Dae-Jung #3
"Elias." I turned the glass in my hands.
"When you grabbed Marcus's thread… When you felt him…
What did—" I stopped. This wasn't fair to my friend.
Elias had nearly died unmaking himself to pull that thread.
He'd burned through a century and a half of immortality in a single act of desperate courage to save Talin and Alex, and I didn't have the right to drag him back into it. "Never mind."
"It felt…like a god," he said quietly. "And not the fairytale kind all of these religions would have you believe in. The kind they were much more likely to be if they ever existed."
I looked up.
His hands had gone still on the glass he was holding, and his dark eyes were somewhere else entirely.
"I felt every year, every decade, every century, peeled back like layers of skin.
Everything I was as a vampire, everything Killian's blood made me, burned away between one heartbeat and the next.
And underneath—" He set the glass down with exaggerated care.
"Underneath was just a man. Standing in a field, listening to mortar fire, wondering if the next shell had his name on it. "
My chest ached. Not for me. For him.
"Marcus didn't feel like any kind of creature I'd met before," Elias continued, his voice dropping.
"He felt like a black hole. He's a void shaped like a man, trying to fill itself with anything it can reach.
Power, control, love, hate—" He shook his head.
"It doesn't matter what. He just wants to possess things. Hold them. Keep them."
We've been waiting.
We.
Who the hell was we? "But how—"
My phone buzzed against the bar, and I grabbed it so fast I nearly knocked over my glass. My dead heart doing something embarrassing in my chest before I registered the name on the screen.
Not Alice.
It was Alex, her twin brother. The text was short and direct.
She won't talk to me about what happened when she came to see you. She says she's fine. She's not fine. Can you go over there? Maybe she'll talk to you since you're the one she went to.
I read it twice. Three times. My thumb hovered over the screen.
I typed back:
When? What time?
The response came immediately:
Now. Obviously.
Something cracked the careful nothingness I'd been holding in my chest for three days and allowed something very dangerous to leak through.
Hope, maybe.
Or dread.
The two felt exactly the same these days.
I pocketed the phone and drained my bourbon. On stage, Tyler was taking his final bow to scattered applause, and the two women from the front table were already putting on their jackets.
A few months ago, I'd have to kick the women out at closing time.
But now the Purple Fang was emptying before Bourbon Street even filled up.
I listened to the hum of the stage lights beneath the music and chatter, soaking in this place where I'd been performing for decades.
And for the first time since we opened the club, I didn't want to be standing under them. I didn't want the attention.
I wanted to be standing at a ward line in the Garden District, waiting for a witch in a rainbow dress to step through.
"Lock up for me?" I asked Elias.
He nodded once. "Go on," he said, without bothering to ask what the text said. "I got it."
So I went.
The cool February air hit me as I stepped onto Bourbon Street. After a brief warm snap, it seemed the city had decided to give winter one last chance, which only made me feel slightly better about our lack of customers.
Still, the usual human chaos swirled around me.
Drunk tourists stumbling between bars with plastic beads hanging around their necks, a jazz trio playing for tips on the corner, the smell of vomit and beignet grease, and the lingering notes of a strong floral perfume that was probably way overpriced.
Normally I'd walk through it all like a shark skimming through the water, reading auras, feeding on the ambient energy of a city that almost never stopped.
Tonight, though, I barely noticed anyone else was even on the street because I couldn't get my mind off the woman I was going to see.
The food smells reminded me of how she usually forgot to eat when she was stressed or scared, which meant she'd probably been living on little more than the herbal tea she liked.
I didn't crave the things humans loved anymore, not really.
But I remembered the way something like a beignet would melt in your mouth, and there was a place two blocks down that had an all-night window.
I made a small detour and bought a dozen, tucking the bag under my arm and feeling like the biggest fool in the city. She might not even want to see me.
I didn't know what I'd find when I got there. Would she even be my Alice? Or would I find that thing back inside her? Would she tell me what happened? Did she even know?
Would she look at me the way she had before?
Pushing those thoughts from my head, I kept walking.
Because for the first time in a lot of years, I was walking toward something instead of away from it.
And that scared me more than any djinn ever could.