Page 79 of Flames and Blood

“Good.”

“You’re an unrewarding man to thank.”

“I’ve been told.”

He turns his glass on his knee.

“She’s angry with me,” he says. “Serenity. Have you got a minute for something foolish?”

“Go on.”

“She’s been trying to mark me.” He brings it up the same flat way another man would bring up a leaking roof. “Her wolf wants a mate bite on me. She’s determined about it. And every time she manages it, the skin closes over inside a minute. Faster than that. She’ll have her teeth in my shoulder and by the time she’s sitting back it’s gone.”

“That’s the problem with what we are.”

“It is. She takes it personally.” He almost laughs. “She wants a mark on me that stays. She’s a wolf-witch. I’m four hundred years old. Nothing about me keeps a wound. So she’s furious, and she’s decided this is a personal failing of mine.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Several unhelpful things first. That it doesn’t matter. That I don’t need a mark to know what I am to her.” He shakes his head.

“That’s fair.”

“It’s completely fair.” He turns the glass again. “Then I told her the truth, which I should have started with. She doesn’t need to put a mark on me. She put one on me months ago.”

He sets the glass down and holds out his right hand under the lamp.

A split runs across the back of it. Pale now. Closed. Still there.

“That’s a scar,” I say.

“It’s the only one I have. Four hundred years, and it’s the only one.” He turns the hand over and back. “There’s one thing on this earth that marks us and stays, and you know what it is as well as I do.”

“Sun.”

“She opened a shutter while I was asleep. The sunlight came in across my hand.” He says it as if it’s no big deal. “She got it shut before it reached anything worse. We never spoke about it.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No. I worked it out the next evening and let her keep her secret. She got there herself eventually.” He closes the hand. “So I told her she can stop trying to bite me. There’s already a mark, and she’s the one who put it there. It just isn’t the one she was aiming for.”

He says it lightly. He isn’t making any kind of point.

Every time the sun comes up, I go to sleep with the memory of a woman’s teeth in my throat. A memory of something that’s never happened.

I think of the burns on my palms from when I tried to free her from that truck. I don’t take my hands out of my pockets. I let him change the subject.

“So what happens now, Crowe?”

“Now?” I shrug. “Now, I take Kallista Ondrathe to Aldrake territory. I keep her alive until she’s inside her own borders and in her mother’s hands. Then Aurora’s obligation ends. The Court’s ends. Mine ends with both of them.”

“Then you’re done?”

“Then I’m done.”

Done. It’s a clean word. Four letters, no ambiguity in it, and it’s been the best part of every job I’ve ever taken.

“You’re sure about that?” he says.