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It looks like someone just pressed a kiss there.

Like I could press a kiss there, if I wanted to. Which I don’t, I don’t, I have no idea why the idea even comes into my head. There are so many, many reasons it shouldn’t have, starting with the fact that he stalked me across time. The man I am staring at right now once threw me down a mineshaft in the middle of a giant spider fight. And sure, he knew I could survive it. But that doesn’t make this any less fraught.

I’m betraying more former selves by even entertaining such a notion.

Hell, even if I can convince myself I’m not—what if this is more than a memory spell? What if there is something more there that has bound him to me, something made by someone else, and it suddenly dissolves? Will he be evil again? Without any idea of who he was, but still with some inherent thirst for blood?

I just don’t know.

All I really understand is that my head is swimming with it all, and my heart is constantly beating at the bars of my chest, and every decision I start to make seems like the wrong one. Like I’m being corralled down one very narrow and very particular path by forces I can’t quite see.

It’s maddening.

And it’s made even worse by something even more inexplicable that comes over me as we stand in my bedroom, staring at each other: guilt. All I can think about alongside the fear and the confusion is that he is likely not saying or doing any of this naturally. If it’s a spell, it’s against his will.

And no matter how much of my enemy he might be, I don’t like the idea of him being forced into whatever this is. If I respond in any way, if I keep liking the things I see and feeling something about his seeming affection, I’m taking advantage of that fact.

Even if I just stay standing here as he keeps leaning down, down, down. As his hand comes up and almost touches my hair. As he whispers all low and soft: “Sorceress.” Only sorceress isn’t all he says. There’s something else there, too, one little word before it that makes me shiver all over.

My, I think it was. My, my, my.

Sure as an arrow, streaking through the air.

I know it gets me right in the heart. I can tell, because I close my eyes. And it isn’t me that stops myself. It isn’t my ethics, my concerns, my sense of how terrifying this all is. It’s the sound of Phone suddenly blasting “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Before I lose my fucking mind.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Phone does not mince her words once we’re alone together.

The second I close us into the bathroom, she just launches right into it.

“Please tell me you were not going to kiss your immortal fucking enemy,” she goes with, in a voice I’ve never heard from her before. Usually she sounds a little automated, a little like a very weird Siri. But now she’s hissing like a scorched cat.

And I don’t even have a good defense for it.

“He was the one who leaned down.”

“Yeah, and you didn’t move away.”

“I was frozen in terror.”

“Like fuck you were. I saw your foggy eyeballs.”

“That’s just how my eyeballs go when I’m horrified.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. You were into it, admit it.”

I sigh, and sink down onto the closed lid of the toilet.

Head in my hands, so I don’t have to look at her glaring at me anymore from the sink. “Look, just give me a break, all right. I’m not used to a naked man being in my apartment. And it’s not even as if he’s naked in an avoidable way, either. He is an entire continent of nudity. Just a mass of endless bare skin,” I say from between my fingers. I know it’s never going to fly, however.

“That’s your excuse? His enormity?”

“No, my excuse is that he’s not the same man.”

“Or maybe you’ve always wanted him, deep down.”