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I stared at him as he finished eating. He was dressed in his furs again, that big black knife on his hip. I was wearing a dress I'd woven on the loom, warm comfortable moccasins on my feet. I didn't bother to wonder where he'd learned all these skills. He'd told me that he'd been an Eagle Scout, I'd met his father, and I knew William often made things out of leather and had a whole bunch of leatherworking tools in his room.

The odd thing was he didn't look any older with the beard, mustache, and long hair. His face still held that taut wariness that had been there as long as I'd known him, the scars on his face were still red on his tanned face, but he still looked so young. He wore an eyepatch of brown leather, tied to his head with three pieces of soft brown leather strips no thicker than a strand of spaghetti.

I had to remember that he was only twenty. If that. I didn't know if his birthday had passed while we had lived here.

"Stillwater," I said. He looked up at me, cocking his head slightly and frowning. "Anthony Stillwater. That's your name."

He nodded, slowly.

"Do you remember me?" I asked him. He shook his head. "Heather Cromwell. Remember me? Out at Atlas?"

His brow furrowed as he thought. Then he shook his head again.

"Nagle. Do you remember Nagle?" I asked, flinching inside and worrying that he'd react violently.

Again, he shook his head.

"Two-nineteenth?" I tried. Another headshake. "Can you talk?"

He sat there for a moment, then shrugged.

"I need you to talk, Stillwater, I need to hear another human's voice," I said. I got up and sat next to him, taking his right hand. His pinky still jutted up at an angle when his fingers were relaxed, the joint in it destroyed from too many boxer's fractures. "Please, Stillwater, I need to hear a voice beyond my own."

He stared at me for a long time.

"I like it here," he said. His voice was rough, like he'd been inhaling CS all day.

"I know," I told him. I could understand, I really could. Compared to the Hell he'd been living since 1984, compared to his childhood before he'd been adopted, this was a peaceful and comfortable existence.

"Do your eyes hurt?" He asked me. His voice was still scratchy, uneven, so I picked up the jug of fermented juice, pulled the wax lined copper lid off, poured him some juice, and replaced the lid. Jesus, he spent most of his awake time calmly working on stuff. He'd carried back that massive comb of honey, wrapped in cattail stalks with the corn-dog looking heads still intact. He'd roasted them, put butter on them, and gave me one.

It had tasted pretty good.

"Just when its bright," I told him.

"I like them. They're lavender," he told me.

That made me frown. My eyes had been blue.

"Are you sure?" I asked him. He nodded. "Damn."

I sipped on my thick berry juice "wine" and thought about it. "Anthony?" He looked at me. "Can you get us off the mountain? Get us home?"

He frowned and put his hand on the table. "Home." He said firmly.

I shook my head. "No, Tony, this isn't our home. We belong with other people. People like Bomber."

Something passed in the shadows at the back of his eyes. "John."

I nodded, grabbing his hand. "Yes. John. We need to get back to John."

He stared at me for a long moment, then at a pretty good replication of a US Army foot locker at the foot of his bed, then back at me.

"Back?" There was a slight hint of pain in his voice. He suddenly pulled his hand from mine and stood up. "No. There is no back. No downside paths."

I stood up too, putting my hands on my hips. "Yes, Tony. Down. Off the mountain. Back to John."

He turned and stared at me, the muscle at the corner of his mouth jumping as stress made the damaged nerve start to spasm. "No."

I stepped up into him, looking up in his face. I had to ignore the way he smelled, the heat off his body, ignore my suddenly hungry crotch. "Yes. We need to go back."

He looked in my eyes for a long moment, that one eye of his so very green with flecks of amber in it and a small thin ring of blue. I took his right hand in my left then carefully reached up and pushed away his eyepatch with my right hand. The patch slid up onto his forehead, revealing his red and ruined eye. The eye looked fine, but the pupil was fixed and dilated, the sclera completely red, a drop of blood spilling from the lower eyelid and down his cheek.

Something moved in the back of his eye and he went rigid. He blinked twice, and something dark, inhuman, merciless, ruthless, and without pity stared at me out of that dead eye.

The lizard.

"Cromwell," He growled.

"Yes," I breathed. Heat flashed in that dead eye, something raw, wild, and possibly dangerous.

He reached up, grabbing my shift, and tore it down the middle, staring at my suddenly exposed breasts. I'd always had a large chest, I'd been a C-Cup by the time I was 14, and all pumping iron had done was put a large muscle shelf underneath DD-cup tits. They were a pain in my ass, making it difficult to do pushups during the PT test (You have to break the plane of the shoulders, which requires you to break the 90 degree angle of the elbows, without bouncing your tits off the ground. You do the anatomy and angles, and you'll see why half the time in the PT test I was bouncing off my tits like they were bouncy balls), and heavy as hell.

"Yes, Tony, those are my breasts," I told him. I closed the shirt, ignoring that he'd just torn through a linen shirt. Linen I'd helped make from the time he brought back the soaked and stinking flax reeds to the time I'd used the spinning wheel he'd made to make yarn.

Christ, how long had we been here?

He was still staring, but when I started to speak, his eyes came back up to my face. Again, something in that left eye stared into my soul, but his right eye, his good eye, focused on me.

"We need to go back," I told him.

His shoulders slumped and he reached up to pull the patch in place. I let him. I didn't blame the lizard for ripping my shirt. He had a handful of directives, and since the majority of the vital ones were fulfilled, he'd decided to go for one of the primary directives.

Breed.

I'd been feeling that the last... days? Weeks? Months? Since he'd taught me how to dress, skin, and tan the leather from some kind of big ass saber-tusked boar. I'd laid in my bed and stared at him in the bright light of the fire, watching the shadows play on his face, and wonder what it was like to wrestle with him like that.

What? He was the only other human I'd seen for a long time, undeniably male, and goddamn it, I might be a repressed prude, but I still had a working vagina. I mean, he had muscle, I like scars, he could take a cave and turn it into a nice living area. Hell, of course watching him sleep got me hotter than a nun on a motorcycle.

Oh, blow it out your ass, you judgemental asshole. I may be Grade-A twisted steel and sex appeal, a stone cold US Army killing machine, but my cunt gets drippy as anyone else's.

Anyway...

"We need to go back," I told him again.

"I don't like what I am there," He told me, and the raw pain in his voice almost made me take it all back. "Here, I'm just a man." He undid the catches on the locker and pulled it open, motioning me to look into it.

Our uniforms sat inside. Neatly sewn up, the socks darned, the ragged holes fixed, the rank redone, even washed.

"You used that heated iron bar on them, didn't you?" I asked him, referring to the heavy iron bar he used to rub on the skins to soften the skin side of the pelt. He nodded and I reached in and touched my uniform. "You remember yet?"

He shook his head. "Just that I killed her."

I looked at his face and saw the guilt.

"Yeah. I did too," I told him, lifting out my top.

He touched my arm. "I'm sorry."

I nodded, pulling out the stained brown T-shirt. He'd fixed the slash across the belly, but the stain was still there. "So am I."

We dressed silently. The scar on my belly pulled a little. It wasn't a nice one, Stillwater had sewn it up with something, I didn't want to think what, and the stitches had left marks. But my belly already had the bullet hole and the surgical scars, so I wasn't that worried.

I didn't mind him looking at me while we dressed. At one point I turned halfway away, giving him a view of my fat ass, then turned at the waist to look back at him, clutching the brown T-shirt to my chest and looking at him with my eyes only half open.

He blushed and looked away.

I laughed and went back to getting dressed.

When we were dressed, I didn't bother asking where we were going to get cold weather gear.

Stillwater had killed plenty of those big ass sabertoothed wolves and long tusked boars, and was used to running around in the bitter cold outside.

We put the furs on, including the face masks. Stillwater handed me a leaf-bladed spear with a crossguard, hefted that black metal gladius-looking weapon, and together we moved to the boulder that blocked off the entrance.

"Do I have to go back?" He asked me. The voice of a child.

"We have a duty," I told him, wrapping my eyes with two layers of gauze before pulling up the hood and affixing the face mask.

He nodded, and put his back to the stone, rolling it away.

The strange dim twilight seared my eyes as we headed out into the snow.

314 Brigade Avenue
East Housing Area
Alfenwehr Secure Army Post
West Germany
06 February, 1988, Saturday
2300 Hours

The coffee was warm, sweet, and smooth with milk. I'd been restless all day. I'd gone out and checked over the car twice. Knocked the icicles off the rain gutters. Walked around my yard three times till I'd left a trail of slush. I'd caught myself tapping my fork on the plate, tapping my spoon on my coffee cup.

Even Prudence's arms couldn't settle my nerves.

I'd gotten up, dressed slowly, and belted my Bowie knife to my hip before coming out and making another cup of coffee.

Something was going to happen. I had that trickle of cold adrenaline moving down my spine, that feeling of tightness between my shoulder-blades, and the muscle ache in my hands that made me keep clenching them to ease up the stiffness.

I stood up, grabbing my fleece lined Levi jacket and an old battered softcap, and went out back to stare at the bushes that Aine and Foster had sprang out of.

Just in time to see two figures pull free of the thorned vines. A man and a women, covered in furs, the woman carrying a slightly bent spear with steaming blood still on the blade, and the man carrying a knife closer to a machete than a normal knife.

The coffee cup fell from my hands, landing in the snow and sloshing the coffee out onto the snow covered grass.

"Hi, Johnny," The woman said.

Cromwell. She'd been missing for weeks. Everyone figured she was dead at worst, trapped back in the War Fighter Tunnels at best.

"Heather," I said, bending down and picking up my cup of coffee. "That Ant?"

She nodded. I noted that her eyes glowed in the dark, a soft lavender color. "Yeah."

I turned back to the door, motioning to invite them in. "Come on in, let's get some coffee and food into ya."

"Thank you, Johnny," she said.

I watched the two of them move into my dining room. I'd seen Ant nervous and confused by unfamiliar surroundings before, and he looked around the dining room like he'd never seen one before.

"Tony, here," Cromwell said, and helped him out of the heavy fur cloak and jacket. He was wearing his uniform underneath the blood splattered furs. She handed the furs to me and I moved over to fold them and set them on the counter in between the kitchen and dining room. She stripped afterwards as I poured two cups of coffee and refilled my own.

When I got back, both of them were sitting at my table in their BDU uniforms like nothing had ever happened. Like they hadn't been missing for weeks.

"You guys made it back," I said slowly.

"Yeah. We got a little sidetracked," Heather said. She sipped at the coffee and made a pleased noise in her throat, closing her still softly glowing lavender eyes. "Trail here was tough, but we made it," Her eyes got distant. "The landmarks were... different."

"Hi, John," Tony said. His voice was hoarse, rough, but it was Ant's.

"Hey, Tony," I said.

He looked around. "Nice house."

"Thanks," I grinned. "Pru's asleep. I'd wake her, but let's talk for a bit."

He nodded. "I like Pru."

"I'm glad your back, both of you," I said. "I missed you," I coughed for a moment, hit my inhaler, and felt my chest ease up.

"You have pneumonia again," Cromwell accused.

Ant looked at me intently.

"Yeah," I told them. "Was in a bad wreck."

"Oh," Ant said. Ant was still looking around, slightly confused. Cromwell took his hand, saw me looking, and gave a minute shake of her head to let me know that that was as far as it went.

"Ant, we're back. We're at Johnny's house," She said.

"Oh," He repeated.

"You gonna call it in that we're back?" Cromwell asked.

I sighed. "I should, you two have been missing for weeks, come back looking like Grizzly Adam and his wife," he looked pointedly at Ant, "But it's Saturday, let's give Ant a day or two to remember where he is."

She looked at him, nodded, and looked back at me. "We've had it rough, Johnny. In some strange ways, the last few... weeks to you, I guess... have been even worse," She shook her head. "It was like a honeydew trap, and God help me, I miss it already. We're going to need some time."

I looked at that big black steel knife Ant had set on my kitchen table. It was obviously hand forged, and I'd seen the big wrought iron candle-holder he'd built for his adopted mother. I looked back up at her.

"Sleepy," Ant said, and then yawned. He grabbed Cromwell's hand. She patted it gently.

"I'll watch over you, Ant, make sure nobody steals you," She said. He smiled and nodded.

"Put him on the couch, I'll get a blanket," I told them. I walked them over to the couch, where Ant sat down and yawned again. I noticed that in the dark frontroom, Cromwell's eyes glowed a bright lavender. By the time I got back, she had his boots and eyepatch off, loosened his belt, and taken off his BDU top. Ant had curled up on the couch, his eye closed.

She took the blanket from me and I have expected her to hiss at me. She covered him up gently, leaning down to kiss his cheek, then followed my back into the dining room. I refilled her cup of coffee, adding creamer and sugar.

I lit a cigarette and she almost lunged over the table to grab it from me, putting it to her lips and inhaling deeply. The tension left her body as she sat down, blowing out smoke, and when she opened her eyes the lavender glow had deepened to a violet.

"God, I forgot how good these are," She said, tapping her ashes into the ashtray.

"You seem to be doing better," I told her.

Cromwell nodded, looking over to where Stillwater was curled up on the couch where she could see him. I glanced over there, saw he was crying in his sleep again. Normal tears from one eye, blood tinted tears from the other.

"He was there longer, I think," She told me. "He lost Little-Bit in an avalanche, had to abandon the barracks, and surviving somewhere I don't think we can get to easily." Things went silent for a long time. I heard Pru change position in bed, a dog bark somewhere, and a car pass by.

"Aine and Foster made it back," I told her, more to break the silence. "She looks about five months pregnant. He looks the same," I looked at Ant again. "So does he."

"He said my eyes are purple," Cromwell said.

"They glow in the dark," I told her. She made a fed up noise and slumped slightly.

"Aine. She gave Stillwater salve to put on my eyes after I got snowblindness."

"At least you can see," I told her. I glanced back at him, then back at her. "You going to stay up all night and watch him?"

She nodded. "If I have to. He's worried someone might steal him."

I frowned. "Who?"

She glanced out the back door, then looked at me, her eyes brightening slightly. Interesting, they were a barometer of her emotions.

"Same person who led us out," she told me. I could see the goosebumps on her arms, the perspiration on her brow.

I guessed before she said it.

"Tauth du Aine," we said together.

In the distance, like clockwork, or a bad movie, one of the massive saber-toothed wolves howled and the others joined him.