Shadowed Ground by Vicki Keire

clumsiness. Her dark eyes met his in the mirror. He remembered a doe he’d surprised at the creek at sunrise in Gray’s Landing. They both had the same shy frozen grace. Then, as now, he retreated first.
    “Did you find what you needed?” He rolled onto his back, staring up at the stucco ceiling. He was edgy; he hadn’t grown up around girls. He had Callista, of course, but she was like a second mother to him. He didn’t have sisters or close female friends. The only girls he’d ever been around for extended periods of time were as lost and hard-edged as him. The kind of girls who never relaxed their guard because they were too damaged or opportunistic or predatory. In Austin, when he’d run away for a week long music festival, he’d woken up to a girl with dirty blond hair, spider web tattoos and a knife at his throat, going through the jacket he was using as a blanket. It was the first time he’d ever hurt a woman, getting that knife away from her. He still hadn’t forgotten her feral gray eyes, caked with black eyeliner, as she hissed in outrage instead of pain. Whatever she was on hadn’t let her feel the pain.
    He’d slept on the floor at Chloe’s feet. He’d changed her sweat-soaked clothes and put on round after endless round of fresh bandages when she was poisoned and hurting. He’d taken care of her. But this was different. This was a hotel room, not his own familiar second home. A microcosm of the new reality in which she had no one but him, here they were off the map.
    “Mostly I did,” she said, handling her purchases as if performing an esoteric rite. She picked up a silver tube, uncapped it and smelled. He wondered what magic it held, to make her whole body relax. She twisted her hair into a loose knot with practiced ease before testing the running water with the inside of one wrist. Her hands conjured a growing mass of foamy bubbles with smooth circular motions. “I still need to go shopping,” she said, her words uneven and garbled as her face disappeared into the steaming sink. “Your clothes make me look like a boy.”
    “I highly doubt that,” he told the top of her head, reflected back to him in the mirror. He resolutely did not think of her dressed in his second-favorite t-shirt, a threadbare remnant of a long-dead Atlanta radio station. He tried to ignore the pair of his boxers that, even rolled at her waist, still hung from her hips.
    But nothing could erase the picture of her handprint scars, like trapped wings. They were an angry shiny red shot through with silver across her bent neck.
    She finished at the sink and practically stalked over to him. He remained perfectly, rigidly still as the bed dipped with her weight. She lay flat on her back beside him.
    Perfectly, rigidly still. A cobweb on the ceiling. She smells like flowers, he thought as their combined weight on the mattress rolled them slightly towards each other. A crack in the stucco. Eyes unblinking. Perfectly, rigidly still.
    She sighed happily. Not for you, he thought. Guardians don’t get to be with their Wards. Cass told you, time and again…it’s unbalanced. Unethical. He nodded minutely. She has only you, so she’s not for you. Another sigh followed by movement. Her hair, damp from steam, across his cheek. She rested her head against his.
    He realized he could feel her heart beating, feel her breath on his face. Inches. She was only inches away. Their weight had rolled her on her side to face him without realizing.
    “I don’t remember Annwyn.” Her bitten lip was swollen, her words barely a whisper. “Tell me something.” She let gravity press the entire length of her body against his. “Tell me about the ceremony that made you my Guardian.” She caught his hand and brought it up between them, weaving their fingers together against the speeding, crashing thing that was his heart. “What did we promise? What were the vows?”
    Perfectly, rigidly still. He had fallen against the warm weight of her as