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with his pointer finger.
    Julia batted him away. “What do you know, with your wees and your lasses and your ayes.”
    “Aye, not much meh wee lass.”
    She grinned, and he grinned, and he reached for her hand, and Julia gave it to him.
    She waited a few seconds, letting him stroke her knuckles with his thumb, before she said, “I have a question. One I’m embarrassed I didn’t ask already.”
    His brows lifted. “Shoot.”
    “Um…I was wondering what it was like for you at the compound. We haven’t really talked about it… Since I got the headache and then those few days I was kinda recovering… And then we came here…”
    She bit her lip, totally awkward, totally hating what had happened at the awful compound.
    But Cayne’s eyes were clear; they held hers, and he seemed comfortable enough saying, “Nothing stands out. It was just a prison. Not the cleanest or the prettiest, but not a place of torture. Except—” his voice deepened— “all the thinking about you.”
    “I missed you, too. It sucked.”
    His dark brows drew together; his mouth tightened, and, so quietly she could hardly hear him, he said, “I was worried that you wouldn’t. Miss me.”
    She brought his hand to her mouth, kissing each knuckle, and when a quick check over her shoulder revealed no one was looking and the middle seats were still empty, she leaned over and dropped a quick kiss on the scar at his throat.
    “I will always miss you. Promise.”
    *
    Despite the many reasons that she probably shouldn’t—mainly the ones named Dizzy, Adam, Thierry, and so on—Julia felt like a resident of Cloud Nine, giddy to be holding Cayne’s hand and resting her calf against the pleasant weight of his.
    The good day continued when, early that afternoon, Carlin came back from a pit stop with one of Julia’s favorite Euro foods—a mint chocolate Aero candy bar. And when they stopped for lunch at a little café at the base of the snow-capped Alps, Carlin and Meredith treated her like one of the girls—a good thing, because Julia had been worried her angst and quietness would chase everyone away.
    By the time night fell, they had sneaked into a total of eight St. Moritz resorts, checking the roofs for felines of any kind and finding nothing. They had high hopes for the next one on their list, some kind of spa whose name translated into ‘special people recharge’, nestled at the eastern edge of Lake St. Moritz, which sparkled magically under a hot pink sky and a blanket of silvery stars.
    It was Julia and Cayne’s turn to go inside, and Drew had come along to stretch his supposedly aching legs. As they followed the sidewalk from the parking lot to a side door where they hoped they wouldn’t be noticed, Cayne was lamenting his inability to simply fly over the buildings. Drew explained, a touch condescendingly, that even if Cayne wasn’t being or couldn’t be tracked, a flying man with giant wings was sure to attract attention from the regulars (‘regulars’ being the word they’d started using for everyone who wasn’t Chosen, Nephilim, or whatever Edan was.)
    Julia didn’t like being reminded that she was irregular, so she turned her attention to the lake, out to the left of the boardwalk area their sidewalk was merging with. Several hundred yards across the flat water, a boat slid past, its motor buzzing—some kind of racing boat, she guessed. Somewhere back and toward their right, where the van waited in the parking lot, a car’s breaks squealed. And all of a sudden there was this kid standing in front of them: a young boy, maybe four or five, with dark curls, a chocolate ice cream cone, and a yellow balloon tied around his wrist.
    The width of the boardwalk, which bridged the spa’s side door and the water, was probably less than fifteen feet. It was lined, on the water side, with big, metal binoculars, behind which only a flimsy wooden rail kept foot traffic from the ocean.
    The little boy was standing close to the edge,