The bronze gargoyle bookend on the shelf by her elbow weighed four pounds. She’d bought it at a flea market in Red Hook for twelve dollars because its expression reminded her of her thesis advisor—perpetually disgusted, vaguely threatening.
She grabbed it. Swung.
“Sorry, gargoyle. You’re being promoted from décor to weapon.”
The base connected with the man’s shoulder. The crack echoed off brick. He stumbled sideways, clutching his arm, his partner already circling toward the filing cabinet where she kept her process binders.
The nearest ink bottle. Dark red. The expensive kind she rationed for Sable’s blood effects.
She hurled it.
“This is cadmium red and it STAINS, you absolute nightmare of a human being!”
The bottle burst against the second man’s chest. Ink exploded across his face, his clothes, the hardwood. He staggered backward, clawing at his vision.
The scarred one hadn’t moved. He stood by the window watching her fight his hired help with bored patience. That indifference was more terrifying than the violence.
The first attacker recovered. Came at her faster this time. His backhand caught her across the mouth—sharp, rocking her head sideways, copper flooding her tongue. She hit the work surfacehard enough to send bottles scattering. Pain radiated through her side where the edge caught her.
Get up. GET UP.
She got up.
The can of fixative aerosol sat on the shelf above her head. Industrial-grade. The kind that sealed finished pages and smelled like chemical warfare.
She grabbed it, aimed at the ink-blinded man stumbling toward her filing cabinet, and sprayed directly into his face from two feet away.
“Works on varnish AND home invaders, apparently.”
He screamed. She swung the gargoyle again—low, hard, connecting with the side of his knee. He went down.
The first man tackled her from behind. She hit the ground with a force that emptied her lungs. Nightbloom pages scattered around her—weeks of work floating down like wounded birds. Ink from the burst bottles seeped across the hardwood in dark rivers.
She kicked. Connected with a shin. Kicked again. He pinned her shoulders but she drove her forehead up—caught his chin, heard the crack of his teeth snapping shut. He jerked away. She scrambled free.
The scarred one stepped forward.
Not hurrying. Moving toward her with the unhurried confidence of an apex predator. Pale as dirty ice, his pupils carrying no warmth. Up close, the scars mapped violence across his skin. The wrongness intensified until she wanted to crawl out of her skin.
She pressed against the exposed brick. Nowhere left to go.
The working half of her loft was destroyed. Nightbloom pages scattered. Ink pooling on wood. Her corkboard pulled from the wall, reference photos trampled. Three years of carefulchaos—ransacked for the benefit of a man who’d decided her talent belonged to him.
But the living side stood untouched. They hadn’t gone near it.
They came for the work. Only the work.
The scarred man reached for her.
The door exploded inward.
Not opened. Not kicked. The entire frame splintered—wood and metal flying—and through the wreckage came a shape she recognized for half a second before it stopped making sense.
Zeir.
Then his body tore itself open.
Clothes shredding. Bones cracking with wet gunshot sounds. His spine arching, his frame expanding, reshaping into a mass of black fur streaked with silver. Shoulders the width of the doorway. Amber stare—familiar but wilder, burning with a focus that made the air vibrate.
