CHAPTER 29 #5
He lay in the dark beside her. He could hear her breath.
He could feel the clasp at his sternum holding steady — the second heartbeat that had not gone away with sleep; the bond was the bond awake or asleep; the body knew.
He had not been the body of a man whose lover was bonded to him before.
He learned, in the dark, what it was to be that body.
At six forty-two, sunrise was thirty-five minutes away. He rose carefully from the bed. He padded barefoot across the rug to the southeast window. He waited there.
At seven seventeen, the blackout shades — by his override last night to Helene — rose.
The shades rose silently. They were good shades; they had been installed in 2019 with the rest of the retrofit; the motors were quiet.
They rose to the top of the window in eleven seconds.
The east window opened to the gray of the harbor and the granite of the city and the cold pale sun of a late-December morning on the Atlantic coast at forty-three north latitude.
The first sun on Julian Vance's face in five hundred years that he could choose to receive came in at seven seventeen and forty-six seconds.
He stood at the window. The sun was on his face.
It was the low pale December dawn light, the slow safe end of the spectrum, with no UV to speak of past the floor-to-ceiling glass that had been treated by the building in 1982 — a quiet long way from the noon sun that had killed a thousand of his kind. It warmed.
He had felt sunlight on his skin twice in five hundred years through accident, both at terrible cost — once at Compostela the morning of the brand, once at Lake Erie in 1812 when he held a dying surgeon on a beach for a quarter of an hour before he could get under cover.
Both times the light had been a knife. This morning it was warmth.
His pale gray eyes adjusted. He looked out at the harbor.
He turned.
She was awake. She had heard the shades rise.
She was sitting up in the bed in the white linen shift, the wool blanket at her hips, her chestnut hair loose at her shoulders, the brand on the brass pencil and the cobalt enamel pin on the bedside table catching the new light, the freckle at the corner of her jaw lifted in a small private smile.
"Quinn," he said.
She said: "Julian."
The third time. The second tonight.
She said: "Come back to bed."
---
## Eliza — 09:00
He came back to bed at seven nineteen. He lay beside me. The sun moved slowly across the southeast windows; by seven thirty the harbor was visible in full; by seven forty-five the granite of the city was lit pale gold along the eastern faces; by eight the cold pale light was on the bed.
He did not turn from it. He let the light be on him.
After fifty-three minutes of it, the brand on the inside of his left forearm — he held the forearm up to the light to check — was warm to the touch and the same shade of pink it had been at eighteen-hundred when Helene checked, no redder, no scorch.
Sixty minutes was Helene's safe canon for the bonded male of his age; he stayed in the light for fifty-three. He moved his forearm into the shadow of his own body at the fifty-third minute, by his own discipline.
We slept again. I slept against his sternum the way I have slept against his sternum every night since Sunday December the first. His right arm came around my shoulders.
His left forearm — the one with the brand — lay along the line of my own forearm under the blanket; the brand was at the inside of my wrist where my own chemical-burn scar is; the two wounds touched. Neither was cold.
At nine I wake.
The light is full in the room. He is asleep.
His face on the pillow is turned half toward mine; his mouth is slightly open; the silver streaks at his right temple are visible in the morning; his pale gray eyes are closed and the lashes are darker than I have noticed at any time in eight weeks, because the light, at this angle, is gentle with him in a way the lamp light has never been.
I lift up on my left elbow. I lean across him.
I kiss the brand.
The brand is on the inside of his left forearm. I lower my mouth to the silver scar tissue of the wheel, scabbed at four points where my teeth went in. The skin of the brand is the temperature of the skin around it. The wheel is a wound that is healing.
The brand is no longer cold.
I lift my mouth from the brand. He has opened his eyes. He does not say anything. He does not need to. The brand against my mouth is the answer.
Outside, the harbor is morning bright. Inside the master bedroom, the wood-burning fireplace is dead embers; the rosemary is ash; the four-poster's iron-darkened oak is warm where it touches the morning light.
The Sargent of Mathilde, still turned to the wall above our heads, has its blank linen back to the room.
The brass pencil on the bedside table is in its leather memo cover.
The cobalt enamel of my mother's nursing pin is at the lamp base, dark navy in the morning.
I lay my cheek on his sternum. He puts his hand at the back of my head.
The brand is no longer cold.