CHAPTER TWO — The Woman Who Makes the Rules Cry (2)

"It's a life, actually." He smiled again, and the teeth were back in the mask, and he was a fool again, safe and stupid and infuriatingly charming. "And my hobby paid for a lot of things, Chief. Including the very nice drone your wolves ate."

"The wolves are not mine."

"They live on your mountain, they answer to your law, and they ate my drone. That's a custody dispute, and I'm the plaintiff." He crossed his arms. "I want compensation. One night of shelter, a hot meal, and my phone back. In that order."

She stared at him.

"You," she said, "are negotiating with the woman who's going to execute you at dawn."

"Bold of you to assume you'll win," he said cheerfully, "the mountain's on my side. I can feel it. It likes me."

The mountain, as if to disagree, sang a long, low note through the stone.

And from somewhere far below, the hunting horn answered.

Isola's blood went cold.

The human noticed. Of course he noticed. The fool had eyes like a hawk and the survival instincts of a golden retriever, and he was already on his feet, watching her with that unnerving focus.

"That horn," he said. "That's the second time tonight. Someone's hunting something. Want to bet it's me?"

"Stay here," she said. "Don't move. Don't breathe. Don't — "

"You're hurt," he said.

She looked down. The claw mark on her ribs had torn open again, a thin line of black-tinged blood soaking through the dark cloth. Umbra blood, when it showed, was almost black — another thing humans were never supposed to see.

"Don't touch it," she warned, but he was already reaching for her.

His hands closed around her arm — the wounded one — and she felt it like a bolt of lightning. Her skin, her blood, the part of her that she commanded absolutely, the machine her sister's death had built — it stuttered.

Her pulse. Her traitorous, animal pulse.

His fingers were warm. Human-warm. The kind of warm that said I'm alive and I intend to stay that way, and she realized, with the horror of a woman discovering she's been holding her breath for years, that she had forgotten what that felt like.

"There," he said softly, tying the strip of fabric — her fabric — around the wound with absurd, gentle efficiency. "Now we're even. You saved me. I saved you. We're quits."

His hands lingered a moment too long. Her eyes met his. The shrine was very quiet.

"If you're going to kill me tomorrow," he said, and his voice was low, and the fool was gone, "at least let me say the thing I came here to say."

"What thing?"

"The truth about your mountain." He didn't let go of her arm. "You people don't get old. You get chosen. I've seen the records — the ones your elders burned. Your tribe has been bleeding power for a century, and the Circle's answer has been to cut the tribe off from the world and blame it on human blood."

Her heart stopped.

"Human blood isn't poison, Chief Guardian." His voice was barely a whisper now. "That's the oldest lie on this mountain. And I can prove it."

She moved.

She had him against the wall in a heartbeat, blade at his throat, her body a line of coiled violence, and she was dimly aware that this was the closest she'd been to another living thing in years.

"You don't know what you're playing with," she breathed.

"I know exactly what I'm playing with." He didn't flinch. His eyes were bright, and his pulse was hammering under her hand, and he was smiling. "I just don't care."

The horn sounded again. Closer. So close the stone vibrated with it.

And then a voice echoed up from below — a voice she knew.

"Isola! Isola Vane! The pass is breached. I'm coming up!"

Leon.

Her blood went from cold to frozen. She looked at the shrine's only door, then at the human in her grip, and the math of the situation hit her like a falling tree.

If Leon found him, Kellen died. And she died with him — slowly, publicly, in the dark, the way her sister had.

The human looked at her. For once, he wasn't smiling.

"Friend of yours?" he asked.

"Worse," she said. "A friend who knows me."

She moved without thinking — the way you move when your body knows the answer and your mind is still catching up. She dragged him toward the back wall, where a slit in the rock hid a storage alcove barely wide enough for one body.

Two bodies did not fit in that alcove.

That was the thing.

She shoved him in first, and then she climbed in after him, and the rock closed around them like a tomb, and there was no room for the sword, no room for the law, no room for anything except the heat of his body and the breath of his mouth against her neck and the sound of Leon's boots on the stone.

"Isola?" Leon's voice, from the main chamber. Close. Curious. "I smell blood. What hunted you?"

The human's lips brushed her ear. She could feel his grin even in the dark.

"Should I answer," he whispered, "or do you want to?"

Her hand found his mouth.

It was the first time in her life that she had ever touched a human on purpose.

And the law, for the first time in her life, was the furthest thing from her mind.