Page 35 of Dark Mate

Then his hands go gentle.

He tucks me against his chest like something he’s scared of breaking, one big hand cupping the back of my head. The knot swells and seals while he holds me, and the tenderness right on the heels of the rough is the thing that gets me every time. I press my mouth to a raised line of old scar on his chest—not quite a kiss, more a claim, marking skin I still can’t see. He goes still under it. Then the hum drops deeper, and his arm tightens.

At the stream I hear him cup the water. He brings it to my mouth first.

Cold. Sharper than anything the Cage ever poured into my labeled cup. I drink out of his palm. It spills down my chin, over his chest, and I don’t care. He fills his hand again, holds it to my lips, waits until I turn my face away—full. Only then does he drink for himself, long and deep, his throat working under my ear.

It lands on me with the cold still on my tongue: he reached for my mouth before his own. Every time we’ve come down here, and I never once counted it as something done for me.

“Thank you,” I say. Quiet. I don’t know if the words mean anything to him. His arm tightens around me. Maybe they do.

We rest there a while, the stream talking to itself over the stones, and I work out something about myself I wouldn’t have believed a week ago.

I like the dark.

Not in spite of the fear—with it. The dark took the Cage off me. No mirror handing back the girl they built. No light crawling across the floor to tell me what hour to be. Down here I’m just a body that wants things and reaches for them and makes noise doing it. It’s the most honest I’ve ever been.

The cold comes off his skin where the water touched him, a shock against all that heat, and it’s clean, and I push my face into his chest and let myself think the things I’d never have let through up in the light.

Again.

Harder.

I want him to laugh again, and I want to be the reason.

I’m not going back.

17

STALKER

The drugged quiet is gone out of her. I did that.

I knew her smell before I ever had her. Green. Warm. The flat dead sweetness laid over the top of it. That part’s gone now. Day after day of me, my venom, my cum, my heat, and the cup’s poison has bled out of her skin and left the real thing under it. Sharp. Alive. Hers.

She fights me now. Takes me. Climbs on when the drive rests and dares me to lie still and let her ride. There’s a heat in her that wasn’t there the night I carried her down. Anger, with an edge on it, pointed back the way she came. Good. Let it burn. A thing with teeth keeps better than a thing that only smiles.

I woke that in her. I’d do it again with my own hands.

But the dark isn’t only mine anymore.

I lift my head off the furs in the lull and read what the root-ways carry down to me, and every breath of it is worse than the last.

The soft ones are still on my line. More than before. They’ve quit calling into the dark and started working it, quartering my ground, smearing their dead stink on my boundary trees, walking the trail I tore open the night I took her. They found thegap in her cage wall. They’re reading it backward, to the thing that made it.

To me.

And under their stink, something new. Worse.

A scent with no fear in it. No sweat, no prey-shake, none of what a living thing gives off when it steps into a predator’s dark. Just meat, and metal, and the wrongness the Ordained breed into the things they break and build back. I caught it once before, far off, and hoped never close. They’ve sent their made things. The ones that don’t run. The ones you kill, and they get up, and you kill again.

A growl climbs my chest before I know it’s there. “Grrr.” She stirs against me. I drag it down. Hold her. Hate every wall of dark between me and the things walking my line.

And I can’t go.

The rut has me. My knot’s in her, my body roped to hers, and it won’t turn me loose for hours at a stretch. Even when it eases, I won’t pull out of her and leave her alone down here with that coming. I could carry her. I’ve carried her to water, sealed in my wings, full of me and safe. But I won’t carry her toward the metal-stink. I won’t walk what’s mine into the teeth of the thing that made me.

Because I know what they do.