Demon Moon

mirrors?”
    “No. Only in the bathroom.” She’d taken the rest out.
    “Don’t lower your shields, Savi.”
    “I know,” she said, but he was already through the doorway. He’d probably heard her, though.
    She lowered her face to her knees and silently began to cry.

    It didn’t have to mean anything. She knew better than anyone how uncontrollable it could be, the urge to run. Caused by an involuntary physical response, not free will. He probably hadn’t known he was doing it—if he had, he’d have taken the precaution of a sword and a covering.
    And shoes.
    A long sliver of glass had embedded in the heel of his left foot. Savi carefully probed into the gash with a pair of tweezers, slid the shard out. It clinked into the pan she’d set on the floor, joining the other pieces of glass and metal and gravel—and blood.
    She’d had to reopen several wounds to clean them out; Colin hadn’t moved during the long process, just as he’d remained still when she’d smeared aloe over his skin, tended to the abrasions on his face and knees.
    How he must hate knowing she’d seen him this way.
    And perhaps she should have left him alone—but if he could feel her psychic scent during his daysleep, then he must the sunburn and injuries as well.
    She pressed a clean towel against the last cut and waited for it to stop bleeding—it never took long. His body repaired itself with amazing speed. Already, the burns had faded to pink; his skin had taken a bronze cast in some of the less-affected areas. She looked up over his feet, down the length of him.
    He lay sprawled across the honey-gold sheets on his stomach, his feet hanging over the edge, his face turned into her pillow and his mouth half-open, his blond hair sticking up in random disarray.
    Only his fangs kept him from appearing too boyish. She’d had an instant when, spreading the gel over his cheeks and lips, she’d wondered if he’d unknowingly attack her in his sleep. But she’d been able to maneuver him from side to side without a change in his deep, regular breathing.
    She’d not been similarly unaffected.
    With a sigh, she removed the pan from the wooden flooring beneath his feet, slid a bowl of warm soapy water in its place. God, but she was sick, playing doctor and searching for signs of intimacy when he’d made it perfectly clear he didn’t want her to see him.
    But there was intimacy in this, if an unintentional one, and it was widening the hollow ache in her chest, leaving an unbearable pain in its place.
    She began washing his feet.
    Soap instead of milk, but it felt the same. A vow, a welcome. If her parents had been alive, they’d have washed the feet of her groom, showing their acceptance of him into the family. Perhaps Nani would do it; they’d never spoken of how traditional her wedding would be. Finding the groom came first.
    But it hardly mattered who it would be now.
    One sharp blow—that was all she needed. Not to stop her suffering but to make herself face reality, and one simple truth: she had a choice between her heart breaking once, marrying a suitable boy; or continuing on like this and having it broken every time Colin was with someone else.
    Even if he tried, he couldn’t be faithful to a human. It was a physical impossibility; the bloodlust didn’t care, and one human couldn’t supply all of his blood without endangering herself. He had to go elsewhere to feed—and his body would go elsewhere, too.
    And that was assuming he’d try. He might have run through the city by instinct, not choice.
    Her bedside phone rang, and the water sloshed in the bowl as she startled, leaping forward to answer it before it could disturb him.
    As if her clambering across the mattress wouldn’t. She sat on the edge of the bed, answering it breathlessly, then froze as Colin rolled over and his arm came around her hips.
    “ Naatin? Were you running?”
    His chest pressed against her bottom and lower back. His eyes were closed; his lashes lay in thick, dark crescents across his cheeks, his chin tucked beside her hip.
    “No.” She glanced at the clock: one thirty. What did she usually do on Saturday afternoons? “Just cleaning a few things around the house.”
    Colin’s lips curved into a tiny smile. They’d been chapped less than half an hour before. Now they were soft, smooth, as if the aloe had soaked into them. She clenched her fist to keep from tracing their shape. To keep from burying her fingers in his golden hair and kissing