He stopped.
She nearly walked into him.
He was looking at something through the trees. She followed his line of sight and saw it — a small pond, maybe thirty feet across, tucked into a natural depression between two enormous oaks. The water was still and clear. Afternoon light came through the canopy in pale columns and lay across the surface in moving patches of gold. Mossy stone at the edges. A pair of dragonflies negotiating territory above the far end.
It was, objectively, quite beautiful.
"Want to bathe?" Viktor said.
"Absolutely not," Gwen said.
His hands went to his shirt.
"Viktor—"
He pulled it over his head.
She turned away.
But not fast enough. The peripheral impression of his torso — broad, defined, the specific geometry of a man who had stopped being obese and arrived at the opposite extreme, the incubus mark pulsing soft purple-black at his lower abdomen — registered on her vision in the half-second before she managed to redirect her eyes to a tree.
