DAE
I gave her a full minute before I gave up the fight and followed her out of the club.
Elias was wiping down the same three feet of bar he'd been wiping earlier when I came out of the back room. He didn't bother looking up as I hurried past, barely managing to keep myself to a human pace so I didn't draw the attention of the few customers we had.
"She went right," he said. "Back toward the Garden District."
"Thanks."
In the still air of the night, her scent hit me hard the moment I stepped outside, and once again, it was everything I could do to act like just a normal guy as I followed it, buttoning my shirt as I walked.
She had a two-minute head start now, which for me was nothing.
I could have been beside her before she got to the end of the block. Instead, I hung back.
My reasoning for following her was solid. She shouldn't walk home alone, and I just wanted to make sure she got there safe. That was the first one. Somebody should see her to her door. And that somebody happened to be me.
The second reason I didn't say out loud, but I didn't have to, my body was saying it plenty. I still wanted her. I wanted her so badly my fangs ached, and I was glad my shirt hung down over the front of my jeans to hide the hard bulge there.
And the third reason was the one I kept trying to shove down, but the fucker kept floating right back up to the forefront of my mind.
It was the look on her face when she'd seen the look on mine.
I wasn't about to deny it. When she'd pushed me away, for a brief moment, I'd been thankful, and I'd felt the emotion flicker across my face before I could clamp down on it. And my Alice didn't miss anything.
But that wasn't right. That wasn't how I really felt. The relief I'd felt had absolutely nothing to do with her, and everything to do with me and the things I didn't want to confess to her.
So no. I wasn't going home.
She kept a fast pace, her arms folded tight across her chest. Down Toulouse and over to Chartres, past the shuttered pralines shops and a guy asleep in a doorway under a moving blanket, past the groups of tourists weaving toward their hotels.
That coat she was wearing wasn't nearly thick enough to keep her warm, and underneath it was about three ounces of blue cotton with little flowers on it, and it was thirty-nine degrees out.
Or at least it felt like it with the moisture coming up off the river.
But I knew she wasn't holding herself like that just because she was cold.
She crossed Canal without looking and a few seconds later, I felt a shiver move over my skin, front to back, as I walked through the wards surrounding the witch's part of the city.
Her coven laid them a long time ago, but these days they weren't so much about keeping us out, they were more like a doorbell.
Just a warning to let them know one of us was in their part of town, and I doubted they even paid much attention to it anymore with the two covens combining the way they were.
The streets went dark and residential, oaks blocking out the sky overhead, the sidewalks broken up by the roots that had grown underneath.
I was closer now. Over the sounds of the slumbering humans inside their homes, I could hear Alice's breathing.
I could hear her heart, steady and quick, the blood rushing through her veins, and the click of her boot heels.
And once, a small, wet sound she made and covered immediately with her hand.
That one nearly finished me.
I was so far inside my own head that I didn't notice we'd walked right by Judy's street until it'd already happened.
She kept on for another twenty minutes, past the big houses with their gas lamps burning and their iron fences, past a woman walking a dog who crossed the street to avoid her. Or maybe me. Most humans had the good instincts to stay away from us until they got too close to resist us.
She kept walking until she stood in front of the fence surrounding Lafayette. The cemetery was closed this time of night, of course, the gates chained, and Alice made her way around until she found the corner of the wall where the mortar was crumbling.
She looked both ways up and down the street as I stepped back out of sight, then she hiked that little flowered dress up over her knees and climbed the wall.
I cocked my head in amusement as I watched her.
She wasn't graceful about it. She got a boot in a gap, hauled herself up on her forearms, swore softly beneath her breath, got a knee over the top, and then sat there a second catching her breath before she dropped down the other side.
I heard her land, grunting out a word her aunt wouldn't have cared for.
Then her sloggy steps as she walked away from the wall through the wet grass.
I gave her another minute.
Then I went over the wall without touching it and landed silently on the other side.
I've always liked the cemeteries here. They stack the dead above ground because of the water table, and make little cities of the dead.
Rows of tombs with their plaster crumbling off in sheets, family names cut into marble and worn soft, oaks growing up between them and dropping leaves nobody ever rakes.
In the daytime it's a tourist stop. At midnight, with the fog coming up off the ground, it's what it actually is—a resting place for restless spirits, where the veil between worlds grows thin and the dead whisper secrets to those who dare to listen.
I found her in the middle of it all, staring at a large vault with her arms still wrapped around herself.
I said her name from a distance, so I wouldn't frighten her.
"Alice."
She jumped hard enough that her boot slid in the wet grass, one hand flying up with light already gathering in the palm.
Then she saw it was me.
The light went out and her hand dropped down to her side.
"Hey," she said quietly.
"Hey."
She wiped her palms down the front of her coat. "You should go back to the club." She said as she lifted her eyes to the cloudy sky. "I'm fine. I'm just going to sit out here a while and then I'll go back to Aunt Judy's."
"It's cold, and you're not dressed for it."
"I'll be fine."
She sat down on the low step of somebody's tomb and pulled her coat in around her knees and looked at the fog creeping around the base instead of at me.
"I'm not going to fight with you anymore," she said, "if that's what the walk was for. I don't have anything else in me tonight."
I stayed where I was, trying to figure out how to breach this new gap between us. "Alice…yeobo…"
"Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"I've been trying to convince myself that I was wrong about the look on your face when I left. To make it into something else," she said, in the same flat, reasonable voice, "and I can't get there. So I'd rather just know the truth, if you wouldn't mind just telling me."
"That isn't a question," I teased.
She still wouldn't look at me as she folded her hands in her lap.
"Yes," I told her honestly. "I was relieved."
After a pause, she nodded as she moved her thumb back and forth over her knuckle. "Okay," she whispered.
No. It wasn't okay. She didn't understand. "Alice—"
"No, it's okay. I mean it." She gave a small shrug. "I asked for the truth and you gave it to me."
I took a step toward her. "No. It's not okay. You don't understand. Alice…" I struggled to find the right words. "You don't understand," I repeated.
She finally raised her eyes to my face. "Then why don't you explain it to me. Because I'm lost here."
I shoved my hands into my back pockets. "Alice, if we hadn't stopped, it would have been done before I had the chance to say the rest of it out loud. And you deserve to know the rest before any of this goes any further between us."
"The rest of what?"
I didn't answer.
"Dammit, Dae-Jung." She was standing now. "The rest of what?"
The words flew out of my mouth before I could call them back. "You called me good."
A look of confusion crossed her face. That wasn't what she was expecting. "...What?"
"The other night on Judy's porch. You said it like it was nothing. Like it was just some fact about me you happened to know." I couldn't get any air behind the words. "But you really don't know the man you said that to."
"That wasn't you kissing me on the porch?"
"Alice."
I'd never told anyone everything about my past. Not even Killian.
And here was my witch. So radiant and fierce in her delicate dress, standing in the middle of these graves like she belonged among the forgotten, staring at me with me with big gold-flecked brown eyes, waiting for me to tell her about the monster fate had strapped her with.
She thought her djinn blood made her the evil one. But she had no idea.
"Sit down, please," I said.
"I don't want to sit."
"Please, sit down, yeobo. I can't do this with you standing there looking at me like that."
After a moment, she sat. I sat on the steps near her, close enough that our feet nearly touched. After taking a moment to prepare myself, I started to talk.
"I was born in 1826," I told her. "Joseon. Korea, before it was the Korea everyone knows now. And even then, when I was human, I could see auras around people. My mother thought I was making up stories. Or cursed. She used to tell me not to talk about it outside the house."
Alice held very still while I began the confession of my sins to her.
"When I was nineteen, some men in the government found out about me.
This faction had a lot of enemies and they wanted a way to know for certain who these enemies were.
" I turned my hands over and looked at them, like I could see the blood there.
"They took me to a room and they brought people in one at a time, and I told them who was lying and who was telling the truth by reading their auras. "
"Dae…"