put my boots on the dash again, and he doesn’t tell me to move them.
We get onto the road, and he looks over his shoulder to check the lane is clear.
I’m looking at his hands. They sit at the bottom of the wheel, loose, one thumb hooked over.
Big hands. His wrists come out of his cuffs thick and hard.
When he shifts gear, the tendons move under the skin.
My dragon clearly has a thing for hands. Or I do. Both of us.
“All good?” he says, and I jolt, snatching my eyes back to the windshield. I must have made a sound because he’s frowning at me.
“Fine. Just tired.” I fake a yawn.
“Why don’t you sleep?” he says, focusing back on the road. “You didn’t rest well at the motel.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard you.”
“You can hear when you sleep?”
“I hear everything, all the time.” He aims another look at me. “Sit back. Close your eyes.”
The cab is small. It’s impossible not to brush against him occasionally. If I doze off now, I’ll probably wake up drooling against his shoulder.
“I’m good,” I say. “I’d rather talk to you. Tell me something useless.”
“Useless how?”
“Not the job. Or what might be behind us. Tell me what you actually like.”
He thinks about it.
“Maps,” he says. “Old ones. Before they got everything right. I like the parts where the mapmaker just wrote ‘here be worse country’ and left it blank.”
I grin. “That’s a very ‘you’ answer.”
“A ‘me’ answer?”
“You know. Offbeat. Quirky. You could’ve said you like bikes. Or guns.”
“I like bikes and guns too. But I prefer old maps.” He reaches back for the map on the seat behind him, and his shirt pulls tight across one shoulder while he twists. His hair brushes his collar. It’s thick, and longer than most men wear theirs, and it curls against his neck.
You’re staring again, dammit.
I look at the trees.
“Your turn. Ask me something useless.”
“What’s the worst meal you’ve ever eaten?” he asks.
“A council dinner when I was nineteen. Roast something, I never found out what, served under a sauce so thick you could stand a spoon up in it. I ate all of it because my grandmother was watching and would have known if I hadn’t.
” I make a face just remembering it. “I threw up afterward and told everyone it was the wine.”
“Was it the wine?”
“It was absolutely the sauce.”
He laughs. It’s happening more and more often. I’ve started watching for it.
“When did you last eat?” I ask.
He glances over.
“That isn’t a useless question.”
“No. But you’ve watched me eat twice, and you haven’t taken anything. I’d like to know whether that’s manners or whether you’re rationing.”
“There’s a cooler in the back.”
“What’s in it?” I know it’s a stupid question even as I ask it.
“Blood, Kalli. I drink blood.”
“Oh. Right. I knew that.” My voice is small. I feel like an idiot.
A mile goes by.
Then, without my asking again, he says, “I fed at Aurora before we left. I’ll feed again when you’re safe with your clan. In between, I make do. I’d rather you didn’t have to watch it.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“I know exactly what you’ve seen.” He says it flatly. “That’s the reason.”
I’m not sure how to answer that, so I don’t say anything.
“Your turn again,” he says, after a while. “What did you actually want to be, before all this? Not what an heir is supposed to want.”
“A pilot who never has to land anywhere important.” I say it before I’ve decided to. “I liked being up on the boundary lines more than anything else the clan gave me to do. Nobody up there needed anything from me. I could just fly the line and come home.”
“Flying the lines was a job too, wasn’t it?”
“It was a job I chose. That’s different.” I look over at him. “What about you? Before the alley, before any of it. What did you want?”
He’s quiet long enough that I think he isn’t going to answer.
“I don’t remember wanting much,” he says finally. “I was thirty-five and tired and working for men who didn’t pay on time. I wanted better work. That was all of it.”
“That’s a small thing to want.”
“Sometimes, the small things are the hardest.”
We drive another twenty miles before either of us says anything else.
Hours before the sky starts changing, he turns off onto a service road.
“There’s an Aurora safe house at the end of the road,” he tells me.
We stop at a cabin with one room, a wood stove, a single bed against the far wall, and a chair that’s seen better decades near the door.
He does the windows first. Tape, and a folded blanket over the one that faces east, then he stands back and checks it.
Then he looks at the chair.
I look at the bed.
“I’ll take the chair,” he says, before I can offer to take it myself.
“You always take the chair.”
“It’s a good chair.”
“It’s a terrible chair. I can see the stuffing.”
“It will do.”
He crouches at the stove with his back to me and gets it lit. His sleeves are pushed up past the elbow. The muscle moves in his forearm when he works the door catch. His shirt has come loose at the back, and the whole line of him from shoulder to hip is right there in the firelight.
I sit down and pull my boots off, and take a great deal of interest in my own socks.
I want him.
My head keeps circling around to that, and it’s not getting any easier.
Is it the drug?
My body did strange things in that valley, and I haven’t fully trusted it since.
Maybe it’s gratitude. He did save me, after all. Or maybe a year without being touched like that? Maybe I’m just horny.
Nice, Kalli. Very classy.
But there’s got to be something to explain this nagging need.
What difference does it make? He turned you down.
I don’t know if he wants me at all, under whatever was making him careful that night. Maybe I’m just a job, and he’s being decent while he does it.
I’m not going to ask. Asking and finding out that he’s just being polite will make me want to crawl into a hole and die a quiet death.
So I won’t ask.
“How are your hands?” he asks, yanking me back to reality.
I stare blankly at my palms for a moment. “Fine,” I say. “Good as new.” I’d forgotten all about the blisters, to be honest. I took the wrappings off the day we left Aurora.
“Let me see.” He crosses the room to check. He takes my wrist and turns it over.
“I’m fine. Really.” I’m staring at where he’s examining my palm. His hand is twice the size of mine. It closes around my wrist with room to spare. He runs his thumb once across the new pink line where the burn was.
My whole body goes tight. Heat, fast, up through my chest and into my face. My breath catches on the way in. For one full second I want to close the gap between us and see what he does if I throw myself against him.
I don’t.
I pull my hand back carefully and fight down everything my body is screaming at me to do right now.
No.
Wrong, my dragon says.
She’s been quietly watching for two days, and she picks now to step in.
I said no, I tell her.
Heat comes up under my sternum, slow and even, and stays there.
“Are you okay?” He’s frowning at me. “You said your hands were fine.”
“They are.” My voice is too high.
The heat in my chest goes hot enough to hurt. I feel a ripple of scales beneath my skin and my breath has quickened.
The next second I’m standing.
“I need to get some air,” I blurt. Then I’m heading out the door before he gets a chance to respond. I stop on the small porch outside, wrap my arms around myself, and squeeze my eyes shut.
Pull yourself together!
I start to pace. Quick, agitated strides from one side to the other. My beast is dragging at me every step.
Go back inside, she says. He’s right there.
I shake my head. I’ve spent over a year forcing her down. And these past few days, it’s become harder. Now, I feel my own limbs resist me. I’m turning to the door. My head follows. I didn’t decide to.
Stop, I tell her. Stop it.
The warmth in my chest has spread lower, and there’s no mistaking what she wants now.
Get a freaking grip! He doesn’t want you.
My feet move to the door. My vision has fractured into the facets that she sees through.
I said stop!
She doesn’t stop.
The last thing I’m aware of is my own hand rising toward the door.
I’m not the one reaching for it.