“If you’re afraid—”
“Of course I’m afraid. Are you stupid? After what we’ve seen and dealt with tonight, we’d be morons not to be afraid.” She pressed her hands to her face, struggled to eve
n her breathing again. “I know what has to be done, but I don’t know how to do it. And neither do you. None of us do.”
She dropped her hands, went to him. “Let’s you and I be honest here. We have to depend on each other, have to trust each other, so let’s be honest. We’re a handful—with power, yes, with skills—but a handful against untold numbers. How do we survive this, much less win?”
“We gather more.”
“How?” She lifted her hands. “How? In this time, in this place, Hoyt, people don’t believe. Anyone who goes around talking openly about vampires, sorcerers, apocalyptic battles and missions from gods is either considered eccentric—best case—or put in a padded cell.”
Needing the contact, she brushed a hand down his arm. “We have to face it. There’s no cavalry coming to the rescue here. We are the cavalry.”
“You give me problems, but no solutions.”
“Maybe.” She sighed. “Maybe. But you can’t find solutions until you outline the problems. We’re ridiculously outnumbered. We’re going up against creatures—for lack of a better word—that can only be killed in a limited number of ways. They are controlled or led or driven by a vampire of enormous power and, well, thirst. I don’t know much about warfare, but I know when the odds aren’t in my favor. So we have to even the odds.”
She spoke the kind of cold-blooded sense he couldn’t deny. The fact that she would say it was, in his mind, another kind of courage. “How?”
“Well, we can’t go out and cut off thousands of heads, it’s just not practical. So we find the way to cut off the head of the army. Hers.”
“If it were so simple, it would already be done.”
“If it were impossible, we wouldn’t be here.” Frustrated, she rapped a fist on his arm. “Work with me, will you?”
“I haven’t a choice in that.”
Now there was hurt, just the shadow of it in her eyes. “Is it really so distasteful to you? Am I?”
“No.” And more than a shadow of shame in his. “I’m sorry. No, not distasteful. Difficult. Distracting. You’re distracting, the way you look, the way you smell, the way you are.”
“Oh.” Her lips curved up slowly. “That’s interesting.”
“I don’t have time for you, in that way.”
“What way? Be specific.” It wasn’t fair, she knew, to tease and to tempt. But it was a relief to simply be human.
“Lives are at stake.”
“What’s the point of living without feeling? I feel for you. You stir something in me. Yes, it’s difficult, and it’s distracting. But it tells me I’m here, and that being afraid isn’t all there is. I need that, Hoyt. I need to feel more than afraid.”
He lifted a hand to brush his fingers over her cheek. “I can’t promise to protect you, but only to try.”
“I’m not asking you to protect me. I’m not asking you for anything—yet—more than truth.”
He kept his hand on her face, bringing his other up to join it in framing her as he lowered his lips. Hers parted for him, offering. So he took, needing as she did, to feel and to know.
To be human.
It was a slow simmering in the blood, a lazy tightening of muscle, a flutter of pulse—hers and his.
So easy, he thought, so easy to sink into the warm and the soft. To be surrounded by her in the dark and let himself forget, for a moment, for an hour, all that lay before them.
Her arms slid around him, linking his waist as she shifted up on her toes to meet his mouth more truly. He tasted her lips and her tongue, and the promise of them. This could be his. And he wanted to believe it more than he’d ever believed anything.
Her lips moved on his, forming his name—once, then twice. A sudden spark flared, simmer to sizzle. The heat of it rippled over his skin, burned into his heart.
Behind them, the fire that had gone to embers flared up like a dozen torches.