After a moment, Ty drew Lily’s hair back over the mark, casting a quick glance out the window behind him. He sensed nothing, but he would take no chances, not until he knew what this meant. He knew the marks of the dynasties, and of the lowbloods that served them, and all of the variations that marked the wretched nightcrawlers who lurked at the edges of society, who hunted as they were hunted.
This was nothing like those.
“What have you gotten me into, Lily Quinn?” he asked softly, rising again. But her sleeping face gave no answers. As the first hints of lethargy began to steal through him, heralding daylight, he left her, becoming a cat as he wound around the corner of her door and stole on silent feet down the hallway. The woman had a basement full of hiding places, and he had no intention of going far.
Even in sleep, he would guard her.
Because he had a bad feeling that Lily, before all was said and done, was going to need all the protection he could give.
In dreams, Lily wandered in a ruined temple that was still blackened and charred from the fire she had seen so many times. She looked for someone, but she knew not who; she knew only that they were lost to her forever. The fire, and the people, were gone.
In sorrow and confusion, Lily looked in vain for what would never return. A man’s voice whispered on the breeze. Her name. She turned, feeling the simple word like a caress.
And the mark on her skin began to burn.
Chapter THREE
BY THE TIME her last class let out on Monday, Lily had to accept the truth: She was obsessing. And not just her usual, run-of-the-mill sort of obsessing either. She was a master at worrying over the most minuscule issues, but having an impromptu make-out session with a guy who’d managed to vanish into thin air didn’t feel all that minuscule.
“Okay, that’s it for today, everyone. Drop your papers on the desk on your way out, and start reading Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. I hear groaning. There is no groaning in Intro to English Lit.”
Not unless I’m the one doing it anyway, she thought, eyeing the growing pile of essays as the students filed past. Lily grabbed her cup of coffee off the podium she’d been lecturing at for the past hour and downed the last of it. Even with the aid of her superinsulated travel mug, it had gone pretty much stone cold, but she was hoping that eventually, when her caffeine levels hit critical mass, she could shake this weird, nagging feeling she was experiencing. Tynan MacGillivray was probably a serial killer. A really, really hot serial killer. With beautiful silver eyes, and a mouth that felt like—
“My God, you look like death warmed over. Please tell me you at least had an attractive reason for losing so much sleep.”
Lily jerked her head up, momentarily startled. While her imagination had gone wandering, the lecture hall had completely emptied.
And she hadn’t even noticed.
This has got to stop, she told herself, but managed a smile for the woman making her way down the aisle toward her. Bailey Harper looked a lot like a pixie who had recently tangled with a werewolf, which meant she’d come straight over from work. Bay’s wavy blond hair was desperately trying to escape the ponytail she’d wrestled it into, and the ancient jeans and T-shirt she wore were absolutely covered in a rainbow of dog hair. Lily’s eyes dropped to Bay’s sneakers, which looked as though they’d been recently chewed. Probably with her feet still in them, if Lily knew anything about Bay’s clientele.
“Does every dog you bathe maul you?” Lily asked, frowning as she realized that there were indeed fresh chew marks on Bay’s Nikes.
Bay narrowed her eyes as she came to a stop beside her. “Pretty much. And since you’re avoiding my question, I guess I can assume there isn’t an answer I’m going to like. Damn it, Lily, would you please get your ass to a sleep clinic before you just drop dead of exhaustion?”
Lily sighed and huffed an errant lock of hair out of her face. She had learned early on in their friendship that it was an exercise in futility to argue with Bay. The woman was very short, deceptively cute, and a human steamroller when she thought she was right about something, which was almost always. The only thing that kept Lily from wanting to clock her sometimes was that Bay’s heart was permanently affixed in the right place.
“I’m fine, Bay. It’s been a while since I hooked up with Prince Insomnia, so I guess he was due for a visit. He hasn’t changed—all tease, no action,” Lily said, deciding to go for humor in her latest attempt at defusing this ongoing argument.
“Ha.” Her friend’s look was bland at best. “Lily, I’m aware that I’m no fashionista, but those dark circles under your eyes aren’t doing it for you. Or me, for that matter. I worry. You’ve seemed a little out of it since Friday night. Are you sure you were okay when you left the ghost hunt? Did something freak you out and you’re just not telling me?”
Lily covered her discomfort with an amused snort. Bay was a lot closer to the truth than she liked, and she wasn’t interested in talking about it yet, if ever.
“You mean besides having to listen to that couple getting it on in the closet? No. I still think they say that place is haunted just as a gimmick to add local color or something. Speaking of local color, how’s the cute techno-geek?”
Bay pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “Another detour. We are not done talking about this, Lily Quinn. But since I have you to thank for it, cute techno-geek—otherwise known as Alex—is good. At least, I think he is. We couldn’t manage to hook up this weekend, but I’m heading to dinner with him in”—Bay glanced at her watch, and her eyes widened in horror—“Jesus, an hour.” She looked down at her dog-hair-covered clothes, then back up at Lily with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “First date is way too soon for him to discover the real me, don’t you think?”
“The real you is fabulous. I just hope he isn’t allergic to animal hair,” Lily replied. She leaned against the heavy metal desk that sat off to the side of the podium. Exhaustion, hovering like a phantom over her all weekend, seemed to be coming in for a landing. She’d been honest with Bay about one thing: It had been quite a while since her so-called insomnia had acted up. What Bay didn’t know, and what Lily had no intention of sharing, was that her bouts of sleeplessness were entirely self-inflicted and born out of self-defense. Even this bone-deep weariness was better than falling into the nightmare about the woman in the temple, over and over and over… the nightmare she had spoken about only once and never would again.
In any case, the end result was the same. She’d managed less than five hours of sleep the entire weekend, and that was usually about the point at which her body and brain came to a consensus that it was finally time to hit the sack. But Bay, true to form, didn’t seem inclined to just let this go.
Her friend’s brows drew together, creating a stubborn little furrow between them that Lily was all too familiar with.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Lily? I’m serious. You’re way too pale.”
Lily smiled with genuine affection. “You worry too much, Bay.”
“Someone has to. I’ll never understand how you managed so long without—” She stopped, snapping her mouth shut before the words came out.
But Lily knew exactly what they would have been. Without a family. Without anyone who cared enough to take care of you. Even unspoken, they stung. She had wanted a lot of things in her life that she hadn’t gotten, but pity had never been one of them.
“I can take care of myself. I’d think that would be more than apparent by now,” Lily said, her voice clipped. She didn’t want to fight with Bay, didn’t want to drive her off with a bunch of defensive BS either. But she wasn’t in the mood to have a discussion about her family or lack thereof. Not now. Preferably not ever. She looked away, beginning to gather up her things with stiff little movements.
Bay’s hand on her shoulder, the touch gentle and apologetic, made her pause. Still, she kept her gaze averted. She didn’t want her friend to see the unshed tears that suddenly filled her eyes. God, I must be exhausted, Lily thought. It wasn’t like her to let a simple mention of her crappy parental situation get to her.
But then, it was always when she was most tired that she had also felt the most alone.
“I’m sorry, Lily. I know you can take care of yourself. But it doesn’t make me a bad person for wishing you hadn’t had to for so long, does it?”
Lily sighed, her shoulders sagging. “No. I just hate being thought of as the poor little orphan no one wanted. It’s pathetic.”
“No. What’s pathetic is adopting a kid and then dropping her the second Plastic Bimbo’s baby factory starts working. What’s pathetic is caring more about your image than your child.”
Lily heard the icy fury in Bay’s voice, and loved her for it. But it was time to end this conversation. She didn’t want to expend any more energy thinking about the family that had cast her out—or the reason why they did it.
She blinked away the aggravating moisture in her eyes, straightened, and turned to look at her friend. “They don’t matter, Bay. They haven’t for a long time. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate your burning need to kick their asses on my behalf. I’m just really tired, which means that Prince Insomnia has finally left the building. I’ll be fine with some sleep.”
Bay let her hand drop and stepped back, but that stubborn furrow in her brow remained. “You’re sure?” Her big blue eyes were soft with concern. “We’re good?”
“We’re good. Promise. You go have fun, okay? Call me tomorrow with the gory details.”
Bay lifted her eyebrows. “How gory? Like, sexy-time gory?”
Lily wrinkled her nose. “No, like if he lives with his mom and collects action figures gory.”
They laughed together.
“You got it,” Bay said, then threw her arms around Lily in one of the impromptu hugs it had taken her a while to get used to but were as natural to Bay as breathing. She envied her friend that, her comfort with physical affection. It had been in such short supply for most of Lily’s life that it still startled her more than anything.
