“I’m always Scottish, muirnín. No matter how far I get from the bloody place. Murder, murder, murrrdurrr. Here’s another you’ll like. Houghmagandie. That’s sex for pleasure, not for procreation, a right sinful thing, ye ken.”

She smiled, then sobered, curling her fingers against his face. “Whatever the truth is, Niall, I didn’t intend to hurt you.”

He closed his hands on her wrists, holding her there. “Ah, lass. I guess I started it, didn’t I? I wouldnae have reacted the way I did to ye talking about other men if you didnae matter to me far more than you should. Three hundred years since a woman captured my heart, and ye did it in less than a week.”

When her eyes stilled on his, he continued, “I do hope guid things for you, but maybe, once things are resolved and they reassign ye, which they will, ’tis fine my time’s coming tae an end. Knowing I’d lose you, on top of Evan . . .” He shrugged, gave her a smile that wrenched her heart. “To my way of thinking, Heaven only exists if my heart stays here with you two.”

Turning her toward the door, he gave her a pat on the bottom and a gentle shove. “Go to your Master. For all he pretends to be different, ye know vampires get in a high do if they have to wait.”

The last thing she’d wanted was to leave him after that astounding declaration, but she wanted Evan, too. So she went, because her Master had ordered her to his side.

Her mind was spinning over the other things Niall had said. Up until now, she hadn’t allowed herself to think about it. It was easier to accept her inevitable death. But if she did miraculously survive, and was somehow released from Stephen’s mark to be reassigned? She imagined her return to the austere, regimented world of the vampire aristocracy, after experiencing Evan and Niall. She’d be leaving not just them, but the relationship they were developing with her.

The choice would not be hers, not any of it. But would she learn what it felt like to lose her heart entirely, the way Niall suggested? Stephen had fallen short of her expectations, but she’d accepted responsibility for that, knowing she’d assumed something that wasn’t in the typical vampire–servant relationship. She thought she’d evolved in her training. Instead, she’d simply buried what she wanted, and Evan and Niall had unearthed it in less than a week.

No matter the long penance sessions and doing everything to be the most obedient, most useful InhServ ever to Stephen, she’d watched vampire–servant pairings like that of Lady Lyssa and Jacob and fed that fuel to the tiny fire that had stayed alive deep in her heart.

Her training said nothing was about her wants or desires, but was it possible she would be a better servant if those wants and desires were taken into consideration? The InhServ program had always been about gifting an InhServ to a vampire showing political promise. Since they were all trained the same way, to be adaptable to whatever the vampire required, only the vampire’s preferences were considered. What if the program went more in-depth, considered variables in both InhServ and vampire, to make the relationship a more compatible one, beyond the services the servant was trained to offer?

She was turning into a radical. Though wryly amused, she was also a bit shaken by her thoughts. As she followed a path lit with solar lights toward where she felt Evan waiting for her, she did some calming mind exercises.

The colony’s layout added to that steadying influence. Cottages like theirs formed a loose, irregular circle around the main compound, which had a variety of functional buildings and open-air pavilions. Three of the former were obviously laid out for studio work, since she could see a variety of projects in process through the plethora of tall windows. One artist was still at work, her blowtorch throwing off a festive shower of sparks as she bent to her metal sculpting, her protective headgear in place.

The pavilions appeared to serve as communal areas as well as additional outdoor studio space. Groups of residents were playing cards at the assembled tables, others holding sleeping children on their laps as they chatted together. A group of staff members, wearing the dark embroidered shirt like Mel, were sharing a late dinner. They noticed Alanna, but she merely gave them a polite nod and continued onward. Unless they stopped her, it wasn’t appropriate to seek introductions until she determined what her Master required.

Her steps slowed despite herself when she passed the children’s playground. All the swings, mazes and climbing equipment were wooden carvings designed to look like mythical creatures, dinosaurs, trains. There were painted stone statues of fairies, comical gnomes and woodland animals, all of a size to encourage the children to touch or climb upon them. She let her hand slide along the arch of a unicorn’s neck before she recalled herself.

Among the trees bordering her paved path she was surprised by the occasional face, wooden pieces pinned to the trunks to create remarkably human expressions. Shrubs had been pruned into the shapes of fauns, unicorns, a car. These artistic touches were blended into the natural thick forest border around the compound, such that locating them became a treasure hunt.

At the crest of the path the forest opened up before her. A mowed, grassy field sloped down to a large pond, where the docks were stocked with paddleboats and canoes. The moon hung low over it, creating a silver lake, and the light pointed her to her destination.

Cutting off the path, she headed across the tended field. He waited for her inside a large gazebo, meeting her on the steps with a half smile. When he reached out a hand to help her up those stairs, she hesitated as she always did from the unexpected offer of assistance, but it was barely a pause, since she was eager for his touch. His eyes warmed on her.

“Nerida and Miah will join us shortly, but I figured you’d need a few minutes to get across the compound. Even with your eye for detail, in daylight you’ll find you missed half of it. The children call the perimeter paths The Enchanted Forest.”

“I can’t imagine how you ever bring yourself to leave.” Of course, she could say that for every place he’d taken her thus far.

He winked. “Mel kicks me out when I overstay my welcome.”

She suspected his art drove him ever onward to see new things, but he likely returned to this place when the ideas were overflowing, so he could execute them in familiar surroundings.

Always insightful, beautiful InhServ. This is a place of refuge, in many ways.

As he guided her into the gazebo, she saw art mounted on the interior walls, the piece directly before her catching her eye. It had been protected in a glass box, the lighting positioned around it making it clear to the viewer at night.

“This is your work.” Alanna drew closer. “But it’s different, and not just because it’s paint. What did you do?”

“Highlighted what was already there.” Evan moved to stand just behind her, his hip brushing her buttock. When she turned her head to look up at him, her hair fluttered across his shoulder, moved by the wind coming from across the lake. She made a move to draw it back, but he captured her hand, held it against his chest, though his eyes were on the canvas.

“You’re familiar with the saying, ‘we don’t see the forest for the trees’?” When she nodded, he added, “It works the opposite way as well. You look at a forest, but do you see the trees? Do you really see them?”

He pointed. “Each has a different shape, different leaves, even if they’re the same species. Some have been scarred by lightning or a bear’s claws during their lives, and that causes them to grow differently. They even respond differently to the touch of the wind, based on the shape of the trunks, the weight of the limbs. We don’t notice because we lack time, patience. Yet sit in one spot and watch, listen, notice, and you see it, how incredibly individual every single thing in life is. And yet”—he stepped back, taking her with him—“in key ways, very much the same. They all reach toward the light, though of course in this picture it’s moonlight.”

When she glanced at him, his gray eyes were intent on the work, studying what he’d done, what he could do better, though he kept speaking. “They all drive their roots into the ground to hold on to their space, to draw strength and nourishment. However, some go deeper than the others. As they grow up, their roots overlap. For some, it’s like fingers tangling together. Others tie knots.”

He drew her attention to a separate canvas, directly below that one. Whereas the upper one showed the forest above ground, the lower one showed what was happening beneath the earth. How the roots did become like fingers or, in the case of thicker tubers, like bodies. Bodies twined in passion or in a fetal waiting position, the nest of roots around them becoming the womb. Another shape was bound up in the more ropelike roots as if bound by a Master, waiting for whatever he desired. And then . . .

She bent to examine it more closely. At the very bottom of the lower canvas, near his signature, was a tiny, whiskered mole, working blindly on his small tunnel, oblivious to all of it.

“As long as you’ve lived, you could have painted historic events, but you seem to paint . . . everything else.” She didn’t mean it as an insult, and fortunately, he didn’t seem to take it as such. He shrugged.

“I’ve seen some amazing work. I’ve been to the Louvre, I’ve been to Rome . . . What I saw there was amazing, but it was intended for display, much of it commissioned. That doesn’t make it less remarkable, but what always interested me was the type of art created when it was simply what called to the artist. In a little, out-of-the-way church in the mountains of North Carolina, there’s a painting done by a nineteen-year-old, of Jesus laughing. When I looked at that, I thought, this is how it must be done, a direct conduit of the muse, no middleman of priest or art patron to interfere with that flow of pure energy.”

He nodded at the paintings. “As life grows short, it’s the small moments remembered, not what war was fought, or when the rocket went to the moon. It was the day you went to the beach with your mother, or a lover’s touch in a predawn light. The true history of the individual life. That’s what interests me.”