This all might have been easier if his sense hadn't been so keenly aware of Laurent's physical state of being. Animals smelled fear, and so, Damen thought darkly to himself, he could smell Laurent's. If the Prince could have run, he's certain he would have.

Turning and walking away, Damen found the volumes with an ease and swiftness that suggested he'd visited them upon more than one occasion, putting them back in exactly the same spot. The pages were just slightly battered, for he was not always the most patient when he read, and in his beastly form his claws were as like to get caught up in the edges of the leafs as to slide under the next one to turn it dexterously.

He returned with two copies to take a seat in the nook. He filled up the chair, oversized as it was, and the breadth and darkness of his form seemed to dominate the entire space. Damen watched out of the corner of his eye to see if Laurent would be brave enough to take the other seat adjacent, or would stand at a safe and retreatable distance.

Either way, he began the canto:

Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
Split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, burst into tears, and say:

'Mother,
You said that you and God were friends.
You said it.
..."