Clearer in the Night (38 page)

Eli stood in the doorway and beckoned me inside. I followed. There were no lights turned on; there was ambient light from the windows, but many had curtains drawn over them, so it was dim. He gestured towards a couch, and I settled myself while he lit an oil lamp. He did use a lighter, at least, not an actual match.

“Not wired for electricity?” It wasn’t common anymore, but there were still a few properties on the sides of the lakes that were much more like summer camps, and much less like vacation homes.

He nodded, the shadows of the lamp creating planes and crags on his face that weren’t visible in the sunlight. He looked old. Decrepit. His eyes were hollow. “I have a wood-stove. It heats the place up, cooks. It’s not glamorous, but it gets the job done. And it’s easy to leave a clean slate behind.”

“A clean slate?”

“For the next Hunter.” The capital letter was painfully clear.

“For the…what do you call yourselves, anyway?”

“The name on the stationery isn’t important.”

“You don’t live at the super-secret underground base?”

He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. “Not if I can help it. I like the sunshine and the fresh air.”

“You stayed down there with me for a week,” I said. He met my eyes, steadily and easily, until I blushed and looked away. “So what are we doing here?”

“Shannon had always been instructed to call in if it appeared you were becoming volatile. So I came to collect you.”

“Shouldn’t you bring me back to the base? Where I can be contained if—when—I lose control?”

“The full moon isn’t for another five days.”

I shrugged. He moved closer to me, perching on the small coffee table in front of the couch. “I don’t know if it matters. My skin itches. My dreams last night were insane, and when I woke up, I threw my sister across the room because she touched me, trying to wake me up.” I sighed. “I can’t control this, and you were very clear that we won’t have proof that Sophie is or isn’t the attacker until it’s too late. I just want it done.” My voice sounded thin and drawn out, like a dribble of maple syrup in January.

I thought he’d try another stupid pep talk, or a lecture on why we should take Sophie down now, just in case, but instead, he stared at me for a long minute, then sighed. He shifted to the couch to sit next to me, and drew me into his open arms. I pulled my knees up, nestling myself between his legs, and letting his arms circle me. My head rested on his chest, and as he stroked my hair, I closed my eyes.

I drifted for a while, not hearing or seeing or feeling. I wasn’t asleep, but I was rested. More thoroughly rested than I’d been in years. Maybe ever.

After an indeterminate amount of time, I opened my eyes and looked up at him. “You were going to tell me something.”

He opened his eyes, liked he’d been drifting as well. “What?”

“Before. That last night. You had some huge revelation to make, and then you were going to accept the idea that I determine who I sleep with.”

“Ah,” he said, incredibly informative as always. “Any chance of you dropping that, ever?”

“Not really, no.”

He was silent for a little while. “There was nothing to tell.”

“But you said—”

“I know. I was buying time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for you to calm down and realize that I wasn’t the guy you wanted. That I…God, Cait, you smell like everything that was ever good in time or space, but I’m no good for you. I am old, older than I look by a lot of years, and I live my life mostly in the darkness. I chase death on a daily basis, and it has changed who I am, and not for the better. I have swept into your life, and I look like a rescuing knight on a barded horse, and I would like to be that for you, but—”

I put my hand in the center of his chest, and pushed myself up until I was looking into his eyes. “I’m going to say this one time, and I really need you to put on your listening ears, okay?”

He laughed, which was better than I’d been hoping for. “Sure.”

“I am not a damsel in distress. I am messed up, sometimes, and I have made some very interesting decisions, even in recent memory, but they are mine, okay? I don’t want a rescuing knight, I just want someone to face the darkness with me. Think that you can do that?”

For a moment, his eyes glistened with a softness and a gentle yearning that surprised me. “Yes,” he said, finally. “Yes, I can do that.”

“All right then.” I settled back into his arms and just enjoyed his touch.

“We should eat,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes. Always.”

The cabin’s kitchen was more a section of the main room than a separate area. I’d thought, when he suggested chili, that he’d start pulling out some sort of canned food byproduct, but instead, he handed me onions and peppers to chop, while he pulled meat out of an actual ice-box—the kind where you put ice in one section, and it kept the rest as cold as a refrigerator—and started to brown it in a pan on his wood-stove. He did have canned beans and canned tomatoes, but I decided to forgive him, since I didn’t want to wait for beans to soak all day, either. Once I chopped the veggies, he started adding things to a stockpot and stirring like mad. When he was satisfied with how things looked in the pot, he added in beans, tomatoes, and the cooked meat. He added various spices for a minute, sniffing frequently. There was a certain chill in the air, even though the weather outside was lovely, but it faded as the little stove heated up. At first, it smelled like tomatoes, sharp and crisp and acidic, but as the pot simmered, the smell mellowed out, deepened, and my stomach started to rumble.

He came to me, then, and wrapped me in his arms, my back to his front, and we swayed gently to music that only he could hear. He leaned down, slowly, and pressed his lips just under my ear, and I sighed, trusting him to catch me if my knees went weak. “I like to read,” he said. “I read everything I can get my hands on. There hasn’t been a good song made in this century, as far as I can tell, and I try to buy ingredients instead of meals whenever possible. I try to protect people even when they don’t need protecting. And I think you’re beautiful enough that looking at you is like staring at the sun. Can you stand to get to know me a bit better?”

I smiled up at him. “For the next three days, anyway. After that, we’ll re-evaluate.”

He laughed, a loose and easy sound that I hadn’t heard from him before. His mouth returned to gently teasing my neck, his hands steady at my waist. He was rock hard, pressing into the top of my ass, but whenever I tried to press against him, or shift his hands higher or lower, he gently moved away from me, keeping the contact light and soft. I sighed more than I moaned, but the soft shocks of desire that spread out from the lowest part of my belly were unexpected. The wolf was quiet, for once, distant and uncaring.

When I was driven into the mildest frenzy of all time, he pressed one last kiss into my neck, and then went back to his kitchen, putting together drop biscuits faster than I’d ever seen. When they were done, he bowled up the chili, set a biscuit on top, and cleared off a section of a small round table. We sat down together, and the first bite of chili was like spicy heaven in my mouth. “This is delicious,” I said.

“Thanks. My grandmother—my actual grandmother—taught me to make it when I was just a kid. The recipe has evolved over the years, but chili’s basically a kitchen sink meal anyway.”

“What was she like? Your actual grandmother, I mean.”

He smiled, staring off into the past. “She was small—short, I mean—but built like a fireplug. She took no nonsense from me, or anyone else. She whacked my hand with her spoon when I didn’t pay attention to her.” His face clouded. “She was killed by…well, it doesn’t matter what killed her. I was just a kid, a teenager. And I tried to track down the thing that had slaughtered her, and I nearly got killed myself. Clara was the one who found me, took me in, kept me from dying while I was unconscious, then kept me from dying again when I woke up and realized I’d failed. She offered me a purpose.” All that warmth he liked to hide showed in his eyes right then, and his voice shook just a little with feeling. “Said that once you’d been touched by darkness, you could see clearer in the night, and could help to protect those who were still night-blind.”

“And you agreed?”

He nodded. “It has its ugly moments, I’m not going to lie, but it’s been a good life. It’s…I’ve helped people. I’ve kept people from Gran’s fate. And that’s something.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

He studied me for a long moment, weighing his answer. “Would you go screaming out the door if I told you it’d been seventy-five years since I found Gran dead in her own kitchen?”

I smiled. “Seventy-five? No. If it were a hundred, though, that would be just ridiculous.”

“I’m not kidding.”

I shrugged. “I’m not in a place to be judgey right now. As you said, if we survive this next week, we’ll revisit the conversation. For now—let’s just eat dinner.”

The food was delicious. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt nourished by a meal, instead of just fed. When I’d wiped the inside of my bowl clean with biscuits, I stood to stretch. He had a bookcase in the corner, and I stared at it, at three shelves of leather-bound books with nothing written on the spines.

He came up behind me, his hands on my waist again. “What are these?” I asked.

“Journals.”

“Of your heroic deeds of derring-do?”

There was coldness radiating off his skin again. “The lives of the ones I wasn’t able to save. Everything I was able to find out about them, so that their stories aren’t forgotten.”

My eyes scanned the many volumes of stories gone awry. Too many. “Will you write my story down?”

His fingers were digging into my skin. If I bruised anymore, there would be deep purple marks there by nightfall. “If I have to. If that is the only memorial I can give you, I will.”

“Silver bullets, right?”

“Do we have to talk about this?”

“The book said that silver shot in a shotgun was preferred, that actual silver bullets were far too soft.”

“Cait. Please. I can’t.”

The wolf was riding in my skin now, high and tight. If I listened closely, I’d probably hear my fingernails thickening, lengthening. “Do I still smell good now? Or do I smell like wolf? Like wet fur and forest loam?”

I thought he’d flinch away. I thought he’d back away from my crazy. I never once, not for one second, thought he’d draw me in closer. “You smell like a girl. You smell like the spicy chili you just ate, and you smell like strawberry lotion, and you smell like a girl who has been thinking about sex all day. Tell me, Cait. Are you that girl, or are you a wolf?”

One hand was splayed over my belly, and the other came up to brush my hair away from my neck. He didn’t use his lips this time, just brushed the back of his fingers down my sensitive skin. Shivers, shivers everywhere, and she grumpily retreated. I turned in his arms, and brought his mouth down to mine. He gave in to me easily this time, his hands on my ass, lifting me into the air. I wrapped my legs around him, groaning into his mouth as my sensitive core brushed up against his still rock-solid length. Even through layers of denim, I shuddered.

He brought us to the couch, bringing us down so that I straddled his lap. I broke the kiss just to pull the hem of my t-shirt over my head, and he fell upon my breasts, kneading them with his hands and nipping at my nipples through the cotton of my plain gray bra. I arched into his mouth, my hands tangled in his hair. I thought I’d burst just from that contact, that he’d take me over the edge with nothing but his teeth and the seam of my jeans. It had been days, days of teasing, and there was something now, some lack of restraint, that made it all impossibly urgent, incredibly necessary. He was panting, making high, tight sounds. He tore his mouth away from me to gasp, and I swore. If he stopped now, with another stupid excuse, I would kill him, I would cry from frustration.