Chapter 10 Cora #2
The fire burned down.
Veron did not eat human food. He did not need it.
He ate a small piece of the dried meat Cruz handed him because Cruz handed it to him without explanation and the cohort-rule of taking-what-the-senior-passes overrode the Lucian-biology-default-of-not-eating-human-food.
Veron took the meat. He chewed it. He swallowed it. He did not comment.
Renn watched the meat-taking.
Renn did the Vampyren-formal nod at Veron afterward. The senior-junior nod he had given Drew in Vegas. Veron returned the nod with a Lucian-equivalent: a small bow of the head at the throat-line, the bow Rael had once told me was the Lucian acknowledgment of a hand-pass.
The cohort was forming.
I had not signed up to be the lead of a cross-species cohort.
I had signed up to bring six people home.
The cohort had happened anyway. Renn had told me at the Albuquerque cache that the cohort would happen whether or not I had signed the paper for Drew.
He had been right. The cohort was happening for Veron now too.
The cohort was the kind of thing nobody could plan and everybody could recognize when it was there.
The thing was there.
* * *
It was past midnight when I stood up at the fire.
The drum was burning down. The light was contained, the way Cruz had built it to be, the kind of light that did not show from the road.
Veron sat across from me. He had not slept yet.
The long Lucian-sleep was something he would do on his own clock, not on the team's.
Renn was at his right. Renn had been at his right for forty minutes without moving.
Cruz was at the drum, the SAW reassembled and oiled, the Marine-evaluative face gone now to a quieter one.
Sylvia was at her field kit. She had finished the medical sweep at eleven.
She had stayed by the fire afterward instead of going to her cot.
She was not sleeping. She had the medic-evaluative face that registered when she registered something the rest of the team had not yet registered.
Drew was beside me.
He had been beside me since the fire was lit.
The Illinois sky was the clear I had not seen in a year.
The cab door was open. The Milky Way was a band over the broken half of the barn roof.
The cold dry-air smell that meant the Oklahoma supercell had pulled the moisture east and there was nothing in the atmosphere between us and the universe.
I had been a kid in Illinois. The sky was a thing I had not let myself remember.
I had thought, an hour ago, that Drew and I would go out behind the barn at midnight.
I had thought it the way a woman who had watched the genre of her life from the outside for thirty years would think it. The quiet step away. The two-of-us on the wall. The four seconds in the dark. The walk back inside.
I had thought it. Drew had stood up beside me when I stood up. He had been ready to follow me out. He had not asked where. He had not needed to ask.
I had turned around.
I had walked to the fire instead.
Drew said, low: "Cora."
"I am not going out behind the barn."
"Okay."
"I count six people inside this barn. You are two.
I am two. Renn is three. Cruz is four. Sylvia is five.
Veron is six. The six of us are the count tonight.
The going-out-behind-the-barn is the count that has been held inside the four-second-private-kiss for thirty years of romance novels I never read because I was too busy counting bullets.
I am not the woman who keeps the count outside the count.
The count is in here. The six of us are the count. "
Drew looked at me.
The half-clinical sweep was completely gone. He was looking at me the way he had looked at me on the staircase landing in the storm. The not-saying that had become a saying, the seeing.
He said: "Cora."
"Yes."
"Tell me the count we have."
He had asked me to tell it. I told it.
"Two hundred and fourteen humans at Mojave.
Eleven Vampyren. One half-Vampyren adult, which is you, here.
Six Lucian who'd stuck at Mojave, plus Veron, who is now seven Lucian.
One baby at Mojave, which is Auriel. Five on the team, here, plus Veron, which is six in this barn.
Six in Urbana, waiting. Three children we are counting at Mojave: Auriel, Mira, and Sebastian.
Two children we are going to count at Urbana, on the count of the six: Deedee and one other I do not know yet.
Two adults who are counting them: you and me.
One photograph in my chest pocket. One carving on the dashboard with a 7 burned into it.
One copy of Steinbeck on the cab shelf. One stone in your coat pocket.
One chipped diner mug in the cup-holder. "
"You counted me."
"I counted you between eleven Vampyren and six Lucian."
Veron's head turned. Not fast. The Lucian-slow turn that Rael did when something on the network had moved.
Veron's network was silent — Renn had told me as much, the southern-Tyvor frequency Veron had once carried was now an empty channel — but the gesture was the gesture.
The body remembered the network the body had left.
Drew said, low: "I have been counting myself since the bridge."
"I know."
"I am going to count myself in front of them."
"I know."
"I can't make the count work for you, Cora."
He said it to me. He said it across two feet of fire-warmed air with Renn at his ten o'clock and Veron at his two and Cruz at his five and Sylvia at his seven.
He said it with his voice low enough that the words were ours and clear enough that the words were everyone's.
The cohort heard him. None of them moved.
"I know," I said. "I wasn't asking you to."
He nodded.
He reached up.
His hand was at my jaw. The half-Vampyren temperature against my skin, ninety-five, a few degrees cooler than human, the difference small enough to notice and large enough to remember.
The one heart in his chest beat its double-pulse rhythm.
I could feel it in the heel of his palm.
The two-notes-per-beat his body played that no human heart played, the cadence Sylvia had told me about once at the Mojave camp the way a medic tells another lay person something so the lay person stops being surprised by it.
I had been surprised by it anyway. I was surprised by it now.
He looked at me.
He did not look at the cohort.
He looked at me and he said, in his American-Midwest cadence with the slight foster-mother lilt of Steinbeck-read-aloud underneath: "May I."
"Yes."
I kissed him.
His mouth was the half-Vampyren-cool that was not as cool as the Vampyren-cool I had touched four times in my life (Mark, once, by accident in the supply line; Loren, twice, the formal cheek-kiss the council Vampyren did at Christmas; Veron, never yet; Rael, never) and not as warm as the human-mouth-warm that I had not touched in eight years.
It was its own temperature. It was Drew's temperature.
The temperature was a thing I had been thinking about without knowing it for nine months.
His hand stayed at my jaw.
Not pressing. Just there.
The chipped diner mug was not in his hand. The book was not in his hand. The carving was not in his hand. The stone was in his coat pocket and the coat was between his back and the metal drum's heat and the only thing on me in his hand was the line of my jaw.
I kissed him.
He kissed me back.
It was not a long kiss. The kiss was the kiss two people had who had been driving across the country for ten days and were about to walk into a fight in eighteen hours and were not going to pretend the kiss was nothing but were also not going to keep the kiss outside the count.
The kiss was the kiss. It was four seconds. It was the count.
I pulled back.
He looked at me.