Page 210 of Hunters and Prey

I wrinkled my nose.

“I need a shower,” I told him, grimacing.

His eyes flickered to mine. I saw the helpless look reflected there, the glimmer of panic and frustration, right before his face felt back into that seer’s mask of his, the infiltrator stoicism I was slowly learning to recognize.

He didn’t say anything about the burn.

After I took a shower, and wrapped myself in a robe, medical techs were in the living room. This had become almost a ritual now.

I no longer went to them. They came to me… unless there was a particular machine they needed to put me into, one that Black couldn’t simply order them to drag to our apartment.

I watched them re-bandage the bite mark on my arm, and the cut on my foot, both of which were still only halfway healed. I’d lost both bandages when I left, as well as the one from my shoulder, where I’d had some kind of penetration wound from a different time I’d vanished, the second or third time after the one where I got bit.

The med techs worked silently, with Luric, the East Indian-looking seer with the shocking purple eyes, acting as their lead.

They no longer asked me the same questions over and over.

They took multiple readings of my light, bandaged up the damage, and Luric told me to come in for a CAT-scan the next day.

He only cracked the barest hint of a smile, once, when he congratulated me for coming back without any kind of dangerous head trauma this time… or at least no new instances of it.

After they all left, I watched my husband try to act calm, to not act like how his light felt, which was in a state of amped up anxiety I couldn’t help but feel.

He offered to bring us up breakfast, even though it was still dark out.

In the end we went down to the terrace where they were building a new restaurant for him, now that the old tenants had fully vacated the floor––or, more accurately, now that Black and his lawyers had kicked the old tenants out, so that he could redesign the set of suites the way he wanted them.

His people brought us waffles and orange juice and coffee, and Black and I sat up there, watching the sunrise together.

I didn’t fall asleep.

“YOU HEARD LURIC,” I said, weirdly amused when I saw Black holding up the Velcro straps, advancing towards our bed. “That’s not going to work, Black. They’ll just fall off me, the second I disappear.”

“The straps aren’t the point,” Black said, his voice gruff.

Hearing the worry in his voice, the bare edge of stubborn refusal to hear my skepticism, I studied his gold eyes, gauging his face with more than a small worry of my own.

“Hey,” I said, softer. “Black. It’s going to be okay.”

He gave me a humorless smile, clicking at me.

His face remained hard though, not just humorless, but verging on warlike. I could feel how some part of his light had gone from concerned husband to I will fix this or die trying guy. I loved him for it, but the more I looked at him, the more I worried he might have a stroke if the two of us didn’t find a way to cope with the stress of my new “condition.”

“Let’s try it,” he urged. “One night. Maybe two.”

Looking at the straps, I sighed.

Fighting back my deepening skepticism, I only said, “If the straps aren’t the point, then what is the point, Black?”

“Me,” he said, his voice back to that gruffer, more warlike note. “I’m the point, doc. I want to be the thing wrapped around you, Miri. The straps are just to keep me against you all night… so one of us doesn’t roll over in our sleep to the opposite side of the bed. So our bodies don’t separate once we’re both unconscious.”

Looking at him thoughtfully, I nodded.

He was right. It was worth a try.

“It’s one more thing to eliminate anyway, right?” he said.

I nodded again, moving over on the bed to give him more room.

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