Page 86 of Fire to the Stars

“I’m not the person I was before I got this scar. That person was honest and thoughtful and generous,” she says, then smiles sadly. “I’m selfish now. I take advantage of your weaknesses just so I don’t have to be alone.”

I swallow and try not to read too far into that last part. “You’ll find happiness again, Claire. Sooner or later.”

“I’d rather find it sooner.”

She steps closer. So close.

“Do you know where I can find it?” she asks.

My free hand flexes at my side. My desire to touch her cheek is so strong, it’s like an instinct. But I can’t. If I’m reading her behavior wrong, I’ll drive her away for good and lose my chance at a second target. One humane slaying is lucky. Two is a pattern.I need a pattern to prove my hunting method is worth implementing.

Too much is at stake. The future of slayer culture. The treatment of people who fall victim to the Ignition. My journal’s safe delivery to the archives. I need Claire’s help to make those things happen. I can’t lose sight of my job.

Sometime during my stupor, her hand takes mine. As if she read my mind, she presses my palm to her cheek and closes hereyes.

“You can touch me,” she whispers.

My breath shudders. All sense and reason go with it. I run my thumb over her sparse freckles, the smooth skin across her cheekbone. AndGods, she sighs at the contact. My pulse quickens from her proximity, her warmth. At how lucky I am. For once.

Doubt creeps in. The clues stack together in my mind: the sleep powder, the bolt in her thigh, the blood on her sleeve after she and Gérard fell onto shattered glass. The sole survivor of Sellecastel.

Her scar.

I let my fingers trace its impossible existence, from her jaw to her throat to her collarbone to the curve of her breast—where she guides my hand farther and holds my palm over her rapid heartbeat.

If she’s been the Sellecastel dragon this whole time, this wound should’ve healed. The scar shouldn’t exist. Is she a dragon or not?

All the work I did to become a better person crumbles under the urge to experiment.

Instinct takes hold. Claire gasps in surprise as I push my fingers through her hair to grasp the base of her head. I tug hercloser and press her body flush against mine. Those cherry-brown eyes bore up into mine.

I hesitate.

“You can kiss me,” she says.

Not a breath later, I do.

Je me défends—that phrase was so effective in justifying one’s own greed that criminals still use it today. Avoid those who say it; Diu will punish them eventually.

—Sermon onThe Tale of Stars (L’Histoire des Étoiles), Part II: The Book of Dark Days

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Claire

The last boy who kissed me thinks I’m dead.

Briefly, his face visits my memory—eyes a little darker, scruff a little fuzzier, less vivid than that sunny day when Papa and I first met him on a dock in Port-de-Chance. He was a sailor for a livestock shipper and helped unload the broodmares down the ramp. When he handed me the lead rope to my sassy new palomino, he had me at that crooked smile. That feverish mouth was on mine behind the inn’s stables once Papa went to sleep that night.

Abel’s kiss moves slower. Insistent, but languid. As it deepens, pleasant shivers ripple down to my toes.

The girl I was before the Dames Blanches might have been that sailor boy’s perfect match. Obsessive in the heat of the moment, yet patient enough to wait for him while he travels the coast.

I’m greedy for Abel.

I want to wrap my arms around his neck and melt into his frame, but with his injured shoulder, I claim his waist instead.

“Don’t stop,” I breathe.