“Must be exhausting, never getting to be surprised.”
I watch him cross the yard, noting the coordination of movement, the stability of his aura, and the way his body now channels energy through the old curse pathways rather than around them. “Surprise is generally what occurs when insufficient data meets consequence.”
He laughs under his breath. “That sounds like something Sable would write down just to mock later.”
The mention of her name pulls my attention upstairs again. Her pulse shifts, not in alarm but in irritation. She has spilled ink, perhaps, or encountered another clause she considers badly phrased. The tether warms around that irritation in a way that corrects a minor instability along my left hand before I consciously register the flaw.
Corin notices my focus move. “She all right?”
“Yes.”
“You checked fast.”
“I am always checking.”
His expression sobers at that, though the humor does not fully leave him. “That should probably bother me more than it does.”
“It bothers her sufficiently for both of you.”
“True.” He drops the sack beside the others and rolls his shoulders. “She’ll get used to it.”
“No,” I say, because the correction arrives before courtesy can interfere. “She will understand it. That is not the same as acceptance.”
Corin studies me through the mist. “You’re learning.”
“I am observing.”
“Same thing, if you’re not being a jackass about it.”
A disturbance moves along the ward line before I can answer.
The yard quiets.
Not because sound ceases, but because the pattern of sound changes. The insects near the drainage stones stop their thin, repetitive chirping. The mist bends wrong near the lane, pushed inward by a presence that lacks permission to approach. The iron scraps nailed along the fence hum faintly, their crude human warding reacting to infernal pressure.
Corin turns his head. “What is that?”
“A lesser demon.”
His posture changes at once. The humor drains out of him, and he steps away from the firewood with surprising control. “How close?”
“Too close.”
The entity crouches beyond the fence where the alley narrows, wrapped in a scavenger’s body of jointed limbs, ash-gray hide, and a mouth that opens too wide for the narrow skull. It has enough intelligence to remain outside the existing ward line, but not enough judgment to flee before I move.
I am across the yard before Corin can draw breath.
The lesser demon hisses when I appear at the fence, its throat unfolding to reveal wet black teeth. Its eyes are too many and poorly aligned, all of them fixed on the house rather than on me. That is its first and final error.
“You approach a protected threshold,” I say.
It scrapes one claw across the stone. “Rumor runs, Collector.”
My hand closes around its throat through the gap in the fence, and its hide sizzles where my fingers make contact. “Rumor often arrives ahead of intelligence.”
Its many eyes roll toward me. “Anchored. Bound to meat. We came to see.”
“We?”
