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instinctive fascination with hunters rousing as I did. My new cell phone lay dead on my desk—it never kept a charge within the Cloisters walls.
    “Astrid!” At the third cry, my brain clicked into recognition. Giovanni, shouting to me from the street. I shot out of bed, even as I felt Bonegrinder slamming against the walls of her cage down in the don’s office.
    Great. She’d wake the whole nunnery if her growing interest in our visitor turned to out-and-out bloodlust. I bolted down the stairs in bare feet and pajamas, sprinted across the mosaic tiles of the entrance hall, and opened the bronze doors as silently as I could.
    Giovanni stood in the street just beyond the courtyard. A car sat idling behind him, a very amused Italian in the driver’s seat.
    “There you are!” he cried.
    “Shush!” I reached the gate. “What are you doing here? You’re going to wake everyone up. You’re lucky we finally got a cage Bonegrinder can’t chew through.” Yet.
    “I tried to call.” His shirt was wet. He wore no jacket and carried no umbrella to protect him from the rain. It looked very sexy on him. I shuddered to think what it looked like on me. Water was already soaking through my tank top and cotton pajama pants.
    I crossed my arms over my chest. “You’re supposed to be on a plane.”
    “I couldn’t leave it like this,” he said as I opened the gate. “Astrid, we’re not breaking up.”
    I almost slammed the gate shut again. “Says who?” He could not hit me with that before dawn. A killer unicorn I could handle. But not Giovanni on my doorstep, wet through and begging for … for what, exactly? I remained on the threshold of the Cloisters, my hand on the gate. “Are you staying here?” That stopped him short. “No, I—”
    “Then we can’t. We talked about this.” We’d laid out several very well-reasoned and dispassionate arguments as to why longdistance relationships never worked and were far more hurtful in the long run to the people who tried to have them. The fact that Giovanni could go off free and clear and I was staying in my
nunnery
didn’t help.
    “We can talk until our lungs give out,” he said, “and it doesn’t make a difference.” He laid his fist against his chest. The water had rendered his white shirt translucent and sticky, and the darkness of his skin shone through. “I can’t talk myself out of the way I feel. Don’t you know that by now? Don’t you know how hard I tried, all summer long?”
    I hugged my arms tight around myself and buried my chin in my chest. “Stop.”
    “I couldn’t give you up when there were rules and family and deadly mythical monsters standing between us, Astrid. What kind of person would I be if I let something as stupid as an ocean succeed?”
    I squeezed my eyes shut.
    “And not even a big ocean, like the Pacific,” he added. “The Atlantic? It’s a puddle.”
    I flatly refused to smile. The rain pattered down all around us. The cracks in the cobblestones filled with water, washing away the dust of two thousand years. How many people had died on this street? How many lovers had stood here, just like us, and said their final farewells? Giovanni was a fool to think it couldn’t happen to us, too. “Astrid,” he said. “Please.”
    I couldn’t. Losing him now was hard enough. Later, I’d only care more; it would only hurt more. I was already teetering at the edge. How could I risk it? “I’m afraid,” I whispered in a breath softer than the rain.
    But he heard it, nonetheless. “You?” he said, and I heard the smile in his voice, and when I lifted my face into the rain, I could see the smile in his eyes. “But you’re the bravest person I know. I’m not giving you up, Astrid the Warrior. I can’t.”
    And I knew at that moment that I couldn’t, either. Even if it would be easier. Even if it would be the rational, practical, non-magical thing to do. The old Astrid could have been so dispassionate. But if I wanted to hang on