Chapter 5

VANDA

It came through the window before I could get her fully behind me.

Glass sprayed across the kitchen floor and something hit me hard enough to drive me back into the counter, claws where hands should be, a face that had once been human stretched too tight over teeth that did not belong in it. A scout. Low ranked, sent to watch, not to fight, which meant someone above it had gotten impatient.

I got my blade up in time to keep it off my throat. Barely.

"Get back," I said, and for once she listened, pressing herself against the far wall while I drove the thing across the room, into the counter, glass and crockery crashing down around us. It was fast, faster than it should have been for something so low in its own hierarchy, and I understood in the middle of the fight that it was not trying to kill me.

It was trying to get past me.

"Iana, move," I shouted, and she did, throwing herself sideways as the creature lunged for the space she had just left, close enough that its claws caught the edge of her robe and tore it. She hit the floor hard, scrambling back, and something in me went cold and precise the way it always does when the only thing left is the fight.

I drove the blade up under its ribs, angled the way Corvin taught me a lifetime ago, and it screamed a sound too human to be comfortable before it went still and started to burn from the inside, the way they do when the kill lands true.

I stood over the ash a long moment, breathing hard, and then I turned to check on her.

She was staring at me. Not at the ash on her kitchen floor. At me, with an expression I recognized from two hundred years ago and had hoped never to see again on her face.

Fear. The specific kind reserved for men who kill easily.

IANA

I could not stop staring at the place on the floor where a person, or something shaped like one, had simply stopped existing.

He stood there breathing hard, blade still in his hand, and the way he held it told me this was not the first time. Not the tenth time. This was a man who had done this so many times his body knew the motion better than his mind did, and something about that terrified me more than the creature had.

"What was that," I said. My voice did not sound like mine.

"Something that wanted you."

"That's not an answer either."

He wiped the blade clean on a dish towel from my own counter, an act so mundane against everything that had just happened that it almost made me laugh, the kind of laugh that comes right before you fall apart.

"You need to come with me," he said. "Tonight. Somewhere I can protect you properly."

"I don't know you."

"I know. I'm asking you to trust me anyway."

I looked at the ash on my floor, at the broken window letting rain blow in sideways, at the torn edge of my robe where claws had missed my skin by less than an inch, and understood with sick clarity that whatever choice I made in the next thirty seconds would matter more than any choice I had made in years.

Before I could answer, the ash on the floor stirred.

Not the whole pile. Just a fragment near the edge, small, glowing faint amber like a coal refusing to go out, and from it came a voice, thin and dying and impossible, speaking a single word into the wreck of my kitchen.

"Valeria."

The word hit me like a hand closing around my throat.

I do not know that name. I have never heard that name. And yet something in my chest answered it the way your body answers your own name called across a crowded room, instant, involuntary, undeniable.

I looked up at him. He had gone rigid, blade still in hand, face drained of whatever color the fight had left in it.

"Why does that word do that to me," I said.

He did not answer right away. The silence stretched long enough that I understood, with a clarity that scared me more than the creature had, that he knew exactly what that word meant and exactly why my body had answered it like a bell struck true.

"Tell me," I said, and my voice cracked on the second word, because some part of me already suspected the answer was going to break something in me that could not be put back together.

He set the blade down on my counter, slow, deliberate, like a man disarming himself in front of something more dangerous than any weapon.

"That's not a word," he said quietly. "It's a name."

"Whose."

He looked at me the way you look at someone standing at the edge of a very high place.

"Yours," he said. "It used to be yours."

The last of the ash on my kitchen floor crumbled to nothing, and somewhere below my building, faint through the broken window, I heard more than one set of footsteps moving fast across wet pavement, closing in.