He has known himself beautiful.
What angel isn’t beautiful?
What gilded, saintly thing is not handsome even when he is dark?
And she is beautiful, too. A color he’s never seen before except in the sunsets at the height of summer when the heat turns the sky a kind of liquid warm. He licks his lip, abandons his reflection in favor of something better. Company, he thinks, but it’s more than that. He craves the heat of her skin because the blood that courses through him is a dragon’s blood, cold and thick.
He moves slow along the shore. Strangely elegant for a thing of his size, his considerable stature. The words may be empty but it doesn’t matter. The smile is cold and stiff but he is drawn in by the honeysuckle voice. He is not a fool, Messiah. But there is something to be said about saints and trust.
She laughs and he can taste the sweetness of it. Saccharine. But he does not yet know how to heed warning signs, so he stations himself close enough that he can smell her. That he can feel the heat that rolls off her in waves. He almost reaches out to touch her. Doesn’t. Contents himself with studying the color up close, the curve of her lip.
Devilish, she says, and he drags that golden gaze lazy along the ridge of her spine, across the fine slope of her shoulder, until he finally meets her eye. “Do I look like a devil to you?” he asks, low, tips his head so that the halo casts an even stronger glow down the length of his face.
