He’d expected a laugh; a flash of neat white teeth, another joke about smiting. It was what they’d been, before – a game of chicken that never ended, bodies that sought again and again to crash. Shattering glass was the best sound in the world.
But the solemnity in her expression reminded him that they’d been a different kind of danger to each other lately. Once brash as lions, they slunk soft-footed again and again to some new truth. Could he speak it here, in a place far holier (to such as him) than any god-walked mountain?
At last she spoke, and it was easy (this, at least, was always easy) to smile.
“Bexley Briar,” he said, thick as incense and rough as sackcloth, a testament in a name, “I haven’t been able to think straight since I met you. That’s more than I can say for any god.” Beyond them the snow-fed stream ran on and on, and Acton couldn’t care less if it carried his words to the world or drowned them in its noise.
Until there came the rough-throated call of a crow, black against bare branches, familiar enough to make him lift his head.
“Even now,” he added, and there was something like unease in his tone as his gaze slid over her shoulder and back to the east, where clouds lay piled above both their courts. It was a dark wall as formidable as the Raven Gate and for a moment the worry that settled like a stone in his heart was stronger even than the want.
But then he inhaled once more the sweet-wild scent of her and turned his face away like Lot, to bury his muzzle instead in her mane and occupy his electric nerves with a different kind of devastation.
@
how we kiss and kill each other
