She set the camera on the platter of air, engaged the timer. Then dashed to Hoyt. “Just look at the camera.” She slipped an arm around his waist, pleased when he mirrored the gesture. “And if you can manage a little smile... one, two... ”

She watched the light blink. “There we are. For posterity.”

He walked with her when she retrieved the camera. “How do you know how it will look when you take it out of the box?”

“I don’t, not a hundred percent. I guess you could say it’s another kind of hope.”

She looked back at the ruin. “Do you need more time?”

“No.” Time, he thought, there would never be enough of it. “We should go back. There’s other work to do.”

“Did you love her?” Glenna asked as they started back across the field.

“Who?”

“The girl? The daughter of the family who lived here.”

“I didn’t, no. A great disappointment that was to my mother, but not—I think—to the girl. I didn’t look for a woman in that way, for marriage and family. It seemed... It seemed to me that my gift, my work, required solitude. Wives require time and attention.”

“They do. Theoretically, they also give it.”

“I wanted to be alone. All of my life it seemed I never had enough of it, the solitude and the quiet. And now, now I’m afraid I may always have too much.”

“That would be up to you.” She stopped to look back at the ruins a last time. “What will you tell them when you go back?” Even saying it tore little pieces from her heart.

“I don’t know.” He took her hand so they stood together, looking at what was, imagining what had been. “I don’t know. What will you tell your people when this is done?”

“I think I probably won’t tell them anything. Let them think as I told them when I called before I left that I took an impulsive trip to Europe. Why should they have to live with the fear of what we know?” she said when he turned to her. “We know what goes bump in the night is real, we know that now, and it’s a burden. So I’ll tell them I love them, and leave it at that.”

“Isn’t that another kind of alone?”

“It’s one I can handle.”

This time she got behind the wheel. When he got in beside her, he took one last look at the ruin.

And, he thought, without Glenna, the alone might swallow him whole.

Chapter 17

It plagued him, the idea of going back to his world. Of dying in this one. Of never seeing his home again. Of living in it the rest of his life without the woman who’d given new meaning to it.

If there was a war to be fought with sword and lance, there was another raging inside him, battering the heart he’d never known could yearn for so much.

He watched her from the tower window as she took pictures of Larkin and Moira sparring, or posed them in less combative stances.

Her injuries had healed enough that she no longer moved stiffly, or tired as quickly. But he would always remember how she’d looked on the ground, bleeding.

Her manner of dress no longer seemed strange to him, but proper and so right for who she was. The way she moved in the dark pants and white shirt, her fiery hair pinned messily atop her head seemed the essence of grace to him.

In her face, he’d found beauty and life. In her mind, intelligence and curiosity. And in her heart both compassion and valor.

In her, he realized, he’d found everything he could want, without ever knowing he’d been lacking.

He had no right to her, of course. They had no right to each other beyond the time of the task. If they lived, if the worlds survived, he would go back to his while she remained in hers.

Even love couldn’t span a thousand years.

Love. His heart ached at the word so that he pressed his hand to it. This was love then. The gnawing, the burning. The light and the dark.

Not just warm flesh and murmurs in the candlelight, but pain and awareness in the light of day. In the depths of the night. To feel so much for one person, it eclipsed all else.

And it was terrifying.

He was no coward, Hoyt reminded himself. He was a sorcerer by birth, a warrior by circumstance. He had held lightning in the palm of his hand and called the wind to launch it. He’d killed demons, and twice had faced their queen.

Surely, he could face love. Love couldn’t maim him or kill him, or strip him of power. What level of cowardice was it then, for a man to shrink back from it?

He strode out of the room, down the stairs, moving with the rush of impulse. He heard music as he passed his brother’s door—something low and brooding. He knew it as the music of grief.

And knew, too, if his brother was stirring, so might others of Cian’s kind be stirring. Sunset was close.

He moved quickly through the house, into the kitchen where something simmered on the stove, and out the back.

Larkin was amusing himself, shimmering into a gold wolf while Glenna called out her delight and moved around him with the little machine that took the pictures. The camera, he reminded himself.

He shaped back into a man, and hefting his sword assumed a haughty pose.

“You look better as the wolf,” Moira told him.

He raised his sword in mock attack and chased after her. Their shouts and laughter were so opposed to his brother’s music, Hoyt could only stand in wonder.

There was still laughter in the world. Still time, and need, for play and fun. There was still light even as the darkness crept closer.

“Glenna.”

She turned, the humor still dancing in her eyes. “Oh, perfect! Stand right there. Just there, with the house behind you.”

“I want to—”

“Ssh. I’m going to lose the light soon. Yes, yes, just like that. All aloof and annoyed. It’s wonderful! I wish there was time to go back in and get your cloak. You were made to wear one.”

She changed angles, crouched down, shot up at him. “No, don’t look at me. Look off, over my head, think deep thoughts. Look into the trees.”

“Wherever it is I look, I still see nothing but you.”

She lowered her camera for a moment, with pleasure blooming in her cheeks. “You’re just trying to distract me. Give me that Hoyt look, just for a minute. Off into the trees, the serious sorcerer.”

“I want to speak with you.”

“Two minutes.” She changed angles, kept shooting, then straightened. “I want a prop,” she muttered, and studied the weapons on the table.