“I can’t believe Faerie is this big.” Basil stopped and leaned against a tree.

Isa halted as well, and sat down on the trunk of a fallen fir. Her feet ached. Even though she was used to traveling long distances on foot when she was in pursuit of a fugitive, she still felt the toll of the day’s hiking keenly.

“We do sort of…expand the territory a little,” she admitted.

“What?” Basil stopped with his water bottle—made of some lightweight metal, from what she could tell—halfway to his mouth.

“Well, Faerie has the habit of…growing. But not outward. It’s more of a mirroring and folding of space, while nominally staying within the borders that were once set.”

“So…it’s like a TARDIS?”

“A what?”

“So many movies, so many shows…” he muttered to himself, rubbing a hand over his face. Focusing on her, he said, “It’s bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside.”

“Yes.” She grinned. “That’s a good way of putting it.”

He took a swig from his water and offered her some as well. “All right, how much longer until we reach that village?”

She drank a bit, calculated in her head. “I’d say probably another five hours.”

“Good gawds.” He banged his head against the tree.

Eyeing the rising moon, she said, “We could rest for the night. We’ve been hiking all day, but we still have quite some distance to cover. I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep going right now.”

He let out a heavy breath. “Yeah, I sure am beat. Sleep does sound good.”

“I saw what looked like a cave not too long ago. We can double back and see if we can camp there. It’ll be good to have a roof above us in case it rains.” The next settlement was too far away, but they did have enough gear with them to spend the night in the woods in relative comfort.

“Sure.” Basil fell into step beside her while she backtracked. “We’ll have—”

“Dinner, yes. For the second time.”

He bumped his shoulder against hers. “You know me so well, Isa of Stone.”

It occurred to her that, yes, she did. To bide their time, eager to distract herself from maudlin pondering, she’d asked Basil to tell her about himself during the long hours of their hike, and he’d obliged with the cheerful openness that was as much a part of him as the gold silk of his hair—which her fingers still remembered, a sensory memory she was constantly tempted to repeat. Over the course of the day, she had to physically restrain herself from reaching out and touching him again so many times, had to curl her fingers into her palm instead, hard enough to snap herself out of the wave of need riding her.

Every time Basil tried to shift the conversation to her, she managed to derail him by following up on something he said with another, more specific question about him, and he took the bait, seemed delighted that she showed such interest in him.

She would have felt bad about deceiving him…except she wasn’t. Not anymore. The more she learned about him, the more she wanted him to keep talking. She found herself entranced by his voice, by the calm yet serene way he spoke about his life, and she wanted to know even more about how he saw the world. She’d always been better at listening than talking anyway, and yet she’d never before met anyone she wanted to listen to for more than an hour.

Basil, however, could talk to her all day, and she didn’t mind it one bit. In fact, she soaked it all up, and relished the way listening to him calmed her thoughts.

Now, as they sat at the mouth of the cave in front of the crackling fire, her belly full of the stew Basil prepared—damn, but that male could cook up something delicious, even in such meager surroundings as a cave out in the woods—she was caught unawares when he leveled the full force of his quiet attention on her and asked, “When was the last time you laughed?”

Blinking, her mind slow in coming back from late-night idleness, she opened her mouth, closed it, glancing around the cave…anywhere except him.

Basil shook his head. “Too long ago, then.”

It was true. She couldn’t even remember the last time she laughed out loud.

He sat with one leg stretched out in front of him, the other cocked up, had his elbow on his raised knee and put his chin on his hand, looking at her with such disconcerting, thoughtful, caring focus, it rattled her.

“Tell me,” he said with a smile that set her nerves aflutter, “what makes you laugh?”

The way he regarded her…so unapologetically interested in her, as if he truly cared about her as a person, a friend…a lover—if she let him. The affection in his gaze hurt her heart, not because it was wrong, or unappreciated, but because it touched upon long-neglected parts of her, and like a muscle that hadn’t been used in a while, the feelings he stirred in her ached from being activated after years—decades—of disuse. His attention made her feel special, treasured, as if she was someone worth looking at, listening to…caring about.

Quickly shaking off those feelings before they pulled her under, she cleared her throat and said, “The hardest I’ve ever laughed…” She broke off, grimaced and shifted her weight. “No, I can’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing.”

Basil perked up. “Well, now you’ve got to tell me. No teasing. Spit it out.”

She took a breath, looked down at her hands. “There was this cat…”

A giggle bubbled up from some half-forgotten corner of her heart, and interrupted her. She tried to stifle the laughter with a hand over her mouth, and forced herself to continue, but barely managed two more words before the full memory washed over her and laid waste to her composure.

She laughed so hard she was gasping for breath, with tears running down her face and her body tingling, nerve endings alive with delight, her chest light even as she struggled to draw in air in between her giggles.

“I’d urge you to calm down and tell the whole story,” Basil said with a chuckle, “but to be honest, just watching you laugh this hard is way more fun.”

“All right,” she choked out, catching her breath while waving her hands in wait-a-minute signal, “all right. When I was out in the humanlands on a case, I once saw this cat sitting on a porch. I went to pet it.”

She wiped tears from her cheeks. “It was very majestic-looking and dignified, but then…” She stifled another bout of giggles. “…it had to sneeze”—giggles erupted from her again—“and…” Flopping down on her sleeping mat, she succumbed to belly-aching laughter.

Basil started chuckling along with her. “And?”

“—it farted, at the same time.” She had to laugh so hard, her entire body shook, every muscle sore and tingling.

Basil choked out a laugh of his own. “It snarted?”

“Snart?” She wiped at her eyes.

He grinned. “Sneeze-fart. It’s a thing.”

More giggles burst forth, and she nodded, caught her breath. “Yes,” she said, with the very best straight face she could muster. “The majestic cat snarted.”

“I can’t believe it.” He shook his head, still smiling. “Serious Isa is amused by fart humor.”

“I know,” she wheezed. “It’s so silly.”

“I like silly,” Basil said with a wink. “In fact, nothing’s too silly for me. My favorite movie is Spaceballs.”

Still snickering and wiping her face, she said, “I don’t know that one either.”

“I’ll show you. When we’re done with all this. I’ll take you home with me, and we’ll watch Spaceballs. Of course, we’ll have to watch Star Wars first, otherwise you won’t get all the goofy references.”

Her carefree amusement died as the reality of her situation doused her happiness like a bucket of ice water. She wouldn’t ever get to watch those movies with him. Or do anything fun at all with Basil. And she didn’t have the right to. She didn’t have the right to enjoy his affection, didn’t deserve to be the center of his attention. Oh, why couldn’t she have met him under different circumstances? Why couldn’t he have been someone else, someone she was free to like back, to care for?

Someone she didn’t have to kill…

Pain more awful than what wracked her during the seizures raked through her, made her gasp.

How could she kill him now? Now she’d gotten to know him, now she’d glimpsed the warmth of his soul, the sunshine of his personality.

I don’t want to take his life. A visceral thought, risen from the depths of her heart of stone, which yet had softened for this impossible male who so audaciously cared for her, who tumbled headlong into the challenges of life.

Survive, a voice whispered in her mind. You need to survive at all costs.

At all costs… But what good would it be to survive when what she had to do to stay alive would kill her inside?

“Hey.” Basil’s voice, breaking through her sinister thoughts. All laughter gone from his face, he studied her with concern in those eyes of myriad earth tones. “What just happened? You look like someone died.”

Her breath hitched. “I need to go…take care of nature’s call. Don’t wait up. You can go ahead and settle down to sleep.”

She jumped up and sprinted off before he could reply.

Whatever was tenuously budding between them, it was cursed, just as she was. No matter which way she turned it, she’d never be able to be with him. Either she snuffed out the flame of his life, or her own would fade into eternal darkness.

* * *

Basil watched Isa rush away from him as if fleeing from a soul-sucker demon. The rustle of the brush died down as she got farther away, leaving him alone with the silence of the night and the crackling fire.

Well, hell. That escalated quickly.

What in the world had gotten into her? One minute she was doubled over with laughter, her gray eyes alight with such infectious humor, his heart had filled with joy, and the next she looked so crestfallen and in pain, as if she’d lost everything dear to her.

Was it something he said? He frowned, poked the fire with a stick. What could have set her off like that?

Shaking his head, he leaned back against the cave wall. Just when he thought he’d made progress with her, she shut down and ran off. If only she’d tell him why she felt she had to keep her distance, maybe they could work on it together and figure it out. He’d love to help her with whatever made her hesitate to relax with him.

He loved seeing the glow on her face when she listened to him talk while they hiked during the day, the spark in her eyes when she asked him questions about his life. That was real interest.

When his high school buddies had regularly complained about not understanding girls, Basil was the one to point out subtleties and complexities in the females’ attitude and explain them to his friends. To Basil, these things were clear as day, and he’d always been stumped when guys he hung out with acted like women were an enigmatic, irrational alien species.

Perhaps he understood the nuances of female behavior because he grew up in a community dominated by women—witch families were notoriously matriarchal—and the women in his life had always played a bigger role than men. But in any case, he never had a problem understanding females, their body language, and behavioral cues, just as well as men’s. He knew when a woman was truly interested in him versus just making nice conversation or being friendly, and he picked up on even the subtlest nonverbal hints of a female rejecting him, which he always respected.

Isa, however… She was sending mixed messages. No clear rejection yet, rather she was vacillating between attraction and retreat. As if she was waging some kind of war with herself about whether to give in to whatever was growing between them.

He’d be only too happy to help her tip the scale toward giving in.