He grabs my head and holds it with two fistfuls of my hair, forcing me to look at him.

“I knew it—you weren’t!” His mouth is on mine, he has me against the wall. I can’t breathe and I don’t care. He is exultant. “How long?” he demands.

“What happens when you die?” I counter.

“I come back.”

“Duh, obviously. How? Where? Do you eventually just stand up from your ashes again or something?”

I hear a rattle and suddenly he’s on the floor, head back, muscles rippling, fighting to remain a man. He’s losing the battle. He has talons. Black fangs slide from his mouth, gouging into his skin. I can tell he doesn’t want to turn, but something I asked him has made him frenzied.

I can’t stand watching him struggle. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to help Barrons. I answer, talk to him to keep him grounded in the here and now. “I knew what was happening from the moment you asked me what I wore to the prom.” I drop to my knees beside him, take his head in my arms and cradle him at my breast. His face is half beast, half man. “I began to surface. It was like I was there but trying not to be there. I’m here, Jericho. Stay with me.”

Later we sleep. Or I do. I don’t know what he does. I’m exhausted and warm and feel safe for the first time in a long time, drifting off in Barrons’ underground world, next to the king of beasts.

I wake to him pushing into me from behind. We’ve had sex so many times, so many ways, I can barely move. I’ve come so many times I think it’s impossible for me to even want to come again, but then he’s inside me and my body tells a different story. I need so badly I ache. I slip my hand down and, as soon as I touch myself, I come. He shoves into me deep, rocking into my climax. I’m on my side. He’s tucked me into his body, spooned close. His arms are around me, his lips on my neck. Teeth graze my skin. When I stop shuddering, he pulls out and immediately I want him again. I push back with my rump and he’s back. He goes slow, so slow it’s torture. He thrusts, I clench. He withdraws, I lay tense, waiting. Neither of us says a word. I barely breathe. He stops and stays perfectly still for a while but not to tease. He likes being hard inside me. Connected, we lie there in silence. I don’t want the moment to end.

But it does, and when we’re separate, we don’t speak for a long time. I watch the shadows flickering on a famous painting on the wall. He’s not asleep. I can feel him back there, aware.

“Do you ever sleep?”

“No.”

“That must be hell.” I love sleeping. Curling up, napping, dreaming. I need to dream.

“I dream,” he says coolly.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Never pity me, Ms. Lane. I like what Iam.”

I roll over in his arms, touch his face. I let myself be tender. Trace his features, slide my fingers into his hair. He seems both put off and entranced by the way I’m touching him. I rearrange my head to accommodate the advantages of never sleeping. There are a lot. “How do you dream if you don’t sleep?”

“I drift. Humans need to shut down to let go. Meditation accomplishes the same thing, lets the subconscious play. That’s all you need.”

“What happened to your son?”

“Aren’t you question girl?” he mocks.

“He’s why you want the Sinsar Dubh.”

I feel the sudden violence in his body. It gusts like a sirocco, and just like that I’m inside his head and we’re in a desert and I wonder with a strange sense of duality in which I am him and I am me why it always seems to come back to this place for him. Then …

I’m Barrons, and I’m on my knees in the sand.

The wind is kicking up; the storm comes.

I was stupid, so stupid.

Death for hire. I laughed. I drank. I fucked. Nothing mattered. I swaggered through life, a god. Grown men screamed when they saw me coming.

I was born today. I opened my eyes for the first time.

It all looks so different now that it’s too late. What a grand fucking joke on me. I should never have come here. This is one battle-for-hire I should never have taken.

I hold my son and I weep.

The sky opens, letting the storm free. Sand comes, so thick it turns day into night.

One by one, my men fall around me.

I curse the heavens as I die. They curse me back.

There is black. Only black. I wait for the light. The Old Ones say there is light when you die. They say to run for it. If it goes away, you drift the earth forever.

No light comes to me.

I wait all night in the dark.

I’m dead yet I can feel the desert beneath my corpse, the abrasion of sand on my skin, up my nostrils. Scorpions sting my hands, my feet. Open, dead eyes crusted with sand watch the night sky as the stars pop and vanish, one by one. The darkness is absolute. I wait and wonder. The light will come. I wait, I wait.

The only light that comes for me is dawn.

I stand up, and my men stand up and we stare uneasily at one another.

Then my son stands up and I don’t care. I spare no thought for the strange night that shouldn’t have been. The universe is a mystery. The gods are fickle. I am and he is and that is enough. I toss him on my horse and leave my men behind.

“My son was killed two days later.”

I open my eyes, blinking. I can still taste sand, feel the grit in my eyes. Scorpions crawl at my feet.

“It was an accident. His body disappeared before we could bury it.”