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“Alone?”
“I was safe enough, as I kept to the br
ight path. They can’t come out in the sunlight.” She looked toward the windows. “There was nothing left of the ones that attacked us last night. Even the ash was gone.”
“Where is everyone else?”
“Hoyt went up to his tower to work, and King said he would go into the town for supplies now that there are more of us. I’ve never seen a man so big. He cooked food for us, and there was juice from a fruit. Orange. It was wonderful. Do you think I could take some of the seeds of the orange when we go back to Geall?”
“I don’t see why not. And the others?”
“Larkin, I imagine, is still sleeping. He tends to avoid the mornings as if they were the plague. The vampyre is in his room, I would think.” Moira rubbed her finger over the carved word on the book. “Why does he stand with us? I can find nothing in the books to explain it.”
“Then I guess you can’t find out everything from books. Is there anything else you need for now?”
“No. Thanks.”
“I’m going to grab something to eat, then go up to work. I imagine whenever King gets back, we’ll start whatever torture session he has in mind.”
“Glenna…I wanted to thank you for last night. I was so tired, and upset. I feel so out of my place.”
“I know.” Glenna put her hand over Moira’s. “I think in a way, we all do. Maybe that’s part of the plan, taking us out of our place, putting us together so we find ourselves, what there is in us—individually and together—to fight this thing.”
She rose. “Until it’s time to move, we’re going to have to make this our place.”
She left Moira to the books and returned to the kitchen. There she found what was left of a loaf of brown bread and slathered butter on a slice. Damned if she’d worry about calories at this point. She nibbled on it as she climbed the stairs to the tower.
The door was closed. She nearly knocked before she reminded herself it was her work area, too, and no longer Hoyt’s solitary domain. So she balanced the slice of bread on the mug of coffee, unlatched the door.
He wore a shirt the color of faded denim with black jeans and scarred boots, and still managed to look like a sorcerer. It wasn’t just the rich and flowing black hair, she thought, or those intense blue eyes. It was the power that fit him more truly than the borrowed clothes.
Irritation crossed his face first when he glanced at her. She wondered if it was habitual, that quick annoyance at being interrupted or disturbed. Then it cleared, and she found herself being carefully studied.
“So, you’re up then.”
“Apparently.”
He went back to work, pouring some port-colored liquid from a kind of beaker into a vial. “King went for provisions.”
“So I’m told. I found Moira in the library, reading, from the looks of it, every book in there.”
So, it was going to be awkward, she realized as he continued to work in silence. Better to get past that. “I was going to apologize for disturbing you last night, but that’s just an indulgence on my part.” She waited, one beat, then two before he stopped to look over at her. “So you could tell me not to worry about it, that of course it was all right. I was frightened and upset.”
“That would be true enough.”
“It would, and since we both know all that, indulgent. So I won’t apologize. But I will thank you.”
“It’s of no matter.”
“It is, for me, on several levels. You were there when I needed you, and you calmed me down. Made me feel safe. You showed me the sun.” She set the mug down so her hands would be free as she crossed to him.
“I jumped into your bed in the middle of the night. Naked. I was vulnerable, hysterical. I was defenseless.”
“I don’t think the last is true.”
“At that moment it was. It won’t be again. You could have had me. We both know that.”
There was a long beat of silence that acknowledged the simple truth more truly than any words. “And what manner of man would I be to have taken you at such a time? To have used your fear for my own needs?”
