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For another hour, I tried to tell myself it was just my own overburdened mind messing with me, seeing unnecessary cause for alarm in the most innocent of clues. But I ran into Delwin six times in that hour and passed Rosalind twice – and still, not a glimpse of Creon.

By the time the phoenix army arrived and began setting up camp – staying a few hundred feet away from everyone else’s tents – I decided I was sick of worrying and doing nothing.

It took a few minutes of asking around and stubbornly fending off everyone else’s questions, but in the end, I found him - between some alvish tents, of all places, surrounded by a small group of Underground alves. Like the fae I'd seen before, they stood listening to him unusually quietly. None of them noticed me until I advanced within hearing distance, just close enough to catch a shred of Creon’s last sentence – ‘… find maps in the central tent …’

It was then that a gangly alf interrupted him with a bright, ‘Oh, Nosebreaker!’

Creon whipped around.

For a single moment, I thought he’d run or fly or grab the nearest alf to fade out; there was a flicker of shock on his face, there and gone too swiftly for me to be sure of it. But the smile curling around his lips the next moment was his usual one, lazily graceful and sensual in a way that could make an army camp look like a den of sinners; if Naxi’s schemes were still haunting him in whatever way, he was hiding it very, very well.

Good gods. I really was working myself up over nothing, wasn’t I?

He turned to say something to the alves, and they faded out with some last quick greetings, leaving only the two of us between the tents. Close by, shouts and the clattering of steel against steel suggested a final training session before hell broke loose tomorrow. But in this corner of the camp, the world was jarringly quiet – nothing but grass and endless rows of man-high linen tents, the pale autumn sun shining down upon us.

‘Hey,’ I said sheepishly, feeling suddenly awkward as the last tendrils of anxiety slithered from my veins, leaving only breathless trepidation behind. He looked so very much like himself, standing there. Bronze skin almost aglow in the sunlight. Long hair bound up, loose strands tucked behind his pointed ears. All loose-winged, loose-shouldered casualness –the very last person in the world to ever do something as dramatic asavoidme. ‘Good to see you. What have you been doing all morning?’

He shrugged in that careless way of his – a shrug that blithely denied we were standing in the middle of an army, on our way to a likely death within twenty-four hours. ‘Oh, a couple of things. Trying to prepare, just in case.’

It took me half a moment to realise that was not, in fact, an answer.

‘Things?’

‘Things,’ he nonchalantly repeated, nodding as if it had been a request for confirmation rather than for the substantial information that was very much lacking, his expression so perfectly unconcerned it could hardly be real. ‘You?’

‘Reassuring panicking humans about vampires,’ I said, squinting at him. Perhaps the worry had not been as misplaced as I’d thought, after all. ‘So what sort of situation have you been preparing for, exactly?’

He faltered.

Just one miniscule slip of the mask, smile stiffening for a fraction of a moment – but a slip meant that therewasa mask, and at once every spark of worry came roaring back to life, the fire I’d so determinedly squashed flaring up to claim its new fuel. Had he been doing things I wasn’t supposed to know about?

Hadhe been avoiding me?

‘Creon?’ It came out more sharply than intended.

‘You know.’ An unfocused gesture; his wings fanned out a few inches in half-hearted evasion. ‘The whole story with Thysandra.’

Any other time, it would have been convincing enough, the wry, self-deprecating smile that quirked around his lips. Just a topic he preferred not to linger on. Just a small distraction of little importance. Had I not been confused already, it would haveworked flawlessly, that hint of a scar he’d rather not prod on a day like this.

But Iwasconfused and wary, and he knew it, too.

Which made this a nonsensically empty response.

Which meant that it was the only way hecouldrespond – that this was the shield he’d built around whatever lay behind, and he had no choice but to hold it up so stubbornly there was no way to let go of it. Those unhurried shoulders, loose and lean … They weren’t a reassurance at all. They were armour as much as the knives in his boots and the restored black of his shirt and trousers.

I cocked my head, frowning. ‘What are you hiding?’

The flash of emotion that slid over his face was all the confirmation I needed. No surprise. No confusion. Just that same, strange stiffening – the look of a male caught red-handed, despite his most desperate efforts.

His chuckle came too swiftly to be convincing. ‘I—’

‘Creon.’ I stepped closer, lowering my voice – gods knew who might be hiding in these tents, listening to every word spoken. ‘Do I really need to remind you that you're not the only one who notices when something is wrong?’

And why was he looking at me like that as the last shadows of his smile melted off his face, as he parted his lips and closed them again – with such forlorn intensity, as if he’d shut his eyes the next moment and never see a single glimpse of me again?

It took no more than a heartbeat of his silence for a thousand alarming possibilities to storm my mind all at once. ‘You … you haven’t been organising some suicidal mission into the city, have you? Or made funeral arrangements? Or—’

‘No!’ His shock, at least, looked fully genuine. ‘Hell’s sake, Em. I promised I wouldn’t do that again.’