Page 29 of You Give Me Fever

"Well…" she winced, completely unsure if he should admit to witchcraft and using blood and roosters—to a demon, no less. "Maybe a little."

Shiver grinned. "You clever little —"

Something hit the ground out in the field beside them, and Shiver looked up, his eyes flashing bright green.

"Get inside," he said, voice suddenly much lower, much darker, thunder on the horizon.

"What do you see out th⁠—"

"Now, girl!" He hauled them both to their feet,threw her over his shoulder, and ran inside, slamming the door behind them, as if it would do any good.

"What are you doing? Unhand me, you… you caveman!" Clara couldn't help shouting at him, even if she was hoping he might carry her all the way up to her room.

Unfortunately, he set her on her feet in the center of the sitting room—the largest room in Clara's house, which she hadn't used since her parents' funeral. Shiver began to yank them around by the string on their wrists from one corner of the room to another, digging through drawers and tossing out their contents until he shouted "ha!" and held a pencil in the air.

"This is hardly the time to practice your alphabet," Clara said, torn between amusement and fear. She heard another odd thump from outside, but with the thunder rolling in, it could easily have been the wind.

"I'll have you know I was an excellent student, and could write all fifteen of my letters," Shiver said as he swept his hands to the sides, pushing couches and tables to the edges of the room.

"Fifteen?"

"It goes up to fifteen, right?"

"At the risk of changing the subject, what ever are you doing?" Clara was forced to follow by their connected wrists as Shiver drew a large circle directly on the hardwood floor.

"Things are about to get interesting, honey," said Shiver, scrawling lines and symbols within the circle. "So you'll have to just trust me and do what I say."

"Oh good, things have been a bit of a yawn since I met you," Clara said, looking to the window when she heard another sound from outside, and then another. Thumps, louder and more frequent. Drumming? Hail?

Shiver straightened up, and, as Clara had seen him do the last time he drew a mark like this, he reached up to the sharp tip of a horn and pricked his finger. Then he knelt on the floor, looking up at Clara with eyes that glowed in the dim light.

"Into the circle," he said.

Clara might have argued on a different day, but the hail on the windows was picking up speed, and she was getting frightened. It was hail, wasn't it?

She stepped into the circle. Shiver touched his bloody finger to the very center, and, with a faint crackling sound, it lit up, bathing the room in an aquamarine glow. Shiver stayed on his knees, wrapping his arms around Clara's waist to pull her to him, their faces reflecting the glow of the runes beneath them.

"Baby, listen," he said. "There are demons outside⁠—"

"WHAT?" Clara jerked in his grip, starting to push him away. "My chickens!"

"They're not after your chickens, Clara, they're after you."

She froze, eyes fixed on nothing, afraid to look down at him and more afraid to look toward her window. The hail—or not hail—was hammering at the glass like it was after revenge.

"I was supposed to die when you recovered. I was ready to do it," Shiver swallowed, still shaken. He'd not even had a moment to deal with how it felt to face his demise after hundreds of years, only to be saved by forces far more mysterious than himself. "But I lived. And I'm more human than I've been in a very long time. And… it is not terribly hard to apprehend why that might have happened."

Clara finally looked down at him, this huge demon who held her in a strange sigil, who had slipped into her room and touched her while she was in a fever—and she saw a man. It was almost as if she had been focusing on a shadow thrown across the sidewalk, and only just realized who was casting it.

He had tan skin, black curly hair, thick eyebrows, two long curled horns, and, of course, not a shred of clothing on. He was no stranger to her. She had long known this man, this face—he'd been there all the time, slowly emerging from the mist and darkness, piece by piece. She had never seen a creature so handsome in all her life, and she ached to look at him.

"Do not try to tell me that you were saved by love, because that is purely fiction, it… it doesn't happen."

“Yes, it does, every day," said Shiver, keeping his grip on her. Now that he had her, she wasn't slipping away. "And the evidence is right in front of you."

A particularly sharp thwack against the window brought him back around to the point.

"Which is why every demon in Hell is trying to break into your house," he said.