He shook his head at her. ‘The burns. They’re thawing out, as it were. Everything hurts.’
The wind howled outside, and Noon found herself listening for the voices of the wolves. She doubted they would come back tonight – surely they had established themselves as the greater predator. Blinking, she realised that thought had not come from her.
‘Do you want to . . .?’ Her voice trailed off awkwardly, and when Tor looked up at her he, too, looked faintly embarrassed. She held up her arm, the sleeve now rolled up to her elbow.
‘Oh. That.’
‘We’ve a long way to go yet, and the weather is shit. I don’t want to be dragging that bloody sledge by myself.’
‘This should not be the case,’ said Tor. He turned his face away from her so that she could not see the scarred side, but not before she caught the look of hunger in his eyes. ‘To need blood just to walk through snow – it shames me. This’ – he gestured at his injuries – ‘has taken more from me than I thought.’
Guilt again, a sore contraction in her chest, but she pushed it away. ‘So you’d run the risk of getting stuck here for the sake of your pride?’
She expected him to get angry at that, but instead he nodded. ‘You are quite correct. You have a pragmatic streak, just like Vintage did. Does.’ He met her gaze now, and she thought she could almost sense the things he was hiding: fear, and a very stark need for what she was offering. ‘Once we get to Ebora, all this will be solved. It is merely temporary.’
‘That’s the spirit.’ She pulled a knife from her bag. ‘Shall we?’
Rising, he came and sat next to her, facing away from the fire. She held up the knife, but he touched her hand.
‘May I?’ Seeing her look, he smiled slightly. ‘I know where to cut so that it will bleed well, and cause you the least discomfort.’
For a long moment Noon didn’t move. She thought of all the stories she had grown up with, of the inhuman enemy over the mountains, the monsters that came to steal their children and drink their blood.
‘Do it,’ she said, passing him the knife. He pressed the blade to her skin, and the sting was less than it usually was. He pressed his mouth to the cut before she even saw the blood, and she gasped a little – his lips were warm on her chilled skin. His other arm, the one not holding her hand, circled her waist, drawing her slightly closer whilst barely touching her. And this was what she hadn’t told him, of course: that it was possible to become addicted to this closeness, the warmth of another body. She no longer felt cold at all. If anything, she felt feverish.
His tongue slid over the cut, and when he raised his head there was no blood on his lips at all.
‘You’ve done this before,’ she said, slightly shakily. He nodded, his eyes half closed. Already he looked brighter, his skin almost as luminous as it had once been. Without speaking, he held out her bare arm and touched his lips to the flesh of her forearm, tracing a path to her wrist. There he raked his teeth over the pale blue veins just under the skin, and Noon shivered, more violently than before.
‘What was that?’
‘The Early Path: Dawn’s Awakening. One of the first levels attained at the House of the Long Night.’
‘Will you do it again?’
His face split into a grin, and Noon saw several things happen one after another, like a stack of falling cards: genuine pleasure at her response, a flicker of that same hunger, and then, as his skin tightened on the burned side of his face, his smile faltered. She saw clearly, in the way he looked down and away, how he imagined she saw him – something ruined and broken.
‘No,’ she said, and she touched his face. ‘No. I want you to.’
In the firelight his eyes were a deep maroon, warm and uncertain. Without looking away from her, he pressed his mouth to her wrist again, kissing her skin and then biting, very softly. She had never seen him look so vulnerable, and it was that, more than anything, that made her shift forward and, as he raised his head, kiss him. He tasted of snow and apples and her blood, and then he moaned against her mouth, pulling her against him, his hands sliding up the back of her shirt.
Noon had not kissed anyone before. She quickly concluded that it was something she intended to do much more of.
‘Wait.’ Tor pulled away from her. He seemed to be searching her face for something. ‘I am not what I once was.’
Noon blinked, for a moment completely uncertain of everything. Had there been an injury she had missed?
As if guessing her thoughts, Tor shook his head. ‘I mean, I am – you can see what I am.’
‘I do, I see what you are.’ She took a slow breath. ‘I see who you are, I think.’
This time he kissed her with an urgency that took her breath away, and banished all thoughts of their bleak situation; of the location of their friend; of the potential invasion; the alien voice in her head. She was lost in a silky warmth she had never guessed at.
They fell together onto the floor, Noon’s hands seeming to search of their own accord for buttons, belts, fastenings. Tor tugged at her shirt and she yanked it off, revealing the tight undervest she wore against the cold. He murmured something in a language she didn’t recognise and kissed her softly just under the ear, weaving a trail of kisses down her neck to the rise of her breasts. With a hand pressed on either side of her chest, he trailed his thumbs down to her midriff.
‘What are you doing?’
‘The Early Path: Morning’s Music.’ He paused. ‘Can I take your trousers off?’
She kicked them off along with her boots and his hands smoothed the skin along her thighs and the backs of her calves, curling around the soft roundness of her heel. It tickled slightly, and she laughed.
‘The Morning Sun: A Bright Bird’s Song,’ he said, smiling.
‘Take more of your clothes off.’
He hesitated only for a moment. Soon they lay together on the blanket, with only Noon’s thin underclothes between them. She could feel every place that he had touched her with a special clarity, while at the centre of her was a deep rhythmic crashing, like the sea pounding the beach. Her hands were hungry devils, fascinated by the smooth, hard planes of his body, his luminous near-golden skin, like some exotic wood. Next to it, the tawny colour of her limbs was like silk.
‘If the wolves come back now, we really are fucked.’
He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘I refuse to rush.’ Sliding his hand down the back of her underclothes, he pulled her close again. ‘The Morning Sun: The Rushing of the Day.’ His voice, she noticed, was less than steady, and under her hands his heart was beating rapidly.
She moaned and pressed her body to his; the crashing inside her was growing faster.
‘The Afternoon’s Awakening: The Turning Shadow –’