6. Soren
SOREN
The bell jingles below me, and my mate walks out into the night with the cook at her side.
I stay where I am even with Andy gone, flat behind the chimney, and track the two of them by sound. The cook says something in that big easy voice and she laughs. I am jealous of a man in an apron.
Then her steps stop, halfway to her car.
“Lamar.” Her voice is careful. “Was there a statue on the roof when you got here this morning?”
I don’t move a muscle. She’s dead on her feet and the night is cold, and she still stopped for a statue no one else remembers. Whole towns have lived under me and never known I was there. This woman noticed me the same night I noticed her.
The cook glances up and tells her no, he doesn’t think so. It takes everything I have not to lean out where she can see me, just to watch her face when the statue looks back.
“Never mind,” she says, and her steps pick back up, faster than before.
She’s not crazy. The statue was right where she remembers it, and one night she’s going to hear that from the statue himself.
I ease around the chimney where I can see them. She’s already got her door open and her purse thrown across to the passenger seat, ready to leave, but the cook props a forearm on the roof of her car like he’s got nowhere better to be. “So,” he says. “You gonna let me take you out sometime?”
My claws go through the chimney mortar before he finishes asking. That’s all it takes for him. He stands there with his keys in his pocket and asks her out like it’s nothing. For him it is nothing. I cannot even let her see my face.
She laughs. “I don’t date coworkers.”
He tries again. He asks if the rule has any room in it, and he leans in when he says it. I’m off my haunches.
“It’s a hard rule, Lamar,” she says.
I work my claws out of the mortar one at a time. A hard rule is the best thing I’ve heard in this town, and the cook will never know those four words are why he gets to drive home.
He takes it well, I’ll give him that. He puts his hands up and backs toward his truck, tossing out a joke about Shadow Suds hiring. She drops her head back and laughs. The sound carries all the way up to me, and I would trade the wings off my back to be the reason for it just once.
She slides into her car shaking her head, and I take one long pull of the cook’s scent so I’ll know it anywhere. Soap and grill smoke, and a sour satisfaction underneath that I don’t like at all.
He drives home alone up a mountain road.
Engines stall on those grades, and no one would ever look at the sky.
I let myself think about it while she backs out of her spot, and then I let it go.
She said no and he listened. The man is the closest thing she has to a friend in this town.
I file him where I filed the trucker with the quarter, under watch him anyway.
She pulls out of the lot, and I follow from above, dropping from one dark building to the next until she parks in front of a squat brick walk-up.
I settle over the entrance and listen to her climb the stairs to the second floor and lock herself in, deadbolt and chain.
Until she knows I am out here, those locks can do the guarding.
Light comes up yellow under me, through the glass door off a little balcony barely built for humans, and I quit pretending I have any decency left.
I drop over the edge, land on her balcony rail without a sound, and fold myself against the brick at the edge of the glass, where the light doesn’t reach and she’d have to press her face to the door to find me.
Anyone on this street could look up and catch a monster hanging off a waitress’s balcony, and I can’t bring myself to care about them.
Her keys and purse land on a little table. She kicks off her shoes leaning against the wall, and the sight pulls a sound out of my chest I’ve never made before.
She drags a chair out from the kitchen table, sits, and folds over her own lap to press her thumbs into the arch of her foot.
I dig my claws into the balcony rail and hold on.
That work belongs to me, her feet in my hands and every ache pressed out slow, and instead she’s doing it alone in an empty kitchen.
She should not be aching. My mate should never be aching, and that moves to the top of my list.
She stands, rolls her neck, and pulls her shirt over her head. I forget how to breathe. Her skin is brown and smooth, and the long line of her back under the kitchen light has my claws curling into the rail again. Worship is too small a word for what I want to give this woman.
She disappears down the hall, and I study the place while she’s gone.
Her bookshelf is only half-filled, and the moving box next to it never got opened.
The sofa is old, the television is older.
Nothing hangs on the walls, and nothing in the room says she plans to stay.
I hate that more than I hated the cook’s forearm on her car.
The pipes knock, and the shower comes on. I climb back to the roof and give her that much privacy. Up there in the cold I wait and calculate.
Somewhere over this valley, Sable is tasting the wind for me. I don’t care about anything past the sound of water running through this one building’s pipes. How long have I waited for this woman? Longer than this town has been standing. Every roof and road before her was killing time.
I hold my hands up and make myself look at what she’d be getting.
My claws go through brick like it’s bread, and my grip was built for holding on to mountains, not for holding a woman.
There is no man under all this stone for me to change into.
The night she finally sees me, this is all there will be to see.
Can she love this? Humans have only ever had one word for my kind.
Monster.
Looking at these hands, I cannot argue, and fate made me hers anyway.
Then I hear her humming under the water. It’s a tune I don’t know, notes dropped and picked back up. I close my eyes and smile like a fool. I memorize it next to her laugh. She could command me to do anything just to hear it again.
The humming stops with the water. I follow her through the walls by sound, room to room, and her kitchen stays dark.
She put plates in front of everyone in that diner, and no one put one in front of her.
My mate is going to sleep hungry. Every foot of brick between me and that window itches, so I climb over the edge and come down the wall, my claws set in the mortar, until I hang beside her bedroom window with my feet braced on the sill.
The curtains are too thin to hide anything, and the lamp inside is down low. She’s tucked up in bed on her side, going through pictures on her phone. She laughs at one of them, and it comes through the glass into my palms. The sigh behind it lasts longer than the laugh did.
“I’m not desperate for hoping I have a fated mate in Shadow Wolf Creek, am I?” she asks the empty room.
The no makes it halfway up my throat before I remember she thinks she’s alone. I swallow it whole.
She laughs at herself. “Delusional, yes. Desperate, no.”
The phone goes dark, and she pulls the blanket higher, her voice going soft with sleep.
“I don’t even care what he is,” she murmurs. “He could be a bear shifter. A wolf shifter. Even a lion shifter??—”
Every species out of her mouth is another male with his hands on my mate, and the want comes up my back the way the stone comes at dawn, fast and impossible to stop.
Mine. Mine. MINE.
My wings snap open, and I’m one push off this wall from coming through her window and telling her the position is filled. She has belonged to me since her scent climbed that diner wall and picked me out of the dark. I get a grip on the brick instead and hold on till it passes.
What’s the plan here, exactly? Come through that window and introduce myself, claws first, as the monster fate chose for her?
And the window would be the easy part. If she completes the bond with me, she stops aging for as long as I stand.
Her time starts moving again the day I fall.
The gift I bring her is forever, and my own body is the collateral.
She’d scream this building down, and she’d be right to.
I press my forehead to the brick and breathe. Still my wings keep pulling open, like they mean to go through that window without me. What is happening to me. I have held still under hammers. I cannot hold still outside this woman’s window.
Then she sighs one more time, snuggles down into her pillow, and hums a few more bars of the shower song.
“Honestly, I’d even be happy if that statue happened to be a real gargoyle,” she says, and giggles into her pillow. “A gargoyle for a fated mate? That’s even better.”
My claws go through the brick beside her window.
The crack is loud enough to wake the whole street, and she sits up with the sheets clutched against her chest.
“Hello?” she calls, and I can hear her heart going like a rabbit’s. “Is someone there?”
I push off her wall and go straight up until the whole street is nothing but porch lights. She hoped for a gargoyle and called it even better. I laugh out loud for the first time in a century and scare a cat off someone’s fence.
Her name is Treasure. The cook kept thanking her by name through the diner floor, and I thought the boards were garbling it until I heard it plain.
Whoever named her knew what they had. I have stood whole centuries over rubies men killed each other for.
Guarding is the only trade I know, and no one ever let me hold what I guarded. Her, I mean to hold.
“So,” my brother says, level at my wingtip.
I flinch so hard I drop ten feet. Sable came up on me out of a wide-open sky, and I never caught one whiff of him. Six blocks of night air hadn’t cleared her strawberries out of my nose.
Some guard I am.
“Why were you watching that human girl?” he asks.
“How long have you been following me?” I ask him right back.
“Long enough to notice you were too entranced to notice,” he says, mild as ever.
I bank for the shopping center instead of answering, and he follows me down onto the diner roof. The shingles creak under us. Sable folds his wings and waits.
“What did you find?” I ask him instead.
“A town that might actually have room for us.” He says it slowly, like he doesn’t quite believe it yet. “Shifters marked me from three rooftops and none raised an alarm. We walk it tomorrow night, openly, and see how it answers.”
I have the town’s answer. A woman hauling groceries caught me in the open, told me not to eat anyone, and walked on home. But everything I know about this town is filed under her now, and I’m not opening that drawer for anyone, my brother included.
“That’s a good idea,” is all I give him.
“You haven’t eaten.” He tips his head at the far ridge. “There’s a lake past that shoulder. The fish are fat and slow and practically apologizing.”
I nod, and at the roof’s edge he looks at me sideways.
“You’re behaving strangely, little brother,” he says.
He isn’t wrong, and I don’t bother arguing it. I gouged my mark into two of this town’s buildings over one waitress. She’s asleep believing no one ever came for her, and the male fate built for her is standing on a diner roof with empty hands.
That changes tomorrow.