Page 23 of Into Ember

“All five of us,” he says instead. Quiet.

“All five,” Leif says. He looks back at the fire. “The Vestry isn’t going to like that.”

I take a breath as they all nod.

No one wants to hear it, but it’s the truth.

Nobody asks what we do about it. There’s nothing to discuss.

Upstairs, a woman is asleep over the kitchen with her fist still curled where my shirt used to be, her breath riding slow and even through the floorboards, and on the windowsill Gerald’s leaves have turned, all of them, toward the ceiling above the stairs, and the five of us sit with the fire burning down and listen to her sleep — which is a thing I did alone for three years, through a wall, in the dark, and will apparently never do alone again.

If they want her, they’re going to have to go through all five of us first.

Chapter 8

Elara

I wake up warm.

Not regular warm. Luxury warm. The kind with weight to it, and I am not opening my eyes, because I have slept — actually slept, the deep kind, the kind I assumed got discontinued sometime in my twenties — and whatever is generating this heat can keep doing it forever.

My pillow is hard.

Not bad hard. Structural. It rises and falls, slow, and under my cheek there’s the steady knock of a heartbeat, and under my palm — my hand is flat on warm skin, skin over muscle that does not give, and when the pillow breathes, the muscle moves.

Interesting. Not my problem. Dreams have their own physics and I don’t make the rules there. In dreams, men are allowed to be built like load-bearing walls, and I am allowed to appreciate the architecture. Those are the rules. I don’t make them.

So I appreciate. My thumb moves a little. Purely structural interest.

Behind me there’s a second body — a wall of one, heat soaking through my shirt from shoulder to hip, breath moving slow in my hair, and a hand settles on my waist like it has always lived there. Heavy. The fingers alone cover half my stomach.

Dream. Obviously. Case closed. Goodnight.

The hand moves. One slow stroke along my side, thumb tracing the bottom of my ribs, and every place it passes reports in, and a voice behind me — low, rough with sleep, directly into my hair —

“Starlight.”

Every system I have comes online at once.

Starlight.

Nobody calls me Starlight. Nobody has ever called me Starlight except — except a man who doesn’t exist, a man I built out of a paperback and cheap wine, a man with silver eyes and thorough hands in a dream I have been aggressively not thinking about, and that man is fictional, and fictional men do not have morning voices, and morning voices do not happen INTO YOUR ACTUAL HAIR—

My eyes snap open.

Facts. I need facts. Fact one. That is a chest. I am on a chest. Fact two. There is an arm across my waist and it is not attached to the chest, which means — I follow it backward, over my own hip, up a forearm absolutely covered in ink, to a shoulder, to a jaw, to —

Rayner. Asleep. Barely. Eyelashes doing a slow confused flutter, hair wrecked, looking like something a museum would guard.

Fact three, late and screaming — the chest is Leif.

I am in a bed. Between them. My hand is — I look at it — my hand is INSIDE Leif’s shirt, flat against his sternum, like it moved there in the night and signed a lease.

The thumb. I moved my thumb. That happened. I was there for it.

I detonate.

The blanket comes with me. Then it changes sides. My foot finds the edge of the mattress, the edge of the mattress declines to be involved, and I go off the end of the bed and come up on the floor with the blanket half-caped around me like a disgraced superhero, pointing.