Not only on time, but actually early! I feel quite proud. Many, many thanks to you most lovely and awesome of people who reviewed last time round - thank you to Bex Drake, Anterrabae, CalliopeMused (hope the exams went well!), yukatalamia, girltype, Queen of Slayers, Lethe, and the splendiferous Shelli.

I adore hearing your thoughts - criticism much welcome: in the words of Ani di Franco, I'm a work in progress. Any comments, questions, crits very much enjoyed! The lyrics belong to The Cure with Something More Than This.

Hope you enjoy!
- Ki

Ripples Part Thirteen

Make believe in magic, make believe in dreams
Make believe impossible; nothing as it seems
To see, touch, taste, smell, hear
But never know if it's real

Phi got out of bed the next day with something to look forward to.

Her mind was out by the lake, beside the boy with fire in his eyes.

She smiled at herself in the mirror, feeling ridiculously light and happy and full of hope.

X - X - X - X - X

Don Ivan was woken by pain. It sheared right through his body, fingers to feet, and he could do nothing but curl up around it, snarling into his pillow. Ragged breath in, even that small motion hurt.

It felt like cramp, like every muscle in his body had seized up in spiteful unity. His fingers were hooked into claws, his calves locked into rigid bars. Maybe it was a heart attack. Meningitis. Maybe-

And then, between stabs of pain, he knew.

Three days, the hag had said. The drug had worn off, and he'd forgotten to go back.

If it was a drug, maybe he could wait it out. Part of him tried not to remember her saying I'd recommend you come here before the cramps start, or you may not make it back.

Shuddering, sweat beading on his shoulders and neck, he waited for the pain to stop.

X - X - X - X - X

When she saw her mother, Phi felt her heart sink. Adrift in the bed, she was thin and grey and small against the deliberately bright hues of the bedroom. Her wedding ring seemed to weigh down her bony fingers, its winking gold all the colour Marie Thetis had left.

"Your breakfast is getting cold," pointed out Phi.

Her mother gave her a faint smile. "I'm not that hungry. You look very pretty today, sweetheart."

"Do I?" She accepted the change of subject. Easier, that, than the alternative. "Must have inherited it from you."

For some reason, that wiped the smile clean off her face. "You've grown up so much in the last couple of years. You'll be an adult soon."

"Not that soon! I'm only sixteen, Mum." She didn't understand the sadness in her mother's eyes. "Too young to do…anything."

Even that subtle hint was too much. Her face hardened. "Like get married?"

"Exactly like that," she said, nervous.

"Do you think we did this to make your life difficult?" her mother demanded. "I've seen it, Phi. I didn't just do it for the good of the pod – if I hadn't supported the blood-oath-"

"You supported it?" It was the most tremendous betrayal she could imagine. "How could you? After last time?"

She knew the words were unwise the instant they passed her lips. Her mother's face was terrible, her eyes blazing with a cold light that seemed the only life in her withered body.

"Do not question my motives. Everything I have done – everything – has been for the good of the pod, and for your own happiness. Do you think I would do anything to hurt you? I gave birth to you. I have spent my life working to give you the best of all futures – and believe me, Delphine, I know exactly which future that is."

"Really?" she challenged, reckless. Having gone so far already, she had nothing to lose. "I thought you couldn't see everything."

For the first time in weeks, a flush streaked her mother's cheeks like warpaint. "Do I need to see every minute of your life? This will take you to happiness. If you marry Don, the pod will have another Golden Age. You'll have children who adore you – two of them, you'll end the feud between the wolves and us, you'll be everything I could possibly have hoped for." Her voice cracked. "Can you blame me for wanting that?"

"But it isn't what I want. I won't be happy with him. I don't even like him."

"You won't be the first to marry someone you didn't like." The hardness of her words was barely softened by her soothing tone. "But time will cure that. You will come to love him, Phi. Ask Jess. She didn't want your godfather either, but that changed."

"So have the times. I don't want to love someone because I've got no other option. That's…that's awful." Phi searched for the right words, the ones that would make her mother see. "How can you say that to me? You didn't marry Laurie. Are you telling me that you'd have given up all of this if you had the choice? Dad, me, all of it?"

Her mother didn't flinch; all her gentleness vanished. "If I had known, I would have learned to love Laurie and forgotten your father."

"How can you say that?" she whispered, reeling.

"Don't look at me like that. You'd say the same if you had gone to the lake that morning, if you had seen…"

"I might think it," she said, lost. She hardly knew the hard-eyed woman in the bed. "But I don't think I would have said it. Not even to the daughter you clearly regret so much."

She couldn't stay any longer. If her mother called after her, she didn't hear it.

X - X - X - X - X

The pain was getting worse. His vision was blurred and greying, and breathing was difficult around the knots in his chest. He slipped into brief, hallucinogenic dreams. Cartoon creatures, shapeless things with great triangular teeth and multitudes of eyes chased him through the woods. He twisted and turned, body bent into strained shapes.

Rough shaking rousted him from the nightmares. "Don. Son! What's wrong?"

It was his father. He'd be so angry when he found out. "Avy. Took…took something from her."

A great stillness existed between them, and then Laurence Ivan said huskily, "What?"

"Drink. Dragon horn. Made me…strong." His whole body jolted into convulsions. He couldn't stop – he was pain and rattling bones and fear, he was dying surely…hands clutching him, a litany of his name in a panicked voice…

It stopped. Desperate, he searched for the blur of his father and found it. "Need more. Need to go back. Take me, please."

There was no answer. He knew it was a difficult request – to ask his father to return to the cave that haunted him so, but he was his son, he had to help, he had to…

"Please!"

Still no answer. Then he felt hands sliding under him, gentle as when he'd been a child and demanded to be slung on his father's shoulders, and Laurence Ivan lifted him as if he weighed nothing. There was no sound except his breath, quick and jagged and frightened as Don's own.

Safe, trusting his father, he slid back into the voracious grasp of nightmare and pain.

X - X - X - X - X

After that, Phi needed comfort. The kind of comfort you could only get from people who understood the sheer maddening ways of parents and the constricting traditions of the Nightworld.

Most kids grew out of treehouses at a young age. Her friends had been no different. Unfortunately, they'd grown out of treehouses and into trees.

The old oak was out on the very edges of the wood, and so vast and obviously unnatural that only a witch could have grown it. Its sprawling branches were perfect for five or six people to sit on, and so she found her friends. Finn was nervous as ever and clinging to his branch for dear life; Jo and Riose were quite comfortable and Celia reclined in pride of place at the junction of all the myriad boughs.

Their chorus of greetings startled a sparrow into flight. She waved up at them, and their grins were a welcome antidote.

She scrambled up next to Finn, who gave her a sleepy grin. "What time do you call this?"

"Sorry. I had an argument with Mom," she said glumly.

"About the wedding?" Celia said, her face understanding.

"Of course. She won't back down. You know what? She even supported the Ivans when they suggested blood-oath."

Indignant exclamations filled the air.

"Yeah," she said. "She'd seen it. My perfect future shacked up with Don. Two kids, apparently."

"Oh, hell no!" Finn yelped. "That means you'd have to sleep with him at least twice! Where's the life where you and I are living in sin and raising a brood of ginger arsonists?"

His silliness made her laugh. "I don't think Mom would consider that a perfect future."

"And she's quite right," Jo declared, "any future which involves bringing more ginger children into the world is clearly a vision of anarchy."

"Hey!" Finn objected, stroking his hair protectively. He gestured at Phi. "You're closest. Push her out of the tree. Show her the wrath of a ginger warrior."

"So she won't back down?" Riose said quietly, ignoring the banter. Phi knew his question was motivated by more than friendship.

"Of course not," she sighed. "You know my mother. It took a year before she'd let any of you in the house." She glanced at Finn. "And she's still not sure about you."

"For the last time, I didn't mean to set the curtains alight," he said patiently. "It just happened. It's hard being a growing boy, you know. Normal people get mood swings. I got spontaneous combustion."

"Speaking of firebugs…" Jo said, far too casually, "have you seen yours lately?"

Suddenly four pair of very interested eyes were on her, and she couldn't stop the smile on her face. "Yes."

"Ooh, you look like the cat that got the cream," Celia remarked.

Jo's eyes glittered. "Something tasty, at any rate."

She couldn't fault their almost psychic ability to know when something was going on. "I was, um, at the lake last night."

"And what, um, happened that put the smile on your face?" Jo said slyly.

A blush scorched her cheeks. "I met him."

Finn was scowling. That was nothing new. "Your stalker?"

"My soulmate," she corrected.

There was a small shocked silence, then a barrage of questions assaulted her.

"Darling, so he is, then! Did you get up to no good?"

"What was it like?"

"Did you find out what he is?"

"You understand that doesn't make it any less creepy, right?"

She ignored the last question, which was of course Finn. "Ri, he's an elemental. Fireblade made him. And would I tell you if I had, Jo?" To Celia, who looked eager for every detail she said, "It was…amazing. I don't really know how to describe it. It was…scary and huge and fantastic all at once."

"Scary?" echoed her human friend, frowning.

"Yeah. Every time I touch him, it's there, this pull, and I could get so close to him that we wouldn't be two people anymore, you know? We'd just be one. There'd be no difference between my thoughts and his, nothing he wouldn't know, no privacy or mystery or anything but each other every minute of every day."

Jo grimaced. "Not my cup of tea."

"Mine either," she confessed. "He's my soulmate, but he's still a stranger. I don't want him to be a stranger."

"Pity," muttered Finn, loud enough for them all to hear. She gave him a pinch, and he glared back.

"Then what do you want?" Riose said, his eyes piercing.

She struggled for clarity. "I want to get to know him. I want to know if I like him enough for it to be more than…than…than some guy I happen to share this random connection with. If he's going to know all my secrets, I need to know he's the sort of person I can trust with them."

He nodded. "Sounds like a good idea. You said Fireblade made him?"

"He said…" His words came back to her. "He was a gift for a woman. A slave."

Finn's eyes were very blue, and a little peevish. "Could be a sob story."

"It's easy to check," Riose said thoughtfully. "Someone, somewhere will know."

She had a feeling she knew who the someone might be. From her disturbed expression, Celia did too. But…but part of her demanded confirmation – was afraid that it would be a lie or a trick. Most of all, she feared that Don was somehow involved. It wouldn't be the first time.

"Do your parents know?" For all her languid poise, there was nothing idle in Jo's question.

"No," she said simply. The rest she kept to herself, but couldn't help wondering: would it change things? But it always came back to her mother's words, back to if I had known, I would have learned to love Laurie and forgotten your father.

They didn't ask, but she knew that eventually she would tell them everything. For now, it was too raw, too astounding for her, but when it became real, she would need them all more than ever. They were her family, after all, just as much as her father and her mother, who regretted her.

X - X - X - X - X

World seesawing, distorted, the sky lurching. Roaring lions, biting him; jaws on his arms, his legs, everywhere. He was being eaten alive, but he was still screaming and shouting, or was that only in his head?

Darkness above and below, all bumping, sounds of monsters in the dark – wheezing, wailing, thundering things…

Cold liquid that spread through his body and then sweet, sudden relief.

X - X - X - X - X

Don came to in her throne room, refreshed as if he had slept for a hundred years and woken hungry for the world. He felt invincible again, rented power coursing through his veins, but now he knew it for a lie.

Hands helped him up. His father was wan, eyes dark and distressed. "I warned you," he said heavily.

"I know," he replied. "I thought-"

"You were wrong."

Recovered? Avy's voice was sugary-sweet. Perhaps you will listen to me now, Poseidon. Be glad your father is a wiser man.

Laurence Ivan wouldn't look at her. "Not wise enough to protect my son."

Still bitter, then. Did I not help you, Laurence? Did I not lay the pod at your feet?

"It wasn't the pod I wanted."

That was not what you said when you came to me. But then, you thought you already had Marie, didn't you?

The name brought life back to him; he raised his head and said slowly, "I did have her. She was taken from me."

Was it theft? I thought it mere love.

"Don't play your games with me. I am done with them."

I am not playing games, Laurence. I am offering a trade, as I did all those years ago. I will give you what you want in exchange for your help with what I want.

"You have my son." The glance he flicked at Don was accusatory. "You don't need me. And you can offer me nothing I want."

Not even a dying woman's last hours? A curious grinding sound reached them: the horns scraped between her fingers. Marie Thetis will be dead within a month, my word upon it. Help me, and I will give you the last of her life.

"The dregs, is that it?" he said, hostility pouring from him.

If she was an ordinary woman, perhaps. But she is a seer and in their dying moments, they are granted one last vision. It is the only time they can see their own future, you know. She will be able to step back to any point in her life and see what would have happened if she had chosen differently. Tell me, Laurence, which point do you think Marie Thetis would choose?

His father's face twisted, and Don saw that he had been wrong to think him broken, useless. The ambition burned just as keenly in him; the goal was different, that was all. He had always known that his father did not love his mother as he did Marie Thetis. He had not known that the love was more than mere ash.

Triumph softened Avy's voice, mimicking compassion. And wouldn't you want to hear what she has to say?

So his mother had been right, Don realised. She had been the second choice – she still was the second choice.

He didn't doubt his father's love for him, for what else could have persuaded him to come back to this heartless cavern knowing what might wait there for him? Yet it made him uneasy, a little afraid, to think that his family was not the secure triad he had thought; his mother was the outsider, passive, waiting for love that would never come.

He pitied her. Yet it never occurred to him to despise his father for it.

"What do you want?" Laurence Ivan said in a low voice.

A trifle, she said, and as her words unfolded, Don Ivan began to understand – and to respect – the immensity of the plan she laid before them, and the riches she would bring them.

It was worth the price, he thought as his eyes lingered on the empty cup and the droplets beading its rim. In the next two weeks, as he followed her instructions to the letter, as he drank down her elixirs again and again, the thought repeated, and became conviction.

No matter her price, it was worth it. It must be for his father to pay it twice.

X - X - X - X - X

After that discussion, Phi found that life fell into a pattern while she waited for Riose to come back to her with a date to meet the Furies. It wouldn't be soon, he warned her: they would not set aside their high games for one bothered shapeshifter. Weeks, maybe even months.

She avoided the pod except for Jess and her parents. Even seeing one of them in the street made her wonder if they had known about her grandparents…if they would do the same again.

Her friends wrapped her up in gossip and idle amusement. Jo told them coyly about a certain boy she had in mind, and fed them developments. Riose was quieter, his smiles rare and fleeting while Finn grumbled constantly about anything that came to mind. Celia scolded and chivvied, but Phi caught the anxious looks she sometimes gave Riose.

The days peeled off like petals from a rose, and they were all uncertain what lay at the end.

Her conversations with her mother reached polite stalemate. They did not discuss her marriage: Marie Thetis seemed to think it forgotten and Phi didn't trouble to correct her. She was still picking at her food and had grown thin and hollow as a reed. Worry soon replaced any anger Phi felt.

As for her father…he was working harder than ever and at home he spent most of free time with her mother, trying to coax food into her. Often they spoke in low, intimate voices, and every time laughter blossomed on the air, Phi felt relief sluice through her. If they were laughing, it couldn't be that bad.

Sometimes they all sat together and chatted about old family holidays, the pod, anything past or current. Never the future. After all, her mother already knew it.

Phi was afraid that she and her father did too, but she pushed back the fear. Her mother had been this ill before and recovered. That didn't make it any better each time it happened, but it gave her hope. She needed it badly.

And chasing hope, every night she left the house after her parents had gone to bed, and made her way down to the lake.

It felt like chains slipping off with the first lungful of warm night air. Against the confines of her mother's room, the sky seemed limitless, the careless spray of stars bright counterpoint to the pills lined up in neat bottles on the bedside table. The pale moon glowed above it all, freed from her nest of clouds while Marie Thetis endured the long confinement in her bed.

It was all that her home was not: wild, promising, alive.

Phi didn't walk down to the lake anymore – she ran, wind snatching at her hair. The minutes mattered suddenly. He mattered.

He was always there, sitting on the springy patch of ground that they had deemed their own. Every night, she watched for the look on his face when he saw her, and every night she was not disappointed when he got to his feet, delight on his face: the boy with the fever-bright eyes, burning for her.

X - X - X - X - X

It had been awkward the second evening, last night's confessions between them. But then he'd given her a shy and enchanted smile and said only, "I didn't know if you'd come back."

"And miss your spider stories?"

Zeke's sigh broke the tension. "I'm going to regret telling you that, aren't I?"

She grinned, seating herself, and patted the ground beside her. "Oh, I don't know. It was kind of charming. Once you got past the crazy."

"Fear of spiders is not crazy," he argued, settling down.

"No. But fear of spiders because 'it's like there's hundreds of tiny minds watching you' is."

He mock-scowled. There was a respectable gap between them, and part of her felt tempted to close it – to lean into that gentle curve between his neck and collarbone. She didn't though: it was too intimate. "And I suppose you aren't afraid of anything?"

"Could be," she said nonchalantly. "Of course, you could always ask, and find out."

He leaned in, one arm stretching behind her back but not touching her. His breath tingled on her ear, and his voice was husky and teasing. "If you insist. So, Delphine Thetis…"

And all her nights were poised and perfect upon the simple request:

"Tell me something about you I don't know."

X - X - X - X - X

And so night after night, she learned and was learned: not knowing what he might choose to tell her, only sure that it was true.

"The first sound I remember was the ocean," he told her. "Fireblade made me there – forged me, I suppose – because he wanted to be able to destroy me if I went wrong. I came from the fire spitting sparks, not knowing anything except how hungry I was and how afraid, and then I heard the waves crashing."

He paused, his face wistful.

"I thought it was someone's heart beating, like mine. It was cool and dark and peaceful, everything I wasn't, and it seemed like heaven." Zeke sighed, but his eyes gleamed with humour. "And then of course Fireblade opened his mouth and spent the next three hours spouting triumphal, self-glorifying tripe about how amazing he was and how he'd made me in his own image. He turned out to be wrong about that one, thank god, because the thought makes me die a little bit inside every time I think it."

X - X - X - X - X

"I can speak six languages," he said one evening.

"Six! I can get by in Spanish, and that's it."

"Two of them are dead," he pointed out. "And the other four have changed. But I needed to know them. I travelled a lot. Inevitable, really, if you happen to live in the court of the Soulless King when he's having a world-conquering week."

"Say something in one of them," she entreated.

He looked a little embarrassed, but then he said something soft and liquid and low that sent pleasant goosebumps rippling over her skin. When he finished his eyes were full of heat, and she felt breathless.

"What did it mean?"

"Just an old poem," he said elusively. "It was quite famous for a while."

She'd never seen a poem that could put that sort of look on anyone's face. "Tell me," she beseeched him. "Please."

"There are songs which are beautiful and songs which are true, and they are just music. Then there are songs which are both, and they are the beginning of wonder."

She smiled. "That's lovely." Then a thought struck. "That's a very short translation."

His gaze slid away.

"Is there more?"

"I don't know how to translate it," he said in what was an obvious and appalling lie. Curious, she touched his cheek before he could think to stop her – and felt the heat there, echoing that which had simmered in his eyes.

"What does it mean?" she persisted.

Exposed, he looked slightly panicky. "Not tonight. I need time to think about it."

Unsatisfied at this half-victory, she said, "But you will tell me?"

"Eventually. Just not now."

Seeping through his skin to her fingers, came a chasing, secret thought - escaping him unnoticed, she was sure. It woke a warm, restless glow in her.

Not yet.

X - X - X - X - X

Thursday rolled in like a hearse. She fled the house that night because the healer had come, bringing the whiff of futility with her. But even here she could not drive her mother from her mind. The image lingered: her hands shaking feebly, calling out for people who couldn't answer until she was drugged into sleep.

"Tell me something about you I don't know," he said quietly.

She swallowed hard. There were other things she could tell him, but this one was omnipresent, a ghost laid over everything she did.

"My mother…" She stumbled, not because she didn't want him to hear, but because she didn't want to say it. "My mother is dying."

It didn't matter that her mother regretted her birth then, it only mattered that she was not getting better, that she would never dance in the living room with her father again.

"What am I going to do without her?" she whispered. "How do you live without your mother?"

"Phi…" he said helplessly, huskily, and the compassion in his eyes undid her.

Quietly, because she didn't want to fuss, because she had already cried these tears a dozen times before, she drew up her knees and let her forehead rest on them.

He put a gentle arm around her, and she leaned into his shoulder. "What am I going to do?" she asked him, and Zeke offered her no answer. He only stroked her hair while she stared out at nothing, a song that her father refused to play echoing dimly in her head.

X - X - X - X - X

"…and then," he said dryly, "Fireblade burst in naked, waving his namesake – well, both his namesakes, I suppose, if the rumour in the court was anything to go by - screaming that someone had violated his wife and there would be hell to pay. When he saw Ryar sitting there, I'm not sure who was more surprised. Apparently Ulryat had needed an excuse to wage war on the Eastern Lands, and that was what she came up with."

It was the next night, and they sat facing one another, Phi shaking with laughter. She had been afraid that he would be wary of her, or that she would be embarrassed by her outburst, but he'd been waiting as usual, and the warmth in his eyes had quelled all her fears.

"Your stories have a lot of naked people in them."

"Product of the times. They didn't see human skin as different from fur or scales, and at that point, nudity was very much de rigueur in the court. It was a seriously unfortunate time to spend most of your life kneeling in submission."

"How so?"

"Imagine what was at your eye-level."

She covered her mouth to hide a grin. "Ouch."

"Exactly. But then Bhari arrived and brought Eastern fashion with her, and every slave in the court blessed her for it. We didn't bless her for much else, but for fashion...yep, she might have sold out her own people to Kheo, but she sold out to Prada first."

X - X - X - X - X

Slowly, Phi grew comfortable with him, and as the nights passed, she found herself wanting to laze in the circle of his arms, as she might with Finn or Riose - but with other, wilder thoughts filling her mind. Thoughts of his mouth, curving in a certain way, of how he said her name, of the heat of his skin.

She didn't speak these thoughts or venture any further into the link that bound them. In truth, she was a little afraid. It seemed to good to be true, too wonderful that he should be here, now; already she felt she hovered like an eagle in the high vault of the sky, that some immense, dizzying fall lay before her, and she was not sure if she had the courage for it.

And yet every day she was bolder. It became quite thoughtless to leave her hand in his, to send him a thought, an image, a query on the wings of a touch. She knew the cadence of his words, she mocked him and teased him, she was honest and true and herself.

She was waiting, though she didn't know what for.

X - X - X - X - X

He was lying flat on his back, gazing up at the sky, mulling over an answer while she waited impatiently.

That night, he had been quiet for a very long time but finally he said, "The most beautiful place I ever saw was the palace of clouds. The royal family of the forestlands lived there and it was right at the very heights of the rainforest, so that every morning it appeared out of the mists as if someone had dreamed it."

She slid onto her side, watching the rise and fall of his chest. His eyes were closed, and he looked utterly peaceful.

"They'd grown it from the forest so that it lived still – it was full of sunlight and never silent, this huge series of rooms connected by bridges. You could always hear the rain on the leaves in the afternoon or the waterfalls running through the rooms. There were no guards or weapons, and every morning, someone sung up the sun."

The wonder in his voice made her ache.

"What happened to it?" she whispered.

He opened his eyes and they were shadowy, far away from her. "Kheo tore down the palace and enslaved the people. There was no one left to lure the sun back to its halls, and so it fell into ruin. But even in another country, the slaves still sang every morning, because they said that it was all that kept darkness from the world."

"Do you think they were right?"

"I wasn't sure." His gaze focused on her, steady, fire rising in it, and his voice was raw and marvelling. "And then I heard you, and it seemed entirely possible that one voice could call back the sun."

She was amazed, her breath stolen, and then she stammered out, "Me?"

How solemn he was. "There's no one else."

Yes, she thought, feeling the truth of it ring up and down her bones. There was no one else in this night, only him, only the space between them shrinking and shrinking…

His lips on hers were tentative, tender. The thrill of attraction she felt was a shock – and then she knew what she'd been waiting for. She was almost savage in response, heated as he was hesitant, and his gasp, his answering smile curving against her mouth felt like victory.

And she knew what it was to be fire, to burn in his arms.

When at last air eased between them, he looked dazed. He held her like she might shatter in his arms.

"Tell me-" he murmured, and she silenced him with a finger on his lips. Even that mere touch was electric. She had never felt more alive.

"What was the rest of the poem?" Phi asked, sure, heart racing, all her world shrunk down to now.

His fingers slid through her hair, reverent. "Some women are beautiful, and some women are true, and they are just women," he answered. "And there are women who are both, and they are still just women."

His eyes were bright, afire, as if the sun had set in them – and she the voice who had called it back.

"Then there is you," he said softly. "The beginning of wonder."

When he kissed her again, for one sweet moment she saw herself as he did. How her hair tumbled about her, how candid and unwavering her gaze was; a certain wild way she had of throwing back her head in laughter.

She was astonishing, a light in his shadowed world.

"Tell me…" he began.

"No," she whispered. "Show me."

It was with unsteady hands that he drew her down beside him. He sang in her blood, in her bones, in the flush of her skin where his kisses fell and in those moments, against all the cruelty of the world, she was no longer alone.

Then there is you, she thought. The beginning of wonder.

For this second of your life
Tell me if it's true
Anywhere beyond is all I want of you
In your lips lies a secret
The promise of a kiss
Or something more than this

X - X - X - X - X