of me thought I could manage it. No rules, no strings, meant that we could revel in the thing between us.
“So, no rules? Just no holding back. We . . . date.”
“And on the sixth of January, you have one favor,” he clarified.
I paused, rolling it over in my mind. Twelfth Night, the Masquerade Ball that started Carnival season, was on January sixth. That was roughly a month from now. Between now and then, however, were a lot of events. Chanukah began in ten days. Yule and Christmas were roughly ten days later, and then New Year’s Eve in six more days, and then the Twelfth Night Masquerade Ball six days later.
“Why are you offering so many details?” I asked. The last bargain he’d offered me was without much clarity.
“Because, Geneviève, I want you to understand the terms.” He steered us onto the bridge, taking us out of the city into the ghost zone.
Something about the ghost zone, what was once the suburbs of most cities, was eerie. It was simply a ghost town of sorts, one that existed beside most cities. If you were brave enough or foolish enough, you could scavenge there; those who left their homes there, did so without taking most of their possessions. But the risk of draugr encounters in the ghost zone was high.
After the ghost zone was the Outs. I grew up there. Nature. People with more guns than sense. That was where Jesse and I met, neighbors in the Outs. My mother, Mama Lauren, was still there. I thought briefly about Chanukah. I’d have to take Eli to meet my mother if I agreed to this.
“Date, as in I play nice at the Yule presentation and you are at my side for any event during those weeks,” I clarified.
“More or less. I want you to be yourself, but without thought or discussion of the future,” Eli added.
“But any event?” I pressed. “You mean you’d meet my mother?”
“I would like that.” His hand tightened on the steering wheel. “That, however, is not my primary goal. I just want . . . to be in the now with you.”
I glanced at him, enjoying the moonlight on his profile. There was something about those cheekbones that just made me want to touch. Something about Eli that I barely resisted. My voice felt too loud even though I was whispering when I said, “If I didn’t think about the future, we’d already have been naked, bonbon. . .”
He grinned at my use of one of his pet names for me and said, “All the more reason to date me.”
I sighed.
Eli glanced at me then. “Give me these days. Let me be in your life. We were so close to progress, and then this”—he gestured between us—“engagement stalled us. I want us to be as we were.”
My throat was parched with the wave of need he brought to the forefront of my every nerve, but I still had to add, “Whatever happens is not precedent-setting. When January sixth comes, we . . . reset.”
He chuckled. “Expected, and accepted.”
“Agreed, then,” I said shakily. “I agree to your terms, Eli. We will date.”
“I look forward to courting you,” he said in that damnably calm tone, which meant that he was hiding his emotions.
I knew for sure then that I was fucked somehow, but the deal was done. I was going to let Eli into my life.
I swallowed hard and tried to sound just as calm. “For tonight, let’s see what disaster awaits us at Beatrice’s door.”
~ 4 ~
A little later when we arrived in The Outs, the region that was once called Slidell, I had to concentrate not to send out a summons to the dead. I was on edge, and my magic was akin to a malformed pipe lately. Sometimes, I tried for a trickle and ended up with a flood. Sometimes, I tried for a stream and received a few droplets.
If I let my magic out tonight, I would wake the dead.
Or beckon the again-walking.
My affinity with death was an affront to some people—the faery king included—and I couldn’t entirely blame them. I had a pheromone that meant the not-living found me irresistible. Not in a weird lets-get-naked way . . . okay, sometimes that way, too. Mostly, though, that response was because I was powerful, and power gets many a motor revving.
“What do you feel?” Eli asked, his tiny little convertible was bouncing along a road that seemed to be cobblestone.