Hands. His own hands had reached for her, held her before she’d called his name and made him remember. She had tried to run, and he had thought only of keeping her close, regaining the warmth and comfort that had drawn him to her sleeping place.
No. There was a word for it—bed. And she had driven him from it, rejecting him as she rejected him now, with her body crouched and ready for battle. He knew how to interpret her movement and the sounds she made and the scents of her body. The knowledge grew, became a more familiar part of him with every beat of his heart. He looked into her eyes and read the set of her face.
She was afraid of him. Afraid. Her fear cut into him and squeezed his heart like the steel jaws of a trap.
“I don’t know how you got in here,” she said, “or who you are, but I have a rifle, and I do know how to use it.”
The warning in her voice was as explicit as a snarl. For the first time he saw the slim, bright tube of metal resting against the wall. Rifle. More words—and memories.
He struggled upward, finding his balance. The world spun. He took a step toward her, needing, driven by a single realization.
He had found her.
“Stop,” she commanded. He took another step, and she retreated. Frustration coiled in his belly. He looked down at the ground so far beneath him and saw the flat, dark shape stretched out from his feet, moving as he moved, touching the woman as he could not.
A shadow. More than a word. It was a name, what she had given him. She had called him Shadow, but now she didn’t know him. He didn’t know himself.
He touched his face. The smooth contours were strange and familiar at once. It was like hers. Human, he told himself. Human. He fought to remember, to find the path that would take him across the great darkness separating him from his only link to sanity.
The woman’s gaze moved up and down his body. She touched her lips with her tongue, and her teeth came together with an audible click.
“You must be cold,” she said.
Between one heartbeat and the next the world receded, changed, pulled him to another place. Back—to the time Before.
“You must be cold,” the girl said. “Here, take my coat.”
He lay shivering on the ground—shivering not from the cold but from the smell of death all around him. Only she was life, with her gentle voice and hands. “Please, let me help you,” she said. But answers were locked away in his mind, sundered by terror and sorrow. He could only stare at her, memorizing her face as the one sure haven in the midst of hell.
“Help me,” he whispered.
She started—not the girl but the woman. He looked at her and knew they were the same. He remembered. He remembered her as she had been, her promise that had kept him living.
He had found her.
He recaptured the image of the girl who had helped him. Slim and gawky with adolescence, like a half-grown pup, but already beautiful. His understanding of human beauty came back to him in a rush; he recognized it when he looked at her now.
Changed and yet the same. Red hair and light blue eyes, long-legged and undeniably female. Her scent had changed as well, in a way that made his body feel strange’ and tight.
“You can speak,” she said. “Who are you?” She had asked that before—here, and in the dream-time of long ago. He searched within himself and found something else. Something he knew, as he knew her.
A voice. A voice that whispered mockery of his muteness, grew louder as he listened and felt the first stirrings of fear.
Who are you? the Voice echoed. You are a monster. Monster. The meaning escaped him, but he felt the judgment behind it, disgust twisting inside him like the Voice, faceless and ringing with authority. Pulling him, dragging him into a place where he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t breathe.