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solid matter.”
    She shook her head, still reeling a bit from the memory, and more so from his proximity and touch. “No. That’s impossible.”
    “You’re denying it because the human mind recoils from the experience. I would not have done it if I’d had any other choice. Passing often has an untoward effect on your race. It seemed an acceptable risk, however, when the only alternative was dying in the blast.”
    “It was a trick of some kind,” she insisted.
    All the playfulness went out of him. “Think back, Ann. First we were in my house, drinking whiskey.”
    “You grabbed me. I remember that.”
    “Like this,” he said. He placed a warm hand at the small of her back and drew her close. She didn’t push him away. “Do you remember what happened next?” he asked.
    “And then we were outside,” she said, her breath short. “On the slope beneath the monument, but we must have walked.”
    “Can you recall walking out of the house?” She could feel his breath on her face, warm and sweet.
    “I was in shock. That’s why I don’t remember how we got out of the building.”
    Somehow her hands had come to rest on his chest. She was such a fool.
    “This is the second time you’ve come to me, Ann Phillips. If you mean to involve yourself in my business, then you need to understand who and what I am.”
    “I know you’re a criminal.”
    “That’s not all I am.”
    She could feel all that he was: the warmth of his body, the solid muscles of his chest. “I’m not sure I want to know any more. I’m a schoolteacher. Getting involved with a man like you could ruin my career.”
    “Oh, I’ll ruin you, Ann Phillips, I promise you that.”
    Finn’s mouth covered hers. Warm and wet. Lips and tongue. Licking fire into her. Kindling heat low in her belly and between her legs, where she suddenly, alarmingly ached to be touched. She had not felt anything like this, anything so immediate or revelatory since her first heart-pounding fumblings as a teenager; and it was so transporting, so consuming, that it felt almost supernatural.
    He broke away. She opened her eyes, thoroughly dazed, to look up at his face, and felt a frisson of sublime terror. Finn MacUmhaill was beautiful. The high cheekbones, the pale-gray eyes, the full lips and masculine jaw were in fact too perfect. Seen from this angle his beauty was inhuman and cruel.
    The hand at the small of her back drifted up to her shoulder, then gripped her painfully tight. His other hand stroked her cheek, caressed her jaw, pain and pleasure in one embrace. Then he said, “Close your eyes.”
    She did, because she wanted more.
    She didn’t get it.
    The ground shifted beneath her feet, and she cried out but the sound was swallowed by the earth. She was falling. And flying. And suffocating. She was part of the ancient wood of the house, of the soil beneath it, of running water deep underground. She was growing through tree roots and out of blades of grass and then she was in the open, shaking with terror and shivering in the cool evening breeze.
    They were standing in the middle of a park on scrubby grass. Or Finn was standing; she was clinging to him for support.
    She pushed him away and stepped back. Her knees wobbled, and she staggered up the dirt path. She could feel the breeze tickling her skin, but seconds ago she had been . . . buried alive. And yet moving through the earth. Her mind reeled. She felt for the cool silver of the whistle at her neck and tried to get her bearings.
    They were in the old training ground. The little park was crisscrossed by dirt paths and bordered on all sides by homes. Light shone from the windows of the grand brick mansions on the high slope and peeked around the shades in the tiny, two-story row houses on the other side.
    Everything about the scene was oddly peaceful. Somehow their arrival, which had felt like a cataclysm to Ann, hadn’t even disturbed the birds in the trees.
    Or Finn.
    “What—What did you just do?” she