hair. “Nothing I’ve tried can reverse it. Only sheer will slows its tide.” A desolate laugh escaped him. “Something to be grateful for, I suppose.” He closed his eyes as if pained. “Once it reaches my heart, takes over my brain, I will turn. For they are the house and window of my soul.”
“There must be a way—”
“It is indestructible, Miri. I cannot be physically injured where I’ve changed. Not in any obvious way, at least. Knives, swords, bullets are unable to pierce this flesh. The only recourse I have not tried is setting myself on fire.” He snorted softly. “I find the notion vastly unappealing.”
She could well understand that, though the thought of him considering the action made her heart ache.
He gazed down at his fists. “I am a nightmare. Just as you said.”
Her mouth turned to sand. Stupid, unforgivable words she’d uttered. “You are not.” She reached out to touch his cheek, and he jerked back, his head hitting the wall with a thud.
“Don’t.”
He was weak as a kitten under her gaze, and she took advantage ruthlessly. The tips of her fingers grazed his translucent cheek, and he shuddered. Her fingers curled, recoiling from the foreign flesh, so very smooth. Just like marble.
His eyes, now that she could view them fully, were beautifully formed, deep-set with friendly crinkles at the corners. Thick, dark brows curved gently upward as though he were in a constant state of ironic inquiry and found the world amusing, if not a bit ridiculous. The skin around the right eye was silvery blue, making the gray of his iris all the more startling. A smudge of black remained in one of the tender grooves around his eyes.
“Kohl,” he said, watching her as she rubbed her thumb over the smudge. “Vegetable dye on my right lashes and brow. Eula said I’d blind myself but I really didn’t see any other recourse…” His helpless babble trailed off as Miranda continued to stare without speaking.
The line of change ran from beneath the hairline of his left brow in a diagonal slant to the right, down across the high bridge of his nose and toward his right jaw. Most of his neck was healthy flesh but the wicked line of blue-crystalline skin divided his torso from collarbone to navel where it moved toward his left hip and disappeared under his dressing robe.
The left side of his body glowed with healthful vigor. Fine black hairs dusted his chest and abdomen. His breath quickened as her fingers brushed over the hairs, but he did not move to stop her. The stitches had healed clean, the scar from the knife fight now a thin smooth line. The sight of it gave proof that it was truly Archer before her and not a vision.
His right side was just as beautifully sculpted with hard, flat muscles, but entirely hairless and clear as quartz—moonstone, she realized, catching a glimpse of her wedding ring. A body of sculpted moonstone with nothing inside, no sight of bones or blood. Nothing a living, breathing man might need to survive.
“It wasn’t fair for me to claim you.” He held himself as still as a soldier. “I’ve behaved abominably. I am sorry,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “Sorry to have brought you into a life filled with such horrors.” His head bowed, exposing the tender column of his neck.
How could he think himself a horror? He was beautiful. The sculpted lines of his face were strong and sure. Without the mask, he appeared younger than she’d thought, perhaps just thirty.
His hair lay thick on his well-shaped head, and she ran her hand over the shorn locks bristly as a boar brush, before resting it on the back of his warm neck. “ ‘I might call him a thing divine,’ ” she quoted. “ ‘For nothing natural I ever saw so noble.’ ”
He winced, and she knew he was more comfortable with being reviled. She’d seen enough looks of revulsion cast his way to bruise her heart for a lifetime.
His dressing robe gaped at the chest but held fast at his waist with a silken cord.
“Show me all of it,” she said quietly.
His expressive brows lifted but the cord gave way with a pull of his silver hand. The robe slipped apart and then fell. Narrow hips, long and well-formed legs of translucent flesh shone in the light; even the proud length of his sex had turned.
“Oh, Archer.” Her hand slid along the milky silver of his skin, down