“Let go, Missy,” he murmured, tipping my chin up with his free hand. “Just let go, for once. Let me.”
I did, melting fully against the trunk, the bark rasping against my head as I tipped it back. Whatever I gave him would be the right thing. I could trust him with not just the best, but with all of me.
He trailed kisses down my neck until my entire body burst with tingles. Everywhere he skimmed his fingers, the inside of my skin ignited. I remembered how sometimes, in mining cities, the coal beneath the earth caught fire and burned for years without ever going out, because it couldn’t be extinguished. That was what I felt like when his hands ran over me, as if he were drawing out veins of ore I’d never known I had. Even my cheeks felt like they might glow with heat as he brushed his lips where my tears had dried.
He set his teeth delicately into my neck, and I shuddered against him, shock waves spreading from the suck and flutter of his lips and tongue in the hollow of my throat.
“Oh, that’s going to leave a mark, my Missy,” he breathed against me, ringing one of my wrists with his fingers so he could feel my racing pulse. “How do you feel about that?”
I licked my lips, trying to gather myself. “Um, I feel very yes about it.”
“Good,” he purred. “Because if I’m going to be yours, I want the whole world to see.”
He drew back for a moment as I tried to catch my breath. Strands of my hair had gotten caught between my lips, and he gently smoothed them free. “There,” he said, leaning in for a kiss that startled me even further with its softness. “Now you’re perfect again.”
“Perfect?” I challenged. “Or uncanny?”
He let me go to smile into my face, teeth glinting in the dark as he slid his hands over my waist. “Both, of course. Exactly the way I love you.”
Nothing Mara had ever done could have touched what we had then.
THIRTY
A FEW HOURS LATER, I WOKE NOSE TO NOSE WITH LUKA, snug in the sleeping bag we’d somehow managed to cram ourselves into together for a nap. As soon as my eyes opened, he smiled, blinking himself languorously awake.
“Your eyelashes are ridiculous,” I informed him, nuzzling the tip of my nose to his. “You look like Bambi’s hotter brother. It’s completely unfair, and constitutes much of what’s wrong with the world.”
“And you have pine needles in your hair.” He gave me another slow smile, shifting against me. “It looks real pretty.”
“Oh, I can tell you think so. They’re not only in my hair, either,” I added, squirming.
He grimaced. “That can’t be good.”
“It was well worth it,” I murmured, leaning in for a kiss.
Dunja popped up above us like a bad-omen crow, the black pashmina rewrapped around her head and shoulders. “So the children have consummated their tendresse,” she said. “Thank the gods. The tension was about to give me a migraine, and I didn’t even think I could get those anymore.”
Luka and I scrambled apart, to the extent that two full-length individuals confined to a sleeping bag can scramble any distance. “Sorry to have imposed on you,” I muttered.
“Not to worry.” She gave me one of her quick, brilliant smiles. “I’m a staunch supporter of young love. Your sister is somewhere nearby with her lady; I’ve been keeping watch and nothing has come for us. I think, perhaps, that we might be safe.”
Luka and I squirmed our way out of the sleeping bag after that, and Lina and Niko wandered back over to rummage with us through the van’s supplies for snacks. Lina gave me a sly look through her lashes as I handed her a packet of dried apricots, humming something that sounded suspiciously like “Peaches and Cream.”
I fought back a smile. “You’re the worst, you know that?”
“What, me? When I’m not even judging you for being such a copycat? Just remember who had their own Damjanac first.”
Still, I saw her slip a subtle high five to Luka as she passed by him, and the sight of it warmed my insides much more than it should have. I felt generally tender, as if the clay casing I’d packed around my heart for years had finally cracked open, and what was beneath it was so raw it felt even the slightest, passing breeze of emotion.
Or maybe that was what it always felt like, knowing you might lose everything when you’d only just discovered all there was to live for. The sheer brilliance of the light against the darkness was almost too much to stand.
I was sitting on the ground between Luka’s knees, with my back to him, when Dunja returned from one of the perimeter checks she had been running periodically; I could feel his legs tighten around me as she finally appeared from between the trees like some gorgeous, unlikely nun, the pashmina hiding her hair.
Her flawless face was bleak as she reached our clearing. “They’re coming,” she said grimly. “I can hear them gathering, the ground carrying their sound. It’s all of them now, full coven strength. Whatever we did yesterday must have accomplished something, and now they come to hunt us. I can hear Izkara baying.”
Luka dug his hands into my hair, as if he could feel the collapse of my heart in my chest. “Baying?” I asked faintly.
“Izkara is one of the first nine tiers. Mara’s great-great-granddaughter. She can gleam by taking on animal form, any combination that she dreams to life. Like a sphinx, or a griffin, but without limitation. Whatever menagerie suits her will.”
“Like Naisha?” Malina said.
“Not like Naisha. Her gleam is hollow, a pretty fancy, while Izkara’s is ancient enough to be real. If she grows claws of any kind, you had better flee before you think to test whether they can rend you from stem to stern.”
Niko twined her arms around Malina’s neck as if she had no intention of ever letting go, from where she sat tightly snuggled on my sister’s lap. “So, what do we do, then?” she demanded. “Now can we run?”
Dunja closed her eyes, and even in that inhuman, altered face, I saw the leaching of her stony strength. “I don’t know what to do. Jasmina—what we planned, the makeshift spell, that was the only hope. And now there’s nowhere to run from them.”
“How much time do we have?” Luka asked above my head.
She tilted her head, considering it. “An hour, maybe. Perhaps a little more. It’ll take them time to mass, and with so many abreast, they’ll have to scour the forest on foot.”
“So dance it for us,” Luka said above my head. I tipped my chin back, craning to look at him. His face had fallen so still and furious that it was terrifying, like rage somehow carved into rock. “That’s the one thing you haven’t done. Show us all what it was like, between you and Death.”
Her face shuttered. “Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s the one thing we’re missing,” he said. “You’re the only one who’s been there and back. Maybe there’s something we could learn from seeing it.”