—because nothing could start over until whatever happened first had ended—

She felt it crawling up her spine in prickles, catching the breath in her lungs and biting her nipples into painful points.

—and nothing had ended yet.

She stared at Meoraq, caught and held in the terrible grip of a moment no larger than a pinpoint, a silence with three words like a billion voices screaming together: He’s still sick.

Impossible. Viruses didn’t live that long, did they? It hadn’t just been years, but hundreds of years, maybe a thousand, and the whole planet couldn’t still be sick!

But…

She thought of Meoraq and the way his eyes glazed over whenever those yellow stripes started showing up on his throat, that hot/dead stare he got, and how his hand had a way of drifting down to tug at his belt. She thought of that story he’d told the night she’d gotten bit, how his father had single-handedly slaughtered over a hundred well-armed men and then not answered the door for a day or two. How he’d just left…just left. And all the women and children that the bad guys had tied up to take away with them, he’d left them too, left them butchered behind him, and maybe it really had been the raiders who did it like Meoraq said, but maybe—

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Just…in general.”

“In my flesh, you mean?” He looked at the nearest withered corpse and rolled his eyes. “Well,” he said, enunciating in that testy way he had. “I feel very well.”

“Are you mad?”

He lost the irritated angle of his head almost at once, averting his eyes and scratching at the side of his snout. “I’m not angry, Soft-Skin. I only wish that you would understand that these ruins are meant as reminders of God’s wrath, not as shelter.”

“That isn’t what I meant. You don’t want to…I don’t know…shove me into a wall and have scary sex with me, do you?”

He leaned back and just looked at her for a moment, then twitched his spines cautiously forward. “Is that a request?”

“No, I just…” Her gaze strayed down to a dead man’s blood-stained dick, still half-sunk into that poor woman’s side. “Should we do something for them?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Let them lie.”

“How can this not bother you?”

He looked down at the mummies tangled around the console, then around at the cells. “Their punishment is well-earned and it is not for you or I to end it.”

“Can we at least go to another room?”

“This is the lowest level. Safest.”

“Yeah, and if God wants us, he’ll have us even if we’re ten miles underground. I believe you now. Please, Meoraq. I don’t want to stay here.”

He sighed, but led her back through the maze of corridors to the stairwell and up. He didn’t bother opening the doors on any other landing—marks in the dust indicated he had already done so once, so his unwillingness to do so now probably meant more bodies on the other side—and instead took her back up to the lobby on the ground floor. The storm was still roaring around them, but after the scene below ground, it was almost welcome.

“Define scary,” Meoraq said suddenly, watching her pace a small circle around the room.

“What?”

“As you seem to think it will frighten you to be leaned against the wall for sex, would you prefer to lie down?”

She stared at him and finally heard a short, humorless laugh puff out of her. “You don’t mean it.”

His spines flicked. “I find it curious that you always manage to sound so certain about the things I mean.”

“You can’t actually want sex after seeing all that.”

“They have been dead for ages,” he pointed out. “How long would you deem a respectful time of mourning for them?”

“Would it mean anything to you at all if I said I wasn’t in the mood?”

“It might. Would it be true?”

Her mouth opened and closed a few times. It seemed a straightforward enough answer. Baffled by her inability to give it some voice, Amber turned and paced away.

When she turned back, he was right behind her.

“You are an aggravating woman,” he told her, his hand slipping around to the small of her back. “You make me feel things there are no words for. You make me want to do things I do not know how to do. You also make me very angry. How fortunate that these are the times I most desire you.”

Cold fingers clenched in her stomach. She tried to back up out of his grip, but he flexed his hand once and brought her hard against him. Smiling. He was smiling. She tried to feel better about that…but the basement was full of bodies. She backed up again.

This time, he let her go, exposing his teeth in a playful grimace that suggested he was not much put off by the idea of chasing her down. For the moment, however, he just watched her retreat and pace around the room. “You want to be my woman. Do not pretend otherwise. I make you feel safe.”

She had no idea what she was going to say until her mouth opened and she heard it shiver out: “Nothing makes me feel safe anymore.”

“Lies.” He caught her by the belt and unfastened it. She didn’t stop him. “I am your shelter, and never more than when I do this.” He shucked her out of her breeches in two tugs, picked her up in the same movement, carried her two steps forward as he pulled her thighs around him, and shoved her hard into the wall. She gasped at the impact, but she bucked into him anyway. He nodded once, as if accepting an accolade. “Never more than when I do this,” he said again, loosening his loin-plate just enough to let his cock free. It pushed up between them, a brand against her belly for only a moment before he pulled it away and thrust it inside her.

Climax was immediate, unwanted, eruptive. Amber shook, digging her fingernails into his shoulders even as she tried to hide her face against his chest, but he wasn’t through making his point. He kept his hands kneading at her thighs, his hips scarcely moving at all, so that their joining was little more than the crush of his weight against her chest, the throb of his pulse in her womb.

“Look at me,” he commanded, scraping his scales lightly against her shoulder where his mark scarred her. “No, not so. Put your hands upon me. I am with you. Show me that you see me.”

Her hands rose, trembling, to cup his strange face between them. She looked at him and saw him looking back at her. Just Meoraq, who could be a scary son of a bitch when he wanted to be, but who, for the moment, just wanted to be with her. He was fine. Amber felt herself smile a little, relieved right to the edge of stupid, girly tears.

He showed his teeth, approximating a smile for her, pleased. “Are you frightened?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Not even here.” Thunder crashed; he did not flinch. “Not even now. You are for me, Soft-Skin, and I am with you. Let go to me, my wife. Let go.”

Amber dropped her brow to his shoulder, sobbed once, and did.

8

It was the last great storm of the season and even before he had pried the door open and seen the world for himself, Meoraq knew that winter had come. The previous day’s rain was still wet on the ground, but his breath misted in the air and when he looked beyond the ruins to the mountains, he saw a fine dusting of fresh snow on their tips.

“Oh wow.”

Amber crept out behind him, her soft hand catching at his. He squeezed absently, then released her and started walking, stepping over the remains of a metal tower, twisted together with a few trees and dropped here. Most of the ruins were gone, crushed into a single substance and spread over the streets like jelly over bread. Their shelter alone stood whole, although parts of several others protruded from the wreckage here and there. On the windward side of the remaining walls, debris sloped up like snowdrifts—omens of the weather to come.