Thought-less? I heard one of them think as she turned around to look at me over her shoulder. She had red tangled hair and I recognized her as the one who had shared her breath with me in a kiss. But she is always in our thoughts. She is part of us forever. Then she turned back to her sisters and joined them as they ran over a grassy hill, leaving me gasping on the bank, beneath a weeping willow tree, feeling all the more alone for the absence of their buzzing hive mind.

Alone except for the dark creature that had saved me.

It was still in the water – a swirl of oily black on the water’s surface. I struggled to my knees and leaned over for a closer look … and the black swirl coalesced into a face.

His face.

Liam.

But not Liam.

In the months he’d spent as a bodiless entity in the Borderlands he’d lost some of the features of Liam Doyle, the shape he’d assumed to seduce me so I’d fall in love with him …

You almost did.

I heard his voice in my head. His lips were parted in a rueful smile, an expression I recalled so well I automatically reached my hand out to the surface of the water where the image of his lips appeared … and touched flesh.

“You haven’t forgotten me,” he said, this time moving his lips as his head cleared the water. As I watched, he took shape.

“Your desire for me is giving me form,” he said, his chest – his bare, very nicely muscled chest – rising from the water.

I laughed … or tried to. The sound came out hoarse and raspy. I must have swallowed some water. “I don’t recall you being quite so … buff, Liam … or should I call you that? You’re not exactly him anymore, are you?”

“I can be him,” he said with the Irish lilt and cocky tilt of his chin I recognized as Liam’s. “I can be anything and anyone you want, lass.” The Irish lilt had roughened to a Scottish brogue (he’d called me lass before, I recalled), but the glint in his dark eyes was pure incubus. He was standing hip deep in the pool now, the water lapping teasingly at his groin. I tried to keep my eyes above the waterline … but didn’t quite succeed.

“Um … I didn’t order that,” I said, blushing.

He laughed and took a step toward the bank and I sat back on my heels, poised to stand and … what? Run? What was I afraid of? He wouldn’t hurt me. Was I afraid that if he touched me I would give in to my desire for him?

I didn’t get to find out. Something tugged him back into the water. He fell to one knee, those sweet lips twisting in pain. Instantly I forgot my fear and moved toward him. His right arm was twisted painfully back behind his shoulder, his wrist dragging in the water. Leaning over the bank, I reached under the water for his hand … and touched cold iron.