Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Nikhiv was in the restaurant’s cozy library, as promised. From the books stacked around his table, it appeared the staff had relinquished it to him permanently.
Dominic and Bastian split in opposite directions, checking the library’s hidden nooks for other patrons. At the sound of the door’s lock turning, Nikhiv glanced up sharply from his reading, tracking them across the room.
Dominic whistled as they approached. He tilted his head to the side, studying the books’ spines. “Politics, history, and poetry. A regular chef scholar. Though personally, I would’ve chosen Frost over Blake.”
“Do you like poetry?” Nikhiv asked him in surprise.
“A lot of people spent a great deal of time trying to make me like it, as a child. Fortunately, it didn’t take.”
Nikhiv frowned at his cynical response. He exhaled heavily, his eyes distant. “I only seek to pass the time more quickly.”
His words held an almost musical cadence. Seeing what he read in his free time, it now made more sense. He’d spoken with the same quiet eloquence at their first meeting, even while freshly healed from mortal wounds, and smelling faintly of sex.
With a well-fucked woman in his lap.
“I can only imagine how anxious you must be to return home to your mate,” Bastian told him. “Rest assured that Phoebe’s store is under constant surveillance by my men.”
“It’s not the same as being there myself. Protecting her.” Nikhiv’s jaw flexed. “She’s been trapped at home while relying on Mira for the smallest errands.”
“Wait.” Dominic crossed his arms in disbelief. “Is that what Mira’s been up to?”
The ghost of a smile teased Nikhiv’s lips. “I assume you’ve sought me out on business?”
“I’m here to continue the conversation we started our first morning. So you can explore your other options.” Bastian placed the black case on the table.
Nikhiv regarded it silently. He slipped a bookmark into his volume of poetry, and set it aside. “I’ll hazard a guess that whatever is in that case allows Dominic to masquerade as a human.”
Dominic froze. He and Bastian frowned at each other.
“You can tell he’s not human?” Bastian asked.
“Can you smell me?” Dominic demanded, at the same time.
His low, furtive voice caught Bastian’s attention. “Nikhiv may be an exception. He has extraordinary senses, even for a demon.”
Dominic knew his friend intended to reassure him, but it wasn’t enough. The tension coiled tighter in his body until his limbs nearly trembled.
Bastian didn’t live as he did. He didn’t know what it meant to work in the Council’s headquarters every day. To calmly walk through a building crawling with DCA, within a warding set strong enough to kill him in three seconds.
“I can’t smell you.”
Nikhiv’s words drew his attention again. His eyes were out of focus, and introspective.
“Not directly. I smelled you on Mira.”
Dominic and Bastian exchanged bewildered looks. “My scent is rubbing off on Mira?”
“It’s more like she’s reacting to your pheromones. Now that I’ve had a few weeks to… experiment with my mate,” he said, a husky note entering his voice, “I’ve noted Phoebe often emits a similar scent to my own, but more complex. A combination of her essence and mine. Especially when aroused.”
Bastian smirked at Dominic. “Interesting.”
Dominic sought to ignore him. “Phoebe’s your mate. She’s supposed to smell like you.”
“But Mira isn’t yours,” Nikhiv countered. “My theory, then, is that it holds a biological function. A signal to other potential mates that she’s spoken for.”
“Well, that was back then. It must have faded by now.”
“Yet, it hasn’t.”
Bastian was outright grinning now, in a way that meant Dominic wouldn’t hear the end of it for days. “It’s more likely that you’re constantly renewing it. You do seem particularly diligent in this DFC case.”
“Back to the matter at hand.” Nikhiv regarded the black case, then Bastian, without touching it. “I think it’s best to leave its secrets behind the curtain.”
“Are you certain?” Bastian asked him. “After all, it can open some doors. Doors we might otherwise never pass through.”
“As I can see.” Nikhiv regarded Dominic. “For certain missions, it’d be necessary. But for the average smoke demon like me, I would simply be learning to suppress every instinct that comes naturally to me. To erase every trace of what makes me what I am. That doesn’t seem like much of a life, at all.”
That doesn’t seem like much of a life, at all.
Dominic opened his bedroom closet in his Hyde Park apartment, and withdrew the small suitcase. Its dented, battered exterior was stamped on both sides with a long series of digits and numbers, followed by three stenciled words, faded with age:
PROPERTY OF brIARWORTH.
As they’d truly been. Smoke demon orphans, from as young as eight to as old as fourteen. The Briarworth researchers had decided older demons were already too settled in their habits. Too difficult to train.
Or break.
The Briarworth experiment was viewed as a mission toward social progress: If smoke demons could think, behave, and live like humans, the growing schism between humans and demons would become irrelevant.
Unfortunately, the dirty work of the progressive vision was left to the instructors. The Academy had once been a military boarding school, where the nation’s elite families sent their most unruly children. When the boarding school shuttered, those seasoned drill instructors stayed on, and their job duties were much the same.
After all, the process of remolding young smoke demons could only be accomplished by first tearing them down. Breaking them, in order to rebuild them.
Inside the suitcase, old yellowed undershirts and white socks greeted Dominic, still neatly folded, like souvenirs from another world. Weathered notebooks were stacked atop the clothing, their pages filled with whatever thoughts had kept him company at the time.
There’d been no television in Briarworth Academy. No phones, or games. Nothing to hinder their assignment to forget all demon instincts, and live only as humans would.
Apparently, this end would be accomplished with rigorous drilling, grueling exercise, and an exacting, hours-long daily cleaning regimen.
Like boot camp or prison, the simplest forms of entertainment became all-consuming. In Dominic’s dormitory, boys who’d never picked up a pen or book other than for homework turned into dedicated writers and avid readers.
Forgotten boxes of reading treasures were scattered around the Academy, leftover from the old boarding school’s bankruptcy.
No book had drawn them more than a historical account of nineteenth century circus performers.
Dominic spread open the folded page covered in vintage black and white photos, its edges ragged from where he’d carefully torn it from the old history book. In the largest photo, a group of men in leotards smiled for the camera outside a circus tent.
Death-Defying Demon Smoke Divers, 1879 .
Beneath the caption, a series of blurred photos attempted to capture the stages of a smoke demon leaping from atop a high platform. He plummeted head-first toward the ground before dissolving in a cloud of smoke, inches before impact.
To a group of teenage demon boys trapped in a school where their every demon instinct was ruthlessly suppressed, the concept of smoke diving wasn’t just exciting, or eye-opening.
It was fucking transcendent.
It also turned out to be nowhere near as simple as it looked in the pictures. They soon learned that the shortest leaps were the most difficult, and painful. Dozens of broken bones were earned before they learned to dissolve into smoke at just the right time.
Only two variables were ultimately within their control: height, and air resistance. Once they’d chosen the former and mastered the latter by manipulating their physical forms, smoke diving became more than just plummeting. They could free fall, somersault, and even just drift.
They could float.
Dominic closed his eyes, listening beyond the room’s thick silence to the memory of the wind in his ears. The way it would quiet, as he released his physical body to push back against it, and let the air buoy him.
Those memories weren’t so distant. Opening his eyes, he glanced out the window toward the distant skyscrapers of the downtown skyline.
They’d all left Briarworth with the yearning to keep diving. Because of it, very few of them remained. Like any other daredevil sport, their fate was the same.
Sooner or later, they all took one leap too many.