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I lie there for a few minutes, continuing to watch him sleep until I realize it’s probably inappropriate and perhaps even creepy of me. Then I get up carefully, my joints creaking noisily in the room.

Goodness. Creaky joints? Have I really aged overnight?

Adding to my question, I have a sudden urge to pee.

I need the washroom more than I need almost anything else right now, with the exception of a bath I don’t have time to take and a meal I don’t have time to eat and eight solid hours of sleep in a bed with no resurrected professor in it.

The washroom is at the end of the hall, and I’m lucky that the corridor is empty. It’s the hour where everyone who has the sense to sleep is still doing it.

What I really want is a bath but there’s no time for one today, so I have to make do with washing up with a washcloth, the water cold and bracing and making me feel a little more human.

Naturally, my thoughts turn to the picture of Baz in a tub. It didn’t help that last night was the first time I’d seen him with his shirt off, which is silly since he was inside me at one point. Still, his body is quite the sight, once you get past all the blood and the stab wounds on his back, broad shouldered, lean-waisted, the kind of build a woman could spend a significant amount of time thinking about under much better circumstances than these.

I splash water on my face again, harder. Now isn’t the time for lusty thoughts, especially when it seems that Baz has zero memory of us kissing by the sea wall, nor of our coupling at the cemetery. There’s a lot to untangle here, with things perhaps it’s best he not know, and things he probably should (like us stumbling across Caranthis and the mystery man in the corridor).

But that’s something we’ll have to deal with when the time comes. I don’t profess to know what it’s like to die and come back, but I have a feeling Baz will need to take everything in slowly. In fact, I should too.

I unbraid the loose braid I slept in and comb it with my fingers until it’s in waves around my shoulders. The woman in the mirror above the basin is one I don’t entirely know. The gauntness in my cheekbone is real and it certainly wasn’t there the other day. The coloring under my eyes is a little too close to that of the Bleeding sky. My lips are white and chapped. Is it possible that the cost of saving Baz came at the expense of my beauty? If so, I can’t care about it now, nor can I regret it. I’m vain, but not vain enough to think saving him wasn’t worth it.

When I get back to my room, I find Baz on the floor.

Not on the floor properly, more like half-off the bed with his legs tangled in the quilt and his shoulder on the rug. His face is pale grey and his mouth is open and his breath is rattling in his chest.

I gasp and close the door, then cross the room and crouch beside him.

“Baz?” I whisper. “Are you alright?”

I place my palm gently on his back. His bare skin is cold, very cold. I feel him breathe under my hand, labored and raspy, nearly choking for breath, but the longer I hold him, the longer his breaths become until they sound normal again.

Then the rest of him falls to the floor with a thunk that shakes the room.

“Baz!”

He groans and sits up and looks at me in confusion, his hair a mess. The gold of his eyes is dull and tarnished.

“Why am I on the floor?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I don’t…” he pauses and runs a hand over his eyes.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

“I don’t remember anything. I was asleep. Now I’m here. I must have rolled out of bed.”

“Maybe. Or you might have been trying to get up. Here, let me help you get back on the bed.”

He nods and lets me help him. He is heavier than I expect, again, even now that he’s alive. Together we get him upright and sitting on the edge of the mattress with the quilt around his shoulders like a cloak, and his breathing seems normal again and his skin is back to his slightly tanned hue. The amber of his eyes glows.

But no…his eyes have always seemed to glow, but they don’t literally glow. That’s something else. Like it’s been illuminated by…

I look down and have to blink a few times.

Barely visible in the morning light is a glowing line. A line running from somewhere behind my breastbone to somewhere behind his, the color of chartreuse. The color of the electricity from last night and of the sigils in the circle.

The line is lit from the inside.

It coils gently where it hangs in the air between us. When Baz exhales it brightens for a half-second and settles again. When I lean toward him it thickens ever so slightly. When I lean back it’s almost as if it thins.