She wasn’t crazy about drinking after them, so she just splashed her face. The water was cold, but her skin tingled with more than the chill. “It’s everywhere in this place, isn’t it?”
“What?” Gan plopped down on the bare rock next to the water, sitting in the tilted sprawl its tail necessitated.
“Magic. Not literally everywhere,” she corrected herself, looking for a spot with some of the dust for cushioning. Bare rock wasn’t as comfortable for her as it seemed to be for the demon. “But there are patches of it all over— the ground, the air, the water.” Sometimes as she walked she’d felt it drift by, like a breeze, only the air wasn’t moving. Just the magic.
That was different, wasn’t it? She felt sure she wasn’t used to having so much free magic floating around.
“You mean you can feel it? You’re not even trying and you feel it?”
“Of course. There’s nothing between my skin and everything else, and I’m a sensitive, remember?”
Gan snorted. “Better than you do, I bet. Unless you’ve found your missing marbles.”
Her fists clenched. “Not exactly crammed with tact, are you?”
Rule stood and came over to her, rubbing his head along her hip. She dropped a hand to his shoulder, and just like that she felt better. Easier, as if she’d been holding an immaterial fist clenched around some thought or fear for a long time and could finally relax.
“I’ve gotten a little of it back,” she said, speaking to him now. not the demon. “Nothing about me, but I remember… a place that isn’t like this.”
He made a low, rumbling sound. She looked to Gan for a translation.
“He says he’ll remember for you. Could you try to be quiet now? Or do you just have to attract an erkint or two?”
“1 think,” she said, still talking to the wolf, “that Gan gets especially cautious about noise when it doesn’t want to answer questions.”
He nodded.
“I have a lot of questions, and you probably do, too. But maybe we’ll save them until we’ve rested.” Not that she was physically tired, though it would feel good to get off her feet. She was weary of questions, of the void inside her that gave back only silence. “I’ll grill Gan later. I need to sit, and you need some sleep.”
Rule hesitated but then agreed by moving to a spot slightly sheltered by the rise in the ground that made her think of the lip of a meteor crater. He lay down and looked at her. He had lovely eyes, warm and dark and capable of conveying quite a bit of meaning. Right now they seemed to offer an invitation.
She took him up on it, sitting down beside him. His body felt warm and furry and good. She stroked his back. “Go on, get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
Again he hesitated.
“Not used to letting someone else do the watching, are you? It’s true, I won’t be as good a sentry as you. I don’t have your senses. But I don’t need sleep right now, and you do.”
He sighed and laid his head on her thigh. Within moments, he was asleep.
This, too, felt good. He’d been angry with her earlier, she knew. He hadn’t wanted her to take the ymu, or for them to leave the ravine. But either he’d gotten over his anger, or he’d set it aside. He trusted her to keep watch while he slept, and that mattered. It mattered a lot.
If she hadn’t had him with her here… well, she did, so there was no point in chasing that particular question. But even thinking it brought such a surge of feeling… like one of those ocean waves she remembered, it rolled up inside her, getting bigger and bigger.
Also like the waves she remembered, this one was salty. Her eyes filmed over with tears. He was the one good thing she had. “I’m so glad about you,” she whispered—soft, soft, so she didn’t wake him. “I’m so damned glad about you.”
Gan giggled. She dashed a hand across her eyes and turned to it, angry—but the demon was paying no attention to her. It was preoccupied with the flying bugs with the shiny wings. Its hand shot out, closing around one of them.
She ought to appreciate Gan’s presence, too. True, the demon acted from self-interest, but it had healed her wounds.
Gan popped the bug in its mouth.
Its habits weren’t exactly appealing, but she and the wolf would find it much harder to survive here without the demon’s guidance.
It grabbed another bug. This one it fed to the snake vine. It giggled again as the bug’s wings thrashed.
There was a reason she hadn’t bonded with Gan. She looked away.
Sitting still was hard. She’d wanted to rest, but now that she was resting, she wanted to move. She’d thought that the restlessness would go away once they left that ravine behind, but she’d brought it along with her.
She’d brought another feeling with her, too. One that fed the restlessness, though she sensed it wasn’t the cause. An achy, needy feeling.
She wanted sex.
Now that she was sitting still, the ache was obvious. But she’d felt it for some time without paying it much notice—ever since Gan gave her the ymu, she realized. She remembered the startling rush of strength and energy, as if her blood had gone from flat to fizzy in an instant.
Maybe she always felt this way when her body was healthy and rested. But weren’t demons supposed to be oversexed? Maybe these feelings came from Gan—she was tied to it, after all. Or from the ymu.
She glanced at Gan again. No way was she going to ask.
Gan had said that she and Rule used to have sex “when he wasn’t a wolf.” She frowned. It bothered her to think of him being different. Had he been a wolf a long time? What was he like when he wasn’t a wolf?
She wished she could remember. Funny… she knew about sex, knew what her body wanted. She could imagine the way a man’s hands would feel, but she couldn’t remember being touched. She tried to call up a single, specific image—a face, a name, a place. And failed. What did her bed look like? Who had been it with her? Had she had many lovers? Or… another word arrived, but this one slammed into her mind with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Marriage. What if she was married?
She looked at the wolf whose head was heavy and warm on her thigh, her brow wrinkling at the thoughts pinging through her mind. She wasn’t wearing a ring… but she’d arrived here without clothes, so the lack of a ring didn’t mean much.
She didn’t realize she’d reached for the little charm hung around her neck until her fingers closed around it. The faint, familiar buzz of its magic made her shoulders loosen. Her necklace had arrived with her. Surely a wedding ring would have, too.
The demon sighed, stretched its short legs and leaned back on its tail. “This is boring.”
Silence only mattered when the demon wasn’t bored? She scowled at it.“What?” it said. “Aren’t you bored just sitting there?”
It was like a child, she realized. A nasty little child who pulled the wings off flies—and fed them to carnivorous plants. But maybe demons didn’t sleep, so Gan didn’t realize it had to be quiet or it would wake up Rule. She shushed it.
Gan grimaced and pulled up a handful of the fleshy yellow grass.
She bet that once she started asking questions it would be hushing her and looking scared again. But they weren’t budging until she knew more.
She’d rushed her decision, she admitted. Or allowed herself to be pushed into it, with pain arguing loudly on the side of the demon. She still thought she’d made the right choice, but she’d made it with very few facts. Before they crossed the Zone into the other region, she intended to get some answers.
She looked to her left at the murky barrier stretched across the mouth of the valley like a T-shirt that was fifty percent spandex, fifty percent mist.
Spandex. T-shirt. She smiled with pleasure as the words shifted all sorts of images and concepts into her mind. Gyms and working out. Department stores and malls. Socks and athletic shoes… and oh, but didn’t she wish she had some of those right now!