“Because this new little girl is so spectacularly beautiful, he can’t look right at her. He thinks to do so might make him go blind, like when you look directly into the sun. So he’s learned to look around her, to keep her in his peripheral vision. And because he knows how to do this, he sees her smirk when he loses the game. And he feels something he’s never felt before in his young life: despair. To manage it, he does the only thing he can think to do, and that is to get revenge.

“He kisses the girl he just lost the game to. His plan is successful: He sees the other little girl turn and run away, her face as white as the dress she wore.”

Gooseflesh rose all over Honor’s body. She fell still. Beckett was telling the story of what happened all those years ago, of the day she saw him kiss Sayer in the playroom, and her whole world came crashing down around her ears.

Because she’d always loved him. Ever since she could remember, she’d loved him.

But he wasn’t done speaking yet.

“After that, the little boy felt bad, like he’d done something wrong. But the next time he saw the beautiful girl, she acted like she smelled something terrible and turned her nose up at him. All the other children laughed, and the boy felt like a part of him died. He wanted so badly for her to notice him, but the only way she ever did was when he tried to get revenge. So he began to kiss a lot of girls, and felt better when the beautiful one looked sad, and soon the only way she ever showed any emotion at all was when the boy was near another girl. And so, because he hoped in his heart of hearts that her sadness meant she cared for him, the boy . . .” his voice broke, and lowered even more, “the stupid, senseless boy set out to try and win her by making her jealous.”

Her heart must have stopped beating, because her blood had stopped circulating through her veins. Slowly, Honor raised her head, looking at Beckett through tear-sticky lashes.

He looked back at her with a bottomless depth of regret in his eyes. “It didn’t work, though. Years went by, and the boy didn’t have the courage to change his senseless game, and by the time he realized it would never work, it was too late. The beautiful girl was lost to him, and all that was left was the game. The game that had no winner, that was a maze with no exit, only a million cold dead ends. It was the only thing he knew.”

Honor stared at him long and hard, hope flaring in her chest like a Roman candle. Was he playing her? Was this part of an elaborate scheme? Was this how he did it, how he ensnared all those women, with emotional confessions that sounded too good to be true because they actually were?

“I’m not blind, Beckett. I saw how you looked at my sister,” she said, grasping at straws.

“Because she looks like you,” he replied immediately, his voice breaking. “But she’s not. There’s only one you, and that’s the only one for me. It’s always been you. You’re my beginning and my end, Honor. I’ve been in love with you since I could walk. I’ll be in love with you until the day I die, and after, whether I go to heaven or hell, I’ll still be loving you. Forever. Until the end of time.”

After a long time in which she did nothing but examine his face, Beckett softly pleaded, “Say something.”

What Honor said was, “If you’re lying, so help me God I will turn you into a popsicle. A big, stupid Becksicle, which I will devour after turning into a dragon. And then I’ll shit you out and freeze you again and throw your frozen, chewed-up, shitty self out into the ocean, where you will float on the waves until you get eaten by fish and birds, and shit out by them, too.”

Beckett threw back his head and laughed, squeezing her so tight against him she couldn’t breathe. Then he looked down at her, his eyes shining, exultant. The glow appeared around his head, flaring into nimbus, warming all the dim, cool corners of the cave.

“Ah, you sweet talker, you,” he said, grinning. He kissed her.

And for the first time she could remember, Honor was engulfed by happiness, bright and burning as the summer sun.

TWENTY-EIGHT

When he was a boy, Magnus adored story time. A weekly event where all the children of the tribe would gather around the great bonfire in their colony deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle, story time consisted of various elders taking turns thrilling and horrifying the children with tales of magic and adventure. His favorite story was a dark fable that starred a poor farm boy who was visited one night by an angel, who warned him he would soon face a terrible trial, and his faith was the only thing that could save him.

The angel was exquisite and fearsome, a creature of terrible beauty and awesome power, with white wings that burned with smokeless fire, painting vivid blurs of color on the air as they moved. She was a seraph, the story went, one of “the burning ones” of the human Bible, and Magnus’s boyhood self imagined her so vividly she came to life for him, as tangible as his own hand held in front of his face.

Years later, still fascinated by the story, he’d looked up the term seraph, and was intrigued to find them described as “dragon-shaped angels” in a Christian Gnostic text dealing with creation and end times.

Now, with the room aflame around him and the roar of a conflagration in his ears, Magnus realized the seraph of that long-ago story was no creature of mystic fantasy. The dragon-shaped angels that burned with smokeless fire were real.

They had to be. He was holding one of them in his arms.

“Lumina!” he rasped. “Lumina!”

Her eyes drifted open. Bright-orange licks of flame were reflected over and over in their depths. Behind her, fire burned and churned hellishly bright. Superheated air lifted her hair to float around her head, a golden halo of light. A chair coasted by in slow motion, weightless, turning, along with the pillow and other suspended debris: Books. A framed picture. A pair of boots he recognized as his own.

Lumina blinked lazily, smiling as if returning from a pleasant dream. But then her eyes flew wide, wide open, and she froze, grasping what had happened.

Instantly, the fire was extinguished. The roaring flames disappeared. The floating boots and books and all the other weightless flotsam fell to the floor with a clatter and a thud, and all that was left was a strong scent of smoke and a curl of gray fume rising from the sheets.

In the silence, his heartbeat was thundering loud.

“Are you hurt?” Lumina’s voice was a terrified whisper, a tone that perfectly matched the look on her face.

“No.” He gazed in wonder down at her naked body, wrapped around his. There wasn’t a mark on either of them. Carefully, he moved his head and looked around the room. It was in shambles, but miraculously, nothing looked burned. He looked back at Lumina. “That was new,” he said, trying for a nonchalant tone. With interest, he noted he was still buried deep inside her, and still hard. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. No. Do you think the rest of the house . . .”

“I think it’s probably fine, but I’ll check.” He paused. “In a minute. Right now I’m too busy having a heart attack.”

A tiny laugh escaped her lips, verging on hysterical. “Well. We gave new meaning to the phrase light the bed on fire, didn’t we?”

Sobering, Magnus said, “You’re a miracle. Do you know that? A miracle. There’s nothing else like you in all the world.”