Reid had the easy manners of someone brought up with money, education, and no doors locked to his desires. The Redners were one of the few human families who had risen into Vanir high society—and dressed for the part. Reid was meticulous about his appearance, down to the very last detail. Every tie he wore, she’d learned, was selected to bring out the green in his hazel eyes. His suits were always impeccably cut to his toned body. She might have called him vain, had she not put such consideration into her own outfits. Had she not known that Reid worked with a personal trainer for the exact reason that she kept dancing—beyond her love for it—making sure her body was primed for when its strength might be needed to escape any would-be predator hunting the streets.
Since the day the Vanir had crawled through the Northern Rift and overtaken Midgard eons ago, an event historians called the Crossing, running was the best option if a Vanir decided to make a meal of you. That is, if you didn’t have a gun or bombs or any of the horrid things people like Philip Briggs had developed to kill even a long-lived, quick-healing creature.
She often wondered about it: what it had been like before this planet had found itself occupied by creatures from so many different worlds, all of them far more advanced and civilized than this one, when it was just humans and ordinary animals. Even their calendar system hearkened to the Crossing, and the time before and after it: H.E. and V.E.—Human Era and Vanir Era.
Reid lifted his dark brows at the mostly empty bottle of wine. “Nice choice.”
Forty-five minutes. Without a call or a message to tell her he’d be late.
Bryce gritted her teeth. “Something came up at work?”
Reid shrugged, scanning the restaurant for high-ranking officials to hobnob with. As the son of a man who had his name displayed in twenty-foot letters on three buildings in the CBD, people usually lined up to chat with him. “Some of the malakim are restless about developments in the Pangeran conflict. They needed reassurance their investments were still sound. The call ran long.”
The Pangeran conflict—the fighting Briggs so badly wanted to bring to this territory. The wine that had gone to her head eddied into an oily pool in her gut. “The angels think the war might spread here?”
Spying no one of interest in the restaurant, Reid flipped open his leather-bound menu. “No. The Asteri wouldn’t let that happen.”
“The Asteri let it happen over there.”
His lips twitched downward. “It’s a complicated issue, Bryce.”
Conversation over. She let him go back to studying the menu.
Reports of the territory across the Haldren Sea were grim: the human resistance was prepared to wipe themselves out rather than submit to the Asteri and their “elected” Senate’s rule. For forty years now, the war had raged in the vast Pangeran territory, wrecking cities, creeping toward the stormy sea. Should the conflict cross it, Crescent City, sitting on Valbara’s southeastern coast—midway up a peninsula called the Hand for the shape of the arid, mountainous land that jutted out—would be one of the first places in its path.
Fury refused to talk about what she saw over there. What she did over there. What side she fought for. Most Vanir did not find a challenge to more than fifteen thousand years of their reign amusing.
Most humans did not find fifteen thousand years of near-slavery, of being prey and food and whores, to be all that amusing, either. Never mind that in recent centuries, the Imperial Senate had granted humans more rights—with the Asteri’s approval, of course. The fact remained that anyone who stepped out of line was thrown right back to where they’d started: literal slaves to the Republic.
The slaves, at least, existed mostly in Pangera. A few lived in Crescent City, namely among the warrior-angels in the 33rd, the Governor’s personal legion, marked by the SPQM slave tattoo on their wrists. But they blended in, for the most part.
Crescent City, for all that its wealthiest were grade A assholes, was still a melting pot. One of the rare places where being a human didn’t necessarily mean a lifetime of menial labor. Though it didn’t entitle you to much else.
A dark-haired, blue-eyed Fae female caught Bryce’s cursory glance around the room, her boy toy across the table marking her as some sort of noble.
Bryce had never decided whom she hated more: the winged malakim or the Fae. The Fae, probably, whose considerable magic and grace made them think they were allowed to do what they pleased, with anyone they pleased. A trait shared by many members of the House of Sky and Breath: the swaggering angels, the lofty sylphs, and the simmering elementals.
House of Shitheads and Bastards, Danika always called them. Though her own allegiance to the House of Earth and Blood might have shaded her opinion a bit—especially when the shifters and Fae were forever at odds.
Born of two Houses, Bryce had been forced to yield her allegiance to the House of Earth and Blood as part of accepting the civitas rank her father had gotten her. It had been the price paid for accepting the coveted citizen status: he’d petition for full citizenship, but she would have to claim Sky and Breath as her House. She’d resented it, resented the bastard for making her choose, but even her mother had seen that the benefits outweighed the costs.
Not that there were many advantages or protections for humans within the House of Earth and Blood, either. Certainly not for the young man seated with the Fae female.
Beautiful, blond, no more than twenty, he was likely a tenth of his Fae companion’s age. The tanned skin of his wrists held no hint of the four-lettered slave tattoo. So he had to be with her through his own free will, then—or desire for whatever she offered: sex, money, influence. It was a fool’s bargain, though. She’d use him until she was bored, or he grew too old, and then dump his ass at the curb, still craving those Fae riches.
Bryce inclined her head to the noblewoman, who bared her too-white teeth at the insolence. The Fae female was beautiful—but most of the Fae were.
She found Reid watching, a frown on his handsome face. He shook his head—at her—and resumed reading the menu.
Bryce sipped her wine. Signaled the waiter to bring over another bottle.
I’m crazy about you.
Connor wouldn’t tolerate the sneering, the whispering. Neither would Danika. Bryce had witnessed both of them rip into the stupid assholes who’d hissed slurs at her, or who mistook her for one of the many half-Vanir females who scraped a living in the Meat Market by selling their bodies.
Most of those women didn’t get the chance to complete the Drop—either because they didn’t make it to the threshold of maturity or because they got the short end of the stick with a mortal life span. There were predators, both born and trained, who used the Meat Market as a personal hunting ground.
Bryce’s phone buzzed, right as the waiter finally made his way over, fresh bottle of wine in hand. Reid frowned again, his disapproval heavy enough that she refrained from reading the message until she’d ordered her beef-with-cheese-foam sandwich.
Danika had written, Dump the limp-dicked bastard and put Connor out of his misery. A date with him won’t kill you. He’s been waiting years, Bryce. Years. Give me something to smile about tonight.
Bryce cringed as she shoved her phone back into her bag. She looked up to find Reid on his own phone, thumbs flying, his chiseled features illuminated by the dim screen. Their invention five decades ago had occurred right in Redner Industries’ famed tech lab, and vaulted the company into unprecedented fortune. A new era of linking the world, everyone claimed. Bryce thought they just gave people an excuse not to make eye contact. Or be bad dates.
“Reid,” she said. He just held up a finger.
Bryce tapped a red nail on the base of her wineglass. She kept her nails long—and took a daily elixir to keep them strong. Not as effective as talons or claws, but they could do some damage. At least enough to potentially get away from an assailant.
“Reid,” she said again. He kept typing, and looked up only when the first course appeared.
It was indeed a salmon mousse. Over a crisp of bread, and encaged in some latticework of curling green plants. Small ferns, perhaps. She swallowed her laugh.
“Go ahead and dig in,” Reid said distantly, typing again. “Don’t wait for me.”
“One bite and I’ll be done,” she muttered, lifting her fork but wondering how the Hel to eat the thing. No one around them used their fingers, but … The Fae female sneered again.
Bryce set down the fork. Folded her napkin into a neat square before she rose. “I’m going.”
“All right,” Reid said, eyes fixed on his screen. He clearly thought she was going to the bathroom. She could feel the eyes of a well-dressed angel at the next table travel up her expanse of bare leg, then heard the chair groan as he leaned back to admire the view of her ass.
Exactly why she kept her nails strong.
But she said to Reid, “No—I’m leaving. Thank you for dinner.”
That made him look up. “What? Bryce, sit down. Eat.”
As if his being late, being on the phone, weren’t part of this. As if she were just something he needed to feed before he fucked. She said clearly, “This isn’t working out.”
His mouth tightened. “Excuse me?”
She doubted he’d ever been dumped. She said with a sweet smile, “Bye, Reid. Good luck with work.”
“Bryce.”
But she had enough gods-damned self-respect not to let him explain, not to accept sex that was merely okay basically in exchange for meals at restaurants she could never afford, and a man who had indeed rolled off her and gotten right back on that phone. So she swiped the bottle of wine and stepped away from the table, but not toward the exit.
She went up to the sneering Fae female and her human plaything and said in a cool voice that would have made even Danika back away, “Like what you see?”
The female gave her a sweeping glance, from Bryce’s heels to her red hair to the bottle of wine dangling from her fingers. The Fae female shrugged, setting the black stones in her long dress sparkling. “I’ll pay a gold mark to watch you two.” She inclined her head to the human at her table.
He offered Bryce a smile, his vacant face suggesting he was soaring high on some drug.
Bryce smirked at the female. “I didn’t know Fae females had gotten so cheap. Word on the street used to be that you’d pay us gold by the armful to pretend you’re not lifeless as Reapers between the sheets.”
The female’s tan face went white. Glossy, flesh-shredding nails snagged on the tablecloth. The man across from her didn’t so much as flinch.
Bryce put a hand on the man’s shoulder—in comfort or to piss off the female, she wasn’t sure. She squeezed lightly, again inclining her head toward the female, and strode out.
She swigged from the bottle of wine and flipped off the preening hostess on her way through the bronze doors. Then snatched a handful of matchbooks from the bowl atop the stand, too.
Reid’s breathless apologies to the noble drifted behind her as Bryce stepped onto the hot, dry street.
Well, shit. It was nine o’clock, she was decently dressed, and if she went back to that apartment, she’d pace around until Danika bit her head off. And the wolves would shove their noses into her business, which she didn’t want to discuss with them at all.
Which left one option. Her favorite option, fortunately.
Fury picked up on the first ring. “What.”
“Are you on this side of the Haldren or the wrong one?”
“I’m in Five Roses.” The flat, cool voice was laced with a hint of amusement—practically outright laughter, coming from Fury. “But I’m not watching television with the pups.”
“Who the Hel would want to do that?”