Yeva Kasabian was a pretty girl, with rich brown hair and big brown eyes and thick brown eyebrows that she hated, but the thought of plucking them gave her shivers. They apparently weren’t as repulsive to guys as she’d feared, seeing as how she’d never wanted for a date.

It was rather too bad, really, that the one guy she actually found interesting didn’t seem to find her interesting at all. Well, that’s not true. He did find her interesting, but they had different definitions of “interesting”.

But Yeva was much more than just pretty, and if the guy she crushed on just wanted to be friends, she could damn well be the best friend she could. And after a while, though she could never quite stop just looking at him, her crush faded enough that she could almost pretend she’d never really liked Jonathan that way after all.

***
Rumors are the breath of life in college as in high school, and Yeva had long grown indifferent to them. Hardly a week passed without her hearing some new one about her, or Jonathan, or her and Jonathan, and so when she first heard the rumor about Jonathan kissing Frank Almonaster somewhere on campus – the exact place changed with each gossip – she’d thought to dismiss it.

Except Jonathan wouldn’t quite look at her for the whole day. And it made a little too much sense. It certainly explained some things about Jonathan, and it maybe even explained the strange glitter in Frank’s eyes when Yeva caught him watching them.

Despite herself, Yeva shivered.

***
Yeva couldn’t stop thinking about Jonathan and Frank. She was somewhat used to thinking about Jonathan, but Frank…

Something about Frank had always disturbed her. No, frightened her, which was the real reason she still couldn’t sleep at three in the morning.

She wondered how anyone would even know if something were wrong with Jonathan. He’d always been withdrawn, skittish, half-feral, and extremely evasive about everything to do with himself. He’d always worn high-necked, long-sleeved shirts and long pants, no matter the weather.

He’d always, in his stilted, drop-the-bombshell-and-run manner, told her everything.

He hadn’t told her this. He hadn’t even been able to look at her, when she’d found out.

She didn’t like where her thoughts were leading her.

***
Yeva knew better than to corner Jonathan, but she also knew better than to beat around the bush. “Jonathan…”

He looked up at her, still not quite meeting her gaze.

Yeva took a deep breath and leaned back, resting her elbows on the step behind her. “What’s going on with you and Frank? I’m…” Worried, she would have finished, except that Jonathan’s strange eyes had finally, almost defiantly, raised to meet hers, and she knew she didn’t need to.

She also knew she was right to worry.

***
All she could think, afterwards, was that worry had left her too exhausted, and that sleep had betrayed her this once.

When Yeva woke to a hand over her mouth and almost her nose, a heavy weight across her body, and Frank Almonaster’s mad eyes not an inch from her own, she’d thought at first she was in the midst of a nightmare. But then she felt the tickle of a knife blade as he sliced off her nightgown, and she decided, nightmare or reality, that there was no way in hell she wasn’t going to put up a fight.

Frank was leaning on her in such a way that only one of her legs was pinned. She kicked out, feeling his knife bite deep into her hip.

“Nice try,” Frank grinned, moving to pin her more completely.

It was what Yeva had been waiting for. Before he’d settled completely, in that brief moment when Frank was off-balance, she slammed her head up, barely hearing the crunch of his nose over the sudden ringing in her ears.

Frank reared back, sitting on her knees. “Bitch,” he snarled wetly, gingerly probing his face.

He’d left her mouth free. And her hands.

Yeva grabbed the hand holding the knife with both of hers, knowing that there was no way in hell she could ever hope to beat Frank Almonaster in a test of strength, and bit down on his neck as hard as she could.

Frank screamed and reared back, battering at Yeva with his other hand. A chunk of flesh came loose in Yeva’s mouth and she spat it out, gagging, her vision swimming as Frank stopped flailing wildly and started directing blows to her temple.

Yeva lunged forward again, knowing she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.

Frank scrabbled back, and dropped the knife.

And Yeva’s hands were right there, and then Frank got his knife back, but not in the manner he’d hoped.

It takes a little bit of time for even a knife to the chest to kill someone, but all Frank had time for was a surprised look and one last blow to Yeva’s head.

***
Yeva wasn’t sure how long she’d sat there on her bloody bed, holding a piece of her nightgown to the wound in her hip and staring at Frank’s dead eyes, before she realized that her head and her leg and her teeth and all her other assorted ouches weren’t hurting anymore.

Someone touched her shoulder. She jerked around, wondering if she’d have time to go for the knife before this new intruder killed her.

Jonathan, deliberately looking only at Yeva’s face, handed her a clean robe and a damp washcloth. Yeva took them with hands that, she was distantly surprised to see, were shaking. Jonathan was saying something, and while Yeva could hear all the words, they seemed strangely absent of meaning. She shook her head dumbly, scrubbing at the blood on her face.

Jonathan’s hands were at her shoulders again, gently easing her off the bed. Yeva looked up at him, took in the way he blushed when the last tattered remnants of her nightgown fell off her, and felt mild surprise work its way through the haze of her mind.

Yeva kissed him.

She realized, distantly, that she still had some of Frank’s blood in her mouth, on her teeth, but it didn’t seem to be bothering Jonathan, so she decided not to let it bother her.

Jonathan pushed her back. “This is really not a good idea,” he said, and the words made sense to Yeva this time.

“Sweet of you to care,” she said, and her voice sounded a little odd to her. “I don’t.” She pushed him back against the nearest wall and kissed him again.

One of Jonathan’s broad hands gripped her chin. He brought his face down, almost too close, and stared into her eyes with his own weird ones. A long time, or a short time, later, he let go.

This time, when Yeva kissed him, he didn’t try to stop her.

***
Jonathan was as awkward after sex as Yeva had expected, but he was kind enough not to jump straight into his clothes and leave. Instead, he just fidgeted and blushed every time he caught Yeva looking at him, which was a lot.

Yeva skimmed a hand over a bruise that looked weeks old, but that she knew was only made hours ago. Jonathan jumped. “You must have loved him quite a bit to put up with this,” she said quietly.

Jonathan held very still and examined Yeva from the corner of his eye. Finally, he said, “I loved him enough to kill him once.”

“When he first went mad.” She could, in some way, understand that.

“After he first really lost it. After he disappeared for a week, and I went looking for him and found him stalking a couple of high-schoolers.”

Yeva shuddered.

“He hated me, and sometimes I think he almost loved me,” Jonathan continued, not looking at anything but the blood spatter on the walls. “He couldn’t kill me, whatever he did, which in some way made him feel both secure around and resentful of me. He could do whatever he liked to me, but he couldn’t kill me, and it was the killing that really excited him.”

“Hmm.” Yeva rubbed slow, comforting circles on Jonathan’s back. Something turned over and went click! in the back of her mind. “You say you killed him once?”

Jonathan was giving her that sidelong look again. “Yes.”

“And he came back.”

“Yes.”

“Will he-”

“Most likely. But it took a while last time, and you pinned him to the floor, which will make it harder, and may even keep him down for good.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I think you have enough time to lose him before he comes back.”

Ever since the wildfire had swept through back home, devastating the small town where she’d grown up, Yeva had kept a bag ready, with passport, money, clothes, and anything else she’d need if she had to leave in a hurry. She pulled it out from under her bed, then got up and headed for her closet, then went to get clean.

***
Yeva half-expected Jonathan to be gone when she returned, but he was perched, fully dressed, on the side of her bed overlooking Frank’s body. He raised one eyebrow at her, and poked a finger through a spot on his shirt that was now missing a button. Yeva grinned.

She retrieved her bag and checked its contents, rummaging in her nightstand for her wallet and house keys.

“I called around while you were showering,” Jonathan said. “There’s a direct flight to Italy leaving in four hours, and you now have a seat reserved. Boarding pass is waiting at the desk, the lady said.”

Yeva’d always wanted to visit Italy. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry, Yeva.”

She reached over and squeezed his hand, then kissed the tip of his nose. He blinked. “I know,” she said. “I’ll send you a postcard.”

***
Yeva ended up sending him more than one, from all the places she ended up visiting. She’d been cautious with her money, at first, but after she’d ended up losing a long-distance phone argument over the abnormally high balance in her account, she’d decided she might as well put the money to good use.

Jonathan never did give her a straight answer about where the money came from, except to insist, emphatically, that he’d gotten it legally and was by no means bankrupting himself. There’d been some other cryptic statements about old money, bequests from his father, and the value of castles on obscure waterways, but nothing that made much sense to Yeva.

Jonathan told her even less about the whereabouts of Frank Almonaster, except to repeatedly reassure her that Frank could not ever find her. Yeva was not terribly reassured until her old landlord’s lawyer tracked her down in India and questioned her about the fire at her old home. She’d asked Jonathan about it later, much more sharply than she’d intended, and he’d said that it was the only thing he could think of that might keep Frank dead, and that he’d even poured caustic substances down the pipes to scour out any last traces of Frank’s blood.

He said he’d seen no sign of Frank since then, but Yeva suspected he wasn’t telling her everything.

***
Less than a year passed before Yeva and Jonathan met face-to-face again, in a hospital in Australia.

“Meet your son,” she said, passing him a tiny bundle.

***
If there was one thing Jonathan hated, it was traveling. It had taken almost a solid month of persuasion on Yeva’s part to get him to come out to see her at all, and she’d only succeeded by uttering the magic word “hospital”. In a fit of mischievousness, she hadn’t told him why she was going in, and even now, a week later, she still found herself giggling at the shell-shocked look on his face when he looked at their child.

Adrian, named for an uncle he’d never meet. Their son.

Yeva giggled again, and Jonathan looked up from watching Adrian sleep. “What?”

“You look so parental.” Yeva grinned.

“You could have told me,” Jonathan grumbled, for the hundredth time.

“I should have,” Yeva agreed, also for the hundredth time.

Jonathan looked back down at their son. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Yeva said. “We could get married.”

Something flashed through Jonathan’s eyes as he not-quite-looked at her. “I’m not exactly marriage material.”

Yeva shrugged. “Then I can come back and find a place to stay, and you can see your son whenever you like.”

There was that flash again. “Yeva…”

“I knew you weren’t telling me something. Almonaster’s back, isn’t he?”

“Not … exactly.”

“Jonathan.”

“I managed to bind him so he can’t kill my family, though he twisted it to mean blood family, so marrying you won’t save you from him. I wish it did.”

“So he is back.”

Jonathan shook his head. “Not in the way you mean. Not physically.”

Yeva sighed explosively.

“He hasn’t been able to find you; you move around too much. And you like it – being a world traveler appeals to you.”

Yeva drifted over to the crib. “Yes. It does.”

Jonathan came up behind her and tentatively wrapped his arms around her. She pulled them tighter, rubbing her thumb over the knuckles of his hand. She knew what she needed to do.

“You take him,” she said. Jonathan hissed softly in her ear and pulled her tighter.

Yeva turned in his arms to face him. “You said yourself that Almonaster’s unable to hurt him. You like stability. I don’t. And you need someone in your life to care about, and if it can’t be me, it should be Adrian.”

“Yeva…”

“And I can always swing by to visit. And besides,” she reached up to cup his face, “you’re the only one of us qualified to help him deal with his more … inhuman traits.”

Jonathan jerked back, and Yeva let him go. “The eyes only give away the game to anyone who’s seen a mermaid, but Jonathan, the teeth are a pretty good tell.” Yeva turned back to the crib.

It took a few minutes for Jonathan to drift over. He leaned over to tickle Adrian’s belly, conveniently avoiding Yeva’s eyes. “Okay.”