“Do not fear the change, little bird,” Gabriel said as I returned to myself. His eyes shone like lights in the gathering darkness, and despite an instinct of self-preservation that told me to get away from him, get away from what was happening to me, I was comforted. “I will not let harm come to you.”

“I never thought you would,” I said, bending over him to brush his lips with my own, but the second my breasts touched his chest, the need rooted deep inside returned, and my hands changed to claws, and my senses went back into overdrive, and I suddenly wanted him, all of him, inside me and around me. I wanted to submerge myself in him until he blotted out everything in life that wasn’t the two of us.

I screamed when he shifted my hips and plunged me down onto his penis, a high, reedy sound, startling me when I realized that it came from me, but that concern was short-lived when he moved within me, and I was once again sent spinning into a state of being that went far, far beyond mere sexual climax.

Time held no meaning for me as we made love out there in the bush, enveloped in darkness, filled with fire, surrounded by nothing but sky and earth. I suspect that little time passed, simply because Gabriel’s fuse was notoriously short—as was my own—but it seemed to me, as I lay gasping back on my own seat, that eons had passed. I lifted a hand, relieved to see in the dim light of the car that the hand held familiar fingers, somewhat stubby, but my own.

“If you say a single word about not having foreplay, I swear I’m going to deck you,” I said, turning my head to look at the man who still lay prone on his seat. I mused again how beautiful he was, his body taut and lean, but not gaunt, not sparse in any way.

Gabriel chuckled, a rich, sensual sound that made me shiver as the cooling air pricked at the tiny drops of perspiration that still clung to me.

“I wasn’t going to, but now that you mention it . . .”

I curled up one fist and waved it in the direction of his face. He laughed again, pulling his seat upright, grimacing briefly as he looked down at his side.

The stripes left by my claws were still visible.

“Agathos daimon. Tell me I didn’t do that to you,” I said, leaning over to examine the wounds. They were red and raised, but not bleeding.

“It’s all right, little bird. You don’t have to look so stricken. They don’t hurt. Much.”