Page 76 of Flames and Blood

She doesn’t tell me it’ll be fine. She’s the one person in this building who knows better than to say that.

“Bastien wants to go with you,” she says. “So does half of Aurora.”

“I don’t need an escort into my own clan hall.”

“You need somebody standing behind you who isn’t Aldrake. So that whoever did it sees a witness in the room before they see you.”

“You’re right,” I agree. That’s better than comfort.

“You’ve got Crowe,” she says.

“Gideon?” I say. “Yes. I have him.”

“How is that, by the way?”

“How is what?”

“Don’t.” She’s watching my face now, and she’s better at this than she was through a wall. “You said his name differently.”

“I said it the same as everything else.”

“You didn’t.”

“He’s the man who got me out of there. That’s all he is.”

“That’s a very short answer for a complicated question.”

I don’t give her a longer one. She lets it go, but she keeps the look on her face while she does it, and I know she’ll come back to it another day.

Outside, the trees move in the dark. Behind me, the hall is warm and loud. Everyone in it is already home.

Tomorrow I walk into mine. I’ll shake hands with the person who sold me. I won’t know it when I do.

Chapter 18

Crowe

I’ve spent the better part of a century being the man nobody remembers. That’s the work. You come into a room, and nothing about you sticks. People talk in front of you. There’s nothing there worth talking carefully around.

It stopped working last night.

I stand at the back of Aurora’s hall with a glass I’m not drinking from. The room is thick with shifters. Wet wool and wolf near the doors. Bear at the long table. Two dry, scorched patches of air by the fire that are dragons, and a third behind me that I’d found before I turned around.

Every third person who passes me looks at me twice.

A young wolf near the door has been working out how to come over here for twenty minutes. I can smell his nerves from thirty feet away, sharp and sour under the woodsmoke. He hasn’t moved yet. The two dragons by the fire stopped talking when I walked past them.

Nobody’s afraid of me. It’s worse than that. They’re interested.

I’m the vampire who killed a Vex.

I put the glass down on the nearest table and go looking for a passage with fewer people in it.

Faine finds me before I find the passage.

“Walk with me,” she says.

We go out to a gallery above the vehicle bay. Cold air comes up from below. She stands at the rail and doesn’t look at me while she talks, which is how she does anything that matters.