After what felt like a long time but probably wasn’t, I pulled back.
‘This is a bad idea,’ Anne said. She sounded short of breath, but she didn’t draw away from my touch. ‘I’m dangerous.’
It was hard to keep myself from smiling. It wasn’t to do with anything Anne had said – I just felt light-headed. ‘So are the rest of us.’
‘Not like this. Richard wants me. What happened today could happen again. Just by being near me— Wait, what’s so funny?’
I stopped laughing long enough to answer. ‘Half the reason I never brought this up was because I was afraid you’d be in danger from being close to me.’
‘I’m serious!’
‘So am I,’ I said. ‘We’re always going to be in danger and that’s never going to change. I’m through wasting time.’
Anne looked me right in the eyes. ‘Do you really want to take on everything that this’ll mean? All the mistakes I’ve made, all the enemies I have? Everything that’s wrong with me?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I decided that a long time ago. It just took me until now to say it out loud.’
Anne kept looking at me, then tears glittered in her eyes and she leaned forward to rest her head against my chest.
I stroked her hair. In a little while, we’d go back to the living room to rejoin our friends. And after that, we’d have all of our other problems to deal with. There was Richard, and Morden, and the jinn, and Levistus, and the rest of the Council, and more others than I could count, not to mention Anne’s other self. None of those things were going away, and I didn’t know if I would be able to deal with them all. But right now, for the first time that I could remember, I was happy.
Let’s see what tomorrow brings.
about the author
Benedict Jacka became a writer almost by accident, when at nineteen he sat in his school library and started a story in the back of an exercise book. Since then he has studied philosophy at Cambridge, lived in China and worked as everything from civil servant to bouncer to teacher before returning to London to take up law.
Find out more about Benedict Jacka and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.