“Yes. We’ll be here again. What we do then, what we do between now and then, and after? It all matters so much. I can’t think about … sex.”
“Everybody thinks about sex,” he said absently. “I told you I’d come back to New Hope, and I will. I told you I’d come for you, and I will.”
He drew his sword, enflamed it, shot fire at the crows. He turned to her again as they erupted and fell. “You think of me, too.”
She woke in her bed with the evening light of summer slipping soft through her windows. She sighed, rolled out of bed to dress and find her family.
Duncan popped back to his quarters with the same rude jolt he’d popped out of them.
“Son of a bitch!”
He dropped down on the side of his bunk to get his breath back. Not like flashing, he thought. That brought a little zip to the blood, but this had been—coming and going—like being shot out of a cannon.
He damn well didn’t appreciate it.
He needed a beer, maybe a good, long walk. He needed his hands on Fallon again. No, no, wanted his hands on her, and that was a lot different than need.
He’d kept them off her for damn near two years, he reminded himself, and got up to pace around the bedroom of the house he shared with Mallick. He’d have kept them off her longer if she hadn’t moved on him.
Not her fault—not altogether anyway. He wasn’t stupid enough to think otherwise. They’d gotten caught up in something—best to just leave it there.
How many times had he been to that place in dreams, in visions? The stone dance, the fields, the woods. He’d never been inside the farmhouse where the MacLeods had lived for generations before the Doom, but he knew it.
Tonia knew it—because she’d told him.
Did Fallon?
He should’ve asked. If he found himself in that field again, he’d go to the house, look for his ghosts. Look for the family who’d worked the land, lived and died there for generations.
He knew their names because his mother had told him. Their names, their stories. But it wasn’t the same.
He strapped on his sword. Strange, he’d worn it at the stones, but he’d taken it off to shower after the long training day. He’d worn his prized leather jacket—one he’d scavenged when he and some troops had flashed to Kentucky on a scouting mission.
Dressed for weather and defense, he considered. Fallon, too, he recalled. Brown leather vest over a sweater, wool pants. She sure as hell hadn’t been sleeping in cool-weather clothes.
So that was interesting. Magicks were, for him, endlessly interesting. A science, an art, a wonder all wrapped up with power.
He glanced at the pile of books—most loaned to him by Mallick. Study, the man said, constantly. Read and learn, look and see, train and do.
His own personal Yoda.
Man, he missed DVD nights back at home.
He wandered the room, looking at the sketches he’d pinned on his walls. His mom, his sisters, friends, one of Bill Anderson outside Bygones. One of the memorial tree. It held his father’s name, and the name of the man who’d stood as his father for a brief time.
The man his mother had loved, for that brief time. And Austin had given him an art set—even more prized than the leather jacket. He’d long since worn the colored pencils, the charcoals, pastels to nothing. But he’d scavenged more.
Mallick had surprised him, as he’d expected a man who was that hard a taskmaster to scoff at sketches, and to complain about the waste of paper and supplies.
Instead, Mallick found an alchemist who could create more.
Art, he’d said, was a gift.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that Duncan drew maps as well—minutely detailed. Or could re-create an enemy base on paper to help plan a mission.
Still, Duncan hadn’t shown him the sketches of Fallon. Not even the one he’d done of her drawing the sword and shield from the fire in the Well of Light.
He nearly opened the drawer where he kept sketches of her, then drew back. Just asking for trouble, he decided. So he dragged his fingers through his disorderly mop of black hair, considered it groomed, and walked out to the living room where Mallick sat by the fire.
He knew Mallick had chosen what was basically a vacation cabin for the fireplace, the trees, a plot of land he used for a garden, for beekeeping. And it had a loft for his workshop.