Page 6

DOLION

My Steorra left me staring at a pile of ash as the woman before me disappeared in a blinding flash. Stone shielded my eyes a fraction of a second behind her disappearance, long enough to feel her heat before she died right in front of me.

Again.

This was becoming a bad habit.

My heart beat at a frantic pace the moment my skin returned to its usual color, but by then my fiery star had returned to her regular hiding spot.

A deep laugh rumbled through my chest as the community group returned from their walking tour in time to see the laughing statue.

Several paused in their confusion and chattered needlessly, flashing me with hand help devices.

I winced at the extra light, and swore her giggle followed the group through the cemetery even as the shape of her seared into my arms, as though she still pressed against me.

I’d come so close to pressing my mouth to hers that my lips ached for the missing contact.

And hot on the heels of that little misdemeanor came the deluge of guilt dressed as a different face, one from a different time framed by golden ringlets and rosy cheeks.

“Minette,” I rasped, squeezing my fists tight and scaring the last of the locals who stared at me askance like I might rob them, or worse.

But the draw to the woman with the copper hair that glinted like burnished starlight in the fresh morning sun could not be ignored.

Perhaps Sebastian has it right. A gargoyle’s heart could only beat while it was whole, after all.

I had slept for three hundred years waiting for my brokenness to heal after the death of my beloved.

Someone once told me that time healed wounds.

Perhaps in a physical sense that might be true, the simple knitting of flesh and blood.

But I’d never believed it in the metaphorical space, where a mental chaos or a sickness of the heart could simply be defined as fixed by the series of sunsets and sunrises over my ugly, twisted shadow.

Until, perhaps, now.

I waited until we were alone, the small crowd moved along on their tour of innocuous chatter and inane facts about the lives of people they neither knew nor would remember in the next moments when they changed to the lane beyond the crypt I watched.

Then I crossed the path and knocked on the wall of her stained marble tomb.

“Are you coming back out today, my Steorra?” I murmured, keeping my voice low.

Her soft breaths were the only answer I received.

Alright. She could keep on hiding. I understood that need. My lips twitched as I traced the crack I knew she peered through at me, obliterating her light source for a moment before giving it back.

“Shall I return later for you, or will you find me?” I didn’t let her answer, wandering away from her crypt. She would create her own path. Something told me this girl sought her own destiny, though her words still rang in my head.

Someone else sets the fires.

I am not the one you seek.

As though she wanted to be the one I needed.

Or perhaps that was a pithy fantasy my strung out heart craved in desperation for contact with another of my kind.

Relief hit me that she hadn’t hurt children in a school or the other place that Tifa mentioned.

But she wasn’t of my kind. No one here was.

Of all the sorts I’d seen in the witch’s tavern the night before, or the statues where today, no one was like me.

Or like her. The soft thought whispered through my mind, unbidden. I wondered if Sebastian also found himself alone, or created a hive of vampires in my tri-century long absence. The thought soured in my gut as I refocused on the task at hand.

I loved you, Minette. I love you still. And you will have all my memory and my heart of three hundred years. I pray you will forgive me in this.

My heart beat once, hard and painful and I gave into the thought of my Minette watching, and begged her mercy.

The short time I had with her was not enough. It should have been a mortal lifetime, but that was stolen by the demoness she ended, and gave her own life to free us.

“I love you,” I murmured, my voice low enough that the faintest flicker of morning breeze in the still, muggy air whisked my words away. “And yet, I live.” While you do not.

Perhaps Sebastian lived through his pain. Perhaps I had been selfish in my solitary confinement of stone while he bore his grief alone.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

And now, a fallen star called to me. Her brightness imprinted across my chest, an ember that burned soul deep, etching herself there.

I released a fragmented breath.

No, she was not the one Sebastian hunted. Maybe Ash—not her true name, I was certain—was who I needed, however.

I am not the one you seek.

Wasn’t she?

A soft laugh followed my confession, and this time the winds didn’t deign to steal my sounds.

All I had to do was convince my best friend of that little fact on the word of a flighty being who burst into flame and ash every moment she was scared, even though he seemed to have missed her display back at the tavern.

The witch hadn’t, however.

I slipped my hand into my pocket, rubbing my fingers in the pinch of ash I kept there. I’d keep the small souvenir for myself, if for now, in any case. Perhaps Sebastian was into something with this mystery solving bent of his. It was time I joined the fray.

The witch’s tavern that I had frequented on my arrival in New Orleans—The Devil’s Fool, a play on the major arcana, Sebastian’s current voodoo crush was far from my first brush with magic users—was far from full of patrons as it had been the night before.

I settled at the bar while he slept back in our room, hidden below street level where light could not enter our basement level dwelling.

“The same as you had last night?” The witch, Tifa, offered. Her many shawls dragged across the bar top in her wake.

I nodded, knowing I wouldn’t gain a single word of information out of her without Sebastian at my side if I didn’t drop coin in return for her custom.

Metaphorical coin, I'd come to understand, after reading his scrawled instructions about the phone and how to work it.

I held the screen to my face, tapped the colored square—I prayed I picked the right one—and held it out gingerly in payment.

The bleep told me I got it right. Tifa’s broad grin told me I didn't fool her for an instant.

“Glad you’ve joined the real world.”

“He’s spoken about me.” I bit back an oath and offered her a fake as fuck smile that bit into her good humor.

“At length.” The smile slid off her handsome face. Not my style, but Sebastian and I always differed in our tastes.

Damnit, I need to keep her happy.

I toyed with the ale that she poured for me and wondered how in all the hells I was supposed to start this conversation. “Perhaps I should have ordered something a little stronger.”

“Or start with what you know.”

I winced. “I am…unpracticed.”

Her nose wrinkled. Even that small motion had an edge of grace to it. “You don’t say.” She blew out a breath. Knowing emerald eyes found and held mine. “Is it about the phoenix girl The firebird?” she prompted when I didn't immediately respond to her barb.

I canted my head to one side. Interesting assumption, and wrong. About the girl, yes. That she was a phoenix… There, Tifa was not so correct. Not that I'd be removing that assumption from her any time soon. The longer she thought my Steorra was a firebird, the longer she might leave her alone.

Certainly, my girl’s little ashing issue held some similarities, but she didn’t flap her way to freedom, and she wasn’t reborn in the traditional phoenix manner.

I’d encountered plenty of those in my lifetime.

No, Ash was something rarer than a firebird.

Plus there was that little flash of light that preceded her combustible moment…

I smiled into my ale. “If I told you there was another cause of your fires in your city, would that change the trajectory of your search?”

Tifa stilled. “You have evidence that your friend will accept, of course?” She flicked idly at the tangled fringes of her many seals, the rainbow melding into a conglomerate of color. “He won't like that you’ve brought change to his plans.”

“He’ll have to get used to it,” I said quietly. “It was his idea to bring me along.” That Sebastian had sold the house without consulting me and interrupted my slumber still irked deeply. “I was…resting.”

She snorted. “You were sulking, my friend.”

A deep growl reverberated through my chest. “My heart shattered over the love of many lifetimes stripped away by the sort of demoness this world has seen only once before.”

“We all have broken hearts to suffer. Do you think you are the only one to be besotted by the devil and made a fool by him?” Tifa asked softly.

I glared at her for making a pun of both her bar’s name and my plight. Minette’s fate, though three hundred years had passed in these people’s time, was still too fresh in my own. “How long have you been in this place?”

The witch shrugged one shoulder. Elegance exuded from every movement.

I wondered if she hadn’t been a dancer in her previous life.

“Near fifty years. I have seen New Orleans change. Not from the muddy pilchard it was when you first arrived, the fledgling port struggling to survive when the first filles à la cassette arrived.”

“Gisella.” My heart panged at the thought of first Sebastian’s wife, then her daughter. Both losses long past, like my Minette. The betrayal that I now flirted with another woman, held her in my arms, breathed her warmth in … It grew too much.

Heat of my own burned within me. Not bright like Ash’s, but a low, cold smolder of self-hatred that would never go out.

Minette. I miss you.

I loved you.

“Hell, I love you still.” My voice cracked as I stared blindly at the wall behind the bar owner’s head as though I could bring back the woman I had loved and lost by lack of willpower alone.

But nothing could bring her back now, and I was left with nothing.

Sebastian had moved on. He’d brought me here with the express purpose of creating a new life, and I hated him for it. For moving me from my fixed place, taking me from the garden and away from her grave where I should have rested beside her for an eternity.

Forever, as I promised her when I last turned to stone in that place.

And now I was here, living again. Fascinated with life.

It felt…right.

And yet so wrong.

Fury built within me at Sebastian’s trickery as memory assailed me. The anger I'd kept inside turned on the witch hiding in plain sight right in front of me.

“Be glad she dispatched the evil so your kind don’t have to ever deal with it,” I snapped, slamming the base of my glass onto the counter.

Cracks formed along the sides even as I clamped my palms around the tall glass to prevent the inevitable. As it had the night before, the glass shattered, though this time it slopped its contents on the bar top.

Tifa sighed, sweeping a cloth that soon waterlogged as she cleaned the remnants of my mess from the scarred wood. “That’s two you owe me. I keep a tally,” she reminded me.

I nodded and held out the phone.

“I’ll take payment when you bring her back. The one who isn’t what I think she is.”

Damn bar witch.

Her laugh swirled around my head as I left The Devil’s Fool, heading for our accommodation. I wanted to clean up before I sought out my strange little fallen star.

She should almost be awake by now, and despite my self loathing, and the penance I heaped upon myself, I had a promise to keep.