Page 82 of Flames and Blood

“How do you tell?” I ask when the road has been empty long enough that I believe we’re not being followed. “Between somebody who’s dangerous and somebody who’s just curious.”

“Mostly I don’t, at first. I watch what they do next instead of what their face is doing.” He checks the mirror again out of habit. “A man who’s only curious goes back to his own business inside a minute. A man who’s dangerous finds a reason to stay in your space.”

“You know a lot about this.”

“It’s why my maker picked me.”

“And you like it?” I’m staring at his profile again. I like the shape of his lips.

“It’s the only thing I know,” he says.

“Why don’t you try other things?” I ask. “It’s not like you haven’t had time to find something else to do.”

“What?” He looks at me. “You mean like a lifeguard?”

I snort out a laugh.

“Or a professional surfer?” he says.

“Or a swimsuit model.” I start to giggle. “You’d do well at that.”

“Thank you.” He flutters his eyelashes at me. They’re really long for a man. And I’m staring again.

“You have a good sense of humor,” I tell him.

“Have I?” He glances at me. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“Maybe you don’t notice because you work alone so much.”

“Yes.” He frowns slightly. Then he’s silent, and I wonder if I said the wrong thing.

The sky starts going gray somewhere in the last hours before light, and he pulls off into a motel with eleven rooms and nobody at the desk.

He pays cash through a slot, and comes back with a key.

The room is small but clean. A framed print of sunflowers on one wall, and curtains that were probably cheerful once.

“This will do,” he says, glancing around. Then he takes a roll of tape out of his bag, and goes round the room and tapes the curtains to the wall down both sides and across the bottom. He pushes a towel along the gap under the door, and does the bathroom window too. It takes him four minutes. He’s done it a thousand times; I can see that from how little he thinks about it.

“How bad is it?” I ask. “If it gets in.”

“Depends how much.” He sets the tape down. “A hand’s worth through a gap, at this angle, is a deep burn that won’t heal well. Full sun with nothing in the way of it, and there wouldn’t be anything of me but dust.”

He says it casually.

I sense the change outside as the sun comes up; the birds coming alive and the increase in traffic. People moving about.

“I’ll rest until night,” he says. And then he goes down. I’ve never seen it. It isn’t like sleep. He’s sitting on the end of the bed with his boots still on, and then he tips back against the pillow, and he’s gone.

I sit on the floor with my back against the door for a long time, because there’s nothing else to do and I’m not tired at all.

It’s the first time I’ve been able to look at him properly.

He doesn’t breathe. I knew that; I sensed it from the start. Watching it is different. His chest doesn’t move. Nothing on him moves. The line of his throat, the hand fallen open on the blanket, the mouth I’ve been trying not to look at—all of it is completely still.

He is the least alive thing I have ever been in a room with.

I want him anyway.