“Oh,” I said. “Yes. You. Me. Bed. Now.” I could raise my eyebrows, too. “Is that simple enough? Or do you need poetry? I might be able to do a haiku if you’d like.”

“I vote for a limerick,” called George from the basement. “There was a young lady named Mercy …”

“You don’t get a vote,” I called back.

There was a general round of friendly and interested laughter from various places in the house.

“It seems I am summoned,” said Adam, giving in—as I had hoped—to the pressure of the house’s expectations.

He had a smile on his face, but his eyes were worried.

“You bet, buster,” I told him, and I led him up to the room where I already had the oil warming. Because every good deed deserves reciprocity.

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED OF STEFAN, DREAMS THAT had me sitting up in a cold sweat. Adam was asleep so deeply that I didn’t wake him. By my count he’d been averaging two or three hours a night for weeks; it was hardly surprising that he was out.

Still …

I touched his well-oiled shoulder and he grumbled, wiggling down until his face was tucked against my hip, his hand gripping my knee briefly. Apparently reassured, he went limp again.

Leaving my hand on his shoulder, I slipped back into my otherness so I could look at the bonds that tied me to my people. This time, somewhat to my surprise, I took both the bedroom and Adam with me. Adam … was lit up with tiny strings of light that crossed and crisscrossed his skin before they went off in all directions. Our mating bond was thicker than it had been but was still the same monster-skin texture and color. It felt … sated. Which was, I hoped, a good thing.

But that wasn’t what I was looking for tonight. I found the bond I shared with Stefan. This time it was a strand of lace the color of coffee grounds. It was so brittle that when I touched it, a small piece broke off.

I opened my mouth and pulled out a dandelion in full flower, fuzzily golden and cheerful. I stared at it a moment, because I had thought I was reaching for a gemstone—though in the Perrault story, the virtuous daughter also had flowers fall from her mouth.

Had I considered it beforehand, I would have envisioned roses or orchids, but maybe Stefan needed something less hothouse and more tenacious. That sounded right—because I needed him to be tenacious.

I put it to my lips and said, “Here is a bit of hope for you. Stay strong, my friend.” I would have said more, but that felt like all the words the little flower could carry.

I held the flower over the lacy ribbon and hesitated. There was no way to open this bond, which was already so fragile that it crumbled at my touch.

After a moment’s thought, I crushed the flower between my fingers and let the small bits of gold and green fall on the lace. When all of the flower was scattered in small bits, they melted into the bond—and a small spark popped and skittered from where the flower bits had been toward Stefan. Who now lay supine on the floor, though Adam and I had been alone in my otherness just a moment ago.

I slid out of the bed, knowing with certainty that Adam would not awaken here. I was still naked, but my bathrobe was awaiting me on the foot of the bed. I put it on and tied it securely before going to Stefan.

It took a lot more steps than it should have to cover the distance to him. And each step was weighty, as if I were traveling much more than the ten or twelve feet that lay between Stefan and my bed. Like dreams, the otherspace was sometimes richly symbolic and sometimes just weird. The trick was in figuring out which kind of weirdness I was dealing with.

As I neared Stefan, the carpet vanished between one step and the next, becoming the polished concrete of my garage auto bays, complete with the scratches from Adam’s monster’s claws. My bathrobe altered to jeans and a red T-shirt that said Scooby Snacks Forever in black letters across my chest. Little black bats began at the final “r” in “Forever” and concentrated over my left shoulder so that the shoulder of the shirt and left sleeve were black.

I didn’t own a T-shirt like that. Why my subconscious thought I should be wearing something so Stefan-like, I didn’t know.

Stefan himself was wearing all black, like a stagehand in a play. His eyes were closed and his face was tilted toward where the bay doors would have been if they had made an appearance here, but instead it was only inky blackness—like when I met Adam’s monster. There was a distant rumble of sound, and I forced myself to quit thinking about the monster.

Instead, I knelt beside Stefan and put my hand on his shoulder. The result was explosive.

He went from still to full speed in the blink of an eye, rolling away from me and up and onto his feet in what was obviously some sort of martial and practiced maneuver. But once on his feet he stood swaying, his hands to his face, covering his eyes.

“Stefan?” I asked tentatively. Because I suddenly had the worrying thought that it might not be Stefan. The smoke weaver could take his shape.

But as soon as the worry found me, I knew that whatever shape he wore in the real world, here in my otherness, he would still be the smoke weaver. And unless I summoned him, the smoke weaver could not visit me here.

Stefan let his hands fall to his sides and gave me a wild look. “Go,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“No,” I told him patiently without rising to my feet. “It’s okay. This is my space. You can come here because you are invited.” I indicated the coffee-colored lace bond that was tied around my right ankle and stretched to his left ankle.

He dropped to the ground as if his knees just quit working. If he’d been human, in the real world, and had fallen like that onto my concrete floor, he’d have been in agony. But it hadn’t seemed to have hurt Stefan—maybe because I hadn’t wanted Stefan hurt.

We sat there for a moment, about four feet apart.

Finally, he said, in a voice filled with wonder, “It’s so quiet here.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

His fingers played with a small place on the floor where Adam’s claws had left a stuttering arc. “Sorry,” he said, seeming to gather himself together, a mask suitable for social interaction forming on his face. “It’s been a long time since it was quiet in my head.”

“I need you to listen to me,” I told him.

He looked up—and there was such … despair in his eyes. “I killed people, Mercy,” he told me. “Innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve done it before.” He opened his arms to remind me of what he was. “But I swore that I would never do so again. And until this, I kept my vow.”

I crawled over to him and put my hand on his jaw. “Hang on, Stefan. I promise you that there is help coming if you can just hang on.”

He said, sadly, “I am not a hero to be holding on for one minute longer.”

I recognized the reference, though I couldn’t remember the author—someone German, I thought.

“I disagree,” I told him. “Just hold on, Stefan. Help is coming.”

He shook his head. “Marsilia won’t let me die by his hand,” he told me. “But he will not let me feed. I weaken moment by moment until soon, there will be no more of me.”

I thought about that one. Then, wordlessly, I held out my arm to him.

Stefan bit my wrist—and I let him, just as I had let him before. The feeding wasn’t real except as dreams were real, or powerful except as dreams were powerful. He didn’t drink blood from my veins—he drank strength, conviction, and hope.

When he had finished, he kissed my wrist, then rubbed it with his thumbs until the small wounds disappeared. He looked up. “I don’t know whether to thank you or to curse you.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “As long as you hang on.”

Much as an actor in an artsy one-act play might have done, he lay down on the ground and faded into the darkness that now surrounded me.

I ran my finger over the same mark on the floor that Stefan had touched, feeling the roughness against my skin. I looked around and like the spotlight that lit where I sat, the bed was illuminated. I could see my mate lying asleep, his face turned away from me. Faintly, I could see the hulking monster curled around him like a lover.

I got up and walked through the darkness to the bed. When I finally reached it, I climbed in and wrapped my body around Adam as if I could protect him from himself.

“Hope,” I said out loud, because I didn’t have another pearl for him. “Hope, my love.” And then I closed my eyes and slept.

ADAM WAS STILL ASLEEP BESIDE ME WHEN I WOKE UP the next morning. He didn’t stir when I got up and hastily pulled on clothes as quietly as I could—I didn’t see my bathrobe anywhere.

I had made it all the way to the door when Adam said, with lazy satisfaction, “You should shower, Mercy. You smell like sex.”

“I was trying to let you sleep,” I told him, coming back to the bed.

He smiled without opening his eyes. “Go shower. I’ll sleep until you get out.” And as I walked to the bathroom he said, “Thank you.”

“No, sir,” I said. “Thank you.”

I TOOK BREAKFAST—EGGS AND BACON AND FRENCH toast—down to Ben, who was still in wolf form.

Luke, back on guard duty, shook his head as I walked by him. “He hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning.”

I frowned and approached the cage. I started to tell Ben that he needed to keep up his strength—and remembered Stefan, and what he’d said. I remembered how the last time I’d come down here, Ben had ignored me. But the time before that—when I knew it had been our Ben speaking—that time he hadn’t wanted me anywhere near him.

Ben would be telling me to leave.

Instead of addressing Ben, I said, conversationally, “It takes a long time to starve a werewolf to death. As they grow more desperate for food, their wolf takes over from the man. I wonder if you can hold the wild beast you will be letting loose.” I slid the plate through the long, narrow opening designed for that purpose and left Ben’s breakfast in front of him. “If you can, it will take a lot of magic. You couldn’t even hold me.”