Holding her breath, she stared up at the night sky for long moments after he had disappeared.

Finally accepting that he was truly gone, she turned and climbed the bluff. As she walked along the path on the journey home, she braced herself for the next steps.

She had to sell this story like it was really true, and that wouldn’t be easy. Ferion’s truthsense was enhanced by the fact that he had known her for a very long time.

Graydon kept his speed strong all the way back to New York. He had a lot to do in a short amount of time. As he traveled north, he entered the winter storm system again.

Snow swirled around him for the last half hour of his flight. By the time he landed, he had flown well over a thousand miles, and a good portion of that had been in inclement weather. He was tired and more than ready for a bucket of hot coffee and a hot, filling meal.

If he showed up at the Tower, he could help himself to the copious amounts of food in the cafeteria, but he would never get a moment’s peace. People would approach him with their problems, and he would spend all his time explaining that he was on personal leave.

Instead of going to the Tower, he stopped at Ruby’s Diner, a local restaurant that had been a favorite of his for the last thirty years. He ordered two steaks, half a dozen eggs, and a double helping of biscuits and gravy, along with coffee. The food was hearty, and the coffee was so strong it could put a dead man back on his feet again.

Outside the diner’s plate-glass windows, large, fluffy flakes of snow swirled. Several of the customers were either Christmas shoppers or masquegoers. The snowstorm seemed to foster a sense of camaraderie. Laughter and cheerful conversation filled the diner.

He was such a long-standing customer, and they knew him so well, they always kept the barstool at one end of the counter available for him.

Other than giving him a permanent seat, they didn’t make any fuss or call him by his title. He enjoyed the sense of anonymity and the chance to eat his meal in peace while he watched the ebb and flow of the other diners.

I’m unbalanced and obsessive. I wouldn’t recommend living this way to anyone, and yet, I still can’t give up the thought of you.

She had said that to him only a few short hours ago, but in the bright, bustling light of a New York morning, the words already began to feel distant and unreal.

He had lied to her, and she hadn’t even noticed.

He had said, all I want is the chance for you and me to figure out what we might mean to each other.

Because that was what a normal, healthy person might say. He had been faking it in the hopes that the rest of him would fall in line, and it hadn’t worked.

He wasn’t normal or healthy. He was every bit as unbalanced and obsessive as she claimed to be. They really were trapped in much the same place as they had been two hundred years ago.

Only, if they managed to break free of Malphas, he thought likely that she would move on to a new, different life, while he would still be in the same place, wanting her yet unable to have her. He didn’t know how to protect himself while still fighting for a chance to be with her.

In the cold light of morning it didn’t seem very realistic to hold out hope.

He was still Wyr. She was still Elven.

He had made promises to Dragos, to the other sentinels – Pia and Liam – and he intended to keep them. Bel had already proven over the centuries how devoted she was to the Elven demesne.

While the world had changed and Calondir was dead, Bel’s feelings for Dragos ran deep and bitter, and with good reason. Dragos’s help in January might have mitigated some of that bitterness, but it couldn’t have erased all of it.

As he considered the obstacles that lay between them, he looked around the diner.

The most generous way to describe the restaurant would be to call it retro. Still sporting much of the original décor from the 1970s, it was worn, outdated and definitely working class.

Faded green linoleum covered the floor, while the booths and barstools were covered in orange vinyl. The cracked seat on his own barstool had been patched with a strip of duct tape.

The tables were covered with a layer of faux wood, which was nearly as worn as the floor. The food was hearty, not designer cuisine, but it was well cooked and savory. He felt comfortable in this place, at home. It wasn’t fancy, but neither was he.

He tried to imagine Bel enjoying the diner.

It wasn’t that she was stuck-up. She was the exact opposite. She was attentive to others, and genuine, and her graciousness caused people from all walks of life to gravitate toward her.

She also wore clothes that were handsewn – jackets covered with a fortune in delicate embroidery and seed pearls, along with handcrafted boots, and silk shirts. Everything about her screamed money and class.

He looked down at himself. His jean jacket, jeans and boots had certainly seen better days, and his plain gray T-shirt had come from a plastic multipack of shirts he had bought at a superstore.

As he rubbed his tired face, he encountered stubble on his chin. The catlike part of his nature was obsessed with cleanliness, but he wasn’t sure when he had last shaved.

Wednesday? Maybe Tuesday?

Resting his elbows on the bar, he propped his head in his hands. He didn’t know who he was trying to fool. If you took away the extraordinary events that had thrown them together so long ago, in real, ordinary life, he and Bel were pretty much like oil and water.

“Job getting you down, Gray?”

He looked up at Ruby, the owner of the diner. She was an elderly human woman, around seventy years old. Slim and energetic, with dyed red hair and tortoiseshell glasses, she stayed active in the daily running of her business, claiming her customers kept her young at heart.

He told her, “My job’s a piece of cake.”

She snorted as she filled his coffee cup. “Pull the other one, why don’t you?”

One corner of his mouth tilted up. “Well, some days it’s a piece of cake. Other days… hey, it’s why they pay me the big bucks, right?”