“Why? This is your time, isn’t it, and you won’t seek your bed. I can’t sleep. Something cold.” She hugged her elbows, shivered once. “Something cold in the air woke me.” Because she was watching him, she caught the slight change in his eyes. “What? What do you know? Has something happened. Larkin—”
“It’s nothing to do with that. He and the others are well enough as far as I know.”
“What then?”
He debated for a moment. His personal desire to be away from her couldn’t
outweigh what she should know. “It’s too cold in here for nighttime confessions.”
“Then I’ll light the fire.” She walked to the hearth, picked up the tinderbox that rested there. “There was always whiskey in that painted cabinet there. I’d have some.”
She didn’t have to see to know he’d lifted a brow, a gesture of sarcasm, before he crossed to the cabinet.
“Did your mother always fail to teach you that it would be considered improper for you to be sharing a fire and whiskey alone with a man, much less one who is not a man, in the middle of the night?”
“Propriety isn’t an immediate concern of mine.” She sat back on her haunches, watching for a moment to be sure the turf caught. Then she rose to go to a chair, and held out her hand for the whiskey. “Thanks for that.” She took the first swallow. “Something happened tonight. If it concerns Geall, I need to know.”
“It concerns me.”
“It was something to do with Lilith. I thought it was just my own fears, creeping in while I slept, but it was more than that. I dreamed of her once, more than a dream. You woke me from it.”
And had been kind to her after, she remembered. Reluctant, but kind.
“It was something like that,” she continued, “but I didn’t dream. I only felt…”
She broke off, her eyes widening. “No, not just felt. I heard you. I heard you speaking. I heard your voice in my head, and it was cold. It will be I who does for you. I heard you say that, so clearly. As I was waking, I thought I would freeze to death if you spoke so cold to me.”
And had felt compelled to get out of bed, she thought. Had followed his music to him. “Who was it?”
Later, he decided, he might try to puzzle out how she could hear, or feel, him speak in her dreams. “Lilith.”
“Aye.” Her eyes on the fire, Moira rubbed a hand up and down her arms. “I knew. There was something dark with the cold. It wasn’t you.”
“You could be sure?”
“You have a different…hue,” she decided. “Lilith is black. Thick as pitch. You, well, you’re not bright. It’s gray and blue. It’s twilight in you.”
“What is this, an aura thing?”
The chilly amusement in his tone had a flush creeping up her neck. “It’s how I see sometimes. Glenna told me to pursue it. She’s red and gold, like her hair—if you have an interest in it. Was it a dream? Lilith?”
“No. Though she sent me one that may have been a memory. A whore I fucked and killed in the filth of a London alley.” The way he lifted his glass and drank was a callous punctuation to the words. “If it wasn’t that particular one, I fucked and killed others, so it hardly matters.”
Her gaze never wavered from his. “You think that shocks me. You say it, and in that way, to put something cruel between us.”
“There’s a great deal of cruelty between us.”
“What you did before that night in the clearing in Ireland when you first saved my life isn’t between us. It’s behind you. Do you think I’m so green I don’t know you’ve had all manner of women, and killed all manner of them as well? You only insult me, and your own choices since by pushing them into the now.”
“I don’t understand you.” What he didn’t understand he usually pursued. Understanding was another kind of survival.
“Sure it’s not my fault, is it? I make myself plain in most matters. If she sent you the dream, true or not, it was to disturb you.”
“Disturb,” he repeated and moved away toward the fire. “You are the strangest creature. It excited me. And it unnerved me, for lack of a better term. That was her purpose, and she succeeded very well.”
“And having served her purpose, dug into some vulnerability in you, she came to you. The apparition of her. As Lora did with Blair.”
He turned back, holding the whiskey loosely in one hand. “I got an apology, centuries overdue, for her abandonment of me when I was only days into the change, and near dead from Hoyt tossing me off a cliff.”