Chapter Four — The Cat and the Mouse (2)

Elowen took the coffee with a steady hand. "Maybe they like the way I organize folders."

"Elowen." Marcus turned to her then, and his face was the face of a man who had been holding a question for a long time and was now tired of holding it. "Who are you?"

She gave him the houseplant smile. It was flawless. It had been three years in the making. "I'm the support staff, Marcus. We've been over this."

He studied her. He sighed. He said, very quietly, "Okay. Support staff who gets personally audited by the most secretive firm in New York. Sure." He walked three steps, then paused. "For what it's worth, the way they said your name — it wasn't 'let's audit the intern.' It was 'we've been told this name matters.' Whoever told them, Elowen, you should probably be flattered. Or terrified. I haven't decided which one I'd be."

He left. Elowen stood by the coffee machine, holding a cup she did not remember pouring.

Why would Thorne Capital care about my filing cabinet? she asked herself.

She knew the answer. She was refusing to know the answer. The answer had silver-grey eyes and a voice like a knife being drawn and had, on a street corner three nights ago, called her little light.

No, she decided, with the firmness of a woman building a wall one brick at a time. That man is not auditing my paperwork. He is a billionaire with too much time. I will not flatter him by assuming he has a plan. I will just sit here and water myself.

She went back to her desk.

* * *

She took her lunch at the usual salad place. Rosa added extra avocado, as she always did, and refused the dollar Elowen tried to slip her, as she always did.

"You look like you're carrying something," Rosa said, wiping the counter.

"Deadlines," Elowen said.

Rosa looked at her the way a woman looks at a child who claims the monster under the bed is just a shadow. "Deadlines don't sit in your shoulders like that. Boys sit in your shoulders. But not the good kind." She pressed an extra container of dressing into the bag. "You eat the avocado, honey. It's got fats. Fats fix everything."

Elowen took the salad to the window seat and ate it slowly, watching the street. Two men in dark coats were standing near the corner of Greene and Prince, in the general vicinity of Cec's cart. They were not buying coffee. They were standing with the relaxed, patient stillness of men who were paid to stand there. Elowen noted them, the way she noted everything lately, and did not comment.

Cec, she thought, has friends.

She went back to the office and worked until the building emptied.

* * *

She left at 11:36. The bodega was open. She bought her milk, as she always did. She bought her croissant for tomorrow, as she always did.

And halfway down the block, her skin went up on alert.

She had felt Kael Thorne's attention three times now — on the street corner, in the elevator, in the car. She had learned its texture: patient, warm-dangerous, the weight of a thing that had decided she was worth waiting for. It pressed on her like weather, and by now she had begun, traitorously, to recognize it the way you recognize a house light left on for you.

This was not that.

This was something thinner. Something hungrier. A pressure along her shoulder blades that did not know her name yet. It was searching. It was scanning. It was the attention of a thing that had smelled something on the wind and was walking the block, sniffing, trying to find the door.

Elowen stopped walking. She did not turn her head. She stood very still, milk-bag swinging, and let her eyes track the street in a slow, casual sweep.

At the far corner, half in the shadow of the shuttered awning where Kael had stood once before, there was a man in a dark grey coat.

He was not tall, the way Kael was tall. He was lean and dark and he stood with his head slightly tilted, the way a dog tilts its head when it hears a sound only dogs can hear. He was looking directly at her.

Their eyes did not meet. She did not let them meet. She looked at him the way you look at a lamppost, and she kept her breath even, and she walked on, one block, two blocks, her little apartment-keyed stride unchanged.

When she risked the third look, the corner was empty.

She kept walking. She did not speed up. Speeding up, her grandmother had once told her in a different context, is what prey does. Vosses did not hurry. Vosses walked, and let the street come to them, and decided, at their own pace, whether to look over their shoulders.

She told herself it was a tourist. She told herself it was a private detective. She told herself it was a man waiting for someone, and she had spent too long feeling watched, and now every shadow had teeth.

She did not believe a word of it.

* * *

Far down the block, in the mouth of an alley where the sodium light didn't reach, the man in the dark grey coat stood very still. His head was still tilted. His nostrils flared once, slowly, like a hound that has just caught the line of a scent.

He closed his eyes.

There.

He had walked three blocks. He had smelled six hundred people, seven pizzas, three garbage bags, and one nervous cat. And under all of it, faint as a candle behind a wall, a thread of something that had not walked this city in a hundred years.

Pure. Old. Wrong in the best possible way.

He opened his eyes. They were the color of old silver, and they were, for the first time in a very long time, interested.

"The little ember," he murmured to the alley, to the garbage, to the dark, "is closer than we thought."

He smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a man who had been told, for a century, that a certain flame was extinct — and who had just, tonight, found the smoke.

Somewhere above him, a window in a brick building on Prince Street clicked off. He watched it go dark. He memorized the window.

Then he stepped back into the shadow and was gone.

* * *