Page 54 of Hunger

I move under him, drawing my hips up to meet him, and I guide his face down to my throat — to the place he wanted earlier and wouldn't take. My pulse beats hard against the cold of his cheek. His mouth opens against it. I feel the fine edges of his teeth come to rest on my skin, and I feel him hold them there, trembling, not closing.

"Take what you need," I say.

He breaks the second time.

He moves into me harder than he's moved. The cold drag inside the warm of me. The sound of him — the low groan that leaves him with each push, the inhuman sound underneath it. His face in the crook of my neck. The press of his closed mouth against my pulse, the teeth held back even now, even like this — and I can feel what the holding costs him in every cold, shaking line of his body.

When he comes he goes still and silent. The cold of him deeper inside me than he's been. The faint cold spread of his release. He shudders once against me. He stays where he is, hisface buried in my throat, his body braced over mine, for a long moment in which neither of us moves.

He lifts his face.

He looks at me.

He isn't the creature I saw on the ledge. He isn't the gray thing in the daylight. He's something else. Something that's been let in.

He lowers himself beside me. He gathers me against his chest. His arms come around me. His body curls cold around the warm of mine, and I press my face against the long seam of the scar, and his hand comes up and his long fingers slide into my hair, and we lie like that.

The sun has gone behind the building across the lot. The light in the room has dimmed. The day is ending.

"Farkas," I say into his chest. My voice is quiet. I'm tired the way I haven't been tired in a long time, the kind of tired that has weight to it.

"Yes."

"Tell me about you."

* * *

Farkas

I tell her.

I don't have many words. I haven't spoken about myself in millennia. There was a time, long ago, when I had a mother and a father and three brothers and a small horse the color of a fox. There was a time when I had a name that meantwolfin the language my mother spoke and when she used it she meantbe brave.There was a time when I rode east with my brothersunder a sky full of stars and the snow on the plains and we were hired men, paid in silver, going to a country we hadn't seen.

I tell her this. I don't tell her in order. The fragments come up out of me as her warm cheek presses against the cold scar of my chest, and I don't know what shape they take when I give them to her, but she listens.

I tell her about the battle.

I don't remember much of it. I remember the cold of the morning. The horse going down under me. The shape of a blade in the gray light. And the smell of the field afterward — so many men opened to the air at once, the smell of blood becoming something else as the day warmed.

I tell her I rose.

I don't know how. I don't know why. There was no one there to tell me. I sat up among the bodies of my brothers and I was changed. The teeth in my mouth weren't the teeth I'd gone down with. The fingers I lifted to touch my own face weren't the fingers I'd been born with. The sky was too bright for my eyes.

I rose. I walked off the field. I've been walking ever since.

She lies against me and she doesn't speak.

I keep going. I tell her the small things. The cities that no longer exist. The languages I learned and stopped using. The long centuries between cities when I crossed empty country and saw no one and spoke to no one. I tell her about London. The firm. Whitfield. The bag phone and the addresses delivered by courier.

I tell her about the farmhouse.

I tell her about the night I first saw her.

The parking lot. The smell of her hair under the grease of the food court. The brush of her shoulder against my chest. The wayshe saidsorryand didn't look up. I tell her how I followed her home and stood across the street and watched the light go out in her window and stayed.

I tell her about the feedings.

I don't soften any of it — I don't have the words to, and I won't lie to her now that she's asked. I tell her about the man at the dumpster the first night I saw her, the one I'd taken before I knew she existed. I tell her about the worker at the food court I took next, to find her name. I tell her about Tammy.