“What is it?” he asked. “Did I hurt you, Johanna?”
“No.” She swallowed. “There is something I must tell you, Quentin.”
The slightly dazed look left his eyes. His mouth tightened. “Tell me.”
“I love you.”
He laughed in startlement, and saw Johanna’s face. She was serious. More than serious; she was giving him the most precious gift she had.
Johanna—his grave, beloved Johanna, gazed at him as if he were someone worthy of love. As if they sat in a rose-scented bower, and he were the gentleman he was born to be, she the brave and true lady her soul and spirit made her.
“Johanna,” he said, choking back ridiculous tears. “God.”
“I know it’s hardly a suitable time to make such a declaration.” She wriggled from his hold and stood, shaking her skirts down around her ankles as if she dismissed what had just passed between them. “In light of what we’ve just done…”
“Do you know what we’ve done?” he asked. “I’ve been with other women, yes. But none of them—not one of them—” How could he tell her that he could take her a hundred times more and not get his fill of her? She made him feel formidable, sure of himself, the man he might have been.
Might have been, but was not. Johanna carried that Quentin away with her and sent the familiar craven Quentin back in his place. The man who was so very good at running.
The man who couldn’t speak the words she wanted to hear.
Her back was turned to him, head high, spine erect. The pliable, passionate woman slipped from her body like a ghost. What remained was not Doctor Johanna Schell but some brittle reproduction held together by filaments of habit and sheer pluck, a doppelgänger who spoke with Johanna’s voice in a parody of her competent manner.
“Forgive me,” she said. “It was foolish of me to speak as I did, but I was not sure I’d get another chance.”
“Johanna,” he whispered.
“We need not dwell on it any longer. In fact, we must put it behind us now if we are to save ourselves.” Her shoulders rose and fell. “I have an idea, Quentin. A dangerous idea, and so much of it depends upon you. I do not know if I am capable of what is necessary.”
He stood up, took a few steps toward her, stopped at the stiffening of her body. She took another deep breath. “You’ve said that you wish to go with Boroskov and find a way to overcome him. But I believe there is a chance to defeat him, here and now, by confronting him with what he would never expect to see.”
Dire premonition turned guilt and grief to icy lumps in his chest. “Fenris.”
“Fenris.” She turned to face him, her expression blank. “Boroskov knows nothing of him, though your other self is the embodiment of what his father, and your grandfather, desired to create.”
“Something evil, murderous—”
“But Fenris is a part of you, Quentin. He has your werewolf abilities, as well as the very traits of character that make him an equal to Boroskov in ruthlessness and lust for power. Don’t you see?”
“I see. I see very clearly.”
“Then… we have no choice but to enlist Fenris’s help in defeating Boroskov.”
The last remnants of the ephemeral well-being that had come with their loving drained from Quentin’s body. “Yes,” he said. “Get Fenris to fight in my place, because he is the last thing our enemy will be expecting. The only problem with your otherwise excellent idea is that I’ve already tried it. I can’t make him come.”
“You’ve tried to summon Fenris?” She frowned. “But you’ve never truly met him, only sensed his presence—”
“Just before I found you and May and Boroskov, I woke up in another part of town with no memory of how I’d arrived in San Francisco. It hasn’t been long since Fenris was here. But now—he is gone.”
Her eyes darkened. “How can this be?”
“Oh, I’m not free of him. He still perverts our joint existence as he wishes it to be. I’d rip him out of my soul if I could.”