Page 77 of Veil of Blood and Bone

I want to drink her in, devour my girl in a single bite and memorize the soft lines of her cheeks, the obstinate tilt of her chin.

Bloodlust pulses whenever our gazes clash. I’m the first to look away.

The vein beneath her throat jumps once. My fangs answer with a sharp ache. Christ.

I smell the heat of her blood from across the room.

Some lives are smoother than others, although they all end with pain and hardship. Still, Odin was never able to stifle her fight or her heart. Her strength shows itself in different ways no matter the incarnation.

In Paris she used to warm her hands over candle flames before touching my face. Said cold skin made her sad.

In London, she’d sold elixirs on the street for a man who beat her, her skin stained with herbs. Some lives weren’t kind to her.

She used to hide bruises beneath blue powder and lavender oil and thought no one noticed.

I noticed.

In the last one she’d battled prejudice while raising a child on her own. She sang under her breath while washing dishes in that life. Same melody every night. I still catch myself listening for the thread of her humming.

Through it all, she lived. She may have not always thrived, but she did her best to carve out a place for herself, and with each new face, I fall deeper.

Stay the fuck away from her.

I need to put as much space between us as possible, and watching the fight had been a step too close. What would have happened if I’d been drawn in?

It might have ended with my fangs buried in her windpipe.

I wedge my hands into my coat pockets to keep from reaching for her. To keep from reaching for her throat. Her pulse flutters beneath the hinge of her jaw, and my mouth aches hard enough to split skin over pointed teeth.

I’ve lived more lives than most people dream of in one. And entombed her in each one.

The dirt changes. The prayers change.

The grief never does.

The time before last, I’d been the one to find her in the slums of New York City, with a mother who often took off for weeks at a time and a stay at home father who did his best. Helene in that life had gotten along best with her grandmother.

I could stand beside her for a century and never once feel as human as she did sitting in sunlight alongside her nana.

“What am I?” Wren leans back in his seat, lazy, insouciant. “We call ourselves Dökkálfar. Originally from Rökkrheim, labeled Unseelie by some. But for you I’ll be a very good boy.”

Helene blows out a frustrated breath. “Christ. Focus.”

“Is that our safe word?” Wren crosses one leg over the other, his ankle resting on his knee.

He’s the king of cool. Interrogators could take a page out of his notebook in terms of maintaining their composure. He is nothing but playful optimism.

Helene doesn't know him, remember him, well enough to see the resignation. Or to note the frequent glances the two of us share.

Truth at all cost. We agreed to it.

“If I believe you, and Odin sent two targeted attacks at me, then why? Why me?” Her attention snags on the table, her tone distant. “Like I said before. I’m nothing.”

“Nothing.” I laugh. “I’ve watched kingdoms burn for less than what lives inside you.”

I’ve crossed oceans carrying her bones.

The box shrinks. The floorboards rattle. The dead are more alive than the plants in this old Victorian, and I brush the curling edge of the navy and gold wallpaper. Sunlight hasn’t faded the pattern underneath.