Chương 144: Chapter 137

Sarien My office sits above the Demon Coil like a held breath, a long room of dark glass and low light that looks two ways at once. Turn one way and the whole dance floor lies open beneath me, three hundred beautiful people and the aggressive pulse of the music moving through the mana-lit air, enforced tobacco and spirits of every kind drifting among the crowd.

Turn the other, and a wall of tempered black glass gives me the front, the bridge and the harbor and the long lit approach where the beautiful people arrive to be seen arriving. They cannot see in. I see all of it. That was the first thing I built, before the bar, before the stage. A room that only looks out. Fareth snorted beside me as she sipped a Demon's Kiss, the little ember at the bottom of the glass flaring red against her lip.

"I still cannot believe you named the most exclusive club in Lumineth the Demon Coil. After your own gang? Really? Weren't you a noble before all this?"

"You know damn well I was a noble. And, point of inquiry, I cannot believe that a month in, you are still saying that." She took another sip, the ember flaring again, and said nothing, which from Fareth is its own kind of agreement. The Demon Coil has been open one month, and on a good night it runs itself, which leaves me too much room to think. My last place, the Enduring View, was a good place. I will not pretend otherwise, and obviously I still own it.

I just let my people run it now; it caters to the seedier side of Lumineth. I never pretended it was anything but what I designed it to be: a dark room in a dead district, where mid-house sons came to feel dangerous with a solid wall between them and anything that might actually hurt them. It paid. It kept my people fed and my name spoken in the right lowered voices. But it was a room you went to in order to pretend. The Coil is not that.

I realized that if I was ever going to accomplish my goals, I needed to think bigger, faster, and more aggressively. But not as a street thug. It is amazing, after my family fell, how quickly I fell into that persona. I am lucky I am not dead. The Coil is the result of that reckoning, and it did not disappoint. One month open, and there is already a list to get through my doors that half of Lumineth, hell, half the Dominion of Vera, could not buy its way onto.

Down on the floor tonight, under the low red light, a knot of the Virellion Aether Court in to slum beautifully, all of them Duke Drast's people and not one of them admitting it, a Yamato cousin pretending she is not counting who has noticed her, and Sael Vourne herself at the far rail, the Projection-Artist whose face forty thousand souls would trample each other to stand beside.

A duke's mistress, an Omazan, at one table drinking her companions into the ground, and four tables over the same duke's wife, both of whom inclined their heads to me on the way in. Real money. Real fame. Real power. Real beauty, the born kind, though there is plenty of the bought kind too, and I take their coin with a smile. These are people who have never once had to pretend at danger in their lives. Which is the whole reason they pay what they pay to taste a little of it in mine. And I did not do it by halves.

I put it on the water. There was an island out past the eastern shoals that no one wanted, too far to walk to and too small to farm, so I bought it, built it out, and threw a bridge across the gap, one narrow rune-lit span that everyone complains about and everyone crosses anyway. You come by the bridge, or you come by boat, or you simply fly, if you happen to be someone like the Storm Weaver, or one of the Knight Orders who love to set their Technica Frames down on my parking buoys.

Either way the parking is a nightmare and the wait is the entire point. Making beautiful people wait to be let somewhere is half of what makes it somewhere. I did all of that in about six months, most of it truly coming together in the last two. And I stood above it and could not enjoy a breath of it, because I could not stop thinking about a boy who has never once looked at me as though I were dangerous at all. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

That is the trouble with Cale Arcanus, who happens to be the Ghost of the Wastes. The Ghost of the shucking Wastes. It still blows my mind to think about it. I wanted to see the asshole. Had he called? No. Come by the club, which I had made a point of mentioning to Ellara he should? Of course not. Because apparently, when you are a legendary mercenary, you are far too busy saving people and letting purple-haired, leather-wearing bimbos crawl all over you like an amorphopod. But hey. What do I know.

I pictured Cale's face, and the spellcraft he unleashed at the Northern Preserve. I thought back to the warning he sent the world through the Aurel Mercer slaughter, and that is exactly what it was. A straight-up slaughter. Damn that man. I have spent ten years learning to read a room in the breath it takes to enter one. Every exit. Every blade. Every man deciding whether he wants me or wants me in the ground. I read Cale Arcanus once and got nothing back. A shut door with the light off behind it.

And I have not stopped wanting to know what is on the other side of it since, which is its own insult, because I am fairly sure he has not spent a single thought on me in return. My people keep eyes on the things that interest me, and Cale Arcanus interests me, so I have footage I have no business owning of him standing for a tailor in good light, letting that stormglass gaze drift somewhere far off while another man pinned cloth to his shoulders. It is that damn half-smile of his.

One part rogue, one part innocence. Like looking at a black-bane tiger cub, when you know that one day it will be able to kill you, only not yet. All sorts of men approach me. Some I have even liked. I have an on-again, off-again sort of boyfriend named Messi, mercing down in the South Bloc with some offshoot of the Dusk Assembly, and our time together runs hot. But I have never had anyone, ever, make me feel what Cale Arcanus does when he turns all that attention on me.

And the bastard still has not gotten hold of me. Weeks, and I have had almost nothing off him, that one accidental encounter aside. A nod at the Galleria. A word or two meant for Ellara that were really about the girl and not about me. He hands his sister his whole heart and hands the rest of us the weather. This is not like me. I do not chase. Men chase, and I choose, and that has been the shape of it since I was old enough to be worth the chasing.

Cale broke the arrangement by declining to take part in it, and here I stand on my own mezzanine, a grown woman with a body count, sulking into a drink I will not finish over a boy who forgot I existed the moment his sister wanted a coat. So of course, because the planes keep a sense of humor and it has always been a cruel one, movement on the bridge pulled my eye to the glass. I knew the machine before it finished crossing the span.

A Kholvar 2034, a sleek Technica that, instead of running a real-time conversion of mana, works off compressed Technica pellets. A monstrous, beautiful thing. It came out of the dark, low and worth more than my whole staff earns in a year, the kind of machine I was driven around in as a girl and have not sat inside since my family still had a name worth the fuel.

The approach was already turning for it, already lifting their capture-constructs, and I knew before a door opened that it would be someone worth the trouble. She got out first. Siobhan Morrigan. Eldest daughter of the Dire Bear, Cillian Morrigan, and the Omazan called Sadie. Gorgeous, famous, and here. I was a little surprised to see her; I had caught her tagged on the World Tree Lattice at La Falle earlier in the evening, in a very different dress. Damn, the woman could work an outfit.

Her copper hair, threaded through with mana highlights, caught every light and projection-lattice in reach. What she wore now was barely an argument for wearing anything at all, a scrap of glittering green across the chest and something equally scant below it, handing anyone who cared to look a view of long, muscled, striking legs. The whole approach lost its mind. She let it. She has always known exactly how little to wear, and exactly how long to stand still in it.

And then he unfolded out of the machine behind her. Cale Arcanus, dressed for a club, or as near to it as a man like him gets, wearing every ounce of his discomfort where I could read it a floor up and a wall of glass away. He did not want to be here. It sat in his shoulders. He looked at the lights and the projections and the screaming approach like a man counting exits, which he was, because that is what he does, and my chest did something inconvenient at the sight of it.

Then Siobhan Morrigan reached back without looking, found his hand, and took it. Laced her fingers through his in front of every lens on the water, and claimed him for the whole harbor to see. And Cale Arcanus, who has never once let a single thing on this plane touch him, let her. I took my drink and downed it in one go, narrowing my eyes as I did.