Page 53 of His Human Believer

I pull the box out of my pocket.

Vidar’s whole face changes. “What is that?”

I open the box and find a wedding band of heavy, dark, hammered metal. There is a small folded note in the box in Avery Hellstone’s handwriting that says YOU’RE WELCOME.

I look out at the crowd.

Avery is standing at the end of a row of chairs with both hands over her mouth and her whole face wrecked.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m bad at this. I want everybody to know in advance that I’m about to be bad at this.”

Somebody laughs. Bestla, I think.

“I built my whole new life by myself. I built it alone and I have been proud of that for six years.” My voice cracks and I keep going. “I sit down across from beings nobody believed, listen to them properly and work on their cold cases. And even though I now work in what some call purely entertainment, you treated me with respect from the very beginning. I am proud to call such an honorable scientist as my friend and coworker to say that I love you in return.”

I hold up the ring. “Vidar Coalstone. Will you be my husband? Will you put up with me producing my podcast from our home? Will you walk to the courthouse with me and be my bound until days turn into time? And will you be the father of our offspring?”

“Yes,” he says immediately. “Yes. Yes.”

He stands and I slide that band onto his claw and it fits, because Avery Hellstone is a professional.

And then he takes my face in both claws, very carefully, with the silver tips well away from my skin.

And he kisses me for the first time. It is spectacular.

All those diurnals of not touching, of a hand’s width of air in a hallway, a claw braced against a wall away from my shoulder, of sitting apart in the dark with our knees not quite touching…It all melts away.

His mouth is hot. Everything about him is hot. And that forked tongue comes into my mouth and I whimper into his mouth. Finally, we break apart, our chests rising and falling.

He picks me up off the stage. My feet come entirely off the ground and he swings me in a full circle with the lake going by behind him. I’ve got both hands on his horns because they are right there and they are apparently handles.

The entire lawn is on its feet clapping and whistling.

Chapter Sixteen

Vidar

Ihave been standing on this lawn for hours and I am finished.

My beautiful, sexy, bound laughs at something Bane has said. She has a plate in one hand she has not eaten and my ring on the other and she has been in that white garment all afternoon and I have gazed longingly at her large ass approximately four hundred times.

I want it in my claws. That’s it, I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. I need her alone.

I cross the lawn.

“Vidar—”

I pick her up. “I am taking my bound home,” I announce, to nobody in particular and to every being present.

The lawn erupts. Somebody whistles. Somebody shouts something extremely crude. Riley Touchstone is recording me and I discover I do not care in the slightest.

“Oh my gods,” Margaret says into my neck. She is laughing so hard she can barely hold on.

“Finally,” roars Grandma Narvi from the front a chair and then adds something else that causes Bestla to shriek and cover Mitry’s ears.

The Academy grounds are quiet at this hour.

The scholars’ quarter is at the eastern end, past the chambers and the long library, where the road narrows and goes to stone underfoot. My domicile is the fourth one. It is old and it is grey and there is a wall around the garden at the back with a gate in it.