Chapter 20
Willow’s is, by the standards of the Old City’s supernatural establishments, almost respectable.
This is not a compliment. Respectability in the Old City means the bartender waters down the drinks and nobody has been murdered on the premises in at least a calendar month.
It means the lights work. It means the floor is sticky for mundane reasons rather than arcane ones.
It means that when you walk in, nobody reaches for a weapon, which in Dimitri’s experience is either a sign of civilized company or a very effective ambush.
Willow’s occupies the ground floor of a double story brick building on the kind of street where the lampposts work in shifts.
The sign above the door is flickering neon that seems to sense when it needs to behave and when it can dim to something less obtrusive, and the windows are frosted glass that lets light out but not looks in, which is the primary selling point for a clientele that prefers not to be looked at.
It is a bar for people who exist in the margins.
Not criminals, necessarily. Not exclusively.
Just the ones who live in the spaces between what Haven acknowledges and what it pretends not to see.
Dimitri has been here before, though not recently.
Not since before the summoning, before the warehouse, before the freckled catastrophe of a witch reached through the veil and dragged him into a chalk circle and then, through a series of events so profoundly stupid that Dimitri still can’t think about them without wanting to set something on fire, bound him to a nephilim Templar who is currently walking beside him smelling of soap and coffee and something bright and clean that makes Dimitri’s teeth ache.
Knox showered before they left the apartment.
He stood in the bathroom for twenty minutes with the water running and Dimitri sat on the couch and pretended not to feel the warmth of it through the bond, the quiet contentment of hot water on sore muscles, the way Knox’s thoughts went soft and unfocused the way they do when he lets his guard down.
Which he does. Around Dimitri. Which is either a profound display of trust or an act of suicidal idiocy, and Dimitri has not yet determined which.
Then Knox came out in clean clothes with his hair damp and his skin flushed pink from the heat, and Dimitri pulled him into his lap on the couch and kissed the water off his throat, and Knox laughed.
Actually laughed, quiet and surprised, as though he still can’t believe Dimitri would want to touch him.
The sound hit Dimitri somewhere behind the ribs that he is becoming increasingly convinced Knox has colonized.
They had coffee. Knox made it. Dimitri watched him move through the small kitchen with his hair still damp and his sleeves pushed up and his feet bare on the tile, and he thought, you are going to be the death of me, and he meant it in every possible sense, and the worst part is that he no longer minds.
Now they are here, and Knox is in his coat with his mace at his hip and his hair pulled back into its ponytail and his expression set into the kind of mild, pleasant calm that Dimitri has come to understand is Knox’s version of armor.
He wears politeness the way Dimitri wears cruelty, as a shield, as a weapon, as a way to keep people at arm’s length while they underestimate him.
The difference is that Knox’s is genuine.
He is actually kind. He is actually patient.
He actually means it when he says nice to meet you to people who are actively trying to eat him, and Dimitri finds this so simultaneously infuriating and devastating that he has stopped trying to reconcile the two.
Mine, the bond says, which is the bond’s only song these days, a single note played on repeat at a frequency designed to turn Dimitri’s carefully curated detachment into rubble.
He holds the door to Willow’s open. Knox raises an eyebrow at him.
“What?” Dimitri says.
“Nothing.” Knox’s mouth twitches. “Very chivalrous.”
“Keep walking before I change my mind.”
Knox walks through the door, and Dimitri follows him and does not look at the way the overhead light catches the gold of his hair, because he has some self-respect left, and it is hanging by a thread, and he is not going to lose it in the doorway of a bar that smells of elderflower and old beer.
***
Inside, Willow’s is warm and dim and populated by the usual assortment of beings who prefer their drinking establishments quiet and their fellow patrons disinclined toward small talk.
A group of fae occupy a corner booth, their features sharp and luminous in the low light, speaking in a language that sounds as though wind has learned to whisper through a keyhole.
A man with bark-brown skin and moss growing at his temples sits at the end of the bar nursing something amber.
Two women who might be human and might not sit at a table near the window, their heads close together, one of them trailing a finger through a small puddle of spilled wine that is rearranging itself into patterns that are definitely not random.
The bartender is behind the bar.
Dimitri notices him immediately, because the bartender is conspicuously, almost aggressively mundane.
In a room full of beings who shimmer and pulse and exist at frequencies that make the air taste of ozone, the bartender is a man with short blond hair and a plain face and the quiet, unhurried competence of someone who has been pouring drinks for a long time and stopped being impressed by his clientele roughly two weeks into the job.
He is drying a glass. He looks up when they enter, takes in Dimitri’s horns, Knox’s coat, and the general aura of complicated situation that follows them everywhere, and nods once.
“Dimitri,” the bartender says.
“Sidney.”
Knox glances between them. Sidney’s gaze moves to Knox and lingers for a moment on the red cross on the back of his coat, but he says nothing.
He picks up another glass and begins drying it with the same methodical patience.
He does not ask why a demon is walking into the bar with a Templar at his side looking as though they rolled out of the same bed, which they did, and Dimitri is privately grateful for the discretion.
“What do you need?” Sidney asks, in the tone of a man who has been asked for worse.
“Xela.”
Sidney regards him for a moment. Then he puts the glass down and calls toward the back of the bar. “Xela, someone for you.”
Movement. A curtain at the back shifts, beaded strands clicking together, and a woman emerges.
Hauntingly beautiful is the phrase people use for banshees, and it is accurate in the way that a little warm is accurate for the surface of the sun.
Xela is tall, nearly as tall as Dimitri, and thin in the way of creatures who exist partially in this world and partially somewhere else.
Her hair is long and dark and falls past her waist in a sheet of black silk that seems to move independently of any breeze.
Her skin is pale in a way that has to do with the fact that banshees are, at their core, creatures of death, and death has never been known for its healthy glow.
Her eyes are the problem. They are silver.
Not gray, not light blue, not any color that can be reasonably explained by genetics or contact lenses.
Silver, the color of a mirror, the color of mercury, and they reflect the light in a way that makes Dimitri’s skin crawl in a manner he finds oddly pleasant.
She is beautiful the way a funeral is beautiful. The way a knife is beautiful. Perfectly crafted for a purpose you don’t want to think about.
“Dimitri,” she says, and her voice is low and melodic and carries an undertone that vibrates in the fillings of teeth he doesn’t have. “It's so nice to see you. Where have you been?”
“Around,” Dimitri says, which is almost friendly by his standards.
Xela’s silver eyes move to Knox. They linger. She tilts her head, birdlike, and something in the quality of her attention changes. “And this is?”
“My Templar,” Dimitri says, and then catches himself, but too late. The words are already in the air, already hanging between them, and Knox has gone very still beside him and is radiating a quiet warmth through the bond that Dimitri is going to pretend he can’t feel.
Xela’s mouth curves into a quiet smile.
“Your Templar,” she repeats.
“We’re soulbound,” Dimitri says shortly, because he can already feel the edges of this conversation turning into something he doesn’t want to navigate.
“By accident. By a novice witch who couldn’t read his own spellbook.
We need to find the witch so he can undo it, and I need someone who can trace a magical signature. ”
Xela regards him, and this time her silver eyes narrow. Not with hostility. With something closer to recognition.
“You don’t need me to trace anything,” she says.
Dimitri frowns. “What?”
“I said you don’t need me to trace anything.
” Xela pulls out the stool at the end of the bar and sits down with the fluid grace of someone who has never experienced an awkward physical moment in her entire existence.
She crosses her legs and folds her hands in her lap and looks at Dimitri with those mercury eyes.
“I know exactly who you’re looking for.”
Dimitri feels Knox shift beside him. A flicker of surprise through the bond. Hope. Knox is careful with his hope, keeps it close and quiet, a flame he is afraid to expose to the wind, but Dimitri can feel it anyway, cupped in his palms at the center of their connection, warm and fragile.
Dimitri crosses his arms. “I’m listening.”
“His name is Newt,” Xela says. “He’s a member of the Hargrove Coven.”