“What we need,” she said, her eyes nonetheless drawn to the bottle, “is food. And water. Clean water, fresh food.”
Sinclair scoffed. “Spoken like a true Nightingale. And we shall have those things. But you know, as well as I do, that right now you need something more.”
In her heart, she knew he was right…or at least that he had been right. But wasn’t it possible that this curse had been lifted? Wasn’t it possible that, in addition to whatever strange miracle had released them from their bondage, another one had been performed, too? That this dreadful sustenance, sitting before her, was no longer necessary?
“We don’t know where we are,” Sinclair said, softly. “And we don’t know what awaits us out there.” He was speaking in his most reasonable voice, but Eleanor had become used to such sharp changes. Even in his letters home, she had detected them.
“I believe we must take our opportunities when and where we find them,” he said, pointedly glancing down at the bottle.
Eleanor had to shift her position on the floor, so as to warm and dry a different section of her dress. She worried about how long they would be able to stay there without being discovered. “Couldn’t we just take it with us, wherever we have to go?”
“Yes,” he replied, his temper, she could tell, mounting. “But it was taken away from us once, was it not? It could be taken away again.”
He was right, of course…and she recognized as much. But still her spirit rebelled.
Either to prove his point, or because he craved another draught, Sinclair grabbed the bottle and drank again. This time, he was able to manage several swallows before slamming the bottle back to the floor and letting a dark rivulet run from the corner of his mouth.
She found herself transfixed by the deep crimson line touching his chin. He had done that, she knew, deliberately. Her throat, parched already, felt as rough as a dusty road, and she could feel the muscles in her neck straining. Her palms, which she had just gotten dry, were damp again with perspiration, and so, she feared, was her brow. Her temples began to throb, like a distant drumbeat.
“The least you can do,” he said, “after all this time, is to kiss me.”
His blond hair, though wild and twisted on his head, gleamed with a fiery light in the glow of the strange heater. The collar of his white shirt lay open at the neck, and a drop from the bottle had landed there, too. God help her, but she wanted to lick the spot away. Her tongue involuntarily pressed at the back of her teeth.
“As your friend Moira might have said,” he pressed, “will you not do it for auld lang syne?”
“I will not do it for that,” Eleanor finally answered. “But I will do it…for love.”
She leaned forward, as did Sinclair, and with the bottle between them, their lips met—at first chastely, but then, when his parted, she could taste it, the blood, in his mouth.
He put his hand to the back of her head, wound his fingers through her long, tangled hair, and held her there. And she let him—let him hold her, let him ensnare her. She knew that was what he was doing. She let him unite them again as they had been united so long before. She let him do all of it, because it had been so long since she had felt something like this…so long, truly, since she had felt anything at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
December 13, 6 p.m.
ON THE TRIP BACK, Michael begged, and Danzig agreed, to let him drive the dogsled. After a few rudimentary pointers, Danzig clambered into the cargo shell—it was even a tighter squeeze than it had been for Michael—and said, “Ready?”
“Ready,” Michael replied, adjusting his goggles and pulling his furred hood tighter around his face. Then, gripping the handlebars and making sure his feet were planted on snow and not ice, he shouted the order—“Hike!”—that Danzig always used. The dogs, perhaps unaccustomed to his voice, at first didn’t move; Kodiak actually turned around and looked at him questioningly.
“You’ve got to do it with some authority,” Danzig said. “Like you mean it.”
Michael cleared his throat—now he felt like he was auditioning for the dogs—and shouted, “Hike!” while giving a sharp jerk on the mainline.
Kodiak, in the lead position, whipped around and jumped forward; the other dogs, taking their cue, started to pull, as Michael ran behind, pushing the handlebars.
“Jump on!” Danzig warned him, and just as Michael got his boots onto the wooden runners, the sled gathered momentum and took off across the snow and ice. Danzig had taken the trouble to point it in the right direction, so Michael didn’t have to worry about making a turn, but the task was already harder than he had imagined. As smooth as the surface might look, it was filled with bumps and cracks and stones, and he could feel the shock of each one radiating up his legs. It was all he could do to keep his balance and stay on the runners.