“Not like you’re thinking, no.” Elise lifted her arms, palms up and fingers spread, in a movement that encompassed the cocoon of fog that concealed them from the world. “I want to write about you. This!”
He felt her heartbeat speed up under his thumb, his own quickening to match hers, before he released her abruptly. Shock crumpled what little remained of his composure.
It was not fear that made her heart race. It was excitement.
Just what kind of woman was he dealing with? Realizing that he had dreadfully miscalculated, Cal took a hasty step backward. Luckily for him, his natural grace and only partially corporeal form made the movement seem like an easy glide into the mist rather than the clumsy retreat it really was.
“Why would you want to write about me?” He shook his head. His long hair, bone white and with a will of its own, slid over his naked shoulder to wave like a flag between them. “I’m no one.”
Some of Elise’s radiant enthusiasm dimmed. Her brows snapped down into a harsh angle. “What? No one? You’re… you’re him. The fog! That’s hardly no one.”
She stepped forward, completely heedless of the fact that they were invisible to the outside world, that she stood on a rickety old dock over deadly water, and that her only company was a man of untold power she didn’t know.
In the years since his birth, Cal had seen every manner of depravity and form of violence. Watching over the city he once destroyed, the descendants of all those he so ruthlessly slaughtered, was his penance. It was his vigil.
He knew what could happen to a woman who stepped into a shadowed corner with a man she didn’t know. He knew what happened when someone fell into the water. He knew the danger that writhed in every shadow and under every stone. He knew it all and more than he ever wished to.
Cal was suddenly vexed by her lack of caution. He was also infuriatingly charmed by it.
“You dared to touch my fog for this?” He gestured sharply at nothing, too agitated to much else. “What if I’d been territorial? What if I’d seen you as a threat? What if you’d slipped and actually fell into the water? My story can’t possibly be worth what would have happened to you if I wasn’t what I am.”
“And what are you?”
That drew him up short. It was on the tip of his tongue to say he was a good man, one who would never actually hurt her or anyone else if he could help it, but that wasn’t true. He wasn’t good. He’d never had the chance to be. No one born into so much misery and bloodshed could be good.
Instead of saying any of that, Cal huffed and answered, “Someone who doesn’t hurt foolish witches.”
Elise’s smile widened into a full grin. The power of that smile was beyond reckoning. Cal held his breath, afraid that if he moved a single muscle, that pressure building inside of him would burst, leaving him nothing but shards around her feet.
No one, not even those lucky people he rescued in all his long, long years, had looked at him like that.
“See? There was no harm in it.” Her eyes twinkled with humor, like she knew how foolish she’d been and actually found it funny.
Cal blinked, dazed. Had he thought her pretty? Maybe he was the foolish one.
When Elise Sasini smiled at him like she kept all the secrets of the universe in her hands and found them all dreadfully silly, it made him feel the same way he did when he drifted with the fog bank over the water — weightless, exhilarated, free.
Like I’m home.
“No harm,” he repeated numbly. “I think… there could be a great deal of harm, witch.”
Not to her. She wore her confidence like armor. Maybe it really did protect her from the evils of the world. But him…
Cal got the uneasy feeling that if he followed the path she laid before him, he would not come out the other side the same. This woman was a force of nature all her own. Whether that was a good thing or not, he had no way of knowing. Would he like the man found on the end of the journey she promised?
Well, I can’t really dislike the one I am now more, can I?
“What is your proposal?” he found himself asking, against his better judgment.
Elise lost her smile, but he didn’t mourn it. Instead, he found himself admiring the way she pressed her lips together tightly, as if she was forcefully reining in her enthusiasm. He felt the unsettling impulse to press his fingertips against her lips, just to feel the grin they so valiantly tried to contain.
Joy burst across her expression anyway. It was uncontainable. It was in her eyes and in her flushed cheeks and in the way she propped her hands on her hips — it bled into every line of her body, like this moment in time was the most wonderful thing she’d ever experienced. It was a separate sort of magic from the one that fizzed in the air between them, but Cal was convinced it was magic all the same.
“I want to write a book about your life. All of it. From the beginning to now. How you got to be what you are, who you are, and everything that you’ve done for this city.”
Cal’s stomach churned. She wanted to know all of it? Why? Surely she already knew of his savage beginning. What more was there to know? His story began and ended that day. Any chance of being more was buried with his victims.
Still, he asked, “And what would I get out of this?”