The Demon’s Daughter

Chapter 10

It is said that daimyo are better at communicating messages with energy, and rohn are more skilled at reading them. Some rohn even claim to be able to decipher human auras. This has led to the lamentable proliferation of Yamish fortune-tellers in Avvar’s slums. Though the existence of charlatans is undeniable, your humble chronicler cannot dismiss the practice whole-cloth. As one wise writer said, “Stranger things have passed through Heaven and Earth than philosophers can dream of.”

—The True and Irreverent History of Avvar

No one could fault Roxie’s or Adrian’s determination to deny the truth. They had two more days of vigorous and perhaps slightly desperate coupling before they bowed to the inevitable. Adrian had recovered from his injuries. More than recovered. It was time that he go home.

They took the front stairs to the street. Wide and white, the steps circled down the front of the building in a graceful spiral. When they reached the bottom, Adrian looked up through the screw and saw an old brass lantern hanging from a chain. Spokes of rosy evening light angled in from the windows.

The doctor and his pretty golden wife leaned down from the second floor landing to wish him well. Adrian tried to forget he’d seen them making love. After they left, the silence deepened. Adrian and Roxie were alone.

He kissed her, a brief peck, and repeated his undoubtedly empty vow to call on her. Her eyes crinkled wryly, as if she were mocking the promise in her head. But perhaps she was mocking herself for her reluctance to let him go. Even if her reaction was warranted, he couldn’t leave her with that expression. Folding his hands around her jaw, he kissed her slowly, savoring the taste of her, the warmth, the sound of her breathing when the kiss began to sink in. Soon he was running his palms across her shoulders and down her strong back, struggling against a craving to take her one last time in the shadow of the stairs.

Years with her wouldn’t be enough to sate him.

When he forced himself to release her, she clung for a moment, then set herself back a step. He couldn’t read her now; her guards were as effective as a demon’s.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

He didn’t trust himself to speak. She couldn’t know how accustomed he was to doing just that. Instead, he smiled and touched her cheek before pushing through the door to the street.

It was his first sight of the wider world in six days, and a bit of a shock. He spared a glance for Roxanne’s gallery, admiring the lettering on the window and the tidy pyramid of paint cans in the display. As if to remind him who he really was, his detective’s eye caught on the figure of a tall, well-dressed man standing in a shadowed doorway across the street. A nob waiting for an assignation, he supposed. Since he didn’t want to be seen lingering, even by other skulkers, Adrian walked quickly toward the nearest hansom post, a slight stiffness in his side his only souvenir of the last few days.

Well, that and the hot ache in his throat, like the beginning of a bad illness.

Given his somber mood, the timing of his departure was appropriate. Avvar at sunset always made him wistful, as if some forgotten city had been superimposed upon this one, as if he himself were the ghost of a long dead man. Everything he did, everything he felt had been known before. Maybe not the same way, but close enough to cause the ghost city to resonate with the real, its faded vibration hovering beneath the edge of sight.

Berating himself for his morbid fancies, he hailed a passing horse cab.

The nag was an old one, and the ride took longer than he expected. By the time he stepped down in front of the station, an unlovely soot-streaked hulk of pitted red pourstone, he was almost himself again.

Delaying entry a minute more, he stepped to the coffee vendor’s neat wooden shack, open despite the hour. As he’d hoped, the usual Yamish woman was there.

“No coffee,” she said in her soft, accented voice. “After sunset only tea.”

It was a statement, not an apology, at least not that his human ears could hear. “Tea is good,” Adrian said, “as long as it’s hot.”

He watched her brew it in her clever shiny machine, intrigued by her actions as never before. He was almost sorry when she handed him the steaming cup. Ironically, being in her company felt like a small connection to Roxanne.

Annoyed with himself for needing one, he gulped the tea where he stood and set the cup on her counter. She nodded as she drew it away to wash.

“You don’t smile at me anymore,” he said impulsively.

“Rohn don’t smile,” the vendor asserted.

“You used to, until the day you saw me walking with the Yamish doctor.”

She met his gaze directly, doing nothing to obscure her alien silver eyes. Their color was precisely the same as Roxie’s, though the rohn’s had neither Roxie’s whites nor her delicate gold rim. She didn’t deny she knew the man he meant, though whether she knew that he’d installed Adrian’s implants he couldn’t guess.

“He daimyo,” the vendor said at last. “Very bad man.”

“Do you think I’m a bad man?” Adrian didn’t know why he was asking, only that he needed to.

The vendor cocked her head slightly. Adrian had left his hands resting lightly on her wooden counter. Yama didn’t normally touch humans, but now she turned his hands over and ran her thumbs across his wrists. An eerie prickle jumped beneath the veins, as if his implants were about to activate. He fought an urge to snatch away from her hold.

“You human,” she said with an infinitesimal shrug. “Good. Bad. Up to you.” She nodded decisively, though he hadn’t said anything. “You right. I not blame you for doctor. I smile at you again.”

And she did, releasing his wrists and baring straight white teeth many humans would have envied.

“Thank you,” Adrian said, unsure what had happened. “I’ll…look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

“Good!” said the vendor with an odd, barking laugh.

Unnerved, but feeling as if he’d taken care of a piece of business he hadn’t known he had, he turned back to his station. The windows silvered as the sun sank into oblivion, their panes mirror-blank. The only exceptions were the lights shining through the glass on the top floor, where the superintendent would be working late, plus the two narrow lintel pieces beside the entrance, behind which the watch desk sat.

The familiar sight dissolved the last of his inner strangeness. He couldn’t count the times he’d rushed up these stairs, buoyed by anticipation at returning to a job that challenged him, that he did well.

Caught up in his relief, he didn’t notice the slim blond figure who climbed the front steps behind him, who paused to read the brass plaques on the vestibule’s duty roster, who jerked back at the sight of one particular name, then returned to the curb to collect a waiting cab.

So this was how it felt to get blind-sided.

Roxanne had been stretching canvas in the studio when Charles rushed in to break the news. Heart-weary from hearing it, she slumped on her high work stool, head bowed, hands dangling between her knees. In the darkness outside, rain fell, the first downpour since the night she’d found Adrian. Like a storm of regret, it drummed on the roof and poured off the overwhelmed downspouts.

“At least he’s not married,” she said, pushing her fallen hair from her face.

“I have no idea whether he is or not. They don’t put that on the door. ‘Inspector Adrian Philips, married, two children.’”

She glowered at him. How could anyone that spiteful look angelic? “If you’re so smart, why did you think he was a procurer?”

Charles shrugged and brushed an imaginary speck off his natty teal shirt. She’d made that shirt for him, every elegant pleat, every tidy stitch. Now she could have ripped it off his back and trampled it without a qualm.

She growled and flung herself off the stool to pace. The paint-spattered floorboards creaked beneath her tread. “I can’t believe what a fool I made of myself. A policeman! No wonder he blushed every time I said ‘boo.’”

Charles studied his well-kept nails. “The fact that you flaunted yourself at every opportunity may have had something to do with that.”

“Oh, I see.” She turned to poke his sternum. “Give a man a little encouragement, and suddenly I’m a tart.”

“I didn’t say that. I never even thought it.”

Uncomforted, she covered her face. “Who am I fooling? I never thought I’d say this, but by God, I am my mother’s daughter—much good as it did me.”

“Stop it. There’s plenty of men who’d be interested in you besides that one. Good riddance, I say. He didn’t deserve you. That’s all I meant. That’s—”

To her astonishment, he gasped for breath and broke into tears. The outburst startled her from her gloom. She’d never, in all the time she’d known him, seen Charles cry. Frankly, this was the last thing she’d have guessed would set him off.

“Oh, Charlie,” she crooned, pulling him stiff and resisting against her. “You were afraid, weren’t you?”

“No, no, no,” he said, but he went on crying anyway.

Ignoring his attempts to push her off, Roxanne stroked his fair silky head. He seemed so strong and self-possessed most of the time, she tended to forget he was still a boy—and a vulnerable boy at that.

“That’s right,” she said when his arms finally moved to hold her, awkwardly at first and then with a fierce strength. “Cry it out. I understand. But I’d never put you out. If somebody wants me, I don’t care how handsome they are. They have to take you and Max, too.”

Of course, there wasn’t much chance of that being an issue in this instance. A policeman. She’d almost rather he were a thief. She wondered how she was going to face him now that she knew. As to that, she wondered if she’d have to face him at all.