He veered past colourful graffiti that shimmered with inhuman images and fading posters. Could vaguely feel the air on his face. God, he needed it. He sucked in a breath that rattled in his chest. Right through that hidden, vulnerable place he guarded by keeping his distance from every potential partner or promise of connection. Every reason he might feel likethisagain if someone was taken.
How could he, when the Wake could come and kill anyone?
‘Why, pray tell,’ came a darkly familiar voice. ‘Did you think it wise to go wandering around in a city crawling with Empyreals?’
Dylan zoned back into his body, finding himself gazing sightlessly at the docks.
He turned to find Callum leaning against a post on the same sidestreet.
‘Not now,’ Dylan managed, his mouth dry. He swerved back around to walk some more, forcing the muscles in his legs to move. But as he scanned the surrounding buildings – restaurants, museums – he could feel Callum’s eyes narrowing on his back.
‘And here I thought I was the dramatic one.’
Dylan could feel him then, as sense came rushing back. Getting closer. It shivered through his already wired senses and it struck him: just how much Callum didn’t have the samefeelas Kyan. He was completely silent unless he wanted to be; he felt dangerous and mysterious. One aspect hiding the other.
‘Listen to me,’ Callum said.
Dylan spun as they came to a quiet side street. ‘I hate you for making me do that.’
A flash of regret went through Callum’s eyes before they hardened. ‘Did you see anything?’
‘Nothing I couldn’t have lived without,’ Dylan snarled.
‘You need to wrap your head around a few things,’ Callum said. ‘I get that. I never said this would be easy, I said it would be crucial. But I think we both know that you need to face this as much for yourself as you do for the rest of us, and possibly for the fate of supernatural society. I don’t do this to be cruel,’ he added, an earnest flicker drawing his brows together.
‘I don’t know why you do what you do,’ Dylan said, the fight drained out of him by the little boy in that memory. ‘I don’t know anything about you. So how about this: you want me to keep doing this, you give me something in return.’
This – the mystery of Callum – felt so much more discoverable than the claws of trauma in his mind. Focusing more on this magnetic, secretive Empyreal was a lifeline when the world was trying to drown him in memories.
With Callum he felt sharp and stimulated; challenged andalive.
He didn’t feel like a boy screaming for a mother that would never come back.
Callum’s charming grin was gone, his eyes simmering with challenge. ‘Oh?’
‘Yeah—’
The Empyreal stilled, gaze shooting to the drain at the edge of the alley. ‘Run.’
‘I’m not going to let this go just because you don’t want to sharesomething—’
Callum grabbed him by the shirt, his knuckles grazing the muscle of Dylan’s chest and searing his body with instinct. ‘I said,run.’ Callum’s eyes were alarmed and brilliant as he shoved Dylan back several steps.
Then a Varian slipped through the grates like a wraith.
Drawn to arguments or blood, a human would probably mistake one as a Demon, but Varians were darker mutations of supernaturals, or the more dark-dwelling creatures with wilder hungers.
Thanks to the advent of electric light, they were rare. It was even rarer that they’d be drawn out during the day where they could be spotted by humans or other creatures would notify the Wake and an Empyreal.
But Callum wasn’t fazed. Instead, he moved with a mind-bending, graceful violence.
The humanoid creature shrieked, spittle flying from its mouth, mottled skin a dark grey colour with a body thin and bent from all the time spent scrabbling in cramped spaces. Its face was one pane of skin, like a mannequin’s; its slitted nose and razor-like teeth feral slices in its uncanny face.
Any second now the kill scent would hit Dylan and he’d transform. This creature was feral, launching to kill.
Dylan tensed for it, teeth gritting—
The next moment, Callum pulled aswordout of his coat. It flashed silver against the shadows of the alley as if it was magicked. He held his other hand out towards Dylan, which threw him backwards, further from the creature as a rush of deep tremors nearly overtook him, his slumbering Empyrean power stirring and struggling to wake against the suppression of his father’s tonics.
