Demon Bound

job on a dig wherever and however I could.” He ran his hand over his head, glanced at her. “Then I had to go up in front of the draft board, and came close to making a run for Canada. And thought about proposing to the girl I was bang— dating , because there was a marriage exemption then.”
    And he wouldn’t be pressed into service, she realized. “You were frightened that you’d be killed?”
    He gave a silent little laugh. “Way things turned out, I should’ve been.” His smile lasted for another second, then he shook his head. “And, yeah, that was part of it. But most of it was I just didn’t believe in anything we were doing over there.”
    “But you didn’t leave America or marry her?”
    “No. I ended up with a list of reasons to go—but it came down to just a few. I knew how everyone in town would be looking at my grandparents if I took off for Canada. A small town like that . . . and there’d already been enough talk. My mom ran off when I was just a kid, and my dad was the town drunk.” A dull flush tinged his cheekbones, and he abruptly stood. “Anyway, they’d have been okay with whatever I did, but it would have been hard on them. And getting out of a draft wasn’t a reason to marry someone, either. Especially Barbara, because she was a great girl—but she wanted to spend the rest of her life right where she grew up. One of us would have gotten screwed.”
    His discomfort was acute, almost like a physical pain. Alice looked away from him, but she heard the slide of fabric against skin as he shoved his hands into his pockets, his slow tread as he crossed the chamber. She couldn’t conceive why he was baring himself in this way. How could it possibly be relevant to what he’d discovered about her bargain?
    Yet he must think so—and even though he obviously thought what he exposed was something shameful, or perhaps foolish, he was determined to share it.
    But Alice wished that he wouldn’t. She didn’t want to see this side of him. Didn’t want to know that he’d made these choices with the grandparents he’d loved in mind. Didn’t want to think of all the people she’d known—men, women—who would have used another person to secure their own future, married another person without considering his or her desires and needs. Without ever seeing who that person was instead of what they wanted that person to be.
    Jake had managed to distract her, but she hadn’t wanted understanding and admiration to follow. Yet she knew that even if she asked him to stop, he’d continue.
    She was too intrigued to ask him to stop now, anyway. “So you went, though you didn’t believe in it. I’m not condemning you,” she added when his shoulders stiffened. “I’m simply curious.”
    He shrugged. “By then, I’d convinced myself that I might be wrong. I was nineteen years old—so what did I know? And the only way to find out for sure was to go. It wasn’t the fighting, wasn’t going into service. I’m not a pacifist. If I was, I wouldn’t be doing this now.”
    “No.” A Guardian couldn’t keep his weapon sheathed, and expect to survive. “Were you wrong?”
    He faced her, his expression clearing—and, she thought, taking on an unexpected amount of amusement. That boundless energy seemed to roll through him, and he strode to her side, went down on his heels again. “It’s probably best not to get me started. What I will say is that I felt sick to my stomach all the time. Not so bad when I was in Basic, but once we shipped out, it was just—” He made a fist in front of his abdomen, then twisted his wrist. “All the time. Then you get out in the boonies, and it’s worse, because you’re scared on top of it—and wondering what the hell you’re doing out there. Then there’s the other times, when it’s half-fun, because the guys you’re with are ranging from ice-cool to batshit crazy, depending on the day and how you look at them. Mostly, you’re just trying to stay alive. And you’re doing whatever you can to make it right in your head, even if means making demons out of the other guys, joking about it any way you can. Then you kill one and you’re puking your guts out.”
    He stopped, and his gaze leveled on hers. “I don’t do that when the demons are real,” he said.
    “No.” She smiled faintly. “I noted that you employ other methods of celebrating when you slay one.”
    And the memory of that spontaneous kiss seemed to weave silk threads within her