And I can remember
Forever December
The centre of dying - the heart of the pain.

 He was shocked.

 No, he was gobsmacked. Of course, he'd dealt with dragons; Ryar ap Sangager often amused herself in the Chill, and of course, there had been that business - that damn, damn business that they still didn't talk about, and he had dealt with the Furies too. It was just the two together that seemed so - crazy.

 Cougar didn't know what to think. The Furies were a byword for fear; they were the Night World's ghoulish tales, their monsters under the bed. And now they wanted his help. Him!

 They, who had killed his mother. Who had destroyed his friends; who had murdered and meddled, and for nothing but a cheque.

 "You look like someone's been force-feeding you rat poison," remarked a tipsy Aspen Martin, wandering over. "Or was it just seeing Blue again? He does that to a lot of people."

 "It was Blue," he said sullenly. "He wants me to work for the Furies."

 "Yeah, I know, he mentioned it," the lamia said, blinking mistily. Cougar put out a hand to steady him as he swayed. "What the hell did you put in the wine?"

 "...alcohol?" he suggested sweetly. "I thought you didn't drink."

 Aspen raised a finger. "You're rrrrright! That's why my head feels so fuzzy." The dual coloured eyes were gently crossing. "Mind you, you try looking after my kid, you'd drink too."

 "I babysat your damn brat," Cougar reminded him, fighting to hide a grin. It was impossible not to be cheered up by Aspen's amiable childishness. "He broke my microwave."

 "So you did. You taught him some words I didn't want him hearing." Aspen paused. "Well, you did, or maybe Vaje. Or Toya. Or possibly Celia. Someone did."

 Aspen's boy - well, his nephew, really - had the face of an angel and a set of genetics which were funnelled directly from Satan's own evil laboratory. Surpassing even Thom's sister for sheer mischief, no one ever babysat more than once.

 "So Martin," he said, switching the empty wine glass Aspen had for orange juice, "who decided I'd made an ideal emissary for the Furies?"

 Aspen smiled sleepily. "That would be me."

 "You bastard."

 The lamia's eyes sharpened to cat-like indifference, and Cougar reminded himself that Aspen had headed Pursang. However dumb or debilitated he acted, it was nothing but a practised façade. "Try gratitude instead."

 "Gratitude? For chucking me into that nest of vipers?"

 "For persuading them you'd be more use alive than dead." There was an indefinable change to Aspen's stance; his temper was rising like lava bubbling up through a volcano. "You know a lot about them, Redfern. Too many people do. They're not nameless and faceless, and that's worrying the people high up."

 "Since when? Blue doesn't care, Toya's learned we can look after ourselves, and we don't mess with K'Shaia."

 The vampire hissed between his teeth, startlingly feline, and Cougar was reminded that there really was only a thin veneer hiding Aspen's savagery. Nothing could undo the damage that his family and Pursang had wrought between them; however well Aspen had glued the pieces of himself back together, the cracks still showed, gleaming and prickly.

 "You think they're the only ones who matter? They're the most powerful, but there are others who'd gladly take their places. Especially in Pursang." Aspen kept his voice low, but his eyes were starting to glow, fireflies darting in them. "You know what happens to people who find out about the Furies, Redfern? We kill them, or we recruit them. You've had a few years grace because several of our plans went askew - vermin wars messing things up, some fiend rigging the election, the shake-up in Pursang - but they're out for you now."

 That was the longest speech Cougar had ever heard him make. "I thought you'd left."

 A disgusted look was his answer. "Yeah, they just wished me luck and waved me goodbye. You don't ever leave, Redfern, you just...aren't about as much. Toya keeps me informed, and so do a couple of others."

 "So they want to recruit me," he mused softly.

 "No, they want to kill you. I convinced them to recruit you." It was worrying how blithely he said that.

 "Didn't Toya say anything?"

 "Everyone knows you've been friends for years. Won't wash. Whereas me - well, everyone knows Blue and I grew up together, and I'm still alive, which means a lot in the Furies, and okay, I'm bonkers, but I've got an eye for talent."

 As per usual, Aspen's guileless phrasing made Cougar half-smile. "And I'm talent."

 The lamia blinked. "Not like that! Blue thought about recruiting you once, you know. Way back when. You could be good at the job, if you didn't have so many scruples." Cougar noted his tone: as though morality was a mere inconvenience. It probably was to Aspen, for despite his supposed reformation, he still had a hand in some less than wholesome business. "Redfern - the job's easy, it's clean, and I hear Sangager's daughter is sexy as hell."

 "Yeah, I'm really into women ten thousand times my age," he drawled. "And if I do this for the Furies, that's it? No more knives in the night?"

 "Uhhh...." Aspen looking cute and abashed was never a good thing. Never. "They've - kind of told their trainees to try their skills on you."

 "Wh-hat!" Pursang were sending their vicious, bloodthirsty darlings to try and kill him? Well, it explained the large number of noisy night-time visitors...but why only half-grown kids?

 Aspen raised his hands defensively. "Only the novices. You're part of their training program now."

 He mouthed furiously, for all the world like an outraged carp. Lovely. Just lovely. "I'm...what?"

 "It's your own fault for putting all those traps up."

 "They were for Blue!" he said indignantly. After Blue's last home visit, Cougar had rigged up his house with a number of ingenious snares, with help from his diabolically inventive friends.
 
 A shrug. "Pursang were so impressed they decided to use your house as a display ground. They figured you could handle anyone who actually got in."

 "That's..." he spluttered. "That's incredibly not the point! I want to be able to sleep unmolested in my own home!"

 Aspen's wicked schoolboy grin lit up his thin face. "Really? Not what I heard."

 "Oh god," he moaned, horrified. Keeping Blue out had somehow led to fifty curious assassins trying to get *in*. This was unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. "Fine. Aside from all your puppets, no trouble?"

 "Take the job, no trouble." Aspen looked thoughtful. "Blue provided a list of what he'd personally do to anyone who bothered you afterwards."

 Blue did owe him a favour, and despite their internal feuds, there was an odd protectiveness between them that Cougar had reluctantly acknowledged after bizarrely managing to save Blue's life not so very long ago. If only because he felt that if anyone was to rid the world of his detached, destructive half-brother, he had the most right.

 Still - it was very unlike Blue, and Aspen had to detail half the list before Cougar was entirely satisfied. The precise descriptions certainly *were* Blue, down to the elaborate promises of unleashing Schnookums.

 "I'll take it," he said wearily. It would be less trouble. Maybe getting away would even do him some good; he'd been in Ryars Valley for nearly ten years of his life, and that was a long time in a place as small and snug as this. "God, I'll take it. Just let him know."

 "Shall do," Aspen perked up, gazing over Cougar's shoulder. "Hey, say what you like about our Lady Fury - Chatoya knows how to make an entrance."

 She certainly did.

~*~

 "It's busy," said the twin on her left, in a warm Scottish brogue that didn't match the way she gazed at the crowds, assessing and counting. "Too many warm bodies."

 "Dangerous," murmured the one on her right. "Do you trust these people?"

 "Some," Chatoya answered mildly, waving at the Pack members she knew, sighing as she saw that while Jepar had abandoned the antlers, he'd managed to acquire a pair of fairy wings instead. He had the most atrocious taste.

 "Foolish," the one on her left said. The two moved in step, clockwork soldiers that didn't need much at all to wind them up. Chatoya had brought them not for her protection but for theirs; they were dangerously arrogant, and offending too many of Pursang's older members.

 They made a startling sight, flanking her in perfect symmetry, moving in unison. Alone, neither would have turned heads; both diminutive women with long honey-blond hair that had been pinned up into elaborate loops and twists, and the same icy-green eyes that never thawed, even for each other, but it was the scars that always made people stare.

 Both had a deep purple ligature around their neck, and when she had inquired quietly about it to Ross, who'd found them in Scotland, he'd shrugged. "The Lachlan enclave put silver wire around their necks and strung them from the nearest trees. An inventive trick." Approval had been in his voice, none of the mute horror she had felt. "They'd murdered their siblings and eaten half the bodies."

 "And you felt they were Pursang material," she'd said sharply.

 His china-blue eyes had gleamed, unnervingly clear and perceptive. "For that bit of pettiness? No. But they've been behind a most beautiful stream of murders in the highlands - the artistry, lady witch, the artistry was sublime." Yet - he seemed nervous, shifting in his seat like an errant child.

 She could never grow used to the fact Ross was a connoisseur of death; that he drank it in as he did the fine art and architecture of his European provinces, and if he could, he would frame it and cherish it evermore, revelling in a blood-streaked beauty that she simply could not see in the pathos of gored heaps that were all Pursang left.

 "They're older than usual," she had remarked. Pursang tended to recruit from children, with one or two exceptions of ancient and powerful Nightpeople they felt they could persuade. "And you're jumpy."

 He drew in a sharp breath, his mouth twisting bitterly. "Yeah. There's something about them I don't like." Bemusement crawled into his voice, and emphasised the innocence of his cherubic face. "They remind me of Blue."

 She'd glanced over at the girls, sat demurely in the corner with their beautiful and blank faces. Neither spoke, nor so much as looked at each other, but she couldn't help but feel something had passed between them. "How so?"

 He'd struggled for words, as he so often did. "I don't know," was all he could say. "They'll be good, lady witch, worth all the effort, but get them away from here and get them away from me."
 
 Baffled, she had, but the longer she spent in the twins' company, the more she felt the strangeness that had niggled Ross so. They were eerie anyway, with their identical inflectionless voices, and the sameness of their every gesture, but there was something beyond that.

 Tonight, however, she intended them to be visible and uncanny, and to draw the eyes away from her.

 After all, she had a poisoned promise to keep.

~*~

 "Bloody hell," Aspen whispered. "She brought those British tykes."

 Cougar had noted the twin sisters, mirroring each other in a graceful dance, but had dismissed them quickly. His eyes were on Chatoya. She was wearing the dress he'd bought her for her birthday, and he felt a hot satisfaction at how perfectly it fit; it was a purple velvet halterneck that he'd had tailormade, and it emphasised the slenderness of her body and the white shoulders, rising from the material like Thetis from the waves.

 "Our lady's looking good," the lamia commented, lifting his glass to her. "Wasn't that your gift, Redfern?"

 "Yeah," he said, examining her face, so familiar to him. There were new lines on her face, and shadows under her eyes that worried him. She'd been wrestling Pursang's demons for four years now, and it was taking its toll. So much of the laughter had drained away from her; she spent too much times closeted in meetings, running from dark city to distant enclave, and it showed. Her skin had lost its tan, and she'd grown too thin.

 She was turning to talk to Vaje Chusson, who'd detached himself from Lisa to lecture her, by the looks. The coyote was stabbing a finger at her, frustration on his face.

 "He looks just like he does when he's telling off Zane," remarked Aspen, shaking his head. "Chatoya detests him mothering her, but someone has to do it."

 Startled, Cougar stared at him. "Huh?"

 The lamia gave him a look of exasperation. "You think we can't see that she's burning herself out, Redfern? She's not made for Pursang's life - we've seen it before, when we've chosen people who weren't...right. You can't have a heart and stay sane. Not really."

 There was a terrible sadness in Aspen's eyes; the weight of knowing that however hard he tried, he would never quite fit in with his human soulmate. They make them to kill, Cougar thought, but they break them in every other regard.

 "Then get her out," he hissed.

Aspen's expression became pitying. Pity - from him. That was unexpected, and worrying. "We need her too much." He smiled faintly. "You haven't been there, Redfern, you have no idea how things have changed. She's strong, in a way I wasn't, and Therese isn't. Someone's standing up to Blue at last, and Pursang is different because of it. I...I don't want things to be like they were."

 "What do you want?" he said, storing this new information away. There had been care in Aspen's voice; Toya mattered to him. Maybe she mattered to all these divine, deadly assassins whose eyes followed her with such avidness.

 His face became wistful, terribly young then. "I know people like us can't really have the fairytale ending," he said, so quietly Cougar had to strain to hear him. "But she makes us think we can. And that's something."

 "Not enough though," snarled Vaje Chusson, stomping over to join them. He look like he wanted to rip someone's head clean off, and Cougar hoped it wasn't going to be him. "She's so bloody stubborn!"

 "What happened?" he asked.

 Vaje's eyes narrowed into two orange lines. "I told her she needs to take a damn break. She told me to shove it. You fill in the blanks." He tilted his head suddenly, his expression altering subtly into calculation. "Better yet - you convince her, Redfern. If anyone can, it's you."

 "Me?"

 "Use that famous Redfern charm. And get your snake of a brother away from her. He's been tormenting her, and if he carries on..." Vaje's voice mutated into a low, rolling growl that made Aspen edge backwards.

 Cougar felt the anger bubble up from his ribcage. "Has he now."

 "Don't get me wrong," the coyote said tiredly. "No more so than usual. But - she needs someone to look after her, and Blue only wants to play with her, and pick her apart piece by piece. You love her. Why shouldn't it be you?"

 To hear the truth spoken so brutally shocked him, dampening the anger. "Does everyone know?"

 There was apprehension in the way Vaje stood. He was afraid, Cougar realised, and afraid of him. When had assassins started worrying about...then the thought fell into place. He supposed they saw him as one of them now, if Blue had offered him a job. Even though he wasn't.

 "It's...obvious," the shapeshifter said tactfully. "To me, anyway. I'm pretty good at recognising unrequited love." There was a rawness in those words that Cougar didn't ask about.

 "I didn't know," volunteered Aspen, wide-eyed. "But I'll keep it to myself. You don't want Blue getting wind of it."

 In a moment of mutual paranoia, all three swung round to the corner where Blue had been accosted by the lovely, impassive twins. One of them was stroking his face, and the other was staring at him with such hunger Cougar felt chilled. Poor Blue.

 Poor Blue? What the hell was he thinking?

 Those inhuman azure eyes stared back, and then Blue's voice broke into his mind, faintly annoyed.

 I think I shall be on my way. Pursang's darlings are despicably dull, not to mention the fact they're mauling me, and I have no urge to spend my entire evening talking shop.

 Don't let the door hit you on the way out, he sent sweetly. It was nice of you to drop in and not horribly murder or mutilate anyone.

 The night is young yet. There was promise in the dark-washed words. Already Blue was slithering away from the twin assassins like a silken shadow, the crowds parting easily before him. And I have an engagement elsewhere which will be far more profitable.

 He didn't so much as glance at Chatoya, and neither did she appear to notice him. Cougar wondered if this steely indifference was real, or another of the endless charades that the Furies acted out, but from the sudden stiffness in her shoulders, he thought not.

 "Trust him not to spend the evening singing Auld Lang Syne," muttered Vaje when Cougar told them.

 Aspen beamed. "Everyone knows it's good luck to welcome in the New Year with a sacrifice."

 "A thousand years ago, maybe!" Vaje was looking at the vampire with faint disbelief. "Boy, you have got to get your head screwed on right. You're getting married in a couple of years, remember?"

 Staring through the space between them, his eyes met Chatoya's - and in them he saw the old sweetness he had been so fond of, how often had he seen that look? How many hundreds of times had he seen her face, alight with curiosity, mobile in laughter, and too often lately, engraved with sorrow. How often had he stood by, watching her not from afar but from beside her, aware of every nuance of her body language, the way she spoke too known, both painful and beloved.

 He wondered how long this could go on, how long he would love and hurt for it.

 Cougar left the pair to their bickering. He needed some air, he wanted to be away from the crazed crowds and the never-ending intrigues and backstabbing of it all. Damn it, he didn't want to be tangled up in this world, but it seemed he had no choice, no choice at all.

~*~

 "A moment."

 Elayne St. John held up a hand to the Pack members she was talking to, and they fell silent, instantly. She loathed their cowardice, as she loathed everything about their grubby, hungry existence, but she felt the fizzling of their fear at the edge of her senses. Tender, overwhelming, it reassured her; fear was a presence she had felt about her all her life, and without it, she was bereft.

 There he was. Cougar Redfern, making his way through the crowds with a quip here and a smile here that didn't really hide the urgency in his movements. Something wild that should never have been caged, she thought solemnly, and now spent all his time searching for escape.

 There was a mix of rage and defencelessness in him that she was drawn to, that she recognised. She thought it would taste good under her teeth, and trifled with the idea of luring him out to the lake and letting the waters wash away everything except the fear; that would be left, tingeing his flesh, and-

 But those weren't her orders. No water. No baptisms. No consecration.

She moved to intercept him, sliding her body between gaps in the crowd. Ignoring the hesitant invitation of a vampire nearby, she caught Cougar before he reached the door, her fingers closing around his arm.

 He spun, and there was mistrust in his eyes. "What?"

 Elayne smiled, letting her face warm with something of her hunger. "I just want to say thank you for inviting us."

 The Redfern pride was there, shaping every inch of that aristocratic face, from the way he looked down his nose at her to the slight, contemptuous curl of his mouth. "Alex invited himself, and the rest of you."

 "You could have kicked us out," she said with a self-deprecating glance. "Not without a fight, but you could have."

 His lips quirked. She'd heard he liked feistiness. "I can think of better ways to spend my evening."

 Her laugh was perfect; smoky, and filled with the slightest hint of seduction. She had practiced it for hours. "So can I."

 "Does it involve drowning people?" he said pleasantly, jolting her. "The Baptist? Isn't that it?"

 How...she recovered quickly. "It's a name, and I didn't choose it. And I don't intend to drown anyone." If only because it had been explicitly forbidden.

 "No?" He smiled, tightly, and she saw the first reflections of Blue Malefici in his face, flitting under his skin like a deadly haunting. "Keep away from me, Elayne, and get out of the Pack."

 "Or what?" she snarled, forgetting everything she was supposed to say and do.

 He leaned in, so close she could smell him, filling her nostrils with nothing but searing fury, and not a trace of the fear she prized so much. "There is no or. Just do it."

 She was left staring at empty space, the slam of the fire escape rattling in her ears long after his words had faded. The crowds seemed distant, as far from her as she was from humanity.

 And for the first time, Elayne was afraid.

~*~

 His breath whirled upwards in grey fog, drifting towards heaven. There was a certain cleanness, a sharply defined beauty to the night that Cougar appreciated even in his melancholy. The sky was as velvet-soft as Toya's dress, the same deep and plush indigo, starless, stunning. Against it, the snow was a blue-silver blanket, crunching a little under his feet.

 He knew the cold was hanging on the air, but he couldn't feel it. Still felt too much though.

 I thought these things were supposed to fade, he thought with a dull wonder. How can it be that weeks pass, and I half-forget her, and then she appears and it's as if every moment is the moment I tell her I love her, and she tells me no.

 Her refusal beat at him, again and again, gentle, implacable as the falling flakes.

 He stooped and drew a heart in the snow, like he'd done as a child, and then scrubbed it out angrily. Child's games. He wouldn't write CR 4 CI inside it, that was someone else's suburban fantasy. That kind of romantic nonsense belonged to Jepar and Aspen, who loved with depth and simplicity, who'd found happiness and fought ferociously to keep it.  

He turned to go back in, and froze.

 Chatoya stood there like a dark desire, ankle deep in the unsullied snow with her hands clasped behind her back. Her hair was long and curling in the cold, tumbling about her shivering shoulders; she was so pale now, her skin a sunless camellia-white against that dark dress, so she seemed to have pulled down the sky to wrap herself in it.

 The simplicity and the beauty of it - of her - struck him hard.

 Cougar drank her in like the purest blood he would ever taste, and thought of nothing else. No, he knew her face wasn't beautiful; her nose too long, her features too plain for the classical symmetry that captured eyes. But she had captured his heart, and he saw her through the intimate haze of their shared moments, she who had touched him so deeply, who he had loved so long.  

 Then she smiled tentatively, and the holiness of that moment passed.

 "Alex said you were out here," she said, and tiptoed towards him, unsteady in the slippery snow as a newborn fawn. "What are you doing?"

 "Getting some air." He eyed her, and then bent to scoop up a snowball - he flung it, and she yelped as it smashed into powdery pieces on her shoulder.

 "You bastard!" she gasped, and not to be outdone, threw an even larger snowball back.

 He dodged easily, grinning. "Language, Chatoya Irkil, language."

 "I learned it all from you." She stuck out her tongue, and wrapped her arms about herself. "Couldn't you have found somewhere warmer to loiter?"

 "You didn't have to come out here," he pointed out. "I wasn't expecting company."

 Unfazed, she shrugged. "I wanted to see you - and to show you something."

 "Does the something involve you taking off that devilish number?" he said innocently, giving her the toe-curling Redfern smile that he'd been informed would melt nuclear ice. It was easier if he kept this light, kept it from being too serious.

 "No." Her voice was steady, and guarded. "I owe you an apology."

 He frowned. "What the hell for?"

 She stepped delicately through the snow, setting her feet carefully, over to a dark bush that grew in the unkempt backyard of the Chill. "Do you know what this is?"

 Thoroughly confused, Cougar joined her to stare at the plant. "Not a damn clue."

 "It's mistletoe."

 The significance sank in slowly. "You? But I thought...Elayne...I..." But Toya would never do anything to harm him. He knew that like he knew that water was wet.

 "I hired Elayne," she confessed, mischief glittering in her eyes as she looked at him, for a moment the girl he had grown up with, delighted by her own craft. "And I spread the rumours about your - special Christmas gift. Then almost no one would think it strange if I kept close to you."

 Blue might, he thought, but Blue was gone. Fed up with- "Did you tell those twins to pester Blue?"

 Toya nodded, half-smiling. "Blue can't stand being around people like himself."

 That was something to think about. Something to think about later.

 "So you got rid of Blue," he mused, "and you made it so you could see me. But...why?"

 Her smile faded, and in her eyes, he saw uncertainty. "Someone..." She cleared her throat, and started again, something hardening in her face. As if she had decided that now she had started, there was no point in doing this with half her heart. "Someone a lot wiser than he knows once told me that if you could believe in love at first sight, why not love at ninety-first."

 He didn't know what to say.

 But when she kissed him, he realised that he didn't have to say anything - that saying anything would have broken this moment that he'd spent years waiting for.

 It was a tentative kiss, tender, disbelieving - and then he was pulling her closer, his hands stroking over the curve of her shoulders, the gentle arch of her back, her sides, the way he had wanted to for so long. So very long. She was slight, warm, moving subtly in his arms, shifting her body more deeply into his, until it was not at all tentative; just heat and wetness and years to make up for in this perfect, endless moment.

 Finally, she drew back - or he did, he was never sure - and they stood staring at one another, the wind riffling strands of her hair across her face. Those moss-green eyes were solemn, full with twining emotions he couldn't comprehend.

 "Why...why did you do that?" he said finally, his voice not quite his own; husky, uncertain.

 Her answering smile was faint and sad. "I wanted to know what it would be like."

 "And what was it like?"

 He heard his own yearning in that question, and cursed himself for it. He didn't want this to be so painful; he wanted it to be that magical and breathtaking instant forever, drifting through an eternal sparkling moment, even if he knew that simply wasn't the way the world worked.

 She moved back from him, wrapping her arms around herself again, looking away. That hurt a little. "Better than I thought," she told him simply. "Like - like an amazing dream, the kind you wake up from smiling."

 The warning was there in her voice, but he still had to ask. "But?"

 "But still just a dream," she said, now gazing at him, the regret so clear in that pale, set face. "No matter how wonderful...not real."

 "It could be," he whispered, stepping towards her to unwrap her arms from her body, and replace them with his. Her skin was frost-cool, and covered with goosebumps that he smoothed away with his fingers, holding her as carefully as if she was porcelain. "You know that."

 "No," she said, but her voice was muffled against his neck, her breath a cloudy warmth. For one sweet second, he thought she might change her mind; her fingertips ran over the planes of his shoulders, the light and tender caress almost more profound, more torturous than if they were stood there naked.

 And then she drew back again, and shook her head. "No, Cougar. If things had been different - if I hadn't chosen Pursang, you're what I would have had." She laughed, the sound harsh in the snow-thick silence. "I just wanted to know what it would have been like to have the dream - to have someone who would have loved me like I was everything. I wanted to feel normal again. I..."

 She shut her eyes for a moment, and her voice held a rawness he knew no one else would ever hear.

 "I wanted to be happy."

 "And you'll walk away," he demanded, angry with her now. "Why do you think that you have to keep making sacrifices? Why can't you be happy? Do you think that just because you're part of the Furies you have to spend your time covered in blood, completely miserable? Vaje and Aspen aren't. Lance isn't. Even Ross has it better figured out, and he's about as stable as a radioactive isotope!"

 Startlement made her face younger, and more vulnerable than he had seen her since she stepped into their darkling world. "I..."

 "What you do is just a job," he said flatly. "It's a crap, ugly job, but you're changing things. Vaje, Lance, Ross - they all respected Aspen, but they didn't love him the way they love you. You have their loyalty. They trust you. Do you understand how rare that is? Don't you realise that you've changed them, and for the better?"

 Wordless, she just stared at him. Could she really not see it? Didn't she realise that people were beginning to speak about the Furies differently? Nightfire and K'Shaia did the majority of the killings now. Pursang - the rumours had begun to speak of Pursang differently. Only a few rumours, only a few occasions, but it was the first time anyone had ever differentiated between the three.

 "It's going to take time," he said softly. "The Night World doesn't like change. But don't be blind, Toya, things are changing, and because of you. Don't lose hope, please, don't. And don't - don't be unhappy when you don't have to."

 Chatoya covered her face with her hands, and he thought for one gut-wrenching moment that she was crying, but then he realised she was breathing very hard, forcing herself not to. Unsure what to do, he stood and waited.

 Her eyes were still suspiciously bright, but she gave him a watery smile. "I've almost forgotten," she confessed. "Everything before Pursang - it seems like someone else's life."

 "It was yours," he said dryly. "It was pretty exciting, and I was there for a lot of it."

 "You were. You always were." There was wonderment in her face, a lovely naivety. "How did you manage that?"

 He smirked, putting on the Redfern arrogance like a cloak. "Superb timing."

 "I wish it could have been different," she said.

 He looked at her solemnly, so fragile there on the snowy lawn. Incessantly strong for the Furies, she had to be, and always calm in front of the others - was he the only person  who saw her weaknesses? He felt proud, then, proud of that trust.

 "It still can be." He held up a hand to hush her. "Maybe not now, Toya. But in the future. If you want me, I'll be here. You just have to come and find me. I'm yours." He didn't say those other words; he couldn't.

 She smiled then, that sweet slow smile that lit up her face.

 He grinned back, and held out a hand to her. "Come on, there's a horde of people inside waiting to swoon at the sight of me."

 "So arrogant," she muttered, but as her fingers closed around his, they squeezed tight.

 Maybe not now, he thought to himself. But yes - yes, I think, no, I know, in the future. And I can wait, because god knows, every minute will be worth it.

 "Happy New Year," he said, pausing before they went back inside.

 As the hubbub of the crowd washed over them, their fingers slipping apart, she gave him one last glance, and Cougar saw the stirrings of desire in her eyes, and a tenderness he had wanted to be directed at him for so very long.

As he eased into the chattering crowds, he missed her soft reply. "I think it will be."

 But he didn't need to hear it. Not anymore.

The rose in the bottle, the thorns in the bottom
The stars surround me, the cold astounds me.
And I cry cause the weather has gotten to me
And I laugh at the people that I can't be
All their lives, pretty pictures.