Nerves smothered under lust.
“Once signed, we’ll seal. It’s been too long since I’ve had a man in my bed. A man worthy of it.”
He could take a goddess, have immortality, possess all the powers he’d seen inside the ball of glass.
He signed his name, and she hers. He watched those names bleed and burn into the parchment.
Then she took his hand. “Come with me, and we will do all there is to do to each other, until the light comes.”
She took her fill of him, took with a voracious hunger he nearly matched. Because he pleased her, well enough, in bed, she knew she would use him there again.
When he slept, she smiled into the dark.
Men, of all worlds, of all natures, all species, were to her mind the simplest of creatures. They might spring to act, to violence more fiercely, more quickly than the female, but the female remained cannier and more clever.
And the male? Sex would always rule them. The offer of it, the act, the need.
She’d had only to offer this when he hesitated, and he had signed the contract, in his own blood. That blood now burned and bound him.
He belonged to her now. And when he helped her take the stars, when she granted him his choice of immortality, he would belong to her—as ever she wished—for eternity.
When Annika couldn’t sleep, she crept downstairs. She saw the light under the door of the room where Sawyer slept, and yearned to go in. Just to sit and talk to him, or better, to lie with him in the bed, quiet and warm.
But she understood when doors were closed, those inside usually wanted alone.
She slipped outside to stand and look out over the flowers, the steep road where the singing woman had pushed her baby in the stroller, and out to the sea.
Here and there on the slope down, and along the land below, lights twinkled against the dark. Faintly, very faintly, she heard music and wondered if someone danced.
Overhead, over the indigo sea, the moon turned toward its dark time. When she’d been a child, her mother had told her how the sky faeries nibbled away at the light of the moon until they were full, then breathed the light back. And so the moon turned.
A pretty story, she thought now, for a young one, to ease fears. She thought of her family—did they sleep? She knew she’d brought them pride when she’d been chosen for the quest. They believed in her, trusted her to succeed.
So she could not, would not fail.
Her mother would understand the dreaming part, the longing part, the loving, and would offer comfort when Annika returned home. But she wouldn’t weep long, Annika promised herself. She would have done what she was meant to do, preserve the stars, return them to the Island of Glass. And she would have had this time with her friends who were her family in this world.
She would have her memories of them, of Sawyer, who was and would be her only love.
But she could wish—wishes that caused no harm were never wrong. So she picked out the brightest star, and made one.
Before her duty was done, before she returned home forever, she would know Sawyer’s love, and he would know hers. And from love would come joy for both.
The wish slipped quietly into her heart and eased it. When it eased, she heard the sighs. Far-off, like the music. Hardly more than a breath on the air, yet it tingled along her skin.
She stepped forward, as if to move toward that whisper of sound. And heard another.
A footstep, a rustle in the shadows. She pivoted toward the sound, braced to fight.
“Relax, Gorgeous. It’s Doyle.”
“Oh.” She straightened from her crouch, loosened her fists. “I thought you slept.”
“Just taking a last circuit around the place.”
She heard the sharp slither of his sword homing itself in its sheath before he stepped into the light.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked as he walked up the steps toward her.