He pauses, and the hum in his core flickers.
“When you purchased me, I thought—I thought I would be a secret. A shameful thing kept in the dark. But you want to be seen with me. That’s—” His voice catches in a way I’ve never heard. “That’s a different kind of chosen than I knew existed.”
My eyes burn.
I press my face into his chest and breathe him in, mineral and warm and mine.
His hum resumes, steady and deep.
My body finally stops shaking.
The exhaustion rolls over me like a tide, and Oz adjusts his form to cradle me more fully.
I’m wrapped in him.
Surrounded.
Held.
Sleep pulls at me, soft and insistent.
“Rest,” he says. “I’ll be right here whenyou wake up.”
I let my eyes close.
My last coherent thought is of the ridge, the cave, the green light pulsing in the dark.
Something’s still out there.
And I choose not to think about it.
Chapter 19
Monster to Monster
Oz
The day passes in therhythm we’ve built. Maisie works. I help. We eat lunch on the porch, no longer worried someone might see us. We work some more.
By evening, exhaustion finds her again. The order progresses, and she falls asleep on the couch with her head on my chest and her hand curled againstmy body.
I hold her. I listen to her breathing slow down. I trace the patterns of her dreams through the micro-movements of her body, the way her fingers twitch, the way her lips part around words she doesn’t say aloud.
And I think about the ridge.
The green light. The presence I felt there, old and watchful and strange. The half-recognition that has been tugging at me since we found Captain at the mouth of that cave.
Maisie stirs against me, murmurs something shapeless, and settles deeper into sleep.
I wait until her breathing has been steady for an hour. Then I reach deep into myself and find the place where I can separate.
It costs something. A small something. I pull off a piece of my mass, barely larger than a cat, and I feel the loss like a word I can’t quite remember. The offshoot quivers on the floor beside the couch, gelid and faintly luminous, and I send it toward the door.
It slips beneath the gap, cold air rushing over its surface, and the sensation reachesme like a distant limb, numb but present. I’m still holding Maisie. I’m still warm against her sleeping body. And I’m also moving across the sand, low and slow, feeling the desert floor through a fragment of myself too small to register much beyond temperature and texture.
Cold sand. The scratch of a sagebrush. The distant call of an owl, felt more than heard as vibration through the ground.
The offshoot travels. I stay. The ridge rises through the offshoot’s limited senses, mostly temperature and texture and the faint vibration of something alive within the rock.
