In the shadows of his apartment, Grey lit his candles and sparked off a stick of incense and knelt before the veve with the scents of teakwood rising and coiling thickly around him, the waft of smoke like fur inside his nose. He traced the patterns he knew by heart, then pressed his hand over his chest and listened to the thump-thump-thump that belonged to her and her alone, sworn in such a way that for the longest time, he’d thought he could never give it away to someone else.

“Tell me, Erzulie,” he whispered, and watched the flames flicker and dance like silent voices. “What should I do? Is this right? Is he right?”

But the loa did not answer, and he wondered if she had already left him, abandoning the useless vessel of his flesh.

Picking up his life and going to work the next night felt anticlimactic. Ridiculous, almost. It was a night of chasing frat keggers, and people were drinking too much and choking on their own vomit and giving themselves alcohol poisoning—when they weren’t falling off balconies because they were so very convinced Jägerbombs and vodka shots made them invulnerable to the effects of human stupidity.

Saint didn’t know why he was so worried about killing humans, when they were so fucking dead set on killing themselves.

He closed his eyes. Killing themselves. Ha. Ha. You’re so funny, Saint.

Let’s pretend you aren’t worried that you haven’t heard from him. Not like you left a callback number, handy suicide specialist on call, but . . .

He should be relieved. Grey had realized how terrible this was and backed out. Maybe he’d even decided he wanted to live, and run far and fast in the opposite direction. Good. Good. He should stay far away from Saint. Maybe it was time to let go. Die. If his only hope was falling in love, he was fucked anyway.

Who would love something as broken and damaged and bitter as him?

And why did the idea of never seeing Grey again hurt like fucking hell?

“Hey. Earth to Xav.”

Nuo flicked his arm. He ignored her and just pulled his jacket closer around himself, gripping the cloth tight so she wouldn’t see how his fingers shook. He shouldn’t be this tired, though he’d pulled a long shift tonight; they were always scheduled extra hours on Football Fridays, but at nearly 4 a.m. things had calmed, the emergency room just a quiet tableau of waiting, the calls coming fewer and farther between. He leaned against the ambulance door, soaking in the summer heat, while Nuo sat on the hood and smoked a cigarette and muttered about which one of the doctors would be enough of an asshole to step out of the OR just long enough to report her for smoking on shift.

“Xav.” She swung her legs and knocked the toe of her sneaker into his thigh. He sighed, looking up at her. “Hey. You okay? You look sick.”

“I’m fine. Just a little cold.”

She snorted. “It’s ninety-eight out. In the shade.”

“It’s night. Everything is shade.”

“Don’t deflect, Xav.”

“That’s what I’m best at.”

She let it lie for a few minutes, pulling at her cigarette in deep draughts and blowing out bitter-smelling clouds. She usually left him alone about things, but he had a feeling she wouldn’t this time. He’d known Nuo ever since he decided it was safe to slip his way back into society for a while—when he couldn’t stand the loneliness anymore, cooped up in his little tower room hidden out in the hills and the trees and the dripping Spanish moss. She’d been in his EMT certification class. Nervous as hell, clicking a pen in and out, cursing under her breath, pacing outside the classroom while they waited for the first session to open. She’d stepped on his foot. He’d called her a manky git. They’d been friends ever since, but there was always a wall there and he knew damned well it was his fault, and he didn’t blame her for having too much self-respect to keep poking and prodding at him when all he did was shut her out.

He was the kind of friend you bitched about work with, maybe had a beer with after-hours now and then. He wasn’t the kind of friend anyone trusted with things.

He couldn’t be trusted with anything at all.

Nuo held her peace until she’d finished her cigarette, and flicked it to send it arcing to the other side of the roundabout, leaving a smoldering trail of smoke. “Putting on the jaded act again?”

He shrugged. “Who says it’s an act?”

“You know, cynical people aren’t cynical because they don’t feel anything.” She leaned back on her hands and swung her legs, kicking her heels against the front tire. “They’re cynical because they feel too much, and keep getting hurt for it.”

“Hn.”

“Yeah, you just keep grunting at me.” She grinned and hopped down from the hood. “You’re just mad ’cause I’m right. C’mon.” She thumped his shoulder. “Help me get Black Betty here put away. It’s time to go home.”

“I still don’t get why you call it that.”

“Because you’re a Luddite who doesn’t spend enough time on the internet.”

“Shut up. I have a smartphone.”

“You have a Nokia. They could put that thing on display in the Smithsonian.”

He just grunted again, but pulled the driver’s side door open—then paused as headlights swept the roundabout, turning in. He lifted his head, squinting at the approaching vehicle, but the high beams blinded him until they shut off.

And revealed Grey’s battered, broken pickup truck.

Saint froze. His blood crystallized and threatened to shatter with the wild beat of his heart. What was Grey doing here? Had he changed his mind? Or worse—hadn’t he? Fuck . . . fuck, why did it make Saint’s toes curl and his skin prickle to see the man when he knew what it would lead to?

And why couldn’t he tear his gaze from the easy, graceful roll of his shoulders or the fluidity of his body as Grey slid out of the truck and strode closer?

Nuo smacked his arm. “Xav?” She leaned into him, whispering in his ear. “Why is the suicidal hot artist guy here again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he here for you?”

“I don’t know.”

Grey drifted to a halt a few feet away, glancing from Saint to Nuo, before meeting Saint’s eyes with a small, almost rueful smile.

“Hi.”

Saint stared at him and tried to ignore the tremor of his knees, the tingle in his palms. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re supposed to be having a relationship. I’d like to take you on a date.”

For a half a second, Saint was caught in a tug of war between the sweet, light feeling fizzing in his chest and the heavier guilt plunging to the bottom of his stomach.

Then Nuo elbowed him.

Hard.

He winced, hissing through his teeth—but refused to look at her or acknowledge the dull red knot of pain blooming in his ribs, keeping his gaze on Grey and that oddly earnest look on his face, waiting and hopeful. “At four o’clock in the morning?”

“Your snooty coffee shop isn’t the only place open all night.” Grey spread his hands. “I’m an artist. I don’t sleep like a normal daywalker. Or at all. I know every all-night place in Savannah.” He grinned—a startling thing, white and inviting against the dark heat of his lips, creasing his eyes into simmering candle flames of so very human warmth. “I also know there’s nothing that tastes better than IHOP coffee at 4 a.m.”

“IHOP.” Saint arched a brow. “You’re taking me for pancakes on our first date.”

“Can you think of anything better?”

He scowled. “Hn.”

“Xav?” Nuo asked.

“What.”

“You’re dating Grey Jean-Marcelin. The Grey.”

“I don’t know.”

She huffed. “Stop saying that!”

Grey fixed him with a pointed look, and Saint’s face heated, uncomfortable and dizzying and burning his cheeks.

“Are we dating, Xav?”

God damn it. With a growl, he turned his back on those—those—they weren’t fucking coyote eyes, they were puppy eyes, and they weren’t going to work on him. “I need to put the ambulance in its bay.”

“I’ll take care of it!” Nuo chirped, and he glared at her.

“Stop being helpful.”

“C’mon.” Grey’s fingers brushed his arm. “We need to talk.”

That’s exactly why I don’t want to go.

He looked back reluctantly. If he went, he knew exactly what Grey would want to talk about. This agreement between them. This agreement he never should have brought up, never should have proposed. Worst idea of his life, and after over two hundred years of mistakes and willful denial, that was saying a lot.

“I will kick you in your skinny butt if you don’t go,” Nuo said. “For fuck’s sake, it’s free pancakes.”

Grey laughed, a silky rumble like flowing molasses. “Your friend has a point. Who would turn down free pancakes?”

“Stop ganging up on me!”

Nuo grinned. “You’re so cute when you’re pissy.” She offered Grey her hand. “His friend’s name is Nuo, by the way. I took your blood draw in the ambulance.”

Grey flicked a glance over her, then caught her hand and squeezed. “Thank you. I think. Not exactly a fan of needles.”

“But you’re a fan of living, right?” Nuo asked.

The stricken expression that crossed Grey’s face told Saint everything he needed to know. Fuck. Fuck. He pushed away from the ambulance door, shrugging out of his jacket.

“I’ll go,” he said quickly. Anything to save Grey from having to answer that question when he looked like he’d crack if he tried. Nuo’s frown was confused, but Saint ignored her, just taking Grey’s hand and pulling him firmly toward his truck. “Come on.”

But you’re a fan of living, right?

He should have expected a question like that. It was the kind of question normal people asked, because normal people assumed if you weren’t in the bin after a failed suicide attempt, then whatever had gotten turned sideways in your head must have tilted right again, phew, narrow miss, aren’t we glad that didn’t happen?

Except he wasn’t. He wasn’t glad, and he was a horrible liar. He still didn’t know how the hospital shrink had given her stamp of approval and kicked him out, and he suspected it had more to do with understaffing and less to do with his ability to fake a stable mental state.

He barely felt Saint dragging him toward his truck, barely felt the warm, slim fingers in his, barely was aware of the girl—Nuo—watching them with wide, confused eyes. He just heard that question circling over and over again, driving home exactly what he was doing. Panic sucked the breath from his lungs; he took several wheezing breaths, stumbling.

Saint whirled back, catching him as he pitched forward, arms sliding around him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Grey clutched at Saint’s shoulders, shaking his head until his vision cleared. “Nothing. N-nothing, I—”

His throat constricted. He nearly gagged trying to get the words out. Saint slipped his arm behind his back and guided him to lean against the hood of the truck, resting hard on his elbows with the rusty paint scraping his forearms.

“Breathe,” he said, that lyrical accent soft, soothing. “Count them. In. Out. One. Two. In. Out. Three. Four.”

He closed his eyes and listened to that low voice counting, that warmth against him. “In. Out. Five. Six. In. Out. Seven. Eight.” As he had last night, Saint pressed against his back, the gentle heat of his body comforting and steady. He clung to that memory, to the calm it brought, to the flush of something exhilarating and nervous it roused inside him, while he tried to calm his breaths and force them in and out, silently counting along in time with that voice guiding him out of the dark.

“Everything okay?” Nuo called.

“He’s fine,” Saint answered. His fingers stroked slow circles against Grey’s stomach, leaving bursts of tingling fire in their wake. “Just a panic attack.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

The tightness in his chest eased. Still counting his breaths in his head, measured and careful, Grey opened his eyes and twisted in Saint’s arms to meet his gaze. Those strange eyes looked up at him, shadowed by the veil of sooty lashes, dark with concern. Did Saint actually care for him?

How could he, when they knew next to nothing about each other?

“What happened?” Saint murmured.

Grey only shook his head. He couldn’t answer that. Not with that girl hovering close by, all curious ears and questioning eyes. “Let’s just go. And . . .” He hesitated, struggling. “Thank you.”

Saint looked as if he might protest, then nodded, pulling away. But he barely made it three steps, his fingers grasping the handle of the truck door, before his legs buckled and he sagged with a low moan. Grey rushed to catch him, wrapping his arms around Saint’s waist from behind, pulling him back against his body. Saint stiffened, not even breathing, like holding frozen flame in his arms.

Let go, Grey told himself. Let go. Bondye, they made one hell of a pair, both wobbling about everywhere and one step from falling over. He didn’t like those dark circles under Saint’s eyes, the ashen pallor adding blue undertones to his already pale skin. But he should damned well let him go, instead of standing here in public like an idiot with his arms slowly tightening around him. He wanted to envelop him, protect him, and for just a moment he caught himself leaning lower, the tip of his nose brushing dark, cool hair.

“You okay?” he asked softly.

Saint made a choked sound, flinching. “I’m fine.” He shrugged out of Grey’s grip, ripping away almost violently; Grey let his arms fall, stepping back, as Saint tossed him a slit-eyed look and jerked the truck’s door open. “Just fine.”

He climbed inside, flung himself down against the passenger seat, folded his arms over his chest, and glared mutinously at Grey through the windshield. Grey couldn’t help a faint smile, even as hurt knotted deep in his chest. Stubborn thing. Worse than a cat.

You’ll help me, but won’t let me help you.

Nuo tilted her head. “Um.”

Grey glanced back at her and raised a hand. “Good night, miss.”

“I—um—sure. Good night.”

Grey could only imagine the grilling Saint would get later. But later wasn’t now, and for now he rounded to the driver’s side of the truck, let himself in, and started the engine. Saint transferred that fierce scowl from Grey to the window; Grey lingered on him for a few moments, then sighed, jacked the truck into gear, and eased it around the ambulance, around the curve of the roundabout, and into the street.

“You’re not really fine, are you.” He glanced at Saint. “You’re getting weak. It hasn’t really taken.”

Saint slouched in the seat, stuffing himself forcefully down against the ragged upholstery. “What did you want to talk about?”

“Do you really need to ask me that?”

“No. I don’t.” Saint’s leg jittered restlessly, counting thud-rap-rap, thud-rap-rap with his knee against the underside of the glove box. “So we’re doing this, then.”

Are we?

Was Grey suddenly afraid of death, now that he’d reached for Bawon Samedi’s hand and fallen short?

He shrugged as neutrally as he could. “If you still want to.”

“If I don’t, you’ll find another way, won’t you?”

“Probably,” he admitted, even if he was afraid to ask himself the real answer. Afraid to look head-on at that terrible knot of doubt beginning to coil inside him. He stole another glance away from the road and at Saint. “It feels like I’m using you, when you put it that way.”

“I’m used to it.”

“You shouldn’t be.” He frowned. “Didn’t the others love you? Isn’t that how it works?”

Saint looked at his lap, curling his fingers in the edges of his shirt. It was a thin, black, ribbed shirt tonight, sleeveless, those designs down his arms bared in their stark, livid shadow-light; by night they seemed alive, whispering stories in the shapes of a thousand myths. One incisor worried at Saint’s lower lip, and for a moment Grey was caught: those teeth were subtly too long, strange, their shape wrong. Some people had naturally pointed incisors, but Saint’s were just off enough to make Grey look away from the road for a few moments too many.

Was that the way of things when someone wasn’t human, then?

The oncoming flash of headlights forced him to jerk his gaze back to the highway, steadying the truck’s drift quickly and easing back into the lane in time to pass a drunkenly speeding black sedan that might just be Nuo’s problem sooner rather than later. Saint still hadn’t answered. Grey couldn’t bring himself to push him. Not when he could feel the presence of so many dead like ghosts haunting the cab of the truck, this shadow between them, wordless and yet screaming into the silence.

“I don’t know anymore,” Saint finally said, faint, barely more than a whisper. “I thought they did. But if I’m honest with myself, if I stop pretending everything will be all right if I just love them enough . . . I don’t know if they loved me, or if I was just part of the intensity of emotion that comes with what I do to them. Passion is passion, after all. They mostly forgot me, once it took hold. It was all about their art. I suppose sometimes . . . sometimes they remembered I was still there.” He let out a bitter snort. “When I put it that way . . . I don’t think it was me they loved at all.”

“That doesn’t seem right.”

“I was killing them. There was nothing right about that situation.” Saint laughed, a hitching gasp of sound, and tilted his head back against the seat. “There’s nothing right about this situation.”

Grey couldn’t stand it. That quiet pain, that horrible breaking in Saint’s voice. He pulled one hand off the wheel and offered it to Saint, just . . . asking. He wasn’t going to take, when it felt like so many others had already taken from Saint, even if they’d paid with their lives. But he wanted to do something, anything to, just this once, make it easier on this withdrawn, sullen, beautiful man who made himself such a harsh tangle of thorns, but only kept stabbing himself every time he tried to stab someone else.

“I don’t want to forget you’re here,” Grey said. “Please.”

Saint eyed his hand and leaned away. “Why not?”

“I just . . . don’t.” He shook his head. “Hasn’t anyone ever wanted you for yourself, not what you can do for them?”

“I . . .” Saint made that awful sound again, that one he’d made outside the truck, like two hundred years of heartbreak in one tiny whimper. He lifted his hand, started to reach for Grey’s. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want someone to?”

Saint jerked back, clutching his hand against his chest as if that moment of near-contact had stung; as if Grey were poison, full of venom, full of hurt. His glare cut deep, as Grey let his hand fall.

“If I did, you wouldn’t exactly be the one, would you?” Saint said, then shifted in the seat to curl on his side, giving Grey nothing but his back.

Grey sighed, gripping the steering wheel again. Such a prickly thing. So defensive. So angry.

So why did it just make Grey want to find the bleeding heart underneath his wall of thorns?

Silence was the order of the evening on the rest of the drive. Grey was starting to think they were made for tense silences: Saint pretending he wasn’t there, Grey driving faster as if he could outrun the thoughts chasing him. He hadn’t been afraid in that moment he’d felt everything go black, the pain a dull throb of fire raked down the side of his skull, his blood a sticky pool spreading beneath him with a warmth that was almost comforting, like the embrace of amniotic fluid taking him back to the darkness where he’d first been born. He’d felt nothing but peace, then. Peace, acceptance, a hope he’d bleed out before anyone found him. That night he’d had nothing to lose, and no reason to be afraid.

Did the tremor of his heart, the doubt, the questions, mean he had something to lose now? Was that why he’d felt that moment of wrenching, terrible panic and fear?

He stole a glance at Saint, watching how the oncoming headlights swept over his skin in alternating bands of ivory and gold, occasionally catching in his eyes and lighting them up like a rose-colored dawn before fading into twilight again. At least the other man had relaxed, uncurling from his defensive ball and sinking down to face forward again, even if his gaze focused anywhere but on Grey. But for a half second he caught Saint watching him from the corner of his eye, just a quick, darting glance before he huffed and looked away with a scowl. Grey’s lips quirked.

For an inhuman black widow, sometimes Saint was disgustingly cute.

The sign for the IHOP flashed up ahead: blue, red, and white against the night. Grey switched lanes and then pulled into the lot. He expected a dirty look when he got out to open the door for Saint, and he wasn’t disappointed.

“Why do you do that?” Saint asked.

“Because I want to. Do I need another reason?”

“I’m not a damsel, and I’m not in distress.”

“I don’t think a closed door is enough of a crisis to put anyone in distress.” Grey chuckled, pocketed his keys, and strode toward the restaurant. “Inside. Free pancakes.”

“You really are going to make me hate you if you keep trying to be clever.”

“Trying?”

“Trying.”

Grey laughed and, just to be an ass, held the restaurant door too. He was rewarded by another fierce, petulant glare before Saint stormed past him and inside. His pout held until the waitress seated them and left their menus. Grey chose to keep his silence until they’d ordered; sitting across from each other like this with their knees brushing and the table bringing them so close, he didn’t quite trust Saint not to take advantage and kick him where it would hurt the most if he said the wrong thing.

But once the waiter had taken their menus and left a carafe of coffee, Grey risked opening his mouth. “It won’t kill you to look at me, you know.”

Saint propped his chin in his hand and glared out the window to the parking lot. “You don’t know that. It might. Maybe leanan sidhe are allergic to smart-ass jerks.”

“Am I really such a jerk?”

“Hn.”

“So expressive.” Grey chuckled and poured both their cups full, shaking out a few creamers and a couple of sugar packets into his own before nudging the little condiment island toward Saint. “So you’re definitely a leanan sidhe now?”

“Don’t say it like that. It sounds like you don’t believe me. You’re the one who said it.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. You were the one who didn’t like the idea.”

Saint scrunched his nose and stuck his tongue out, reaching for the sugar packets and counting out eight-nine-ten-eleven before beginning to rip them open and dump them in. “I don’t know. It makes sense. I mean, a lot of things have made sense, though—and I think I’ve been afraid to settle on just one, only to end up being wrong. There are legends of lamiae and incubi and . . . so many other things, and so many could fit for one reason or another. All of them? Some kind of sexual being who preys on the energy of men, filling them with a fever of passion for one thing or another, burning them out, draining them dry.” He shrugged. “If anything, it means human mythology reflects a complete and absolute terror of sex. And women, but mostly just sex in general.”

“You’re not a woman. And I’m not afraid of sex.”

“That is an absolutely terrible pickup line.”

Grey grinned. “I wasn’t offering sex with you.”

Saint blinked; color climbed up his cheeks like creeping vines, and if Grey hadn’t been offering sex before, he’d be damned well tempted now when that blush brought out everything delicate and sweet in that fragile face, everything warm and vulnerable—and he wanted to cradle those lovely features in his palms and feel that heat soak into his skin.

“Seriously,” Saint muttered. “This doesn’t fucking work if I hate you.”

“I’ll behave.” But Bondye, he didn’t want to. “So. Leanan sidhe. Why does it make more sense?”

Another glower. Saint growled something under his breath. “Mostly because . . . they were all creative types. All of them. Jake was an author. Philippe was a graffiti artist. Arturo, a cellist. Dorian was a theater performer back in the . . .” He frowned. His eyes unfocused, misting. “. . . God, I can’t remember. I can’t. I know it was in the late eighteen hundreds, I just . . .” He shook his head. “The years kind of . . . blend, after a while. I spend so much time alone . . .”

“You’d have to, wouldn’t you?” Grey asked. He was afraid to pry, but fuck if he didn’t want to know more. More about this fascinating creature and what he might be; more about this beautiful thing his life would burn to fuel. “To keep from being discovered.”

Saint hugged his arms to himself, rubbing at his biceps. “I can only stay for a few years here and there. Ten to fifteen at most, before people start to notice things. Then . . . a decade, two, hiding away.”

“But you stay in Savannah?”

“Near. I get . . . I don’t know how to explain it. Sick, if I leave too long. As sick as if my time was running out again. So there’s this house, out in the hills . . .”

“Your home?”

Saint nodded mutely, fixing his gaze on the table. Grey reached out to touch the peak of his chin, tracing the soft skin.

“Will you show me one day? Let me see?”

“I . . .” Saint licked his lips and darted a glance at him from beneath his lashes. “If I do, I . . . I need your help.”

“I thought that was already established.”

“No.” Oddly muted, an almost childish sound. He shook his head. “There may be a way to test if I really am. Leanan sidhe, I mean. Things that should hurt me, or make me weak. I want to try, but . . . but . . .”

“But you don’t want to do it alone,” Grey finished. Saint nodded, jerking his gaze away again, pulling back from his touch, and Grey smiled. “Of course.”

“You mean that?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Saint curled one hand against his chest, rubbing as if trying to ease the pain of a wound. “I . . . I don’t . . .”

He broke off as the waiter returned with their plates, sliding a steaming Denver omelet in front of Grey and a stack of sweet-smelling pecan pancakes in front of Saint, almost ludicrous with their comical little pat of butter standing on top. Saint murmured something polite under his breath, while Grey flashed a smile and waved the waiter off. He didn’t know how to ask what Saint had been about to say . . . and so he didn’t.

“I . . . I don’t . . .” what?

Instead he unrolled his fork and knife from the napkin and offered a lame “Bon appétit”—then watched with skeptical amazement as Saint picked up one of the syrup carafes and upended it above his plate, dumping nearly the entire thing over the pancakes until the syrup puddled and threatened to overflow the edges of the plate. Grey arched a brow and picked up another carafe, offering it without a word.

Saint blinked at it quizzically, tilting his head, then darted Grey a confused glance. “Oh—no, I don’t need any more.”

“You sure? I think there’s a small island of pancake above sea level.”

“Shut it.”

Grey only looked at him, biting back a grin. Saint blinked again, then glared to one side.

Then he laughed.

A thrumming vibrato like the last fading quivers of a piano’s strings after a ringing, stirring crash of notes, and Grey’s eyes lidded with pleasure to hear it. Just that simple laugh lit Saint’s gaze until sunset became the dawn, and his lips enticed, pursing into a little raspberry as he made a face at Grey.

“I’ve got a sweet tooth, all right?” He reached for his fork—then faltered, glancing back at Grey, eyes widening slightly. “What? Why are you staring at me like that?”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh. I didn’t think you were capable.”

He immediately wished he’d said nothing when that laughter, that smile, vanished. Saint lowered his gaze to his plate. “We haven’t exactly discussed things worth laughing over.”

“Truth,” Grey acknowledged, and picked up his own fork—but not without one last glance at the lovely creature currently pushing the sodden mush of pancakes around his plate. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“You keep looking at me.”

“Has no one ever looked at you before?”

“No one who can see what I am.”

“What. Not who.” Sudden frustration pushed a growl up Grey’s throat. “You talk about yourself like you’re a thing. I don’t like it.”

Saint lifted his head sharply, staring at him again. It was hard to believe he was so old, Grey thought, when he so often gazed at him with the innocent, confused surprise of a wounded child.

“Are . . . Grey, are you treating this like something serious?”

“Shouldn’t I?” Don’t touch him. Don’t. When he wasn’t playing seductive, Saint was like a small, skittish animal, and Grey didn’t want to spook him away. He forced himself to focus on his omelet, though the idea of eating it—all that grease and densely layered cheese and gristly meat—was much less appealing than it had been when he ordered. “It’s a business arrangement. I get that. An exchange of the strangest currency ever. The most Faustian bargain on earth. But . . . Bondye, Saint. You don’t want me to love you, but can’t I at least like you while we’re doing this together?”

Saint scowled and stuffed a bite of pancake into his mouth. “There’s nothing to like about me.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I do or do not like.” He reached out and brushed his thumb against a drip of honey-brown pouring from the corner of Saint’s lips, smiling to himself. “And right now I like a pretty, fey man who happens to have syrup dripping down his chin.”

He was rewarded by that flush that bewitched him so much, and Saint’s flustered mumble as he wiped at his mouth, then checked his fingers. His brows knit before he made an exasperated noise that sounded suspiciously like a repressed laugh.

“Oh, just eat the fucking omelet you bullied me into coming here for.”

Grey grinned. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled this much, and he leaned over the table in an awkward attempt at a bow.

“As my fae lord commands.”

“Grey?”

“Yes?”

“Shut. Up.”

With a laugh, Grey cut off a segment of his omelet and stuffed it into his mouth.

Dying, he thought, had never felt quite so good.

Saint had never been overly fond of Shakespeare. He’d read the plays sometime in the early nineteen hundreds, when he’d been going stir-crazy in his little prison of a tower. He’d read thousands of books for that reason. Taken up a million hobbies, abandoned just as many. Wandered the hills, seen only as a ghost by the occasional hunter or playing child. Stayed up all night doing nothing and learning to understand the value of nothing. But he’d never quite seen the point of a story about star-crossed lovers fated to die.

Why, then, had he walked directly into one?

He tried to ignore Grey as they ate. Tried to ignore everything but the taste of maple syrup and sugar-crusted pecans and deliciously soggy pancake. At least Grey was gracious enough not to talk. But every time their knees brushed under the table, every time their hands touched when they reached for the coffeepot at the same time, every time their feet nudged as they shifted, they stopped. Looked.

And Saint always looked away first, because he couldn’t stand the intensity of those feral eyes tearing into him, trying to know him. Trying to find that key inside him that would make the gears click together to begin the downward spiral, the machine of his curse grinding Grey toward death.

If it wasn’t already. If it wasn’t already rumbling in each shuddering beat of Saint’s heart, each constriction of his throat when they touched skin to skin and every inch of his body prickled.

You don’t want me to love you, but can’t I at least like you while we’re doing this together?

He didn’t understand how Grey could. Would Jake have still loved him if he knew Saint was the reason for his wasting sickness? Would Philippe?

Be honest with yourself. Stop pretending it was you they ever loved.

“I’m dishonest,” he blurted, breaking the silence, feeling like he was breaking glass. He stared down at his fork, twirling its tip in the puddles of syrup. “I told you I’m not good with the truth. I’m dishonest. I’m a liar. You shouldn’t like a liar.”

Grey’s fork clinked against the plate. In his peripheral vision, Saint saw the base of Grey’s coffee cup lift and then fall again, setting down with a soft thud. Every second dragged out agonizingly until Grey finally spoke. “It seems like your biggest problem is that you are being honest with me.”

“Maybe.” He gulped, fighting the tightness in his throat to swallow. “It makes me realize how much I lied to everyone else.”

“Would knowing have saved them?”

“No, but . . . I could have given them a choice, like I gave you . . .”

“And they wouldn’t have believed you.” Warm fingers touched under his chin, guiding him to look up, to look at Grey, into that smile that was so understanding it hurt. “Are you really hating yourself for what you have to do to survive?”

“Yes!”

“Do you think the cat hates itself when the mouse dies?”

“They weren’t mice!” He shoved Grey’s hand away, his eyes brimming with an abruptness that nearly slapped the breath from him. “They were men. Men I loved. You aren’t a mouse. Don’t talk about yourself that way. If I’m not a thing, then you’re not a mouse.”

“All right,” Grey said. “I don’t mind being more to you than a mouse.”

He recoiled. “That’s . . . that’s not what I meant . . .”

“No?”

His lips trembled. He was grateful for the waiter interrupting this time, with the check. It let him look away from Grey. Outside, the night was almost moonless, just a sliver of light like someone had taken a penknife to the dark canvas of the sky and cut out a little piece to keep. He stared at it and tried to shut out the sounds of Grey telling the waiter they didn’t need anything else, the noise and chatter of people all around them, these people with normal lives who never had to worry about anything when they fell in love except for a broken heart. He’d told himself after the first few times that it wasn’t any different than when one spouse died before another, but to do it over and over again . . .

“Saint?”

Grey had stood, and now his fingers brushed Saint’s shoulder, pulling him back to reality. He risked one look at him from the corner of his eye, then looked away again.

“What?”

“Did you want to stay here longer?”

“You paid?”

“I asked. I paid.”

“You didn’t have to—”

“You keep telling me that. You need to learn the difference between have to and want to.” Grey offered his arm, crooked and waiting. “I’d like to take you somewhere, if you’ll come with me.”

No, Saint wanted to say. No. Because that offered arm was dangerous. That offered arm was heartbreak waiting to happen, a promise that he could and would fall in love with Grey and hate himself for the way it would have to end. Every time he tried to hold them, and every time they slipped through his fingers like sand through his broken hourglass.

No, he told himself, then tucked his hand into the crook of Grey’s arm and stood.

“Sure,” he murmured, and loathed the taste of the word on his tongue. “Sure.”

At least this time, the silence in the truck wasn’t quite so tense. Saint tucked himself into a ball in the passenger’s seat, rested his head against the window, and tried not to fall asleep. Now and then the raggedy truck jounced on a buckle in the pavement and jolted him awake, before he found his eyes growing heavy again. He could blame it on the hectic night at work, but he knew what it really was. The weakness, crawling into his bones and sucking the marrow from him. He pictured it as one of the wild things in Grey’s paintings, this thing so inhuman that it should be ugly but was only strange and alien and incomprehensible and beautiful. Neither good nor evil, just like Grey’s loa.

It just . . . was what it was.

He looked up when archways of perfectly groomed, cultivated trees closed over them, leading the truck down cobbled roadways like the aisle of a church leading them to the altar. Forsyth Park. He peeked out the window at the night, watching the moon play peep-bo with the branches and leaves until Grey pulled the truck onto the curb and parked. He flashed Saint a smile and slipped out to hold the door for him again. This time, when Grey offered his arm, Saint slipped his fingers into the crook without question, and let himself—for just a moment, in this quiet dark of night that smelled of mossy green things and wet, crisp dew—lean against the warm curve of the other man’s shoulder.

Grey guided him across the pathways, between trees almost as old as Saint himself, surrounded by carefully manicured bushes and flowers that filled the air with a sweet, musty scent. As they broke into the plaza surrounding the great pale stone fountain, Grey slowed, gaze trained up to the sky. Saint tilted his head back—and caught himself watching not the night, but Grey, outlined in deep, richly gleaming brown against dark blue, the stars seeming to trace a path of constellations along the lines of his profile.

“Why the park?” he asked, and Grey looked down at him with a slow smile.

“The fountain,” he answered, and pulled away to grip the fence walling off the fountain. His body flexed, tight and powerful, and then he vaulted over, landing lightly on the paving stones on the other side.

Saint laughed, draping his arms along the fence. “Grey! You’re not supposed to—”

“Come on.”

Grey leaned over the wrought iron, caught him around the waist, and lifted him. He couldn’t stop his laughter, rushed from inside him in a breathless gasp, as the world tipped up and sideways, swirling past like a shaken kaleidoscope as Grey swung him across the fence—and spun him around to deposit him right in the fountain in water up to his knees, instantly soaking his trousers and clinging them to him in a cold film. The spray from the central font sprinkled down on him in a drizzle, cold droplets pattering into his hair and shoulders. He laughed, clutching at Grey’s arms as the other man climbed in with him, the water swirling against their legs in almost musical waves. Saint shivered until Grey’s arms slid around his waist, drawing him into the heat of Grey’s body, sharp contrast burning between them until he felt every lean line of slinking, agile muscle coiling against him like ropes of silk.

He looked up, meeting stark golden eyes. Grey was such a portrait of contrasts, nearly monochrome save twin bright spots of color, and Saint couldn’t resist reaching up to twine his fingers against the back of Grey’s neck, fingertips playing against the soft burr of pale, close-cropped hair.

“We aren’t supposed to be here,” he said, biting back another laugh.

“I haven’t gotten caught yet. I come here to think, sometimes. I like the quiet of it. It feels like being somewhere that isn’t here. Somewhere that isn’t anywhere. Like I’m just . . . floating in this place between waking and sleeping, both in this world and out of it.”

“In the water?”

“In the water.” With a chuckle, Grey leaned down, resting his brow to Saint’s. So close, his breaths a curling caress that wisped and slithered along Saint’s jaw. Sweet, like syrup. Stroking. Tracing an airy fingertip, a phantom tongue, down his throat, until his pulse beat in a single hard leap and he ached to . . . to . . .

He licked his lips. Grey’s mouth was too close, tempting cherry-blackberry lushness parted on a tongue that promised gilded things and the taste of darklight fire. He thought Grey would taste of his loa, and the longing to know made Saint want to run.

His hands pressed to Grey’s chest and he twisted, breaking that hold. Grey’s arms fell, and Saint turned from that look of disappointment, fixing his gaze upon the spray tinkling into the fountain’s pool.

“You’re stupid,” he said breathlessly.

“I just might be.” Grey moved to stand next to him, tilting his head back to watch the fountain. He laced his hands behind his back. “Do you remember anywhere before Savannah?”

“No. Nowhere. I’ve lived here since . . . since before this park even existed.” He reached out and let the cold spray patter down over his fingertips, striking in little stinging kisses. “I left once, though.”

“Where?”

“China. In the late nineteen hundreds. Nineteen ninety . . . four, I think? Maybe ninety-five.”

“Bondye.” Grey laughed a bit shakily. “I wasn’t even in high school by then. What was in China?”

“I wanted to see the Walled City in Kowloon before it was torn down.” He shrugged. “But until then . . . I didn’t travel much. I’m tied to Savannah. I only lasted a week in China before I had to come back. It’s like a compulsion, pulling the strings of my life tight.”

“Did you ever come here? To this park?”

“Not often. This was privately owned land for a very long time, before it was donated for the park. Street urchins and trespassers shot on sight.”

“Street urchin. It suits you. Is that what you were, back then?”

“For a while.”

Saint smiled to himself, watching his hand as he turned it left to right, sending the fountain spray sheeting in one direction or another. But if he unfocused his eyes he could almost see not the fountain, but the land that once stood here: rolling green and untouched trees, human lives nothing but glimpses of peaked roofs over the tops of the leaves, and somewhere the baying of hounds and the clatter of hooves signaling the passing of a hunting party through the brush. Such different days, then. Sometimes it felt like a storybook, a thing he’d made up to fill in for his missing memories. Maybe that was the truth of it, he thought. Maybe he was delusional. Maybe he only believed he’d lived as long as he had, and the rest of it was just the dream of a fevered mind.

No. No—he couldn’t believe the pain of every life graven on his skin was something he’d imagined. Jake didn’t deserve to be a figment of his imagination. Remy. Remy, with his pale gray eyes and the sweet spiderwebs of red capillaries turning his eyelids blush, wasn’t a dream. They were real.

I’m real.

“One day I just . . . woke up in the street,” he said. He had to say it, because he had to make it real. Had to tell someone other than an unfeeling tape recorder, someone who’d believe him, the first person to ever know him for what he was. His fingers curled tight and he pressed them over his chest, as if their damp coolness could ease the fire of his heart burning itself to ash. “No injuries. No belongings, not even a scrap of paper in my pockets. No memory, nothing of my own but the clothes on my back. I was in one of the unfinished planned wards of town, but I didn’t . . . didn’t know where I was. The first word I saw was the half-painted sign on a building under construction. ‘Saint.’” He couldn’t help but laugh, now, at his whimsy in taking that for his name. “I knew how to read it. I know how to speak English. I understood basic concepts. Math and reading and reasoning. Not to stand in front of a moving carriage. Not to drink lye. The sun rose and set, and the world required money to turn round. When someone told me I was in Georgia, in the year seventeen ninety-six, I understood what that meant.”

A dry burn haunted the corners of his eyes, remembering those first moments. The disorientation. The fear. The confusion. The painful, ripping sense of loneliness, and the strangest feeling that he’d lost something more than just a name, a few decades of history.

Grey said nothing. Saint wished he would—anything to fill the silence, to take the weight of these words off his shoulders. But there was only Grey’s presence, dark and waiting and warm, and Saint shivered, knotting his fingers in the front of his shirt.

“I knew everything except who I was,” he finished, fighting his voice to keep it from cracking, his throat dry as crumbling earth. “So I became Saint, because that word was the first memory I had. I made a new me. And I watched Savannah grow around me.”

Slowly, long fingers clasped over his own. Gentle. Strong. And it was that gentle strength that pried his hand free from his shirt, coaxing it to open until Grey could envelop it in his. He lifted Saint’s hand and clasped it against his chest, until the beat and throb of his body soaked into Saint’s palm and his eyes lidded, his breaths catching with pleasure. He could feel it: a thin and tenuous crimson thread stretching between them, curling tendrils waiting, waiting to intertwine, flickering in rhythm with Grey’s pounding heart.

“When did you first realize you were immortal?” Grey asked softly.

That warmth dashed, snuffed, leaving behind a dark cold as if the stars inside Saint had gone out all at once. He stared up at Grey, who was night against night, dark and forbidding, colored in the same deep blues as his paintings. Saint’s heart shriveled. He looked away. He tugged on his hand, but Grey wouldn’t let go.

“I . . .” Say it. Spit it out. Let Grey judge him for judging him, when Saint had once made the same choice. “I tried to kill myself.” He heard Grey’s sharply indrawn breath, but didn’t let it stop him. “After Calen. He was the first. The wasting sickness took him. He . . . he took me in. He made me feel safe when I was completely lost. He made me someone, instead of a paper doll waiting for an identity to clip on.” Calen with his elegant hands and short, blunt nails, the cuff of lace around his wrist, that curl of hair that always fell over one eye. The tattoo on his shoulder blade, the striking lines of a rearing mad horse made of otherworldly bright flame, burned against his skin. “And then . . . he died. And nothing I could do could save him. I didn’t realize it was my fault, then. But I felt so adrift, so lacking in identity without him, that I tried to drown myself in the Savannah River.”

He tried to speak clinically, but the taste of dank river water was in his throat, cold and choking off his airways with the memory. “It was . . . an unsettling experience, to feel myself die and not be dead. An unbreathing corpse at the bottom of the river, completely aware but unable to move until I washed up on shore and my body slowly put itself back together.” Feeling flesh crawling, twisting back together, sealing over the holes where the fish had nibbled, water pumping out of his lungs in sour gasps . . . He shuddered, looking down at the water, flicker-flash of moonlight on ripples like breaking glass. “I’ve never had the urge to try it again,” he whispered. “Dying terrified me more than not knowing who I am.”

Grey released his hand, leaving it empty. He waited for the words, the accusations.

How dare you?

The condemnation. The judgment.

You’re a hypocrite.

Instead lean, strong arms slid around him, gathering him close against Grey’s body. The other man nearly curled around him, resting his chin to the top of Saint’s head, enveloping Saint in that warmth he’d felt only as a brushing tendril before. It wrapped him up tight now, swallowed him into Grey, and Saint ached inside as he pressed his cheek against Grey’s chest and, for just a moment, let himself hide. Let himself want.

Let himself wish that this time it could be different, and he wasn’t meeting Grey only to say goodbye.

“Saint,” Grey whispered. “Saint.”

“Don’t. Please, just . . . just . . .” He swallowed back a hitched noise, and scrubbed at his eyes. “Don’t say a word.”

He trembled against Grey while the man held him; he told himself he wouldn’t cry, he wasn’t crying, yet every dry, heaving breath felt like a sob without tears. The only sound between them was the rush of their breaths and the rainfall cry of the falling water, splashing over and over into the fountain. Saint held fast to Grey until he could breathe again, until he no longer felt the crushing weight of every year, every life, wrapped around his neck in a strangling noose of guilt and shame. The soothing touch of Grey’s fingers, stroking up and down his back, eased that pressure. His lungs felt like a million tiny fists clenched to straining, but finally those fists relaxed to let oxygen slip through their fingers. The quiet of this shouldn’t have been so comforting, standing in a cold fountain with Grey’s arms around him.

But right now, it was everything.

He stayed until he couldn’t stand it. Until the silence became waiting, the park so still, the leaves unmoving, the night holding its breath and wanting something from this moment. Something from this heaviness, this sweetness between them. Something from his tight-clutched heart, something that would unravel its knot to make it bloom, opening up to let Grey inside.

Saint hunched into himself and leaned harder into Grey. “What really happened tonight?”

Grey stirred as if waking from a dream. “Hm?”

“When you panicked.”

“I . . .” Grey pulled back, looking down at him. A ghost of something flickered in his eyes, some unspoken question, then vanished. “It hit me. All of this. What we’re doing. I’m treating it so glibly, but . . .” His lips worked, soundless, before finally forming words. “It’s big. It took me months to work myself up to trying it before. And now?” His fingers curled against Saint’s shoulders. “Now I have to choose. It was still a spur-of-the-moment thing, before. For all my thinking and worrying and planning, doing it was an instant decision, and I still had that moment to turn back. I don’t, now. Once it starts, it doesn’t stop. It’s out of my control. And doing it that way, it just feels . . . enormous.”

Saint closed his eyes and rested his cheek to Grey’s chest. “I know. I know it does.” His fingers snared in the other man’s shirt. “It’s all right if you change your mind. It really is.”

“If I do . . . what happens to you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does.”

He shook his head, cheek rubbing thin, fine cotton, cool atop the heat of Grey’s body. “Don’t, Grey. Don’t do this for me.” His death grip on the shirt relaxed, and he wrapped his arms around Grey’s shoulders, holding on to him as if, if he just clung hard enough, he could really convince himself he could keep him this time. Convince himself that Grey wasn’t sacrificing himself so Saint could live. “I can’t pretend to understand why. I can’t. Not when I’ve nearly died once, and it frightens me to face that again. But it needs to be for you. Not me.”

Grey sighed. He bent over Saint, their cheeks brushing, skin to warm, tantalizing skin. “What if doing this for you is for me?”

“I don’t . . .” Saint’s throat tightened. “I don’t know how to make sense of that.”

Rough, heated fingers cradled his face, coaxed him to look up. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to meet Grey’s eyes and see that fatalistic acceptance, that perfect calm, serene and beautiful. But he couldn’t avoid it, and his heart broke as Grey stroked his hair back from his brow and smiled.

“You don’t have to.” Yellow eyes flicked down, lingered on Saint’s lips until they tingled with the promise of a perfect, burning touch. “I think I’ll kiss you now.”

Saint’s lips parted. To question, to protest—he would never know when he never had the chance. Not when Grey’s lips stole his, stole him, and carried him away with a kiss made up of sighs on silk and the taste of amber. He kissed like sugar, sweet and gritty, and Saint clutched at his arms and leaned into the taste of him and opened his mouth to breathe him in. Gasping warmth crept into him, stroked, teased those sensitive, secret corners of his mouth until he felt Grey inside him, caressing somewhere dark and deep that trembled his heart and wrapped him up in inescapable bonds.

This was it. This kiss, this moment, when the stars spun overhead and the earth turned beneath them and the song of the sky was at its quietest. This was when he felt it: the thin bright trembling thread of Grey, singing through him like music, shiver-soft notes that whispered of everything he was. Everything Saint could love about him, waiting to tangle and touch and melt into one.

He whimpered, pressed into Grey, told himself he wouldn’t take hold of that bright thread, and yet it was already knotted around him, binding him into heat and the slow, dark fire of long, strong fingers weaving into his hair, teeth teasing and nibbling his lips to tingling-sweet sensitivity, lean sinew burning against him. Fine tremors rippled over his skin, and he surrendered a battle already lost, letting himself rise high on the dizzying, twisting thing coursing through him with every liquid taste of Grey.

I’m sorry, he thought dimly, as their breaths mingled and he gave his gasps into the depths of Grey’s mouth. I’m sorry, so sorry for wanting you . . .

As if he’d heard him, Grey drew back—slowly, tormenting him with one stolen taste after another, each one softer, drawing just a bit farther away until he was left shivering, looking up at Grey, looking into the dilated, darkened heat of his eyes.

“No more,” Grey said, and Saint trembled.

“Why not?”

“Because even if it needs intimacy to work . . . if I’m going to be with you that way, I’m not treating it like a transaction. Not that.” He nuzzled the tip of his nose to Saint’s. He was so warm, until Saint felt like a dead thing next to his wondrous human heat. “I want it to be real. I want it to be you.”

With a choked sound, he pulled back, breaking Grey’s grip. Oh—oh god, he was a horrible person. Because it was happening; he felt it happening, this red thing a bloody sun burning in his chest. One kiss. One kiss had made it real, and even if he tried to end this now, tried not to give a damn about Grey . . .

Grey would still die.

He forced a smile, forced himself to try to feel anything but this awful ripping inside. “Is this one of those YA novels about a boy who falls in love with a terminal cancer patient?”

“I’m not your manic pixie dream girl, Saint.”

“Then what are you?”

Grey tilted his head with a smile and touched his fingertips to the corners of Saint’s mouth. “Maybe you’ll figure that out on our next date.” With a toss of his head, he waded toward the edge of the fountain. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

Saint stared after him, fists clenching helplessly.

Home? But I’ve never known where home is. Every time I find home . . .

I kill him.

He wasn’t supposed to taste so good.

Grey followed the highway out of the city proper, Saint’s directions taking him into the deep, low woods where the land started to hump and wrinkle into sloping, graded hills. In the silence between them, all he could hear was the overlapping cadence of breathing, and in it he remembered the way Saint’s breaths had rushed out of him and how that lissome body had gone pliant and soft against his own when Grey had twined their tongues and dared to discover just how Saint tasted.

Like everything.

He tasted like everything, like the slow-burn beat of blood in his veins, like the drugged addictive bassoon pulse that moved his heart to beat and drove his hands to paint.

And Saint wouldn’t even look at him.

Grey let it lie as the winding roadways took them off the paved highway and onto jouncing gravel roads that made the truck groan and rattle, the rusty shocks ready to give up the ghost. One day someone would have to put the old girl out to pasture, but not today. There was history in this truck, in the way the cracked leather seats smelled like pipe tobacco. He pictured his grandfather sitting behind the wheel back when the windshield hadn’t been permanently clouded and the dials on the radio weren’t falling off. In old photographs, yellowed and stained, his granpé had looked just like him: all stark angles and yellow eyes, and thick soft lips that had whispered poetry even when his grandfather hadn’t known how to read or write.

It’s in your blood, cheri mwen. Your granpé, he had the passion. He spoke the words like fire. In your paints, in your lines, in your colors, I see his words. His words were what made me love him, but his heart was what made me keep him.

He glanced sidelong at Saint. What did Saint see in his paints and lines and colors that had made him say, Yes. Yes, I want you?

By the time he found out, he might well be on his dying breath.

The gravel road turned to dirt, and dirt turned to an overgrown, beaten path with wheel ruts still sunk somewhere under the grass and blooming peonies, guiding the truck like a train on rails. Up ahead, the trees parted on a tall, rickety house, the whitewashed boards faded to milky gray, the shutters hanging off the hinges, the front windows boarded up. Wooden towers had been built to either side, their roofs peaked and conical and shingled in a color that might have once been dark green; hard to tell in the deep of night and sweep of headlights. Vines and moss overgrew the porch, the eaves, threatening to swallow the ancient, leaning plantation home back into the earth. The entire thing looked ready to fall over, and he had a feeling it would have been condemned had anyone in the city even remembered it was out here.

Grey frowned as he eased the truck to a halt. “You live here?”

Saint chuckled wanly. “I do.”

“Why?”

“Because no one would expect me to.”

“But that can’t be safe—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Saint pushed the door open. “It’s mine.”

He slammed the truck door closed, then leaned in, resting his arms on the open window. He watched Grey pensively before offering a sweet, wistful smile. “Good night, Grey Jean-Marcelin. Thank you for the pancakes.”

“Wait—do you have a car? How are you getting back to the hospital? I could—”

Saint cut him off almost too quickly. “Nuo will pick me up,” he said, and pulled back.

“Sure,” Grey said, and wondered at the near-physical ache of separation as Saint walked away. “No problem.”

He lingered until Saint disappeared into the house, just a glimpse of white and black through the little glass inset in the front door. Then, reluctantly, he pushed the truck into reverse and made his way home.

He’d thought to slip into bed, pull the covers over his head, and try to forget the low heat deep in his belly, a yearning that told him he’d been a fool to let Saint go, to stop that kiss that had consumed him, falling over him like nightfall. It had rocked him, how deeply that one kiss had struck: a crashing thing, shifting his world on its axis, until colors looked different and he felt every sensation so much more keenly, from each droplet of fountain spray on his skin to the fine peach fuzz of Saint’s cheeks against his palms.

Was that the power of the leanan sidhe, then? Had Saint compelled him to want him, just by being?

With a groan, Grey stretched out on his stomach at the foot of his bed and buried his face against the duvet. This was starting to feel like a hallucination. Maybe he’d really shot himself in the head, and this entire episode was just the last flash of dying synapses as the lights went out. Maybe he’d imagined Saint: this perfect thing, this soft and wounded bird he could cradle in his palms and love in all its broken-winged beauty. His idea of an angel, a loa come to guide him down the path into Bawon Samedi’s open arms.

He didn’t like that. Thinking this attraction, this hard burst of feeling like a shot of whiskey-burn fire down his gullet, was fake. Artificially induced. Magic. That was what it would be, wouldn’t it? No. No, magic wasn’t . . . It . . .

How could he have faith in the loa and not believe magic existed?

Rolling onto his back, he dragged his hands over his face and stared up at the exposed beams of the ceiling. “Because if it’s real,” he muttered aloud, “you’ve just been roofied into falling head over heels.”

So what? So what if this feeling was just an illusion? It was getting him what he wanted, in a much less painful way. That was all that mattered.

Right?

He closed his eyes. Too complicated. Too many questions . . . and he sure as hell wasn’t anywhere closer to sleep. He hated when he got like this, restless and full of a thousand painful nothings, the darklings chasing themselves in circles inside his head until they wore ruts in his brain. Those ruts were what got him in trouble—because they became permanent, became pathways, and suddenly every new thought diverted down their channels to an end he couldn’t avoid. Once those channels had been shallow, and the thoughts could overflow them, spill the banks, run free and rampant.

But now they were a deep and silent river, dragging everything inside him into their depths.

Sighing, he rolled off the bed and crossed the apartment to the mess of canvases and drop cloths scattered everywhere. If he wasn’t going to sleep, he might as well do something other than stare at the ceiling and hate himself. Maybe something would come of it; maybe nothing. That was the hell of it. Of this. Sometimes his twisting thoughts fueled his brush, pushed him into a mindless place where he could spill everything out on the canvas.

Sometimes nothing came. Nothing but doubt and self-loathing, holding him back from more than a few sad brushstrokes, so lifeless they might as well be corpses smeared in wet paint.

He set up a fresh canvas, leaning it against the wall, five-by-five and blank white waiting to catch the blood he opened from a vein in his heart. The paints watched him with multicolored eyes, gleaming puddles of color on the palette begging him to dip into their slick coolness, slide his brush and fingers through their wetness, mix and mingle them in torrid swirls. Wasn’t he supposed to be inspired? Should he try painting Saint or something?

Hesitantly, he sketched the general outline of a head in pale gray lines of acrylic. Shoulders. This didn’t feel right. It felt trite. Even Saint had scoffed and said Don’t bore me, but he had nothing else right now, and so he traced in arcing dashes marking cheekbones, jawline, the impressions of brows. Only those weren’t Saint’s brows; Saint’s brows were slim and scowling, while these loomed with darker intent. Promising shadows beneath, darkly hollowed, and Grey whirled them in until the outline on the canvas looked more like a skull than a pretty sidhe who stared at him with the eyes of the damned.

And then it took him, and he understood.

Dark colors. Dark like the ashes of a fire, dark like a sickle-thin moon glimmering off the surface of slippery-deep, still water. Black on black, night on night, and he bled smoke in his veins and exhaled it from his lungs as he slashed across the canvas and around eyes that burned with the fury of one possessed. He didn’t think. Didn’t pause to consider color, composition, lighting. Didn’t outline, layer, shade, not when he knew. The knowing was in his bones, old as the earth, and it spun and pounded and twisted inside him in primal rhythm, caught him up, carried him with the force of the hurricanes that crashed over the islands and swept Haiti in the loa’s wrath.

He felt as if a spirit was inside him, using him as a govi for its possession, moving his hand with the dark, wild wishes of the dead. Something was inside him, wearing his skin, too much to fit inside one body, threatening to burst out and crushing his lungs until he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t need to breathe, not when he sucked in life on swirls of color and darkness, not when he burned with this second inner self, this fire, this consumptive and mad thing that roared with a silent voice and trembled pillars of the world with the movements of its slow and ancient shoulders.

This . . . this was electric. His hands shook. Was he high? This starkness, this clarity, this breathless urgency like adrenaline and endorphins cranked up to ten, buzzing and crazed and knotting in the pit of his stomach like sex, and every brushstroke was another thrust into a phantom body . . . they weren’t normal. They weren’t right, but he couldn’t stop. It wouldn’t let him stop. Not until the sun was well up and across the sky; not until his phone had rung and died a dozen times; not until he painted the last pale violet highlight on the parting of dark-whisper lips.

The brush fell from nerveless fingers that shook with aching cramps, locked in the same position for hours that had felt like days. He stared at the canvas.

Bawon Samedi stared back, his eyes black pits filled with the forgotten dreams of the dead.

White bone painted over skin so black it shone blue and gold, color reflections on a pool of oil. The shadow of the brim of his hat. His leering skeleton grin, grease paint so detailed it still looked fresh and wet even though Grey didn’t remember painting it that way, didn’t remember the work that went into that sheen of hyperrealism—and yet there it was, stitching a smirk over grim, humorless lips that didn’t match that death’s head with its broad sickle smile. There was something real behind those eyes, something unsettling, as if the demon that was skin-riding Grey had crawled from inside his head to live inside the canvas, and even now looked out at him through Bawon Samedi’s livid charcoal eyes.

His hands trembled. His chest hurt. This wasn’t his. But it was. If the things he painted had been shallow reflections of what he envisioned, pitiful attempts to capture his mind’s eye on the canvas . . . this was a perfect projection plucked from his thoughts and come to life, so true and raw he couldn’t stand to look at it.

Not when in those eyes were the dreams of his desire, and a promise.

I am waiting for you, Grey Jean-Marcelin.

Take that pretty white hand, and let him lead you into my world.

Saint had barely been awake five minutes before it hit him: heat, washing over and through him with a languid intensity that made him feel like a cat, gasping as he stretched and kneaded against the tangle of his blankets, rolling in the late-afternoon sunlight that poured through the window of his tower room. He arched onto his back, lips parting on a sigh that felt as tangible as flesh passing his lips, caressing over his tongue.

Oh, Saint thought.

Oh, fuck.

He wasn’t cold anymore, he realized; if anything he was too hot, and he couldn’t quite blame it on drowsing all day in the shifting band of sunlight spilling across the bed. His blood pounded fiercer, stronger, and when he spread his fingers wide the hollows between the tendons were no longer so deep, the shadows no longer so blue. He closed his eyes, his stomach sinking.

Grey was it, then. It was happening already. He’d hoped, in some secret part of him, that it wouldn’t take. Even if he died . . . he might be all right with that, as long as Grey found a reason to live.

Wasn’t that a fucking catch-22. Caring about Grey enough to want him to live . . .

It was exactly what was killing him.

The sound of a grumbling engine rose from outside. At first he ignored it as he tried to catch his breath, tried to calm that slinking, slow need coiling under his skin and making him burn with a hollowness that craved filling. Sometimes logging trucks passed nearby, or people who got lost on their way to some other backwoods dirt road. But it grew louder, and he opened one eye. He recognized that grumble, distinctive and creaking. With a frown, he tumbled to his knees and peered out the window. Grey’s rickety pickup trundled out from beneath the trees, and Saint hated himself for the spark of longing that rose, twining with that blooming heat to twist a heavy, hungry, needy feeling inside him.

What was Grey doing here?

Saint spilled off the bed and dumped himself into a pair of jeans, pulling them over his boxers and smoothing his shirt. He made it downstairs just in time to meet Grey as the man mounted the porch steps, a broad grin lighting his face.

“Saint.”

“Why—”

Grey caught him around the waist, lifted him, spun him; he yelped and clutched Grey’s shoulders—only to find himself gathered close against Grey’s body. Grey curled around him, burying his face in his shoulder, and embraced Saint with something close to desperation.

“I needed to see you. Saint, it happened.”

He breathed out shakily and nodded, resting his brow to Grey’s throat. “I know.”

I just don’t understand how you can seem so happy about it.

Drawing back, Grey cupped his cheek, searched his face. “You look better,” he murmured. “Healthier.”

“For all you know, I just got a good day’s sleep.”

“It’s possible. But unless you drugged me, I doubt it.”

“I could have.” He shrugged stiffly. “You weren’t exactly guarding your coffee last night.”

“I want to believe it’s more than that.”

“Why, Mulder?”

Grey laughed. “I walked into that one.” There was a fevered glitter to his eyes, a breathless rush to his words. “If it’s true, then I really can help you. I really can do something good with this. It will have meaning.”

Meaning? Meaning? He couldn’t mean anything if he was dead! Saint bit his lip, shaking his head. “You’re that eager to be a ritual sacrifice?”

“No.” Again that laugh, sweet and joyous; hardly the laugh of a dead man walking. “No, it’s not about that at all.”

“You still won’t tell me what it’s about.”

“You’ve got your secrets. I’ve got mine.” Grey drew him close, kissed him: fierce and hard and sweet-hot as a burning cherry, searing his mouth and leaving behind the inescapable wildness of his taste. “Saint. Saint.”

He backed Saint against the wall, pinning him roughly against weathered wood, rough edges snagging on his shirt and biting into his back. He stared up at Grey, outlined dark against the halo of the sun, unable to help arching as Grey’s body crushed into his, sliding hard and slow, stroking every inch of him in a full-body caress that left him painfully aware of Grey’s heat, the thick pressure thrusting against his jeans, his deepwater scent. He smelled like the dreams of a leviathan, gliding dark and slow, stealing into Saint until his pulse raced and his vision swam with a sudden dizzy rush of that warmth that had shocked him into such sharp awareness. Heated lips grazed his neck, and he sucked in a raw breath that cut the inside of his throat.

“Grey . . .?”

“Here,” Grey whispered, clutching Saint’s hips, and jerked him closer. His hands slid down Saint’s thighs, cupped underneath, lifted him off his feet and wrapped his legs around Grey’s waist until there was nothing holding him up but the sharp perfect pleasure of Grey’s body clasped between his thighs and the feeling of intimacy when he was spread open and held so close. “Right here. I need you.”

He should say no. He had to say no, but the words were lost inside him, swallowed in this need that infected him. Too quick, too soon, from one sweet kiss to this savage desire, but he couldn’t stop it. If the passion had ahold of Grey, it had Saint too—and without another word, he cradled Grey’s jaw, dragged that sinful mouth up from his throat, and kissed him.

If their first kiss was sugar, then this one was hot molasses rum, an intoxicating burn that poured down his throat and spread fire in his belly. Grey kissed him like a man possessed, his lust a drugging cloud enveloping Saint. He breathed it in like pheromones and ambrosia and let it get deep under his skin, until he was panting and fucking high on the crushing lock of their lips and the way Grey’s tongue slipped into him and lit sparks on every stroking, invading caress.

“Grey,” he gasped, locking his arms tight around him, digging his fingers into Grey’s back, stroking his thighs against Grey’s waist and twisting his hips until the next time their bodies crashed together it hit just right and friction dragged along his cock, the soft cotton weave of his boxers wrapping around him in a sheath and making him cry out with pleasure as the pressure of Grey’s body trapped him. “Grey!”

Grey’s only answer was a low groan—and the rake of rough, desperate hands over Saint’s body, fingers digging into his thighs, his hips, his waist, his chest, leaving trails of electric heat. Saint sucked in a breath as one dark hand worked past the waist of his jeans and pulled hard, denim biting painfully into his skin only to go slack, the pain easing, as with a snap the button flew off and the zipper tore free and suddenly he was fighting with Grey to drag his pants down his thighs and off without ever letting go.

Saint’s boxers tore. One shoe tumbled off. Clothing dropped in shreds to the ground. He didn’t care, as hot summer air licked its damp mouth over naked skin and he whimpered with every touch of Grey’s exploring fingers over his cock. Those long artist’s hands enveloped him so fully; he tossed his head back against the weathered pinewood, choked on the scent of sex riding the musty afternoon, and lifted his hips into every touch that commanded his senses and drew up tight in that low place where his pleasure centered, just below his cock and pulsing deeper than flesh.

“Bondye,” Grey breathed. “You’re so fucking beautiful like this. Mesmerizing. Is this how you inspire people?”

Saint opened his eyes to find Grey watching him with an intensity that bordered on fixation, his expression as rapt as if he’d seen the face of his loa. No one had ever looked at Saint that way. Not even Arturo, devout Arturo who wore his priest’s vestments to write, and thought his words were a gift from God. Saint couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand being looked at that way and wondering if this madness was real, when all he wanted was the heated pleasure of Grey’s fingers on his skin and the pressure building inside him to a break point.

“Don’t. Don’t ask me that right now.” He closed his eyes again, biting back a moan, lifting himself into Grey’s touch. “Don’t make it about that.”

Grey’s hold stilled, gripping firmly. His thumb circled the head of Saint’s cock, teasing delicately at the sensitive places just underneath, and he writhed, panting, as torment rolled through him in shivering waves and painful little stabs of pleasure each time Grey flicked in just . . . the right . . . spot.

“Do you want me, Saint?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Grey released him. He opened his eyes to protest—only to find Grey fishing a small clear bottle of translucent fluid from his back pocket. “Let me touch you.”

“Why do you keep lube in your—”

A fierce grin parted Grey’s lips. “Is that really the question you want to be asking at the moment?”

Mute, Saint shook his head—only to tense as Grey cupped his ass in broad hands, kneaded, gripped. He tried to brace himself, but there was no anticipating the pad of a coarse fingertip brushing his entrance, teasingly light, only to dart away . . . and return slicked in lubricant, probing and massaging in sharp shocks of sensitivity so keen they were almost uncomfortable, embarrassing, and he flushed and turned his face away, biting his lip hard on a cry as that wet-oiled, warm finger sank inside.

He couldn’t stand it. The sweet stretching sensation, the slow plunge deeper, deeper, slipping into him as if Grey had every right to be there and stroking him from within. He dug his fingers into Grey’s shoulders and lifted his hips with a cry. Another finger. Another, long and agile and curling inside him, exploring, touching him in places that made the insides of his eyelids burst with color and his mouth ache with the pain of his biting teeth, trying so hard not to scream and yet failing. He could taste his own cracking whimper, and it tasted like the pleasure and agony of those deft fingers filling him, working his body, twisting and thrusting and taunting him with that slick hot sinful rhythm.

Grey’s mouth skimmed his throat, his jaw, adding sparks to flame with each brushing touch, with the rough, desire-darkened heat of his voice in Saint’s ear. “How much more can you endure?”

He tossed his head and clenched his thighs against Grey’s hips. “No more—no more!”

“I could stop.” Those maddening fingers slowed, stopped, buried so deep. “If it’s so terrible.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Say it,” Grey demanded.

Saint opened his eyes, looking up into burnished gold that glowed with a fervor that bordered on fury. This was the darkness he’d seen in Grey’s paintings. The blackness that was light without light, a soul buried in an endless night and finding beauty in the gloom. This fire was what had made him choose Grey—a fire he only wished was fueled by a will to live.

A fire he wanted to have for his own, if only for a little while.

“Take me,” he said, and drew Grey down to kiss him.

He felt the throbbing absence of touch as Grey’s fingers slipped from his body. Then the rasp of a zipper, the slick press of hot flesh sliding together, the thick head of Grey’s cock nudging against his belly and pushing his shirt up and leaving a warm, wet trail on his skin. He lifted himself, surrendered himself into Grey’s grip as the other man positioned him just right—wanting it, needing it, close to begging for it when Grey gave him everything he craved. Pain split him open, forcing heavy and deep, rushing the breath from his lungs and leaving him drowning in the tight, aching feeling of being too full. Too full with Grey; too full with these rough, tumbling emotions that tore at him with howling claws.

The lock of their bodies came together so perfectly, and filled him with a pleasure like madness. It took his senses, reshaped them, reshaped him until he existed only for the searing thrust of Grey’s cock inside him, until his heart beat to the rhythm of crash and roll and flow until he didn’t know if he was moving Grey or Grey was moving him or they were moving together. Every thrust shocked through him with quick-flash jolts that left him brimming, trembling, alive with something . . . something greater than himself. Something arcane, something primal, something as ancient as the song of the stars and the burn of the sun that beat down on their flesh and witnessed this thing that rolled between them like ritual and worship, travesty and blessed benediction.

He was burnt offerings smoldering at Grey’s altar, locked to him inescapably. Bound one to another, until Grey’s pleasure was his pleasure, until Grey’s breaths were his breaths, until Grey’s cries were his cries. In this moment, Grey was with him down to their very bones, a geas wrought in pleasure and bittersweet emotion that swept him high and brought him low. He tried to resist. Tried to hold back.

But when Grey pinned him harder to the wall, when he felt the swelling that promised a flood of liquid-burning slickness, when Grey’s fingers wrapped around his cock and demanded . . .

He shattered to pieces, and knew he would never be able to resist Grey anything.

For the rest of his short, numbered days.

Grey thought he was going to pass out.

He also thought he might be able to smell colors and taste sounds. He wasn’t even sure which way was up, right now. He sagged against Saint, his entire body throbbing in the aftermath and his senses scrambled. They’d been scrambled since he picked up that brush, and only now after he’d spent himself was everything starting to make sense again. If he’d been high as fuck before, this was what coming down must feel like, and he hurt deep in his bones as he gathered Saint close and tried to catch his heaving breaths.

He felt like something had shifted at his core, moving aside to make room for Saint, and he would never be the same again.

“Grey.” Saint gripped at his arms, and Grey realized he was still inside him, almost too numb and drained to feel it, and swore out an apology.

“Fuck. Sorry. Sorry.”

He pulled back, gently lowering Saint’s legs to the ground, contrition on his lips for Saint’s pained hiss—only to burst into panicked curses again as he saw the slick of glistening fluid on pale inner thighs.

“Fuck, we didn’t use a—”

“It’s fine.” A shallow imitation of a smile flickered across Saint’s lips. He bent, wincing, and retrieved his jeans and torn boxers. “I can’t get sick. Nothing you have can infect me. I don’t have anything to infect you. Otherwise I’d have every back-alley brothel disease from the eighteenth century.”

Grey tried a laugh, but it scratched his throat. These mundane words, after he’d broken every piece of himself with the force of his need for Saint . . . it didn’t feel right. “I . . .”

The words he’d wanted fell away. There was nothing in their space, blank and clouded; he couldn’t even remember what he’d wanted to talk about. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t stop the vertigo from taking a spin round his skull.

“I can’t . . . remember what I meant to say. My head feels— Whoa.” He reeled, and shot a hand out to brace against the wall.

“Yes. That happens.” A soft touch feathered against his arm. He opened his eyes to find Saint dressed and watching him with concern, something shielded in those liquid eyes. “Inside. I’ll make you something to drink. It will help . . . temporarily.”

“Temporarily?”

“Tea cannot restore the lost years of your life,” Saint murmured and, with a lingering look, turned and slipped inside the house.

Grey followed him. The edges of the world had a certain glassiness to them, but that didn’t stop him from seeing the dark, rotting emptiness of the house’s interior. Cobwebs festooned the house, covering peeling walls and cracking rafters and the mildewed, tattered remnants of furniture, each room dusty as a mummy’s rags. The fusty smell nearly choked him; the floorboards creaked under every step. He pulled his shirt up over his mouth, fighting to hold his tongue. How could Saint live here?

The steps they mounted were cleaner—more recently repaired, many replaced with fresh white pine planks. They curved upstairs in a spiral; Saint led him past the second floor, moving with a faint limp that might have left Grey smug with satisfaction if he weren’t struggling to stay conscious. Higher, past the third floor, until the stairs narrowed on a small passageway that opened into, he thought, one of the towers he’d seen from outside.

Saint pushed the door open on a self-contained wonderland.

If the house was falling apart, the circular tower room was carefully preserved—along with everything in it. Books and knickknacks that had to be centuries old, a hoarder’s trove of odds and ends ranging from hand-painted globes to an old typewriter to an entire row of nineteenth-century dolls set along the fireplace mantel. Things occupied every surface, each like a bookmark in the pages of a life longer than Grey could comprehend. Tapestries draped the walls in patterns from the Middle East, interspersed with bits of clothing that had gone out of style a century ago—waistcoats and fitted jackets and breeches waiting to be worn again—all wound about with ivy vines that Grey thought might be plastic but could just as easily be real. The faint, musky scent of some kind of oil filled the air.

The room lit up with stars when Saint flicked a switch and the Christmas lights strung in tangles across the ceiling came to life—as well as lamps with holes carefully poked in the shades, filtering tiny, glowing dots. The entire space was colored in wine and gold and shadow, and those lights only brought out the subtle, shimmering inflections of each hue.

Grey turned slowly, taking everything in, and reached out to gently trace the glass curve of a ship in a bottle, set atop an ancient, curling parchment map spread over a desk as if that ship were sailing the blue-inked seas.

“This is your life,” he murmured, then jumped as, with a tinny whistle, an electric toy train zipped past his shoulder, the track mounted on the wall. “It’s . . . like a catalog of lifetimes.”

“Something like that. Here.” Saint’s hand pressed to his back and guided him to a long, low chaise. “Sit.”

Grey sank down against the plush burgundy cushions and watched helplessly as Saint crossed the layered Persian rugs to a little bolt-on modern kitchenette built into the wall. His movements were jerky as he filled a kettle, his shoulders taut, his eyes downcast. Grey’s throat knotted. This . . . wasn’t how it was supposed to be, after the first time. He’d wanted to just hold Saint and breathe in the sweat on his skin and feel his body cooling as he came down, and instead here they were, standing in tense opposition in the silence.

“You’re upset,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“You are.” No answer. “I’ve hurt you.” A flinch, but Saint’s back remained to him. “Saint. Tell me what I did.”

Saint’s spine stiffened, but he said nothing as he set out mugs and began doling tea bags and sugar into them. Until he set a spoon down inside a mug with a clank, and tilted his head back with a grudging sigh.

“It took you,” he said. The flat, matter-of-fact tone was all wrong. “And then you took me. You came here prepared for that. Pragmatic, the lubricant. I suppose I should admire your sensibility, considering you were hardly in control of your faculties.”

“Oh.” Realization rolled its ten-ton weight through Grey’s gut. “You thought . . . the only reason I . . . Oh.” His mouth dried. He sat back hard against the arm of the chaise. “Then why didn’t you say no?”

Saint shrugged bitterly. “Have to eat, don’t I?”

“No.” Horror choked his throat. While he’d been so caught in something that felt like it shook his world with how beautiful it was, how beautiful Saint was . . . Saint had just been enduring it to live? “Bondye, no. I won’t be a rapist. I can’t. If I’d known you— If I—”

“Grey.” Saint left the tea and crossed the room to sink to his knees before him. Slim hands enveloped his own, and he hadn’t realized he was cold until their heat nearly burned him. Saint looked up at him earnestly. “I was willing. You didn’t rape me.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“You only wanted me because your inspiration had you.” Sunset eyes lowered to their clasped hands. “Maybe I wanted you for other reasons.”

Several seconds ticked by before Grey realized what Saint was saying. Painful seconds, seconds of doubt, seconds of despair, until it sank in:

Saint was saying he wanted him. Not just his life, not just this bargain.

Him.

Relief and warmth fought for dominance inside him, and he spilled off the couch to his knees, thudding down against the layered carpets. “No. No, Saint.” He gathered him close, pulling his stiff, resisting form into his arms, begging him with touch to relax, to let go of that quiet pride and just let Grey hold him. “I’ve wanted you since I opened my eyes and all I could see was you, filmed through blood. I lay there dying, and all I could think of was the feeling of your hands on my chest. White birds, fluttering against me.” His heart faltered, echoed muscle memory of those struggling moments when it had almost stopped. He buried his face against Saint’s throat. “I’ve always been this way. After a day of painting, when inspiration strikes . . . I want to share the intensity I’m feeling with someone close to me. Painting is an intimate thing, for me. It . . . amplifies what I’m already feeling. That’s all it was. I wanted you. No motivation other than that.”

Slowly, that slender body went soft against him. Slowly, slim arms crept around him. Slowly, Saint’s head sank to rest against his shoulder, breaths washing warm against his throat.

“Am I . . . You . . . think of me as close to you?” Saint whispered, and that broken, childlike hesitancy in his voice nearly crushed Grey’s heart.

“There are few things more intimate than sharing a death.” He closed his eyes and held Saint tighter; some deep, secret part of him wished he never had to let go. “There is no one who could ever be closer to me than you, Saint. No one at all.”

They curled together on the chaise, and Saint hated himself more with every moment he watched Grey’s fingers tremble on the mug until Saint reached up to hold it steady, lifting it to his lips.

“Thank you.” Grey’s laugh was shaky. “I feel like an old man.”

“It doesn’t normally happen this fast. One kiss and it took you; one time together, and you’re already weak.”

“Perhaps it’s because I know.” Grey leaned over and rested his temple to Saint’s. “Perhaps it’s because I accept it. I accept you. I chose you.”

Saint clutched his own mug close, as if its heat could warm the layer of ice trying to squeeze his heart. “How can you be so calm about it? I’ve spent two centuries terrified of dying. And you just . . . accept it.”

“It’s easy to accept something that’s seemed inevitable for so long.” Grey shrugged. “I don’t know. It feels . . . logical, somehow.”

“That’s it. You wake up one day and decide it would be logical for you to die.”

“Something like that.” A strained smile. “It’s complicated.”

“As complicated as a man with no memory stealing others’ lives to survive?”

“I’d say they’re on an equal level.” Soft breaths stirred Saint’s hair as Grey nuzzled into him. “I think we complicate each other quite nicely.”

“Most people aren’t fond of complications.”

“I like them. Complications are . . . colorful.” Grey took a sip of his tea. “The world I’d meant to leave behind was empty of color. Gray and empty. I’d rather the last thing I know be a world of colors, full and beautiful.”

“Won’t that make you regret leaving it more?”

“How long can you regret something when you’re dead?”

Not nearly as long as you can when you can never die.

Saint shook his head with a noncommittal sound and tucked his legs up against his side, burrowing into Grey. After a few moments, one warm, heavy arm fell over his shoulders, and he closed his eyes and breathed in the steam from his tea and told himself he couldn’t feel Grey’s trembling.

“My granmé used to say regret is a mistake the living make,” Grey murmured. “You’ve only got so long, so don’t waste that time regretting what you didn’t do. If you do it . . . what you did will still be there when you’re gone. Do nothing . . . and nothing is left behind.”

“You speak of her often. She must be important to you.”

“She was.”

Something in Grey’s voice made Saint look up. “‘Was’ . . .?”

“You aren’t the only one who doesn’t have anyone left.” Grey’s gaze unfocused, seeing far things. Old things, Saint thought, but not forgotten, and for a moment he was jealous that Grey knew his past, his people. “My grandmother and grandfather immigrated here from Haiti in the forties. But they went back to the homeland to retire. Years later, so did my parents. That was before the earthquake.” His jaw tightened on a swallow. “I’m an only child. And all of my extended family . . .”

“I’m sorry,” Saint murmured, though it felt like cold comfort.

“I hadn’t seen them in years. I was selfish. Too focused on my art to see that they wouldn’t always be there. I kept promising I’d visit next year, and then next year, and then . . .” Grey trailed off, but the hitch in his breath gave him away.

“Everyone’s allowed to be selfish.” He rested a hand to Grey’s chest. “We can’t know what will happen. And we can’t blame ourselves for things beyond our control.”

“Not seeing them . . . that was in my control. I chose to make something else more important.”

“And now you choose how you die, before that choice can be taken away.” Tentatively, he reached up to press his palm to the sharp, warm angles of Grey’s cheek, and was rewarded by Grey leaning into him, rubbing a scratchy cheek against his hand. “You still have the memories. That’s something.”

Grey’s eyes closed. “I think I would give anything not to remember.”

“You only say that because you don’t know what it’s like.” So bitter, to want what Grey would willingly give up. The back of his throat tasted foul. “You don’t know what it’s like to have a hole inside you where everything you’ve ever loved should be.”

“Maybe not,” Grey whispered, and pressed his lips to Saint’s palm. “But I know what it’s like to feel empty. To feel as if I’ve lost everything. So I paint for the loa, because I have no one else. To be loved by the loa is to love and be loved by the dead. I love my dead, and so I paint the loa.”

“Does it fill that emptiness?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes, nothing does.” Grey’s eyes opened, nearly glowing in the deep shadows of the tower room: mesmerizing, compelling, and Saint pleaded silently for that light to never go out. “Is it strange that I feel the least empty when I’m with you?”

“A little.” Saint smiled faintly. “All things considered . . . is it strange that that makes me happy?”

“No.” Grey’s mouth moved against his palm, praying the words into his skin. “If I leave nothing else behind but that, then I’ve done enough.”

The weakness hadn’t lasted as long as Grey expected. He’d drifted off with Saint on the couch, and woken up feeling as if he’d survived a plague that swept through the night and was gone by morning: his body strange, but his own again—for now.

He’d thought to kiss Saint goodbye, and return to his studio. Thought to take this slow, day by day. But instead, with the taste of Saint still lingering on his lips and something inside him threatening to break at the thought of separation, he said, “Come with me.”

Be with me.

He’d said it on impulse, but the moment he did, the moment those haunted eyes widened and stared at him with such vulnerability, he knew it was right. If his time was limited, he wanted to spend each moment he could like this:

With sunset eyes looking up at him, seeing him . . . and, for the first time in far too long, easing the numbness and reminding him how to feel.

The first day in Grey’s apartment, Saint didn’t know what to do with himself.

He was accustomed to becoming the wallpaper of his victims’ lives, convincing himself he was their lover and their beloved and not just an afterthought to what truly mattered most. He wondered now if he’d been punishing himself, even if he’d refused to acknowledge it. Enduring the bitterness and the isolation and the ache as part of his penance for what he was, for what came next. Sooner or later he always found a routine, settling in to this farce of domesticity in which he worked and lived the solitary life of the forgotten, alone even when they were together—and coming home each day to find them spent and tired and yet still struggling to eke out just one last drop of blood and turn it into magic.

But sooner or later wasn’t now, and right now he was standing in a home that wasn’t his own while Grey looked at him as if he could see nothing else. Saint fidgeted uncomfortably as he stepped off the elevator and into the apartment. Grey wasn’t supposed to see him, right now. He was supposed to be fixated on his paints, his visions. And as lonely as it had been to be forgotten by everyone before . . . it was fucking uncomfortable to be the center of someone’s attention after two centuries of being a shadow.

He couldn’t stand it anymore. He knotted his fingers in the strap of his overnight bag and glared at Grey. “What?”

Grey had been parting his lips to speak, but froze, blinking. “. . . What?”

“You’re looking at me again!”

“You don’t want me to?”

He scowled. “I’m afraid you’ll start spouting poetry or something.”

With a smirk, Grey folded his arms over his chest. “I’m mildly fascinated. I haven’t lost my fucking mind.”

“Mildly?” Saint’s eyes narrowed. His mouth twitched in that tight way it did when he was trying not to smile, fighting his lips, but they kept pulling upward. “I’m insulted.”

Grey only looked at him flatly, skeptically, before that smirk widened into a grin—an infectious one, a contagious one, full of the warmth Saint had been starved of for so long, and before he could stop himself, he laughed, looking away and covering his face with one hand as if he could somehow hide it. As if he weren’t allowed, in this situation, to feel anything this light, this normal, this sweetly embarrassed.

“That’s better.” Grey chuckled and slid an arm around his shoulder. “Relax. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I’m just . . . thinking. Turning this over. Absorbing the situation, and you. I suppose putting a countdown on everything makes me more focused.”

Mumbling, Saint leaned tentatively into the crook of Grey’s arm. “You’re not supposed to be focused on me.”

“Why not?”

“I just . . . I’m not . . .”

“Not what?”

“I’m not something that fascinates people.” He caught his tongue between his teeth, lowering his eyes. “I’m not the thing that people love. Not really. I’m just a means to an end. That’s how this works.”

“I’m changing how it works. And if you call yourself a thing one more time,” Grey said fiercely, “I’m taking you over my knee.”

He laughed weakly. “Promise?”

“That would be an appealing prospect if you weren’t deflecting.”

“You’re the second person to call me on that in as many days.”

Grey caught his chin lightly in rough-tipped fingers, tilting his face up to meet Grey’s eyes, looking into him in that way that made Saint feel too exposed. “So stop doing it.”

“Why?”

“What are you afraid to show me, when I’ll take your secrets to the grave?”

Saint didn’t know why his eyes brimmed at that. Why they burned. Why he burned, crumbling to ash inside when all Grey was offering was wordless, simple understanding. He only knew he couldn’t let himself break down again, because he was already bracing for the pain of loss, already shuttering himself in to weather the storm of grief that would come when the quiet light left those searching, earnest eyes.

So he pulled away, turned his back on Grey, and reached up to smooth his fingers through his hair just to give his hands something to do other than clutch on to Grey and beg him not to die.

“Show me what you painted,” he said thickly.

In the pregnant silence, he could sense the things unsaid. The questions unasked. The need unanswered. But Grey only strode past him without a word, leading him to the studio area and brushing aside the curtain. A new canvas leaned against the wall, a tall square in shimmering darkness. Grey shifted uneasily and looked away from it.

“Here.”

Saint stepped closer. A chill shot through him, his skin crackling like hoarfrost, and he hugged his arms tighter to himself as if he could ward it off when it was coming from inside.

Deep-set eyes stared into him from the canvas, burning with an unspoken vow. With an unvoiced need, a consuming hunger for a darkness that could so easily swallow them both. His stomach twisted, and he closed his eyes against that wide jackal’s grin, that painted skull-face, that sense of aching familiarity at once beautiful and horrific. That there was passion in this painting, there was no doubt. That it was Grey’s passion . . .

What was he pulling out of this man, just by being in his life?

“Who is that?” he whispered.

“Bawon Samedi.” Grey spoke the name with that same soft reverence as when he’d spoken of Erzulie, and of giving his love to his loa. “You’d probably compare him to the Grim Reaper. He is death, and beloved for it.”

“He frightens me.”

“Why?”

Saint opened his eyes, and met that haunted, needful gaze again. First on the canvas . . . and then in the very real, living eyes that fixed on him, capturing him in Grey.

“Because he looks like you,” he said.

For a while, Grey remembered what it was like to be bright.

Even as he painted out the dark inside him, he remembered what it was like to be bright. What it was like to laugh over Chinese takeout, and watch Saint’s face light up when Grey poked him in the nose with his chopsticks. What it was like to live somewhere that wasn’t empty, when Saint gently occupied every nook and cranny with a living warmth, the scents of flesh, the sounds of being.

What it was like to kiss someone, and lose himself in the consuming feeling, breathing it inside him like incense smoke and the breath of the loa.

Saint wasn’t a cure for what had broken inside him. Wasn’t a cure for anything but that persistent disease of life. But he was a New Thing, a beautiful thing, and Grey had learned that sometimes a New Thing could disrupt that channel in his brain enough to shake his thoughts loose and let them flood free, giving him a few moments of respite before everything ran back downhill and found its flat, empty equilibrium again.

Happiness, he’d found, was a temporary state. Something he had to steal, something he had to savor while he had it, because he didn’t know when it would slip through his fingers and not return for days or weeks or years.

Years.

He thought of Aminata as he traced the outline of a swelling breast and the slope of a gently curving arm in soft, light sketch lines. He thought of Aminata, counted the years, wondered where she was, and buried himself in Saint to try to forget.

He painted: every waking moment, every sleeping one, pushing himself until he could no longer stand. Sometimes those fevered spells lasted days. Sometimes only hours before he was swaying against the wall, gasping, watching as the tendons in his arms turned into rails and imagining he could see them shrivel and wither with each minute instead of each day. More than once, Saint had to help him to bed, dab his brow. Part of him didn’t believe it was real.

But part of him knew he was wasting away inside, until he was just a shell of a man glowing with the fire that lit him from within—even as that fire burned him out to nothing.

Still, he painted. He painted, then took Saint into his arms and loved him with a ferocity that bordered on desperation, because it wasn’t his art driving his passion. It was knowing that when the colors were in his blood, when the music of brushstrokes guided the beat of his heart, that lovely man was waiting for him, watching him from a perch against the windowsill, knowing him with every piece of his soul he cut out of himself to leave on the canvas as yet another aspect of Bawon Samedi’s ghastly beautiful face. He didn’t need those pieces anymore.

That was what was wrong with people, he thought. They guarded their souls so jealously, as if they were afraid if they gave too much they’d just be empty vessels by the time Samedi came for them.

Grey would empty himself out, then. Willingly. Empty himself in colors, empty himself in Saint, and he whispered his name over and over again as he stroked paint-streaked fingers through his hair and kissed his cheeks, his jaw, his mouth.

“I can’t think of anything but you,” he whispered. “Even when I paint . . . it’s only you. How are you doing this to me?”

Saint shook his head, his eyes gleaming unnaturally bright in the darkness of Grey’s apartment, the shadows cast over the bed. “I don’t know.” His voice broke. “That’s not how it’s supposed to be. I thought I’d have more time to know you. Not . . . this. Not watching you disappear through my fingers. You’re water, and I can’t hold on to you no matter how hard I try.”

“How is it supposed to be? Am I not supposed to feed you?”

“You’re only supposed to use me,” Saint said. “Until I use you to death.”

They leaned back to back in the window seat in Grey’s apartment, wrapped in the same blanket and naked in their own cooling sweat. Saint tilted his head against Grey’s shoulder and looked up at the rows of hanging lights in their mason jars, the clouded glass turning the light dusty as sun shafts on a dry Savannah afternoon. He still ached, sore inside from what Grey had done to him, yet the pain was secondary to the feeling of life burning through his veins, too hot, filling up the empty spaces inside. He could feel the vibrato tenor of the other man’s longing rising off him in silent notes, his restless need to get up, to paint, to give an outlet to the fire Saint had kindled inside him.

Yet here Grey was, staying. His shoulder blades spread like the hard-edged wings of a seagull against Saint’s back, more stark than they’d been a week ago; sweat mixed in the channels of their spines. He hated feeling the parchment fragility of Grey’s skin stretched over such prominent bones, but he couldn’t pull away. Not even in those moments when Grey arched over him, and the sunken hollows beneath his eyes belonged to the skull-faced man he painted over and over again with every new piece.

What was Grey trying to say to him by staying? By not leaving him alone, to spend his last hours living for his art?

Was he trying to prove that he saw Saint, when no one else truly had?

The days were passing too fast. He didn’t know how it was happening—how between his shifts and those quiet nights, somehow the days had melted away and taken Grey’s life with them. Later, when he looked back on this, he would remember late-night conversations. Lying in bed with their fingers twined, while he told Grey of every man he’d loved. Whispered to him of how the light would catch Arturo’s jaw, or how Philippe had always managed to lose just one shoe and never find it again. He told him the stories of his past: of what had once been, the ghosts that occupied the same space as the familiar Savannah that Grey knew. He told him of his now, too: of the half-drowned girl who’d cried and hugged him after he and Nuo had resuscitated her, of how he’d hidden himself in the locker room and sobbed when they hadn’t been able to do enough to save a single one of the victims in a drunk-driving accident, of how in that moment he’d wished for Grey’s hand, just to make it hurt a little less.

He’d never let anyone know him like this before. Not all of him. Everyone he’d ever known only saw the colors of a single patchwork square, and not the pattern they made when stitched together.

But Grey saw his colors, saw his patterns, and still dug deeper. Still begged for more, as if he could take Saint into himself to replace what he lost hour by hour, minute by minute.

Why are you doing this? Saint had asked, as their legs had tangled and he laid his head to Grey’s shoulder.

Doing what?

Trying to be with me.

Grey had traced the line of his cheekbone, and threaded his fingers into his hair. I am with you, Saint. I’m asking you to be with me.

I am with you.

Are you?

If I wasn’t, you wouldn’t be dying.

He let the blanket slip aside enough to look down at his own shoulder. The lines blooming there were faint, but growing darker by the day. A stag, proud and elegant, with moon-silver fur and coyote eyes. This would be his memory of Grey, then, and he traced the forming lines with his fingertips and wondered that they felt like the coarseness of Grey’s stubble under his touch.

“This isn’t supposed to feel real,” Saint whispered.

“I know.” Grey tilted his head back as well, until they rested cheek to cheek. “But it does.”

So this is what it feels like to die.

Grey was alone, tonight. Saint had been called out on an early extra shift, barely a moment to pause and kiss Grey’s brow before he rattled down the elevator to sling himself into the passenger’s seat of Nuo’s car—a pale figure against the night, watched from the upstairs window. The warmth of his lips still burned Grey’s skin; the only warmth he’d been able to grasp lately, when he felt so very, very cold. He touched his fingers to his forehead, traced the shape of Saint’s mouth in body heat. Strange, how over barely two weeks such little gestures had become familiar. Normal.

All of this was somehow too normal. The daily routine of dying. Like any other job it took work, time, and patience.

With a laugh under his breath, he tucked himself against the couch and wrapped himself in blankets that did little to stave off the chill that had, just like the weakness and the shakes, become his new normal. Across the apartment, several blank canvases waited in his studio, but they held no appeal for him tonight. His hands ached, his heart sore and tired, and he felt Saint’s absence like a hole in space-time.

Not long now, he thought, and spread his fingers. The webbing between had grown translucent, a fine skim of skin with barely any color at all. Maybe he really was crazy, that he felt such relief. Such contentment, to know that he was almost there. Yet there was a quiet melancholy too, at the idea of leaving Saint behind. Of not being here for him, to hold his hand through the grief and kiss his tears away, when Grey himself was the cause of those tears.

And fear, muted and low, a whisper he tried to ignore. The beginning of a question, a What if without the other half, hanging open-ended and waiting for him to give it space to become something real.

He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He’d made his choice, and there was no turning back now.

He fished his phone from his pocket with clumsy fingers and scrolled through his contacts, then paused before he’d even passed one screen. There it was, right under the As. Aminata. Once, years ago, they’d sat on the edge of the fountain together and watched midnight tick over with the sky lit up in gold and red and violet as one second made the difference between one year and the next, with their bare feet dabbling in the cool water and Grey’s toes going numb from the wet winter chill.

She’d looked at him sideways and smiled her little smile that always meant she was thinking. Hey, Grey?

Yeah, Ami?

How come we don’t never fall in love?

He’d laughed and leaned over to press his shoulder to hers. Back then laughing had been easier, and hadn’t felt like something he just had to fake to get by; he’d felt it behind his eyes, when he chuckled and wrapped his arm around her shoulder to tuck her against his side. We got love. You don’t want to fuck that up by going at it the wrong way, do you?

She’d watched him, her eyes strange. No. No, guess I don’t.

He’d kissed the top of her head and held her tight and hoped, in that moment, nothing would change even though by then he was already changing. And deep down he’d known it was the start of something, something big, but he’d never thought their continental drift would take them to entirely separate worlds. He’d never thought he would let it happen so easily, but that dulling filter had fallen down and he’d turned listless and slow, and some days it took more than he had the capacity for to pick up the phone. Then some days became every day, and every day became one day, and one day . . .

One day, she was just gone.

He supposed Saint wasn’t the only one haunted by memories of people who’d passed from his life.

What would she say, if he reached out and made that connection again? If he tried to remember what it was like to have a friend?

Would she even want to hear it if he said goodbye?

That question hovered too close to the edge of that What if, threatened to fall over. He shook it off and scrolled to Saint’s contact and tapped a text, each word picked out slowly when the screen would hardly register contact with his weak, flickering body heat.

Am I supposed to miss you like this?

Nearly ten minutes passed before his phone buzzed in response. Just a single word, fading onto the screen. Don’t.

Don’t what? he tapped back.

Don’t miss me.

Why not?

No answer. Not for over an hour, not until he’d almost fallen asleep, his head rolling back on a neck that didn’t really want to support it. His eyes lidded heavy, gritty and tired, before snapping open as his phone vibrated again. Letters scrolled up the screen, and in them he could hear Saint’s lilting voice, dark with a pain and recrimination that made him wonder if he was doing the right thing, made that What if into a painful question of What if I decide to live?

Because, Saint wrote, it will make it that much harder to miss you.