The Man In The Wind by Sorenna Wise Page B

paper and placing it on the coffee table. “Apparently it’s to be well-attended, to everyone’s great surprise.” He shook his head. “Always easier to show respect when you don’t have to look them in the eyes.”
           “What does it say about Rai?” Iris asked. Rai winced a little.
           “It says that the Volkari necromancer disappeared in a mysterious incident and has not been found. There is some speculation that he never existed to begin with.” Mr. Deleone smiled his charming salesman’s smile. “Sounds like you beat the system, my boy.”
           “I hope so,” Rai said. Iris kissed his shoulder.
            “If not,” the auctioneer continued, “we can always sell you and have you shipped somewhere else.”
           “Daddy,” said Iris sternly. “I don’t want to sell him. I found him.”
           “I didn’t say you couldn’t buy him, sweetheart.” His daughter rolled her eyes.
           “Let’s go out to the garden,” she suggested sweetly, taking Rai by the arm and shooting her father a look. They stepped through the back doors of the kitchen, into the pleasant shade of the veranda. Iris did not miss the blistering cold of Volikar, nor did she long for the sight of snow. She sat down on the heavily cushioned porch swing, rocking it with the balls of her bare feet. Rai sat beside her, his arm across the back. “I still can’t believe you let me dig those bullets out,” she said conversationally.
           He glanced at her. “I still can’t believe you wanted to.”
           She scoffed. “Like I would have left them in there. They might have poisoned you.”
           “I doubt that very much.”
           She turned so that her back was against his shoulder and swung her feet up onto the bench. The ropes creaked softly. Rai kissed the part in her hair. It was hard to believe that she’d been facing down death just a matter of days ago. How quickly the pace of her life had changed. One day she was a wanted fugitive, the next she was back to her indulgent lifestyle, lying in porch swings in the shade.
           Only now, she had Rai with her.
           She arched her back against his shoulder. “Do you like life in the real world?”
           He was quiet for a while, thinking. She watched him. When he looked at her, he noticed for the millionth time the stormy green shade of her eyes. “I think it’s good,” he said simply, knowing that she’d understand.
           “Would it be better if we were kissing?”
           That made him smile. “Come here and see,” he said.

Epilogue
     
     
           Long after the age of Iris Deleone had passed, legends of Rai lived on, and in them, Iris did as well. Sometimes he would leave his apartment and go down to one of the city’s many bars, just to overhear someone’s drunken rendition of his life story. It was always a little different; Iris fell from the tower window, Iris had tried to break his neck and kill him. The couple who picked them up on the highway had as many different faces as they had names—they were gypsies, or bandits, or a roving team of bounty hunters who’d gone in pursuit of Iris and Rai after discovering their identities. Truthfully, the facts themselves hardly mattered to him. He mostly just wanted to hear her name.
           Once upon a time, when they had first met, he and Iris had discussed the ravages of time. He was immune to them; she was not. But he loved her with an intensity that surpassed the number of years she lived, and the strange ageless quality of his features made it so that he seemed to conform to however old she happened to be. This is how they followed each other through life, bound forever by things that had happened when both of them considered themselves young. The years marched on, whitening her hair and thinning her slender frame. The crow’s feet at the corners of her sea-colored eyes