Chapter 2
Luther
Veal or venison? I stood before my open refrigerator, frowning at the two wrapped parcels as if they might declare a preference themselves. It had been a brutally dull week, and I felt I had earned a proper meal tonight—something indulgent, something with demi-glace.
Ever since the B if you liked that sort of thing.
You look like a veal man today. Elegant.
Refined. Slightly pretentious, the bat added, with a smirk in his tone that made my hackles rise.
I hissed in warning, then straightened the jacket of my suit just on principle.
The gall the little guy had, why did I put up with it again?
Sometimes I really wasn’t sure, like today, when he dared to insult my character.
“I am never pretentious,” I muttered, and I yanked the veal from the refrigerator with vehemence.
Slowing my movements at the last moment, I was much more gentle when I placed the pricey cut of meat on a plate to adjust to room temperature.
You are literally wearing a French suit to cook dinner in, Belfry taunted. His wings rustled as he refolded them around his tiny little body. I could easily imagine the smug grin on his tiny snout accompanying the gesture.
I shut the refrigerator a little harder than necessary.
“It’s Italian,” I lied, but I knew I wouldn’t get away with that kind of fib.
I might have good taste, but Belfry was obsessed with fabrics and tailoring.
Why I’d ended up with a familiar who fancied himself a clothing connoisseur…
Before Belfry could correct me—he lived for correcting me—he went suddenly still on his tiny perch atop the kitchen light fixture.
His leathery ears flared. Uh-oh. Suspicious activity at three o’clock.
I didn’t bother looking. “Unless it is the butcher raising his prices again, I do not care.” The butcher, being Kai—our local feral werewolf—did not consider himself one, but hunting was so deep in his blood that he supplied all of town with fresh venison.
It was a good thing we were all creatures of large appetites and that our local deer population was healthy, robust, and carefully controlled.
No, no, this is much juicier. A woman is sneaking around the library yard.
He paused and smacked his lips, as if he were perhaps imagining a juicy bug to chew on.
A very cute woman, he added, as if that would entice me to look.
He might look twice at every bat passing by our windows, but I was centuries old; I had mastered such base instincts ages ago.
“I said,” I repeated, enunciating like a saint beseeching an obstinate choirboy, “that I do not care. Go investigate. Bother someone else.” I flung my hand toward the window to my left, it was opened a crack to let in the spring breeze and the scent of the blossoming Eastern Redbud trees in the yard behind my property.
There was someone living there, but I had not seen the house’s inhabitant in so long I had forgotten what they looked like.
You’ll want to see this, Belfry singsonged in his most obnoxious tone.
I sighed and stepped toward the window, mostly to silence him.
The spring sunlight was bright—too bright for comfort—but my apartment had deep eaves and heavy curtains.
I parted one just enough to glance into the overgrown library yard next door.
And there she was, just like he said she’d be.
A slender figure, with brown hair escaping its clip in stubborn wisps, stood on tiptoe to peer into one of the boarded-up back windows.
She cupped her hands around her face to block the glare, her posture determined, her expression tight with concentration.
She had brown eyes, sharp with curiosity even from this distance.
She wore professional clothing, though wrinkled from her sneaking, that clung to her body in all the right places: simple slacks, a pale ivory blouse, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a pair of suede heels very ill-suited for the rough yard behind the library.
She had her mouth tightly pursed, as if she were either biting back a curse or preparing to deliver one.
Despite the neat clothes, her outfit demure and sleek, fire seemed to cling to her every move.
Impatience, a hint of excited anxiety, flared beneath her surface.
This woman was all passion contained in a tiny, well-clothed package.
She was also trespassing in my library.
The books within—valuable, fragile, some ancient—had survived for decades only because I had personally stored them when the place shuttered.
No stranger with grabby hands and questionable intentions was going to lay their hands on them, no matter how long-fingered and elegant they appeared to be.
“Belfry, watch the food,” I snapped, already moving for the stairs.
It is daytime, he retorted. I can’t fry anything in the day. I’m basically decorative right now. As if he were any good at frying things at night, he was a bat, not a dragon. And I hadn’t asked him to make the veal, just watch it. I was not about to trust a bat to cook my dinner.
“Then don’t burn the kitchen down,” I told him, instead of correcting him.
I was above that sort of thing, especially when it was pointless.
Belfry believed what he wanted to believe, and that was that.
It was one of his less annoying quirks, and one that usually managed to make me smile.
Not so when I thought the library next door was in imminent danger of being desecrated by a pretty but immoral human trespasser.
You say that like it’s ever off the table, Belfry called after me. I didn’t dignify that with a response as I raced down the stairs, but privately I was relieved he had no thumbs with which to handle matches. I’d really be in trouble if that were the case.
By the time I stepped into the backyard, the sunlight grazed my suit in a way I disliked—UV exposure was hell on dark fabric dyes—but I stayed close to the wall, where the shade lingered.
Her scent hit me before I reached her: warm, sweet, threaded with old paper and something electric beneath.
She smelled like storms rolling across a library archive.
She smelled… enticing. Which only irritated me more.
A future thief that smelled good? Where was the world headed?
I let my voice cut the air. “What do you think you are doing?”
She jolted so hard, she smacked her forehead on the window frame.
“Ow! You...You scared me!” Damn it, even her voice was pretty, dulcet, well-modulated, with this pleasant hint of huskiness that reminded me of the turning of pages.
The kind of voice that would fit perfectly inside a library, actually.
All I needed to do was imagine gold-rimmed glasses on her dainty nose and her hair in a French twist.
I folded my hands behind my back, posture impeccable despite the rising urge to pace.
I had far too strong a response to her; it wasn’t right.
She was a potential burglar, a threat to the books, the town, and the peace I so valued.
“Then perhaps you should refrain from skulking around buildings that do not belong to you.” My tone might have bordered on impolite, and that just wouldn’t do, I never lost my temper.
She whirled on me, cheeks flushed, temper sparking immediately.
“I wasn’t skulking. I was...inspecting.” She, on the other hand, clearly had no compunctions when it came to her temper.
Restraint was not her middle name, and that should absolutely have put her firmly in the unattractive zone.
It didn’t. She looked too much like she’d fit in with the British ton or the French aristocracy.
Pale skin, delicate features, she rang all my bells, so to speak.
“That is simply a polite word for snooping,” I told her.
Inspecting, yeah, right. There was nothing here to see except old books, not something the average thief would be after.
Since she didn’t look like your standard property liberator, I had to assume she had enough knowledge to recognize the value of some of the tomes inside the library on sight.
I already thought she looked like a librarian, a very tempting morsel of a librarian.
She bristled as if I’d insulted her, though that was not my intention.
After all, one couldn’t be insulting when simply stating the truth, could one?
“And yours is a pretentious word for minding someone else’s business,” she pointed out in a very sharp, waspish tone.
All fire and passion, she drew herself up to seem bigger, though that still meant I towered over her.
Not scared, not even a little, she wagged her finger in my face as if she’d just scored a big hit.