Page 20 of Into Ember

I close my eyes.

“Nobody move,” I mumble, into the warm dark. “This is medical.”

Somewhere above my head, Gunnar makes a sound that’s almost a laugh.

But nobody moves.

On the windowsill, Gerald’s leaves are pointed at me.

All of them.

Chapter 7

Erik

Her sentences are losing words off the ends.

She’d deny it. Ten minutes ago she declared this arrangement medical and appointed herself its supervisor, and now her head is doing a slow dip and recover, dip and recover, and her heartbeat has gone soft and slow under the quiet of the room, and nobody has to say anything.

“Bed,” I say.

“I have questions.”

“You can have them in the morning.”

“They’re time-sensitive.”

“They’re four hundred years old. They’ll keep.”

She wants to argue. I watch her look for the argument and come back empty-handed, which tells me more about how done she is than anything else tonight. She lets me pull her up out of the chair, and she lets my arm stay around her on the stairs, and she complains the entire way, which is how I know she’s all right.

“I’m still mad at you.”

“I know.”

“You had no business going in my apartment.”

“I know.”

“You were spying.”

“I was.”

“That’s creepy.”

“…A little.”

“A lot.”

“…A lot.”

I’m not defending myself. I lost that argument at dinner and I deserved to lose it, and there is something that feels right about being told exactly what I did wrong by a woman who is leaning on me while she does it.

The bedroom at the end of the hall has always been hers. No one has ever used it. Nobody discussed it. It’s the warm one, over the kitchen, with the window that catches all four moons. I steer her in and she sits down on the edge of the bed all at once.

“You poked around about Kyle.”

“I’m sorry.”