AND THEN HE FELT IT

She was staring at him, eyes wide and amazed, and he couldn’t believe it, but he could feel it. Heat, a goddamn wall of heat pressing in against him that hadn’t been there a moment ago. His lungs suddenly felt soupy, and his eyes burned with it, as if he’d opened the door to a blast furnace.

Charlie twisted her hand up to clutch his wrist, hanging on. He stared at her, sweating already, amazed that this was real, actually happening just the way she’d described it. That she had been through it before, all alone, and hadn’t freaked out, hadn’t run screaming from the house, hadn’t simply passed out from the sheer intensity of the temperature shimmering the air around them. Even the candle blazed brighter, feeding on it.

The chill bleakness of December, a chill that had clung to this room, utterly vanished.

Her fingers tightened and he dropped his eyes to watch, feeling the sharp bite of her nails in his wrist, and then realized why she was doing it. There was more. More than just the heat. Under its surface, a ripple, a vibration, was something else.