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Then he remembered something. He reached behind him, slowly, so as not to frighten her. He found the pouch he wore at his waist, a length of woven vine that he used to carry the purple leaves back from the gardens. There was something else in it now, something he had carried for days without quite knowing why. He drew it out and held it towards her across the rock.

It was her light, the first one, the one he had seen drop into the pool beneath the falls on the night she came. He had dived for it the next morning and found it lying at the bottom among the stones. He had brought it up and kept it, because it had been hers. It was still dripping.

She looked at it, and she looked at him. Then, very slowly, she reached out one shaking hand and took it from him. Her fingers brushed lightly against his. They were cold and wet and so small, and at the touch of them a shiver ran all the way up his arm and down his spine.

She turned the light over in her hands. She found something on its side and pressed it, and the light flickered, and then it blazed into life, white and blinding. He flinched and covered his eyes, and she made a small startled sound and pointed the light away from him, at the wall.

When he lowered his hand, she was still looking at him. But her face had softened slightly. The fear was still there, but there was something else in it too, wondering and uncertain.

“It was you,” she whispered. “Wasn’t it? The rocks. The water. The cup.”

He didn’t know what the words meant. But he recognized the tone. It was the same soft, questioning voice she had used when she stood at the top of the climb and spoke into the dark. She was speaking to him.

He didn’t move, because he didn’t dare. He stayed crouched on the cold stone with his tail wrapped around his feet and his hands trembling against his knees, and he looked back at her. And across the narrow space between them, in the bright white glow of her rescued light, the small, brave, stubborn female looked back at him.

She didn’t run.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Frankie had imagined a lot of things over the last few days. She had imagined a lost miner, half-starved and a little crazy, living in the caves and fixing her path out of some leftover sense of decency. She had imagined a secret GenCon team in sleek grey suits. On one bad night, when the lichen had dimmed and she couldn’t stop shivering, she had imagined something with too many legs and too many teeth that was only keeping her alive until it got hungry.

She had never once imagined anything like him.

He crouched on the rock an arm’s length away from her, perfectly motionless, with his arms drawn in against his body and his head lowered. The light from the lamp he had given back to her fell across him in a bright white wash, and she couldn’t stop staring.

He was undeniably big. Even crouched down like that, trying so obviously to make himself small, he was far taller than she was. Taller than Ethan, maybe taller than anyone she had ever met. But he wasn’t bulky. He was long and lean, all smooth, powerful lines, with broad shoulders that tapered down to a narrow waist.

His skin was a warm, greenish bronze where it wasn’t covered in scales. Where the scales began they were small and fine, shimmering blue and green in the lamplight as the water dried on them. They framed his temples and ran along his jaw and the side of his neck. They covered his shoulders and his forearms. And behind him, curled neatly around his feet, lay a long, heavy tail, sleek and supple, with a ridge of darker scales running down its length.

His hair was dark and wet, hanging almost to his shoulders, and in the light it had a strange blue-black gleam, like a raven’s wing. His face was angular, all high cheekbones and hard lines, attractive in a strong, alien way. But it was his eyes that caught her attention. They were a deep, startling sapphire blue, the pupils narrow vertical slits like a cat’s, and they should have been frightening, but they weren’t. They were anxious, and gentle, and watching her with an expression so hopeful that it made her chest ache.

“You’re real,” she whispered. “You’re actually real.”

He tilted his head at the sound of her voice, like a curious bird. But otherwise he didn’t move.

She took a slow breath through her mask. Her heart was still pounding, but not quite so hard anymore. She was soaked and freezing, her side hurt, and her knees were bruised from the rock. She was sitting next to a river that shouldn’t exist with a male who shouldn’t exist. And yet now that the first wild terror had faded, what she mostly felt was curiosity.

He had saved her life. He’d pulled her out of that black water and held her mask against her face with a hand that was big enough to crush her skull, and he’d been so careful that she had barely felt his claws. Then he’d backed away the moment she was afraid. He had moved rocks in the dark so she wouldn’t fall. He had left her water and a cup to drink it from.

Whatever he was, he wasn’t going to hurt her. She was almost sure of it.

“Okay,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “Okay. We’re going to be civilized about this.”

She set the lamp down on the rock between them, angling the beam up towards the ceiling so it wouldn’t shine in his eyes. The light spread out and softened, filling the space with a pale glow. Then she put her hand on her chest.

“Frankie,” she said clearly. “I’m Frankie.”

He looked at her hand, and then he looked at her face. She could practically see him thinking. Slowly, very slowly, he lifted one hand and touched it to the center of his chest. His fingers were long, tipped with short, curved claws, and there was a thin, delicate webbing stretched between them that caught the light.

“Korrak,” he said.

His voice was low and deep and a little rough, as if he hadn’t used it in a long time. The sound of it went straight through her and settled somewhere low in her stomach. She told herself that was just nerves.

“Korrak,” she repeated. “That’s your name?”

He nodded, and the ghost of a smile touched his mouth. Then he did something that made her breath catch. He leaned forward slowly and extended one long finger. He paused just before he reached her, his eyes on her face, waiting. When she didn’t pull away, he touched her chest, just below her collarbone, very lightly.

“Frrankie,” he said. He rolled the r in the middle of it, deep in his throat, so that it came out sounding like a purr.