Heartland

I didn't think much about the war council going on in the other apartment while I showered. Instead, my mind kept wandering back to what she had said just before getting out of the car.

It hadn't been that long, nor had there been any sort of serious relationship in between. Granted, what Marielle and I had shared during my time in Paris couldn't be considered serious, as the specter of whether or not she was still dating Antoine hovered over us. She had said it was over, but I had always suspected she had neglected to tell Antoine that fact. Or, if she had, neither of them had really believed their separation was permanent. I wasn't Rebound Guy, more the Transient Mysterious Stranger. Not the healthiest of relationships, but compared to the others I'd had, it was pretty cut-and-dried. We liked each other-a lot-and knowing that circumstances were going to doom us at some point, we simply lived in the moment. The arrangement worked until the duel on New Year's Day.

The Chorus had been obsessed with Katarina, and so I had never been fully able to commit my heart to Marielle, and she had a connection to Antoine that remained steadfast throughout our relationship. We were both bound to others, but that hadn't diminished the intensity of our attraction to each other. You can love more than one person-the human heart has such capacity-but you will never be completely resolute in your attention. There will always be the distraction of that other person in your mind.

Even with Reija-and Rose, too-there had been the ghost of Katarina. But now that the Qliphotic shadow was gone, I was no longer as divided as I had been. I could give my full attention to Marielle.

There was only one annoying detail: the spirit of her father floating in my head. Kind of a mood killer. Unless I could figure a way to lock him out.

I gave that some thought while I stood in the shower. It kept me from thinking of other things. Like the slope of her neck, and the way a pearl kept nestling in the hollow of her throat. Like a soap bubble, a tiny moment of time caught in a sphere of magick.

On the morning of the new year, the city slept, exhausted from the midnight revelry of the new aeon. We had survived the millennial change, regardless of how you counted the first year of the next century, and the parties had been flush with the release of all the pent-up panic and apprehension that had unconsciously filled our hearts during the last years of the old world. It was a new world-this shiny twenty-first century, this third millennium-and while everyone slept off the hangover of the old, the new was still too young to be fully aware. We were outside of time for a few hours, between midnight and daybreak, where nothing mattered. Where nothing was true but the breathless promises exchanged during the ebb and flow of our rhythm. For a few hours, wrapped in the midnight cloak of cosmological renewal, we could pretend the past and the future weren't connected. We could close our eyes and forget our fears, thinking such elective blindness did, indeed, wash away the stains of our history. We could forget our petty jealousies and febrile paranoia. For a few hours.

Paris slept, wrapped in heavy blankets against the winter chill, and no one saw the sun's light splash across the white walls of Sacre-C?ur but Marielle and I.

She leaned against the railing of the apartment balcony. Her dark hair was a tangled mass of curls, and she wore an old anorak, threadbare at the left elbow and unraveling along the top of the right shoulder in a way that made it slip down on her arm, revealing the base of her neck. It was too long, coming down to mid-thigh, and her bare legs and feet seemed unaware of the chill air. She held a bottle of soapy water in her left hand and, plastic wand held close to her lips with her right, she blew a stream of bubbles out across the rooftops of the sleeping city.

The clothes weren't hers, nor was the apartment. A friend of Marielle's-a flash of blonde hair in the lights of the club and a husky voice in my ear-had pressed herself up against me shortly after midnight. 'She has the key,' the friend had said. 'Take her away from here.' She gave me the passcode to the security system, and thus armed- key and code-we had vanished from the world. Anonymous and lost to everyone but each other. Suspended between midnight and dawn, between the last and the next, we could come together one final time.

I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Marielle blow soap bubbles, my left hand covering the ugly scabs on my right knuckles. There was no disguising the black stain of the bruise forming under my left eye, yet she hadn't said anything about it other than to brush the tender skin once with her lips during our out-of-time excursion.

She dipped the wand into the bottle and glanced back into the shadows of the apartment, her hair falling across her face. 'Come outside,' she said. 'Watch the dawn with me.'

Pont Alexandre. At daybreak.

I was already late.

I shook my head. 'I have to go,' I said.

She looked across the rooftops and lifted the wand to her lips. A mist of soap bubbles streamed away into the world. 'What would you do for love?' she asked. 'Anything?' The tiny bubbles-slippery with gold and green light- spun and turned, caught in the eddies of air rising from the street.

' 'Anything' is a dangerous word,' I said, recalling the taste of her finger in my mouth, of the bone beneath the skin; her pinkie digging into my cheek as I bit her ring finger. Mark me as yours, wolf, so that we never forget. Let us choose this.

She walked to the balcony door, framed by the white light reflecting off Sacre-C?ur. 'So is 'love.' ' She blew a large bubble, a swirling globe of iridescence, and with a tiny flick of her wrist, she set it free.

It floated toward me, a sphere of rainbow light. I was afraid to catch it, as if there might be too much electrical tension in my skin. As long as it didn't break, I didn't have to answer her question. I didn't have to look past her and recognize the dawn.

'What are you afraid of, my wolf?'

'I don't want to break it.'

It wasn't tomorrow. Not yet. Like this bubble, we were still caught outside of time.

'I can blow another one.' She dipped the wand in the bottle slowly, her pinkie finger delicately raised from the end of the wand as if she were using a silver spoon to stir tea. She watched me, her eyes in shadow, the light making a halo in her hair. 'But it won't be the same.'

The bubble landed on my naked thigh, and for a second, it hung there, quivering and swirling like a gaseous world, then it popped with a tiny noise like the death of a star. Perhaps the noise came from me. The memory was filled with the striated noise of the Chorus.

'You can't save them,' she said gently. 'They will all fall, and they will all vanish. Just like every minute of our lives. What is done is done, and what is gone is gone.'

'I know.' I touched the damp spot on my leg. 'It's just-I wish. . '

She came into the room, and straddled me, her naked body pressing against my groin. The fabric of the anorak tickled my chest and arms. Looking down, she dipped the wand into the bottle and blew a stream of bubbles into my face. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I never thought it would come to this. I thought you two would be stronger, but you are too polarized. Antoine is your opposite, I see that now; he is like you and yet so different. He knows his heart intimately; he takes it out and scrutinizes it every day, trying to understand what makes it work. Yet, he will never understand the passion that pumps through it.'

My face was wet with exploded soap bubbles, and she lowered her head to kiss me. Her lips brushed and caressed each damp splash of soap. 'And you, my wolf, refuse to look at your heart for fear of being overwhelmed by the passion therein.'

We are all bound to something, be it darkness or light; sometimes we choose which, and sometimes it is chosen for us.

A bubble caught in my throat, one of my own creation, and I couldn't get it out. I couldn't find the breath or the energy to make it rise. My heart, cold and frozen, was a stone in my chest. The Chorus lay about it, a writhing mass of black serpents.

Let us choose this.

'He will kill you,' she whispered, 'because that is the only way he understands how to ease the pain in his heart. If he does, he will lose me, and he knows this, but he doesn't know any other way.' Her lips moved to mine and lingered there. My hands held her waist, and she leaned against me, the bottle of soap bubbles crushed between us.

'If you kill him,' she whispered, her voice all but lost in the noise of my pulse, 'do it because your heart wants such an end, and not because you think I do. And, if you do, you, too, will break my heart.'

She plucked my left hand from her hip and slipped it under the anorak, up between her breasts so I could feel