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“I don’t have anything else to give,” I said.
“Don’t you?”
“My life? Fine.” Funny how quickly that answer came. When it had all started, I would never have considered putting myself in aposition where I could lose my life for a cause, but I also hadn’t had anything worth saving.
My life had been empty, just me pretending to be normal, keeping my head in the sand as I moved through time without any attachments.
Then Kase had shown up on my doorstep and everything had changed. I’d been thrust into a world thatneededme.
One that I needed.
“What if the price isn’t your life?”
“What else could it take?”
He lifted an eyebrow as if the point were obvious.
And itwas. Despite the way my mind refused to think about it at first, even though it avoided that reality or option, that lifted eyebrow forced me to face it.
The price could be not my actual life but the life I’d found, my place in it.
It could be my men…
It almost had been, time and time again, as if the universe were warning me what was coming.
Could I go through with it if that were the price?
It was a far more difficult choice than if it were my own life.
Hunter ended my line of thought by a quick jerk of my hand, one that toppled me into the water, still fully dressed.
I gasped, water splashing in my face, Hunter’s naked body spread out before me. I wassureI elbowed him, but really, that was his own fault. I refused to feel bad even if he were hurt, because he’d caused it!
Still, he seemed to have bounced back, because he shifted me despite my struggles until I was stretched out across him.
I sputtered and picked a dried flower from my cheek before giving him a chiding look. Not that I could make it too serious, because something about Hunter’s nude body turned me to mush every damned time.
“You must be doing better,” I said.
“I still have this chill inside me, like I breathed in some of that mist I can’t quite get out of my lungs.”
That took me back to the day after I’d first found that void, when Gran had pulled mist from me.
I had no idea how she had done it, but I recalled how it had felt when it slid from me. My lips found his, and I drew, calling that same feeling as if I could control it.
When I pulled backward, that same freezing mist left him, escaping his lips and passing between us. It froze my mouth, my tongue, my cheeks, but I didn’t swallow it. I didn’t take it into my own lungs. Instead, I tilted my head back and blew it out. As it had the last time, it dissipated as if it couldn’t exist in our universe unless inside a person.
Hunter’s eyes were wide when I looked down, as if I’d yet again surprised him.
The shivering had stopped, and when he put a hand behind my neck to pull me in for an aggressive kiss, it reminded me of his question.
What if he was the price the universe demanded? What if they all were? What if I could manage to stop Lilith, to save everything except what I really wanted?
When Hunter grasped my shirt and pulled the soaking cloth from me, I pushed the worry aside.
I’d worked too hard, suffered too much, to let the universe take away anything else from me—especially the men I was hopelessly in love with.
