“Almost—?” he asked.
She looked up at him, and smiled. “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible just takes a little longer.”
He smiled too; his smile faded. “This meeting has to happen, Kitaro. It could be vital to us all.”
“I understand,” she said.
Wishing that was true, he walked on in silence.
“Good night, Kitaro,” he said at last, as they reached his townhouse door. He hesitated uncomfortably, wondering whether she expected to be invited inside. The sky was dark beyond the alley’s end; he hadn’t realized it was so late.
But she only pressed her fist to her chest in a salute, with a fleeting smile. “Have a good night yourself, Justice,” she said, and started back down the quiet alley.
He watched her out of sight, before he stepped forward into the shadows and set his fingers to the identification key on his front door. The door opened silently, letting him into the sanctuary of his home. It closed again, as silently, behind him. He pulled open the seal on his uniform jacket, sighing.
“BZ—?” She stepped out of the glow of a lamplit side room, into the darkened hall. He saw her limned with light, her hair silver, her face half in shadow, half visible.
“Moon.” He felt the tightness that was half anticipation and half fear of disappointment release inside his chest. He started toward her. “I’m sorry I was late … the meeting ran over—”
“There was a successful Hunt,” she said, still standing motionless.
He stopped moving, because she made no move toward him. “Yes,” he said, his throat closing on the word. “They must have changed the scheduling code, I—”
She turned away from him, shutting her eyes, pressing her forehead against the doorjamb, murmuring something that he could not hear. “… offworlder butchers—!” She raised her head again, glaring at him.
“Damn it all!” he said, the explosion of anger inside him not directed at her—directed at nothing, everything, himself; because he was the Chief Justice, and he was as helpless, as powerless to stop what was happening as she was … and she was the Queen. “It’s impossible—it’s insane!”
She reached out to him, this time crossing the space between them, and he saw the anguish and the helpless desire in her eyes as she opened her arms.
He took her into his own arms, holding her close, feeling the rough homespun and wool of her clothing, the yielding warmth of her body, the softness of her skin. He kissed her hungry, demanding mouth, letting all the raging energy inside him transform into need. He had never imagined that he could feel anything with such intensity—that such feeling existed. He let his desire burn, purifying him of duty, guilt, memory, until the entirety of spacetime telescoped down to this moment, this fragile refuge, this hiding place from destiny. “Oh, gods,” he whispered, “I want you right now—”
Her body gave him his answer, with her warm soft mouth silencing his own as she urged him wordlessly toward the stairs that led up to his bedroom.
TIAMAT: South Coast
“Look at them all!” Ariele raised her hands, shielding her eyes against the mirroring glare of the wet sand. The beach ran for nearly a mile along the coast, between two points where the foothills waded out into the sea. It was a rare, perfect strip of fine sand, as soft beneath her bare feet as velvet cloth. And it was covered with a shifting mass of mers—not a single colony, but several at once, sharing the same territory, the same resting place on a sudden, incomprehensible journey. “What are they doing here like this? Where are they going?”
Silky rested beside her on the beach, the merling’s body pressing against her leg just enough to make pleasant contact without making her stumble. They had tracked the colony by the tracer the merling wore like an earring, which Jerusha and Miroe had given her when she was tiny; she had led them to this unexpected rendezvous on the beach. Silky had greeted them eagerly, obviously delighted to see them. She seemed content, now, in their company; but something indefinable about the way she held herself told Ariele that she was not.
“They’re heading north,” Reede said, pushing back the hood of his parka. “All of them. I don’t know why, but they are.” He wore a parka while she wore only a thin shin and pants, and had rolled up her sleeves and pantslegs; he dressed as if it were the middle of Winter whenever he left the city, no matter how hot the day was. He looked at the merling beside her; smiled almost involuntarily as he began a series of questioning clicks and trills.
Silky cocked her head, and then suddenly lunged forward, butting him in the stomach. He sat down with a grunt of surprise in the sand. He began to laugh; climbed to his feet again, rubbing his bruised pride. “Damn. I guess that wasn’t the question.”
Ariele looked at him in mild amazement. She had never heard him laugh like that, easily and freely; it struck her how rarely she heard him laugh at all. “Your pitch was off,” she said. He shrugged, extending his hand to her in invitation.
She repeated the run of sounds, watching Silky warily. The mer moved her head in a rhythmic series of nods, and answered with a run of tonal mer speech. Ariele frowned, repeating the sounds in her mind, breaking them down into comprehensible fragments. “ ‘A presence’ …” she translated slowly, “ ‘and a need’…”
“ ‘It’s there,’ ” Reede murmured. He laughed again, suddenly. “ ‘Because it’s there’—?”
She grinned and punched him in the shoulder. “You—” She broke off as Silky interrupted her with another, unexpected run of trilling. “That was mersong,” she said, looking back at Reede; seeing the recognition in his eyes. “Do you think it’s about that … that there’s some kind of gathering, where they share songs—?”
“Yeah,” he said, crouching down, face to face with the mer. “That may be it … it feels right to me.” Silky nuzzled him with her lips in a brief apology, and he buried his face in the warm, dense fur of her neck. She allowed him the intimacy, snuffling his hair in unspoken affection.
Ariele smiled, knowing that she would have been jealous, except that she knew, herself, how helpless she was to resist Reede Kullervo. He sat back in the sand, locking his arms around his knees, watching the mers in motion on the sand, his face rapt. She wished again that he would come with her into the sea, dive with them, swim with them. The sea was their world, and never to be with them there was to miss the true, profound beauty of their existence. But he always refused her, brusquely, without explanation. She supposed it was his ordeal trapped among the rocks that made him so afraid.
“How far do you think they’re going? Is this the gathering place?” She looked away along the beach again.
He shook his head. “They’re going to Carbuncle.”
“Carbuncle?” she repeated, looking down at him. “Why?”
His face clouded over. “I don’t know.” He picked up a handful of sand, let it slip through his fingers. “I don’t know.…”
“Lady’s Tits, Reede!” she said, exasperated. She brushed irritably at the springflies buzzing around her ear. “How do you know those things? Why do you know them? You pick them out of the air like a radio, and then you’re right! I can’t stand you—”
“Liar,” he said. The man who loved the mers, who seemed completely real only outside the city, surprised her with a sudden grin. His arms reached out, catching her by the knees to pull her down, laughing, into the sand beside him. “You can’t live without me, you told me so.”