Page 156

"I know what you meant. You went further than you should have. I felt the veil shake. From here."

She hadn't wanted him to know. "It was necessary."

"Was it." He said it without the lift of a question. "Or are you throwing yourself at the fire until you burn."

She stepped outside, the door clicking shut behind her. Snow squeaked under her boots.

"Lysander."

He looked at her, and she had no defence against it.

"I don't know if I am going to survive what is coming."

His shoulder came off the wall. "Don't say that."

"It's true. The relic. The daemon. The Nexis. Vinea has been waiting for me before I was born. I might be enough. I might not be."

His hand came up. It stopped halfway between them, then went back to his side.

She watched the hand he'd not given her. She wanted it more than she'd wanted anything in months. That thought should've sent her running; instead, she stepped closer.

"I have been trying," he said, "not to say a thing to you for days."

"What thing?"

"You know what thing."

The cold was in her lungs, and her ribs, and behind her eyes. Lance sat on the eaves above the door, motionless except for the very tip of his tail, which moved once and stilled.

"Say it now," she said. "Before tomorrow."

He looked at her another count. Then he closed the space he'd been holding open since the basement, and his mouth was on hers, and the cold didn't matter anymore.

The first kiss was not careful. There was no time in it for careful. His hand came up at last and cupped her jaw, his thumb at the corner of her mouth, and the metal one closed at her waist and held her against him with a steadiness her own body didn't have. She made a sound against his mouth that was almost a laugh and almost not.

His arm came around her waist and tightened, and an unfamiliar sound broke against her mouth. He lifted her. Her boots left the snow. The door banged shut behind them.

Inside, the lamp burned low.

He pressed her back against the wall just inside the door. The wood was cold through her clothes. His mouth moved along her jaw and down to her throat, and a shiver ran through her that had nothing to do with the cold. Her hands gripped his shoulders. She tilted her head to give him more of her throat. Her body had been waiting for this since the basement. Since the kiss he tore himself away from. Since longer than either of them would admit.

"You scare—" She stopped. "No. You terrify me."

"Good."

"That wasn't a compliment, Lysander."

"I know."

His hand slid down to her cloak's clasp. He undid it without looking. The wool dropped to the floor.

She caught his face in both her hands and brought his mouth back to hers. Her glasses pressed crookedly into the bridge of her nose. She didn't push them straight.

He pulled back. His hand came up and slid her glasses off her face. He folded them once, carefully, the way she folded them. He set them on the bedside table without looking, the corner, near the lamp, the exact place she'd set them down last night.

"Lysander."

"Mm."