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The left side of his mouth, entwined with the black lines of the Dog’s presence under his skin, lifted in an unamused smile. “I preferred to focus on other topics at the time.”
“Yes, well—then you’ve clearly mastered the art of it.” I started to step away, but he held me in an iron grip.
“Your promise,” he reminded me.
I couldn’t quite meet his gaze anymore, though surely he sense how my heart pounded. To soothe myself, I released the band holding his hair and twined my fingers in the silky texture. “The terms?”
“You will not attempt to retrieve and use the scepter.”
“How could I? I don’t know what you did with it.”
“Gwynn.” He pronounced my name in warning.
“I can’t promise that.” I risked a look at his face. As I’d suspected, the inky lines writhed, a manifestation of his deep upset. “What if I need it…after.”
His hands tightened on me and he dropped his forehead to touch mine. Even now, dim as thunderclouds barely cresting the horizon, the black cord of his tether to Titania snaked through the back of his mind. “Should things become that dire, not even that will save me. Promise me you won’t use it.”
“Why not just destroy it, as you threatened to?” I stroked the back of his neck, soothing him.
“I tried.” He sounded both grim and chagrined. And needed to say nothing more. The fact that he couldn’t affect the thing spoke volumes.
“How about if I promise not to attempt to use it until after the baby is born?”
“I don’t want you to use it at all.”
“Believe me, I’m clear on that point. I promise not to use it before the baby is born or in any way that will jeopardize our child. That’s as good as you’ll get.”
“Or for my benefit.”
“No dice.”
“Stubborn Gwynn, you—”
“That’s right. I am stubborn and you know full well that I’m better at it than you are. That’s my offer. You can’t ask me to love you with one breath and then expect me to stand by and not do whatever I can to protect you. This is my version of fighting death.”
“I cannot die.”
“No. But, as you’ve pointed out to me, there are far worse things than death.” I kissed him and his lips were cool, unresponsive. So I deepened the touch, reaching in and caressing him emotionally, pouring love and desire into him. With a gasp, he opened his mouth to me and drank me in with fierce need. I pressed tightly to him, entwining my own arousal with his, wanting his skin against mine.
And the baby kicked, hard enough for Rogue to feel and for my bladder to protest fiercely. He looked with bemused consternation at my belly and I laughed at his expression.
“I guess that’s a no,” I told him ruefully.
“Just as well. Cecily’s corpse grows no fresher. We may as well deal with that.”
*
He wasn’t exaggerating.They’d created a table in the middle of the magic arena that looked much like my workbench. I would have made something more like the metal tables we used in anatomy, but I supposed it didn’t really matter. Besides, it touched me that Rogue tried to make things the way he thought I liked them, so I didn’t want to impugn his choice by changing it.
As he’d implied, Cecily’s corpse had long passed any sort of freshness. Contained in a close-fitting bubble of Rogue’s stabilized magic, the body looked almost mummified rather than decomposed. It had been wrapped in a blanket—Nancy’s doing, no doubt—with a withered blossom clutched in the hands folded over her collapsed chest. If I looked, her abdomen would be emptied, carved open by Fafnir’s blade.
Fafnir himself hovered over the body, as if he might protect it. The stabilizing shield of Rogue’s magic kept him from touching her. Otherwise I thought he might be holding her as close, with as much fearful love, as Rogue had just held me. The usually grim fae wore an expression of tender joy and he looked at me with such hope that I banished my uneasy thoughts that whispered nastily of necrophilia.
“You see?” Fafnir gestured at the corpse with a grand flourish.
Taking some time to gather my thoughts, I edged up to the table and studied her more closely. I’d seen corpses plenty of times in anatomy teaching labs and done more animal necropsies than I could count, so the sight didn’t make me squeamish at all. The flesh had decayed remarkably little, though I had no idea how much subjective time had passed for it and I wasn’t at all familiar with what to expect for an unembalmed human body buried in dirt.
Still, her saucy curls still clung to the desiccated skull more than seemed likely. And I made out no sign of the insects, nematodes and bacteria that made their living in my world by recycling no-longer-living flesh. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
