His alien fingers danced across her skin, leaving a trail of light behind in foreign patterns, old and wild. Twice he cut into her skin. Twice, she felt a sharper and cleaner pain than the dreadful heat building in her calf. Clotted blood and no small amount of awful fluid, egg-colored and gut-wrenching, flooded out at his claws’ entry. And he whispered in the Holian language, a chant that went harsh against his volume. These were words that were meant to be shouted.

  Slowly, unflinching, the pain began to recede. She looked down at the ruin of her leg and saw smooth, whole flesh beginning to eat back against the burns. The red streaks were also retreating, albeit slowly. Even the punctured abscesses looked to be improving.

  She looked at him with amazement.

  “It is nothing,” he said, and seemed nearly embarrassed. “I’ve fought against those burns before. I’m well practiced in fighting for the lives of my followers.”

  He tried to keep his words light. There was, however, one very firm reminder that he was, indeed, naked as a jaybird. She looked down at it with a wifely possessiveness, and then back up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, in a smaller voice.

  “Don’t be.” She said. Dear god, she wanted to have sex right here and now, on this rocky outcropping, three seconds after he’d healed her. But she wanted him. She wanted his reassurance, his gentleness, his love. She wasn’t even sure he had those things anymore. His golden eyes refused to meet hers. She wanted to tilt his chin up and kiss him, but there was consent involved, which he clearly was not giving.

  “It is—”

  “It’s a natural human reaction to the proximity of people you like.” Hawk said, clinically. Keeping her voice steady was the hardest thing she’d ever done. “And you like me.”

  “That,” he said softly, “Is what I’m apologizing for.”

  Yeah, Hawk thought. Fuck that entire concept with a goddamn fork. She didn’t hesitate this time, but grabbed his chin with firm fingers and tilted it up so she could reach his lips. The kiss was warm and soft, as gentle as she could make it. He answered with heat, grabbing her and pushing back at first…and then he pulled her closer. He explored with tongue and she answered in kind. She gave this kiss everything—every ounce of romantic angst, every fear that this whole marriage thing was over, that she’d lost her person in the mystery of Shadow, and every breath of hopes she dared not name.

  They parted. It felt biblical, as if there should be a border of water as high as the sky.

  “You do not need—”

  “If you try to be self-depreciating once more time I’m…I’m…” she couldn’t think of a thing to say, so she kissed him again. “I do need,” She finally said. “I need very, very much and very, very badly.”

  “But here?” He gestured at the rocky outcropping.

  “A week and a half ago we were fucking on a stranger’s desk.”

  “That was Alex. And I am not he.”

  “Shadow—”

  “You cannot simply replace your husband with me. It would be a desecration of his memory and my identity.” This came out harsh, sharp, and oddly foreign to him. As if it were someone else’s idea. Because he wasn’t denying her for a lack of interest. That was standing at attention, just for her.

  But I want you! She thought, petulantly…and then reexamined that thought. Her enthusiasm for sex began to die. She realized she hadn’t compared Shadow to Alex in a while. It was no longer Alex’s face and voice and touch, to her. She’d crossed some romantic Rubicon, and pain coalesced behind this understanding. She closed her eyes and let go of him at last.

  “I’m sorry,” She said. “I’m sorry if I made you feel that way.”

  He swallowed, then looked down at her leg. “We will make camp here. No fires. We are far enough from the Temple for it to be noted and pursued.”

  And he turned resolutely away from her and faced the unknown darkness of this dreadful, sunless world.

  ***

  Her calf was improved enough for them to leave by morning, but the wound was still there. He had healed her well, but there was still an ache deep inside, and tooth marks circled her calf, oozing and open. She tried to make a lame joke about it, and attempted to stand. Pain blazed with the attempt, and she sat back down again.

  “Healing,” he said, apologetic, “is no simple task. Especially with the venom of the gods in play. I have healed wounds such as yours perfectly in the past, only for it to sour and kill the victim within hours from blood-poisoning.”

  Hawk nodded. “Sepsis.”

  “It is, in a way, easier to resurrect the dead. When every part is broken, every part may be restored. It is the difference between life and not-alive. But your wound is living and fighting to continue. Reknitting that is a struggle for me.”

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  She nodded again, then couldn’t stop herself from saying, “You don’t want to talk about last night?”

  “No,” He said, in a tone that put paid to her attempts to revive it.

  “Because we should talk about it,” she pressed, the way he’d stopped the bleeding last night. Because part of her was hemorrhaging and his powers could not touch it. Love as sepsis, God help her.

  “There is nothing to speak of,” he said, and then turned his back to her. He was, of course, still completely naked. “We must leave.”

  And he must assume the form that can’t talk, Hawk thought. Damn the man. But she could shift gears, too. From the sublime to the deicidal, as it were. Gods lay ahead, and she could put last night to their debit, too. Both for the devouring of Alex, and for the emotional and physical battery that made the Shadow who and what he was. He had his reasons for restraint and if she ever loved him, she owed him the distance he seemed to so desperately want. No matter how hard it was.

  And it was fucking hard, goddamn it. Her emotions were difficult, too.

  She wanted to go forward and press herself into his back, moving serpentine to evoke the tides of sex with her every curve. Instead she was demure, and only her grip around his neck was tight.

  But she also couldn’t help herself. “We are going to talk about this. Eventually.”

  He gave no answer, but shifted into the great Shadowcat and took off for the depths of Holia immediately.

  ***

  They kept to the high places at first, the cliffs and high hills growing increasingly barren as they raced further and further from the Temple of Light. It was the only source of true sunlight in Holia, albeit translated through a bank of milk-white crystal. The stuff in retrospect was quite impressive. It allowed for forests and crops and the great banks of moss, though leaves were often a light-starved white. Now it was little more than a pinpoint in the distance, and there were fewer phosphorescent plants, and almost zero ground cover. They were now in a great cave-world. At one point the Shadow made his cold-light, and it was bright as sunlight and warming against the chill of these barren grounds. In this light, she saw the great edifices of speleothems, limestone waves and rippling drip formations, stalagmites the size of matured trees with the answering stalactite somewhere high above their heads. Sometimes some segment of mean growth attempted to climb its way across these orange and gray stone faces. A bit of starmoss clinging resolutely to cave popcorn, erupting all across a hill. Helictite bushes replaced the phosphorescent biology. Footfalls echoed now, as did the growing rush of water.

  But it wasn’t until she spotted a pond filled with cave pearls, each object rounded and pearlescent white, that she connected the growing water with Illyris’s domain. The reminder that they were traveling this hell to meet with the most reasonable of Holia’s surviving gods hit her like ice. She clung tighter to the Shadow’s neck and tried to think of a plan. Killing the woman wasn’t an option, yet, her Ragnar?k ambitions notwithstanding. That meant she was going to have to play a game with her, one of words and probably deeds. Prostration was likely going to be involved.

  The first of the blue cold-lights appeared as they rounded a corner festooned with flowstone speleothem. It rippled like a girl’s ribbon and had apparently been blessed with the first of many artificial lights. A blue horizon glow promised Hawk that the lion’s share lay ahead. And it was here that the Shadow stopped and let her slip to the ground. He shifted with the now familiar dreadful sounds and shapes, and then a naked man crouched before her, holding his bundle of armor and rags.

  “You could upgrade those robes,” Hawk said, dryly.

  “I could. But I could not bring the memories with me.” He began putting on the under-things, his padded shirt and long leather pants. “People followed me when I wore those robes. They died beneath my banner, carrying my name. I learned to fear death in those days, and that my own death-wish will doom others, if I act upon it. I live for the people those robes represent.”

  She nodded, and said, “You could repair them.”

  “And the opulence would blind people to the despair. Or have you forgotten Nasheth’s pavilion? She uses gold to hide the blood on her hands, flowers to hide the bones beneath her throne. Her altar is ornate, but it drinks blood the same as Argon’s, or Illyris’s. And it works. That’s the poison of it. I’ll never wear that veil again. Beauty lies.”

  He was dressed now, a long and lean and beautiful figure, despite his awful words. And now she couldn’t tell him he was not awful, too, because of those words, Beauty lies. Perhaps he needed to be awful, to wear the trappings of darkness out of honesty. This was truly how he felt about himself. And, sadly, how he wanted other people to see him.

  “People should follow you,” she said. “You’re a better option than the others.”

  “People should follow their own hearts, unfettered by gods. If there is a god worth following, then their hearts should lead them there.” He paused. “I think, perhaps, that is why the gods are so loud and grasping. They dread the possibility that their worshippers would choose other things to praise. It would take a great God, indeed, to be willing to lose their every worshipper in the name of freedom. To let them all go.”

  “Sometimes they come back, you know,” She said. Meaning herself. She had come back to him like a stray cat for all his pushing, and wrath, and fearful appearance. She could gladly claim his ugliness, the same way she could enjoy his face.

  He gave her a look that said he understood. “More’s the pity for them, then, to have seen the way out and turn away for something as small as a god.” Then he sighed. “We walk from here.”

  “Okay. Is it far?”

  “Far enough to be distasteful,” he answered. “But we will be approaching Illyris as one of her penitents. I’ve done it before, and it amuses her. She also feels an enormous amount of guilt. I never understood why, save for her consumption of me. But now I understand. She robbed cradles and destroyed lives to reach her throne. She feels guilty.”

  This was more familiar ground. Hawk suppressed a groan. “And the others don’t?”

  “They have it; guilt, I think, is what drives them. But they do not allow themselves to feel it. It drives the nature of their perversity, to drown out the guilt with the screams of worship. Illyris actually feels it. It is said,” and he spat this out as if it were foul, “that the waters of the lands—of Holia, as you call it—are the result of her unending tears.” He turned to one side and spat at the ground. “That’s for that lie. The water was here already, and her eyes are dry when no audience is near.”

  Hawk followed the threads of a plan well enough. It was an Alex sort of plan. “Which would be why you brought me. I’m a new audience.”

  “And a woman she has wronged, personally and deeply. Your pain is on the surface still. One need only mention Alex West and one can see the pain of it in your eyes. She will be more interested in you, whom she will surely view as new meat, than I, the already well-gnawed. And that, I think, will give us time to sway her to our side.”