Chapter 3 — The Feast of Beasts (1)

The feast was held in the old opera house — the one humans thought had burned down in 1967, which was technically true, and which the beast clans had rebuilt into the most opulent, most ridiculous, most aggressively monstrous social venue in Umbra City.

Chandeliers made of actual moonstone. A dance floor that looked like a glacier. Waiters who were ninety percent wing. And two hundred of the most powerful monsters in the city, all dressed like they were going to a gala, all pretending they weren't here for exactly one reason:

Me.

The Handler who made the Wolf King kneel.

It had been approximately twenty hours since the Hollow, and the rumor had spread through the underground like fire through a fur farm. By the time Kael walked me through the doors — hand on the small of my back, a gesture I'd have called a gentleman's move if it didn't feel like he was claiming territory — every eye in the building was on us.

The room went quiet.

Then the onslaught began.

“Handler! Handler, I’m Vale, I’m the head of the Vale pack, my brother has the rage-plague, he’s been screaming for three days, they said you can fix anything —”

“— my daughter turned feral at her own wedding, the caterers still won't deliver, please, you have to —”

“— I’m not a beast, I’m a familiar, but my mistress keeps setting things on fire when she’s stressed, do you do house calls, I’ll pay anything —”

I was mobbed within thirty seconds.

It was like being swarmed by extremely well-dressed, deeply unstable groupies. A panther lord shoved a signed photograph of himself at me. A were-crow pressed a dead goldfish into my hands, croaking “sacrifice” like it was a compliment. Someone offered me a crown. Someone else offered me their firstborn, which I declined on the grounds that I didn't have a nursery.

“Okay, okay,” I said, holding the goldfish at arm's length, “everyone breathe. Literally. I can’t calm anyone if you're all hyperventilating at me, I’m one girl, I have limits, and I’m pretty sure the goldfish is a hostage situation.”

From across the room, I heard it: a low, volcanic rumble.

Kael.

He was standing near the bar, a glass of something dark in his hand, and he was watching the mob around me with the expression of a man calculating how many of them he could legally dismember before the appetizers.

The panther lord — the one with the signed photo — made the mistake of putting his hand on my shoulder.

“Handler, if I could just get a private session —”

The glass in Kael's hand shattered.

The panther lord's hand left my shoulder so fast I heard the air pop. The mob parted. And the Wolf King crossed the room in a way that made the chandeliers shake, came to a stop directly in front of the trembling panther, and looked down at him like a god regarding a bug.

“She is not a spa appointment,” Kael said, very softly. “Touch her again, and I will turn your pelt into a welcome mat.”

The panther lord fled.

I stared at Kael. “You’re joking.”

“I don’t joke.”

“You do,” I said, because I’d seen it. “You joke about the catering. You joke about welcome mats. You’re a very funny man who has convinced himself he isn’t.”

The corner of his mouth did something treasonous. He covered it with the glass he’d just conjured from nowhere — because of course he had a bar that refilled itself — and said, stiffly, “You’re causing a diplomatic incident.”

“I’m causing it? You threatened to turn a man into a rug in front of two hundred witnesses because he touched my shoulder.”

“He touched you,” Kael said, like that explained everything, and honestly? In some terrible, possessive, wolf-brain way, it kind of did.

The feast went downhill from there in the best possible way.

Every clan lord in the city came to grovel. The bear accountant Stanley showed up to personally thank me — “I did my taxes so well last year, Handler, you wouldn’t believe the deduction” — and Kael stood behind me the whole time, radiating menace at a man who had once eaten a filing cabinet. The were-crows, the sensitive caterers, presented me with a dish they called “Remembrance,” which I was fairly sure was made of something that used to be alive, and which I praised with the diplomacy of a hostage.

And through it all, Kael hovered.

Not obviously. Not even, I think, on purpose. But every time a beast got within three feet of me, he materialized like a bodyguard with a vendetta. When a snake-caste lord bowed too low, Kael stepped between us. When a hound offered to carry me to my seat — literally offered, like a taxi — Kael made a sound low in his chest that was definitely a growl.

“You’re doing it again,” I said, as he herded me toward a seat with a view of the glacier dance floor.

“Doing what.”

“The territorial thing. The ‘she is mine, do not breathe on her’ thing. It’s very Old Testament.”

“I am a wolf,” Kael said, with immense dignity. “Wolves are territorial. It’s biological.”

“You’re a thousand-year-old wolf who runs a criminal empire. You can evolve.”

“Evolution is overrated.” He pulled out my chair — the gentleman, the menace, the contradiction — and added, in a voice that did not quite land as casual, “Stay. Eat. Let them look. They’ll learn to stop touching what’s mine.”

My pulse did a thing I refused to acknowledge.

“What’s yours,” I repeated, sitting down. “Wow. Romantic.”

“I don’t do romantic.”

“You worried about the catering. You threatened a man for touching my shoulder. You pulled out my chair. You’re doing romantic, Kael. You’re doing it terribly, but you’re doing it.”

For a moment — a fraction of a second — something in his face cracked open, and I saw it: the thousand-year-old monster, caught off guard by a girl with a goldfish and a smart mouth.

Then he covered it, because he was very good at covering it.

“Eat your dinner,” he said.

The fox arrived at dessert.

Serena swept in like a weather system, dressed in something the color of sunset, trailing her entourage of lesser foxes and a scent I could feel — cloying, sharp, dangerous. She didn't look at me. She looked at Kael, and the look was a loaded weapon.

“Darling,” she said, sliding into the seat beside him like she'd been invited, “I heard the feast was in honor of your new project. I had to see it myself.”

The temperature at our table dropped twenty degrees.