Succubus Dreams Page 0,84

love you too - so, so much. But we can't do this. I'm telling you, you just need to have sex. Go out and find someone - anyone. It doesn't matter. I don't care. It'll fix all this and make it easier for us to go on."

"You would care," he said, voice deadly calm. "You say you wouldn't, but you would."

"Not if it protects you."

"Protecting me doesn't matter."

"Damn it, it does!" I yelled, lunging forward. I drove my fists - lightly - into his chest, and all the emotion that had been building up throughout this argument suddenly burst out. "Don't you get it? I have to protect you! If anything happens to you - if I'm responsible for anything happening to you - it will kill me. It. Will. Kill. Me. I can't handle that. I can't handle anything happening to you. It will kill me!"

I stopped my yelling and met Seth's eyes. Neither of us said anything. And as he stared down at me, I knew what he was thinking. Because I was thinking exactly the same thing. I had just given voice to what Hugh had said, what Seth had been worried about. In my outburst, I'd changed the balance of risk. It wasn't about Seth hurting. It was about me hurting.

Gently, he reached out and caught my wrists. He removed them from his chest and let go. Backing up, still not speaking, he picked up his clothes and began dressing. I stayed where I was, naked and frozen.

"Seth..." I said slowly. "I didn't mean it."

"It's okay, Thetis," he said, fastening his pants and not meeting my eyes. "I understand. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I pushed you."

"No, no...it's not..."

"It's okay," he repeated. His voice was so, so neutral. So, so steady. It wasn't natural. "Really. But I think I need to go. I think it's better for both of us, and God only knows you have enough going on without me to worry about."

I felt tears starting to fill my eyes. "I didn't mean..."

"I know what you meant," he said. He straightened his shirt and finally looked at me. "But seriously...I should leave. We'll talk...I don't know. We'll talk later." He held out his hand, like he might touch my cheek, and then let it drop. With another sigh, he said good-bye and left.

I stood exactly where I was, still not moving. My heart felt like it had just had acid thrown on it. It was burning and raw. Finally, finally, it all caught up with me. My knees gave out, and I sank to the floor. It was cold and hard against my bare skin. I drew my knees up to me and buried my face in them, wondering what I had done. Part of me screamed to go follow him, to beg him to come back, to tell him we could make love and have everything we had ever wanted. Another part, half-reason and half-pride, held me back.

It was that same part that had stopped me from going after Andrew that day back in the garden after we'd fought about the Black Death. I'd let him go and gone out of my way to avoid him after that. When the plague finally came to our town, my bishop was one of the first to leave. I went with him and the rest of our household. Just like in The Masque of the Red Death, there was no true place to hide from sickness. Still, some places were better than others, and my bishop took care to keep to the better places. He survived.

Months went by, and stories and rumors trickled in about the town we'd lived in. By that point, I'd grown weary of Geoffrey and decided it was time for me to move on. I got permission from my archdemon for a transfer to Florence and sneaked out of Geoffrey's house one night to make the long journey. Our old town was along the way, and a week later, I passed through it.

A plague town wasn't quite like what modern people might imagine. It wasn't as though there were piles of bodies lying in the streets or anything. Not always. After all, Europe had survived the Black Death in the end, and civilization had still functioned through the worst of it. Crops were still grown, houses still built, babies still born.

But the town seemed quieter and more melancholy than when I'd lived there. Andrew wasn't at the church when I stopped by, and an