Chapter 4 — The Claim (1)

The note on my landlord's fridge was written in a handwriting that looked like it had been chiseled by a glacier, and it had been sealed shut with wax the color of old blood.

My landlord — Gary, werewolf, foreclosures hobbyist, wears a fanny pack to evictions — was standing in my doorway at five in the morning holding the note like it might bite him.

“Lila,” he said, and his tail, which he tried very hard to hide around the fanny pack, was doing something nervous behind him. “I got this. Addressed to me. To my fridge, actually. It says —” he cleared his throat and read, “‘The dwelling above the woman known as the Handler is now under Wolf-King ward. Collect no rent. Evict no one. If she so much as changes the Wi-Fi password without my approval, I will know. — K.’” Gary looked up. “Who’s K? And how does he know my Wi-Fi?”

“That,” I said, “is the Wolf King.”

“The Wolf King.”

“The one from the Hollow. The one who —” I waved a hand at the general concept of monstrous ancient politics. “Long story. We’re kind of dating, I guess?”

Gary’s fanny pack did a little hop. “Dating. You’re dating the man who just mailed a love letter to my fridge.”

“It’s not a love letter. It’s a property declaration. There’s a difference. Love letters have hearts.”

I read the rest over Gary’s shoulder. It went on. Clan heralds had been dispatched before sunrise. The Hollow’s message boards — the ones nailed to tunnel walls in a language I could just barely read — carried the same words, repeated in three scripts. A copy had been nailed to the door of the Double Moon Casino. A personal courier had even knocked on the apartment building across the street to inform my upstairs neighbor, a retired schoolteacher who had no idea monsters existed, that “the loud young woman below you is under royal protection; her music may continue at any hour.”

I had, in roughly twelve hours, gone from “bartender with a rent problem” to “publicly claimed territory of the single most dangerous creature in Umbra City.”

This was not a conversation we’d had.

“Gary,” I said, folding the note back up, “for the record, I did not ask for this.”

“If I survive the week, you can tell people I tried to stop him. He’s very persuasive when he wants something.”

Gary looked at the blood wax. “So I’m not getting rent. Ever?”

“I mean, the note says collect no rent. That’s pretty clear.”

“The note also says he’ll know if you change the Wi-Fi.” Gary’s voice went small. “Lila. What kind of man knows my Wi-Fi at five in the morning?”

“The kind,” I said, heading for the shower, “who has a thousand years of free time and zero hobbies. Wear shoes. We’re going out.”

I didn't, in the end, take Gary with me. I told him to stay inside and not answer the door for any wolves who came by with paperwork. He agreed with the enthusiasm of a man who has just remembered he has a very good reason to be home today.

I walked down to the Hollow proper on my way to the opera house, just to see the damage. The message boards were exactly as bad as Gary's fridge. Every tunnel wall had a posted sheet, sealed with the same blood wax, the same words repeated in the same chiseled handwriting. The hounds read them and averted their eyes. The serpent-caste vendors read them and very carefully did not make eye contact with me. A drunk bear — not Stanley, a different one — read the notice, looked at me, and raised his bottle in a solemn toast, like we were at a wedding.

“Congratulations,” he slurred.

“It's not a wedding.”

“Same thing. Someone's territory. Someone's toast.” He drank. “Whole city talking about you, Handler. Whole city.”

The whole city was, in fact, talking about me. I could feel it. The quiet that fell in tunnels when I walked through them — not fear, exactly. Attention. Every beast I passed knew my name now. Every beast knew I was the Wolf King's.

I did not know how to be the Wolf King's.

I knew how to be a bartender. I knew how to pour a margarita and calm a hound and argue with my landlord about a fanny pack. I did not know how to be a thing that was nailed to tunnel walls in blood wax.

---

I found him in the wreckage of the ledger room.

Not wreckage from a fight — wreckage from whatever Kael had done the second the crow’s blood letter landed. The wall of carved names was fine, but the doorframe was splintered, the table the crows used for ledgers was in pieces on the floor, and there was a new crater in the stone where something, or someone, had been thrown hard enough to leave a mark on a room that hadn’t been touched in centuries.

Kael stood in the middle of it, coat on, silver eyes fixed on nothing, looking like a man who had just lost a fight to his own temper.

I walked through the rubble of what had probably been a very nice table and planted myself in front of him.

“Explain,” I said.

He didn’t blink. “Explain what.”

“The claim. The public one. The one that just arrived on my werewolf landlord’s fridge in blood wax. The one that told half the city I’m yours.” I put air quotes around yours, which felt ridiculous even as I did it, because apparently in this economy a girl couldn’t even get bedeviled by a curse without it going viral. “We had a deal. I said I’m staying. I didn’t say you got to hang a sign on me.”

“I hung a sign on the city,” he corrected. “There’s a difference.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The old king sent a letter.” His voice was flat. Glacier-flat. “He said he was coming to take what belongs to him. Every clan in Umbra City heard that letter. Every clan is now deciding whether to back me, back him, or try to grab you first and play us both.” He turned those silver eyes on me, and there was something in them I didn’t like — too controlled, too still. “A claim isn’t a love letter, Lila. It’s a warning. It tells every beast in this city that if they touch you, they touch me. It’s the only thing standing between you and two hundred clans of people who’d sell your bloodline to my uncle before breakfast.”

I stared at him.

“That’s very sweet,” I said, after a moment. “It’s also extremely presumptuous, and you skipped the part where you asked me.”

“You would have said no.”

“I would have said no! That’s the polite part! That’s where normal people start!”

He actually looked faintly pleased. “Normal people don’t have a millennial blood-feud to survive.”

“Normal people also don’t answer to the name ‘K.’”

“I have a surname,” he said. “Voss. You’d know it if you read the claim. It’s on the fridge.”