“Dammit! You big… lurker! Is this how you get your kicks? This isn’t funny!”
“I wasn’t lurking,” he said, looking irritated. “I was waiting for you. I know you hate being alone outside at night. I thought you could hear me, knew I was here.”
My mouth opened in surprise.
“It looked like you and River were having a private talk, so I waited here.”
Now I felt terrible, accusing him when he’d been being thoughtful. Even kind. His eyes looked brown in this dim light, and his cheekbones cast shadows along his jaw. Then his face cleared and he looked at me with an expression I didn’t recognize.
“Do you really think,” he said softly, “that with the history we have between us, I would think it was funny to jump out at you?” He crossed his arms over his chest.
I took a controlled breath and put a hand over my pounding heart. “I wasn’t thinking,” I said stiffly. “I was startled. How do you know I don’t like being outside at night?”
“Every time I’ve seen you outside at night, you’re tenser than a bowstring,” he said, speaking so quietly that I unconsciously leaned forward to hear. “You hate it. You hate it enough to stand really close to me when we walk.” His voice was warm and velvety, as though to keep the cold night away.
“You waited for me?” It was just sinking in.
“Yes. Should we go?” He gestured in the general direction of the house.
I nodded, bemused by how grateful I felt, and by how he looked, standing in these woods with soft bits of snow falling soundlessly around us.
He tilted his head to one side. “Your hair… looks like it was spun from moonlight.” He looked away and gave a fake laugh, as if he hadn’t meant to say that.
I blinked, thinking, Warrior Poet, and then he turned back, his face solemn, and slowly leaned down to me as my breath suddenly left my chest. No more thoughts cluttered my head as our arms went around each other at the same time, my hands sliding up the soft cloth of his sleeves that couldn’t disguise the hard muscle underneath.
“Reyn,” I whispered. Then his mouth was gently pressing against mine, his eyes open as he waited to see if I would push him away. Instead my eyes closed and I leaned against his chest, as solid as an oak. This was Reyn, kissing me, and everything felt new and unique, despite my four and a half centuries of kissing. He held me more tightly to him, his hands on my back, and I became thrillingly aware that there was nothing between us except our stupid freaking witch robes, which I had totally known was a bad idea.
With winter raider focus, he deepened our kiss, making my head spin. He smelled like smoke and laundry soap and some sort of unusual, almost Oriental spice that I associated with him alone. I hadn’t been aware that he was edging me backward, but now I felt the cold immovability of a big rock sticking up out of the ground, hitting the backs of my knees. So I was officially literally between a rock and a hard place.
It was just… so good. It felt so good, amazingly good, better than anything I could ever remember, though I was freezing and unsure of what had happened at the circle. When I was with him like this, connected to him, I felt safe. Nothing could get to me. Nothing could hurt me now. Except him. And by the time that thought had struggled through the Jell-O of my mind, I had the dim awareness that my arms were around his shoulders, one of my hands was buried in his hair, and I’d curled one leg around his.
I gave in, letting the riptide of Reynness sweep me under, pull me in over my head.
I pressed myself against him as hard as I could, as if I could meld us together. One of my hands pushed beneath the neckline of his robe to feel hot, smooth skin, the straight strength of his collarbone, the sleek muscles of his shoulder. He was big and strong and solid and perfect. I felt him breathing hard and was pleased—I had done that to him. I just wanted to have time stop, right now. I wanted to give up, give in, let go of everything except Reyn.
Of course I was tempted to do just that. I’d love to give up this stupid, difficult, effing struggle toward being Tähti. It would be so much easier to just…coast from now on. To overwhelm my senses with Reyn, letting him fill my mind, my heart, my body.
But—wouldn’t that leave me just as much of a loser shell as I’d been when I got here? It completely pissed me off, but the truth was that I had a goal here. Losing myself in all of these lovely, fierce, tantalizing emotions would just be making another placeholder inside where Lilja—the name I was born under—ought to be.
Reyn lifted his head, looking at me. We were both panting, making puffs of smoke in the frigid air. My arms felt cold and stiff.
“Where are you?” His voice was almost a whisper. I thought I could detect the very faintest hint of his original language—some Mongol/Scandinavian bastard hybrid. He stepped back but kept his arms around me.
“I can’t do this,” I said, knowing I had just done it, hating how breathless I sounded.
His eyes narrowed a fraction.
With a sense of loss similar to feeling magick ebb from me after a circle, I made myself say, “I don’t know why we’re doing this.” I tried unsuccessfully to step away from his hands. “I don’t know why—” I shook my head, feeling bone-tired and confused and sad and yet somehow triumphant for some reason.
“We’re drawn together,” he said, his words falling almost silently in the night air. “We have a past together.”
“A horrible, disastrous past.” Well, someone had to say it.
“Maybe this is the only way to heal it.” His chest was rising and falling, but with longtime warrior instincts he was making no sound.
“I don’t know.” I hated being so indecisive. I prefer to be snappy, even abrasive. I almost always know where I stand on things, am happy to give my opinion about anything. But tonight I couldn’t muster a coherent thought.
“You—have feelings for me.” He was quiet but insistent.
Oh yes, indeed. Lust, longing. “Dread? Pain?”
I felt his muscles tighten though I wasn’t touching him anymore.
“Being at River’s is about… being who you are,” he said, each word sounding as if it was coming out against his will. “Who you really are. And making that—okay, somehow.”
My body, which just moments ago had been singing his praises and urging me to get to know him ever so much better, started to spiral downward. I was coming off my Reyn high just as I had come off my magick high not ten minutes ago. Adrenaline and excitement leached from my veins and I was suddenly shivering with cold again. I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Okay, Dr. Laura,” I said, but without real snark.
“It’s pointless to lie to yourself.” His words landed flatly between us.
I worked up a pretty sincere frown. “Oh yeah? Good tip.”
But this was a man who had probably held out for weeks, even months, during icy sieges, waiting for barricaded villagers to starve and break, so my brittle walls didn’t pose much challenge for him.
“If you can’t face your feelings, all of them, then you’re never going to be strong enough to break free of the past.”
I was caught off guard by his words as much as by the way he looked against the black trees of the woods, the snow white under our feet, moonlight striping his face and hair and making him look like some kind of exotic tiger-person.
“Oh, like you know.” I now felt stupid and vulnerable and not like myself.
Feeling like I had to get away from all this emotion, I pushed past him, and he let me. I headed home by myself, walking fast on the snow where other feet had made a path. I didn’t know if he was following me, but a minute or two later I was almost running up the kitchen steps, desperate for the light and the laughter within.
CHAPTER 7
Most of the January firsts in recent memory have involved splitting headaches and roiling stomachs and often being surprised about where I was waking up. (“No, Officer, I have no idea why I’m wearing this possum costume. I called you what? Oh. My bad.”) Plus a sort of he
avy dread about still being here, still being me, still doing whatever. Then one of my friends would call, or roll out from beneath the couch, or offer me a Bloody Mary, and it would start all over again.
This year felt different. I woke up not hungover, not with strangers, but with a wary sense of excitement about a whole new year of possibility. In Iceland we’d always had huge bonfires on New Year’s Eve and had made wishes and toasts to the new year. I had done that last night.
I felt… excited. Even hopeful, though I didn’t want to jinx anything by admitting that. Lying in the tub in the women’s bathroom on my hall, I cataloged my progress. I watched my toes turning pink in the hot water and silently listed ways where I felt I was doing better.
I wasn’t fine. I wasn’t altogether okay and together and trustworthy and positive. I still had a long, rocky uphill road ahead of me to get there. But I was doing better. And this new year would hold even more progress. Really. Truly. I ducked myself underwater and rinsed off, imagining that I was washing away my past.
Polishing stable tack is high on my list of dislikes, right after piña coladas and walks in the rain. Faced with several harnesses, two saddles, and a couple of girth belts, I could only give thanks that some of the tack was nylon webbing and needed no upkeep.
“Hallo, cara,” Lorenz murmured as I went past him to the tack room. He and Charles were sweeping the middle aisle of the barn, and the air was thick with kicked-up hay and dust. “Have you seen the lovely puppies?”
“Yep.” Everyone was all about the puppies here.
Charles sneezed and drew a clean white handkerchief from his barn coat pocket. Even sweeping the floor, he looked tidy and kempt. And Lorenz could have been modeling for Horse Illustrated: The Winter Collection. He even had a silk scarf knotted around his neck. I myself was dressed to thrill in flannel-lined jeans, muck boots, a sweatshirt, my puffy coat, and a thick wool scarf. Lorenz, his fashion sensibilities offended, tried not to wince but simply couldn’t bear it.
“No, not the scarf wrapped many times,” he said, propping up his broom and coming toward me. He was only about a hundred or so and still had a pronounced Italian accent.
I put my hands up to stop him, but he firmly pressed them down and undid my scarf, while I stood frozen. My hair had grown out a bit and now covered the back of my neck, but just barely. I felt stuck to the floor and tried to get a grip on the raging panic his action had set off.
“Look. This is the way.” With deft hands, he folded my scarf, then looped it quickly around my neck while I tried not to leap away. He tucked the loose ends of the scarf through the loop and tightened it up around me. I controlled my breathing while he futzed with it, draping it and fluffing it up. He stepped back to regard me critically.
“It’s better, no?” he asked Charles, and Charles made a noncommittal gesture.
“It’s better, but you can’t really do much, with that sweatshirt,” he said, not meanly, and Lorenz sighed and nodded.
“True. Nastasya, you have an adorable figure. The sweatshirt does nothing for you,” he said definitively. “Jewel tones, yes? More fitted. A little cashmere cardigan.”
“I am polishing tack in a barn,” I felt compelled to point out.
“Ah,” said Lorenz, and nodded. “Yes, true. But you dress like that all the time. Like a man.”
My eyes widened. “I don’t dress like a man,” I said. “I dress practically. Because I live on a farm. And do icky, farmy things all the time.”
Lorenz grinned, which was breathtaking. “A cute little man.”
I took a deep breath, then headed to the tack room. The two of them chuckled out in the aisle as they resumed sweeping.
“I miss carriages,” I heard Charles say.
“They were so elegant,” Lorenz agreed.
I took all the metal stuff off of a harness and began to whack at the dirt with a brush. Someone had been riding out in mud, and it was caked on. I knew Reyn sometimes rode—of River’s six horses, three of them were for riding—and so did Lorenz and Anne. Probably others. I never did, though she had offered them to me.
Lorenz began humming, then softly singing a passage from Aida. I tried not to listen to the romantic words as I began to soap up a bridle with the aptly named saddle soap. He and Charles actually missed horse-drawn carriages. Here was another reminder of how different we all were, we immortals.
Me + horses = painful memories. I wiped off the saddle soap and started rubbing in tack oil, trying hard not to think about any other time in my life when I had done this. Think about something else. My brain was suddenly awash in memories of the previous night, kissing Reyn in the dark, cold woods. My cheeks flushed with heat and I bent over my task.
Reyn. What was he doing pursuing me? He didn’t seem happy about it, like, ZOMG, I met my soul mate and now my life can begin! It was more like he was being compelled against his will. And not that that wasn’t fun for me, but still. And I continued to totally resent the fact that I was so drawn to him, found him so overwhelmingly hot.
I’m really good at not thinking about difficult stuff, and I put that skill to use right then. I wondered what was for dinner, how Meriwether’s New Year’s had gone, what Dray was up to, since I hadn’t seen her lately. I wondered why Charles was here, why Lorenz was here….
Why, perhaps I should ask!
“Lorenz!”
A few moments later his handsome head peered around the doorway, gull-wing eyebrows arched perfectly over deep blue eyes. “Yes?”
“Why are you here?” I gestured largely, denoting “at River’s Edge” rather than “in the barn.” He blinked in surprise, and I could almost see him weighing the decision to tell me, what he should say, if anything.
He stepped into the stall and stood by the door. I was struck by the change in his demeanor—he was usually brash, cocky, charming; self-confident in the way that an incredibly handsome man can be. He opened his mouth to say something—raised his hand, then let it fall.
I polished a saddle very quietly, my eyes locked on him. This ought to be good.
His fingers plucked the fabric of the Italian wool trousers he had chosen to muck out the barn in. “I…” he said, looking at the ceiling, the floor. “I have…”
I held my breath. Cheerful, lovely Brynne had tried to set someone on fire, so I couldn’t imagine what had brought Lorenz here.
“I have two hundred and thirty-five children,” he said, and I almost fell over. “Or so.” He didn’t look at me, was trying to seem nonchalant, but I’m the queen of nonchalant and I saw right through it.
I realized I was gaping at him slack-jawed, so I closed my mouth, nodded, and worked on the saddle some more, my mind screaming questions.
“Wow,” I said calmly, as if, oh yes, gosh, I run up against stuff like this all the time! Only 235, you say? Why, I knew a man who…
“That’s a lot,” I acknowledged. “All immortals?” Holy moly, our numbers were really increasing.
“No.” He brushed thick black hair off his brow. “About sixty immortals. I think.”
Instantly I saw it: He was facing the death of about 170 of his own children, one after another. Why would he do that to himself?
“I have tried….” He gave the wall an ironic smile. “Vasectomies heal.”
Of course. That’s what we do. And he was apparently too self-destructive for the obvious condoms or other kinds of birth control. Lordy day.
“And yet you keep going up to bat?” Clearly.
“I’m trying to understand,” he said. That’s why he was here. To find out why he would perpetrate such pain on himself, on his children, whom he surely wasn’t being a father to, not all of them—and the women he abandoned.
“Holy crap—you’re only about a hundred!” The thought escaped my mouth before I could stop it.
He nodded solemnly. “A hundred and seven.”
Oh my God—say he got started when he was twenty. In eighty years he had fathered 235 kids, that he knew of. Surely so
me of them were already dead—disease, accidents. But he was facing another ninety years of watching his offspring die. And then there were all the immortal kids, demanding their allowance, forever.
“I am trying to understand,” he said again, and gave me a polite, distant smile. Then he turned and headed out, and a few moments later I heard the swish of his broom again.
Well. I picked up the leather oil and tilted a small bit onto a rag. That had been… reassuring. I mean, not to be all sucks-to-be-you on Lorenz, but the notion that I’m not the worst person in the world was something I clung to like a chunk of the Titanic. And I was blowing my whistle in the dark.
Okay, I don’t know where I was going with that—have to stop flinging metaphors around—but you get the picture.
Jeez. All those kids. The half-immortal ones would mostly live very long lives—you tend to read about them in the papers because they’re more than a hundred or whatever. And either Lorenz would have to pretend to age in front of them so he would seem normal, or he would simply have to split and never see them again. Either way would suck. But the immortal ones… they were his children, but he’d probably never have a real relationship with more than a handful of them. Or maybe he could. Who knows? Maybe living forever meant he’d have tons of time to get to know each one. But any way you sliced it, it was weird and destructive.
“Oh, nice-looking aisle, guys,” I heard River say. Her booted footsteps thunked on the brick floor of the barn. I began to polish industriously. Tack has to look nice but not too shiny, because shiny means possible slipperiness, which is the last thing you want to be dealing with as you’re trying to get a twelve-hundred-pound animal to do your bidding. It’s hard enough tacking them up when they’re not slippery. And sometimes you can’t take the time to tack them up at all….
In the 1860s, I was in England, in some dinky little town up north. I was there, like, waiting to catch a train to London or something. I think I had to wait another two days. What had been my name? It wasn’t that long ago… what was it? England, England, after the gold rush in America… Rosemund? Rosemary. Rosemary Munson. Yeah, Rosemary. Oh my God—I remember the name of the inn where I was staying. The Old Blue Ball Inn (I am not making that up).