Chapter 6

Sibyl's POV

The laugh behind me had already moved on to someone else, but it followed me anyway, the way a smell follows a coat. I gathered my skirt in both fists and went down the stone steps and away from the light.

The garden was black and wet. I went past the first hedge, then the second, then through the roses, cut back for winter and nothing but black sticks. I did not know where I was going. I only knew the house was behind me and the music was getting smaller.

At the far end the lawn sloped toward the wall and the grass was frozen hard enough to crunch. I sat down in it and bent forward with my forehead on my knees.

Somewhere behind me a shoe pressed down on gravel.

"It is cold out here. That dress is not made for it."

I turned too fast and the lawn tilted. A man stood where the window light gave out. Tall. Shoulders that did not need to be braced. I knew the shape of him before I knew the face.

Alaric came forward a step and held out his coat at arm's length and waited until I took it. It was warm through the lining and smelled of black pine and cold iron, and I pulled it around my shoulders and my teeth stopped knocking.

"Are you all right?"

My hands answered before the rest of me did.

Then I realized what I had done and was about to reach for my phone.

His hands came up and answered me.

I stopped breathing. His signing was clean. Not learned from a book in a week. It had the half lazy shapes of a man who used it every day, and he did not slow it down for me.

"How," I signed. My hands were shaking. "How do you know this."

"I learned it a while ago." One shoulder lifted and dropped. "Because of a friend."

In that whole lit hall behind us there was not one wolf who had ever asked me to write a sign down. They asked me to speak.

Wind cut across the lawn and went through the coat and into me. Heat turned over behind my ear and moved down my neck and under my tongue. Fast. The way a bad memory comes back. My knees failed and I put out a hand and found nothing at all.

His arm closed around me before I reached the ground. He took my whole weight and one hand came up flat between my shoulder blades.

"Breathe," he said. Low. So low I felt it in my chest more than heard it. "In through the nose. Out slow. Do not fight it."

This voice sounded familiar.

It sounded like the voice from childhood. A dark room with a low grate in the wall, and on the other side of it a boy sitting on the wet ground, talking to me for hours about nothing. A horse he had seen. A fight he had lost. I gave him a name back then. I called him the nightlight, and he never asked me why.

It was the same voice. Low and even and patient, like he had all night and nobody waiting for him.

The edges of the world went soft. His hand moved once on my back. I tried to lift my head and my neck would not do what I told it.

Then the dark.

I woke on a bed.

The room was quiet and the lamp was low. There was no sound left from the party anywhere in the house. His coat was over me up to my chin, and my shoes stood on the floor in a tidy pair, which meant somebody had taken them off, and my face went hot.

My phone was buzzing on the nightstand. Eleven missed calls from Damian. Then a message underneath them.

[Where are you. I have been looking for twenty minutes. This is not the time.]

I checked the clock. More than an hour gone.

I sat up too fast and the ceiling swam. I got the shoes on wrong twice. I went out into the hall and down the back stairs with my skirt gathered up.

Alaric's POV

For a while after her steps faded I did not move.

The mask came off slowly. I had worn it four hours and my jaw ached from it. I stepped out of the shadow beside the window and the lamp found me.

My canines were already too long for my mouth. The green in my eyes caught the low light and threw it back changed.

I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. I put my palm flat where she had lain and left it there until the warmth went out of the sheet. Then I bent forward and buried my face in the pillow and breathed in.

Under the soap and the hotel cotton there was pine resin. Under that, cold caramel. Snow melting on cedar. Faint, thin as thread pulled through a needle. The only scent in Cedar City that ever made my throat go dry.

I stayed with my face in the pillow longer than a sane man would. When I lifted my head my chest was tight and my tongue hurt from the pressure of my own teeth. The hunger went down my spine, settled at the base of my skull, and did not leave.

"Sibyl," I said into the empty room. My voice came out rough. "My sweettie."

My tongue hurt. I let it.