Chapter 4 #3
“Interesting. Thank you, Yuri. Keep me updated. One last thing; I have felt incubus power tonight. It’s muted, but be mindful. See if Amelia can sniff him out. Keep an eye on him. We don’t want anyone taken advantage of.”
“Da,” he said and left without another word.
I stood at the window, letting the club’s glow bleed through the glass. I could see Bohdan at the bar, laughing with a cluster of demons and high-class vampires. He was in his element, smiling that predator’s grin, teeth white as a new moon.
It struck me how much he’d changed in the last year. Once, he would have torn apart anyone who slighted him or his siblings. Now he ran a business built on compromise and spectacle, and did it better than I could have hoped. I’d never told him, but I was proud.
I watched as he poured a drink for a familiar face—one of the city’s oldest witches, name lost to time, but her eyes were as sharp as broken glass. They clinked glasses, and for a moment, the entire room seemed to revolve around them.
Bohdan’s laughter reached me even through three feet of soundproofed glass. It was genuine.
I turned away, unease prickling the back of my neck. Yuri’s hesitation stuck with me. He was a creature of habit, unflappable even in a firefight. Something had him rattled.
I was halfway to the door when I saw it.
In the corner of the security feed—a small screen above my desk—a disturbance at the club entrance.
Amara at her desk, but her posture was wrong, tense.
A girl, barely more than a shadow, stumbled through the doors, collapsed just inside.
She didn’t trip or faint. She folded, as if the weight of the world had finally crushed her.
Yuri moved faster than I’d ever seen him. He was in the lobby in seconds, Amara already standing, uncertain.
I left the office at a run, covering the three flights in what would have been a blur to anyone watching. I slipped through the crowd, a shadow in my own domain.
By the time I reached the lobby, Yuri was kneeling over the girl.
She sat with her back to the wall, knees drawn up, arms around them.
Her hair was impossibly pale, almost white, and hung in damp hanks around her face.
She wore street clothes, nothing remarkable: tattered jeans, a plain hoodie, but the way she held herself—the rigidity, the utter stillness—was not human.
She looked up at Yuri, and even from across the room I saw the color of her eyes: the unnatural blue of glacier melt, shot through with a clarity that made my vision swim.
Amara was almost yelling at her, “You cannot be here!”
Yuri was asking how she had made it through our doors. If she saw them. She almost laughed at him because she was in the building; of course she saw the doors.
The girl blinked. “Please.”
Her voice. It sounded like music. Amara hovered behind Yuri, uncertain what to do next.
I stepped forward, the club’s lights throwing my shadow ahead of me. The girl’s eyes snapped to mine, and for a moment, the entire room fell away.
It was like being punched through the heart. A jolt so sudden I forgot how to breathe.
I wanted to tear Yuri away from her, to tell him she was mine, that no one else could even speak to her. Instead, I walked until I stood over them both.
Yuri looked up at me, and for the first time since I’d known him, there was real uncertainty in his face.
“She just walked in,” he said. “The wards didn’t react.”
I crouched down.
“Who are you?” I asked, voice pitched for her ears alone.
She looked at me, really looked, as if counting the atoms in my face. Her gaze was old. Older than the youth of her face, older than the longing in my heart.
“Wow,” she whispered. “You’re…”
The girl cocked her head. For a second, her eyes changed: not in color, but in depth. Something immense moved behind her gaze—something older than the walls, maybe older than me. Then she blinked, and the moment was gone.
“I think,” she said, “I’m lost. Or maybe found. It’s kind of a toss-up.” She started to climb to her feet, then slumped back down, as if the effort was too much or the floor was safer than standing.
Yuri tried again. “You can’t be here. This place is—”
She ignored him. “You’re beautiful.” Her eyes found me, and the intensity of her focus felt like a physical blow. “Do I… know you?”
I felt the laughter in my bones. It escaped, a low rumble, shockingly real. I forced it down, reasserted my composure. “I think you probably feel like you do, but you don’t.”
She thought for a moment, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “No, seriously, I don’t know a lot of stuff. But one thing I’m pretty sure of is you.”
For a moment, all I could do was stare. The sense of the world had shifted. All my careful plans, my centuries of control—none of it prepared me for her. Goddess damn me to hell. I can’t do this. She was a child.
Yuri, bless his linear mind, tried a different tactic. “You need medical attention?”
She snorted. “If you have anything for existential confusion, that’d be great.”
I had to get her out of here.
“This nice man is Yuri.”
She gave a wave with her small hand. “Hi Yuri.”
“Hello little one.”
“Let’s get her name, shall we?” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice at his sweet nickname for her.
She shook her head. “Oh, um.” It was as if she had to think of what her name was. What was going on? What was she? “Devon. Devon Wade.”
I stepped closer, and the air between us became electric, charged with something that had nothing to do with the wards or the magic in the walls. I felt it coil around my spine, a promise or a threat. It was almost sexual, almost divine. Shit, divine.
“What are you Devon?” I extended a hand. It was the first time in years I’d made the gesture without calculation, without knowing what would happen next.
She hesitated, then took it. Her palm was shockingly warm.
“I um, what? What am I? I’m a woman? Last I checked.” She looked down at herself and inside the neck of her hoodie. It was in that moment I realized she had no idea what she was.
“I tell you what sweet girl, let’s sit down for a moment and sort things out.”