Demon Marked

to practice avoiding the superfast demon again?”
    She did. This had become her only way of gaining permission to touch him. If he wanted to, she’d practice this all night and day.
    Nicholas’s jaw clenched, and she watched the struggle that played through him. He did want to. He didn’t want to. But she knew which would eventually win, because only one would leave him better prepared to face Madelyn.
    Finally, he nodded. “Yes.”
    But his answer didn’t please her quite as much as Ash thought it would have. Maybe because Yes wasn’t enough. Because although it was what she wanted him to say . . . she wanted him to say it because he enjoyed her touching him, too.
    So maybe she was beginning to feel a little frustration, after all.

CHAPTER 12

    Lying on his side, Nicholas half opened his eyes to a dark room. Sleep still heavy on him, he almost fell into it again before the noise that must have woken him came again: the opening of the stove, the low thud of wood being tossed in.
    A familiar sound, and for a moment he was sixteen again, listening to his grandfather stir up the morning fire. Maybe Ash, then, starting early. She always had it roaring by the time he awoke, and the kettle on to boil. In the past week, she’d gotten into the habit of taking coffee when he did, sitting at the table and reading while he ate breakfast.
    He’d gotten into the habit of looking forward to her company. Maybe too much.
    But hell, who was he kidding? Now that he’d woken, he’d be out of the room within minutes, just so that she’d look up and smile at him a little earlier.
    He rolled over, switched off the alarm on the windup clock. No need to have it now. And—hell, it was really fucking early.
    The blanket slid to his lap when he sat up. Though his chest was bare, he didn’t feel the nip of cold. A toasty warm room. He was used to that upon waking, because she always started up the fire well before the alarm got him out of bed. In the past week he’d come to appreciate that. Unlike when he’d stayed with his grandfather, his toes didn’t freeze into ice pops before he could drag a pair of wool socks on.
    He didn’t need socks now. The floorboards weren’t cold at all. And it was two in the fucking morning. God.
    Scrubbing the remainder of sleep from his face, he opened the door. It took him a second to see her through the dark—sitting in the rocking chair near the window. Pale moonlight gleamed on the pages of the book she held, her blond hair, the barrel of the shotgun tucked beside her.
    Then, as if she’d struck a light, her own crimson glow began shining from her eyes, washing her features in red. “Did the wolves wake you?”
    That glow lit his way across the room. He struck a match to the table lamp, faced her again.
    “What wolves?”
    She tilted her head, eyes still glowing. “I can hear them. You can’t?”
    “No.”
    “Sometimes it’s almost as loud as the city here. It’s just loud in a different way. Not as many people noises.”
    “I heard people noises. And now I understand why the woodpile has been disappearing faster than it should have been.” His grandfather would have skinned him. “You don’t have to keep it hot in here at night. That’s what the blankets are for.”
    The shining in her eyes dimmed, left only blue—human, and amused. “Not everything is about you, Nicholas. The fire is for me.”
    “And you could lie out on a glacier for twenty years, then get up and walk away without feeling any the worse for it. You’re burning through our fuel—which I need if we’re going to live out here—twice as fast as we should. And we didn’t spend the summer stockpiling it.”
    She shrugged. “So I’ll chop more.”
    “You don’t need to,” he pointed out. “So why ?”
    With a sigh, she set her book aside. “I don’t like being cold.”
    “You also said that like and dislike don’t matter. Only familiar does.”
    “The cold is familiar. Not the kind of cold out there, but colder. It’s enough to be familiar, though, and I don’t like it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s different. Those other things that are familiar, when I feel them I want to chase them down. I want to find out where the familiarity came from. I want to know what memory I’m missing.” As if suddenly agitated, she rocked up out of the chair, stood looking out of the window before turning to face him again. “With the cold, I don’t want to chase down what’s at the root of it. And I