PROMISE

CHAPTER 31

Hain was adrift in darkness, his body feeling as though he floated atop a glass-smooth sea. Stillness ruled the place.

A voice rose from the nothingness around him. A woman's voice. Familiar, somehow.

Go south.

Hain struggled against the voice. Why would he go south? Nothing but static wastes led that way. Nothing but death.

El Todo wills it.

The words made anger surge in his chest, polluting the stillness around him. He didn't believe in El Todo.

El Todo works with your faith or without it.

Hain woke to someone shouting his name.

He jerked upright, his eyes barely open, when his forehead came in contact with something that felt dense as stone and twice as hard. A supernova went off behind his eyes.

"Oh, damn it all!" he cried out as he planted a hand behind him.

Someone else cried out, a string of profanity bursting from their lips. Even with his mind as semi-concussed and dreamy as it was, he recognized Lilith's voice.

He clutched the thumping pain in his face, squinting through the cracks in his fingers. "Lilith?"

"Of course it's me," she growled. "Who else would it be?"

Hain lowered his hand. "What were you doing so close to my face?"

Lilith backed away from the bed, squinting one eye and massaging her forehead. "Trying to wake you up!"

"That's why names exist, Lilith. And voices. Literally, for that exact reason."

"I tried." Her hand dropped to her side and her blue eyes glimmered hotly. "But you wouldn't get up."

Hain shaded his eyes from the bright overhead lights. They seemed brighter than when he'd gone to bed, and Hain couldn't help but wonder if the impact between their heads had knocked something loose in his brain.

Hain let his hands cover his face. "I feel like I barely slept."

"You can sleep when you're dead," Lilith said. "Which, incidentally, could be soon if you don't get up."

"Dead?" Hain pulled his hands from his face and sat up. "As in dead, dead?"

"No, the other kind of dead. The one where you get to start again from the moment just before you died."

Hain scowled, letting his hands drop from his eyes, and for the first time since she'd come into his room got a good look at her.

She'd tugged her hair into a small, tight bun at the back of her head, and her muscled arms stood bare from the shoulder down. Over her chest she wore a black vest, all armored panels and metal straps, the chunky fabric cinched closed from groin to throat. She'd traded her billowy trousers for the black wool leggings and soft leather boots he'd come to associate with her. On one leg she wore a pistol, much the same as those he'd seen in Memory, the holster bound to one thigh. On the other leg she wore her very long, very angry looking dagger.

"Let me guess," Hain said, looking her up and down. "You were invited to a ball, but you need a date."

Lilith started to speak, but Hain held out a hand to stop her.

"The answer is yes, of course," he said. "But we'll need to find a gown. Something billowy, maybe?"

"Who says I'd wear a gown?"

He gave her an affronted look. "Who says the gown is for you?"

Lilith's mouth looked as though a smirk and a scowl were fighting for control of her lips.