Page 100 of Flames and Blood

This is my home. I’ve never once had to hide in it and my body doesn’t know how to. My feet are too loud on the stone. My breathing is too loud. I have every right to be here, and there isn’t a person alive who can question it.

It doesn’t help, because if they knew where I was going now, everything would change.

I take the last flight with my palm flat on the warm stone.

The hallway is empty. The stores smell of grain and lamp oil and cold iron, and through it all, there’s him. Clean cloth. Old leather. Cool skin. Something I would know in a room of two hundred people.

His door is the last one. I look at it longer than I need to.

I lift my hand to knock, and the door opens before my knuckles land.

He’s dressed. A lamp is burning in a niche behind him, and the bed hasn’t been slept in. His boots are on. I know that he heard me three passages back, the way he hears everything. He’s been standing behind that door deciding.

He opened it.

“You’ll get cold out on that stone,” he says.

“I run hot.”

“I remember.”

Neither of us moves. At the cabin this was easy. Here there’s a mountain over our heads with my ancestral name cut into it in nine places. He’s a man my mother offered money to in front of the hall. And I don’t care about any of it.

“Are you going to let me in,” I say, “or do I wait here until someone finds me?”

He steps back. I come in. He shuts the door, and then he drops the inside bar, quietly, and watches me while he does it. The room is ours now.

It’s small and sparse; just a bed and not much else. Right now, that’s the most important part. His coat is drying on the chair back. His pack sits by the wall with the straps still buckled. I try not to look at it, because packed means ready.

“You didn’t sleep,” I say.

“I don’t sleep much here.”

“The mountain?”

“The mountain’s fine. It’s the quietest place I’ve been in a long time.” He looks at me, and my skin warms under it.

“They fed you?”

“I didn’t need anything.”

“Hesper must have been disappointed.”

“I think Hesper has been waiting a lifetime to watch a vampire drink out of a jug.”

I laugh, low, and something in his shoulders eases. He watches my mouth while I laugh and doesn’t hide that he’s doing it.

“Gideon,” I say, the name coming out on a soft breath.

He goes still.

“You never called me that the last time,” he says.

“The last time?”

“The last time you came to me,” he says. “You never said my name.”

“I didn’t?” I don’t know what that means, but it seems significant to him.