“Lower the gun, human.” Raziel’s lip curled.
The old dockhand had no choice. He lowered the gun.
“Raz,” Nadi scolded him quietly. “They’re just afraid.”
“Which is why he is still alive, my dear.” Raziel stepped forward and around Kalo, brushing off the blue-haired fae, to stare down at Rob. “Otherwise, I would have made him turn it on his friends here before taking his own life with the last bullet in the chamber.”
Kalo sighed and slapped a hand over his eyes. “Off to a fantastic start,vuampi.”
“Raz!”This wasn’t how they made friends with her people. “We didn’t come here for this.”
“Mm. You didn’t.” He smiled thinly, his crimson gaze never leaving that of the old dockhand.
Rob was shaking, wide-eyed in terror. He was still clearly unable to move. “P—please, we—we don’t—we don’t want any trouble?—”
Walking up to Raziel’s side, she put her hand on his arm, trying to do what she could to dampen how intimidating the vampire was to the human. “My name is Nadi Iltani. Believe it or not I”—she glared up at the vampire—“weare here to help. Can you take us to whomever is in charge, please?”
“At the moment, no, he can’t.” Raziel grinned. The glare she shot him wiped it from his face. “Fine. Fine. Ruin my fun.” And just like that, the feeling in the air simplyshifted.It cleared like the presence of a storm moving through. “I suggest you do as she asks, old man.”
The dockhand glanced from the vampire to her, to the vampire, to her again. Clearly uncertain as to what to do. She was more than a little sympathetic. “We’re not here to start trouble. Grandmother Ebiti had Kalo bring us here because, for the moment, we’re all united against the same enemies—the Nostroms and the Rosovs.”
A voice cut in from behind them from the darkness. A voice that Nadi was shocked to recognize, though it had changed a great deal with time. “And I told Grandmother Ebiti she could rot in the void. So I’ll tell you the same thing,waega.”
Turning, Nadi felt as though her knees had been knocked out from under her. “Kassa?” How was it even possible? The human girl had been only a child when Nadi had left. She’d assumed that all those that she had known were long dead. But she stood there, leaning on a cane, her white hair long and full of beads. She was pushing ninety years old, easily. “You—you’re alive.”
“For now.” The old woman who had greeted her as “sister” sneered. Her teeth were yellowed and many were missing. Her skin was wrinkled and sallow, covered in the spots that humans were prone to in their advanced age. She was flanked by two menwho were staring at Nadi and Raziel with thinly veiled mistrust and hatred, their hands on their guns. Kassa turned her scrutiny to Raziel. “And this is the bastard you’ve brought to our door.”
“He has a name,” Nadi said carefully.
“He has a reputation, is what he has,” Kassa huffed a half-hearted laugh. “The Serpent who killed your family. And now you brought him here to finish the job?”
“No. I swear, we’re here to help—” Nadi took half a step forward, but realized that was a very bad decision when she heard the sound of guns being pulled as she did. Putting her hands up, she moved back. “Mael and Lana need to be stopped at all costs.”
“And you think we can do that from down here? You always were a fool.” Kassa shook her head. “But I also remember you being astubbornfool, and I know you won’t leave until you’ve said your piece. I am too old to stand by the water arguing with you. We can do this inside.” She turned and with no further ado began to walk toward the darkness at the point where the dock met the land.
One of the two men went with her, though the other stayed behind, clearly intending to walk behind Kalo, Nadi, and Raziel. They would be outflanked.
Raziel gestured for Nadi and Kalo to start after Kassa. But he paused as he went to move past the second guard. “You know it won’t help, don’t you?” Raziel murmured to the guard under his breath. “You wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger fast enough to?—”
“Raziel.”She cut him off, glaring at him. “Enough.”
He smiled at her innocently. “Hm? What?”
This was going to be the end of her sanity, if it didn’t wind up being the end of her life. With a long, heavy sigh, she turned back toward the direction the others were headed, and she followed.
As the structures came into view from the darkness, another pang of sadness hit her. The so-called Iltani stronghold.
It wasn’t a stronghold anymore.
It might as well have been a graveyard.
What had once been the thriving underground docklands—a network of shallow caves that were little more than building overhangs where her clan had operated their smuggling enterprises for decades before she was born—was now little more than a collection of partially collapsed warehouses.
The Wild had crept up through the foundations, vines and phosphorescent moss consuming whole sections of buildings, but not in the organic, beautiful way she remembered from deeper in the caves.
This was decay masquerading as growth. Rot wearing the mask of life.
Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen it since she was a child. She hadn’t been here since before her family had died, after all. Maybe time simply hadn’t been kind to it over the past eighty years. Maybe it was the seemingly ever-present groups of people, hunkered around, high on the drugs they were meant to farm and sell to the vampires and the humans…not become the victims of themselves.
