Chapter 2. My Landlord Doesn't Eat People (2)

His eyes landed on her face for a moment too long on the word desire.Lynn's ears went hot. She signed her name so fast the pen skipped, and did not look at him again until she was out of the office and three blocks away, where she leaned against a mailbox and breathed like a person who had just been hunted.At eleven that night, Lynn limped home.She had sealed a rift in the storm drain system near the Mission — a small one, but stubborn, and it had taken everything she had left. She was running on fumes and spite. She let herself into 3B, kicked off her shoes, and stopped.Her kitchen light was on.Warm yellow light, and a smell — sweet, buttery, impossible. Pancakes.Kael Voss stood at her stove, back to her, black shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, the fine bones of his wrists on display, his attention fixed on the skillet with the gravity of a man defusing a bomb. He was wearing an apron printed with cartoon bats."…thirty seconds, then flip," he muttered, "too early and it sticks, too late and it burns. Negotiating with the Dark Domain was easier than this.""How," Lynn said, from the doorway, "did you get into my apartment.""I'm the landlord." He did not turn around. "I have keys.""That's breaking and entering!""Landlord inspection." He turned, carrying a plate with three pancakes stacked like a small architecture project, and set it on her counter. From his pocket he produced a can of whipped cream, and with surgical precision, squeezed a perfect rosette on top. "Eat. That was your third rift tonight. Your blood sugar is in the basement."Lynn stared at the rosette.Something in her chest did something complicated. She couldn't name it. She had been taken care of approximately zero times in her adult life. The Sisters at St. Agnes's had said be strong, be still, be grateful for the roof over your head. Zoey said you got this bestie and sent memes. Nobody had ever, in Lynn's entire life, stood in her kitchen at eleven PM and made her pancakes and put a flower of cream on top because her blood sugar was low."Don't think this buys me," she said, sitting down hard, and speared a pancake. "We're landlord and tenant. That's the whole of it.""Mm." Kael sat across from her, chin propped on his hand, watching her eat. The warm light put amber in his red eyes. "Tenant girl.""Stop looking at me like I'm a —" Lynn's fork paused. She swallowed the word prey. "Like I'm a pancake.""Pancakes don't tear rifts at two AM." He smiled a little. "And they don't yank their sleeve down when someone looks at their wrist."Lynn's hand froze on her left sleeve.She had, in fact, been hiding it. Under the cuff, on her wrist, a fresh Recoil burn: red, raised, throbbing faintly, like a brand.Kael's smile was gone. "Let me see it.""It's nothing.""That's the Recoil," he said, and his voice had gone low.

"The more you feel, the worse it burns. Last night, when you saved that man — you were crying. You don't get to tell me you feel nothing. Your 'nothing' lit up the Dark Domain's signal towers like Christmas.""Those towers are none of my business.""They're entirely your business," Kael said, "and you know it. Let me see the wrist, Lynn."She didn't let him. He didn't ask again. He simply stood, walked around the table, and knelt in front of her — which was such an unexpected thing to do that she forgot to pull away — and took her wrist in his cold, careful fingers. The contact was like winter glass, and it burned her anyway, a different kind of burning.He pushed the sleeve up an inch. Looked at the mark. His thumb traced the edge of the burn, feather-light."Does it hurt?" he asked. His voice was doing something she didn't have a name for."No," Lynn lied. "It stops hurting the moment you leave."Kael did not leave.He bent his head, and pressed his mouth to the skin one inch from the wound — not on it, never on it, but beside it, like a ritual, like a promise drawn in a place that would not scar. His breath was cool on her skin. Lynn's whole body went very still, the way a deer goes still."Remember this," he said, against her wrist, and raised his eyes to hers. The dark in them was deep and patient and terrifyingly sincere. "From today, your wounds are mine to manage."Lynn's brain short-circuited. Gold light surged under her skin, hot and wrong and wonderful, and she yanked her hand back and hit the refrigerator with her shoulder blade, the cold metal a shock against her spine."We're incompatible," she said. Her voice was doing a bad job of being steady. "I'm the guardian. You're a vampire. The Covenant says we're natural opposites. You'd corrupt me, I'd purify you. We're not — this isn't —""The Covenant also says you're a sacrifice," Kael said. He hadn't moved. He was still kneeling there, looking up at her with those impossible eyes. "Says your destiny is to wake at twenty and die at twenty-one. You believe that too?""I don't believe it," Lynn said, and hated how small her voice came out. "But it's the rule.""Rules can be shredded." He stood, unhurried, and looked down at her. "My blade has no limits — except for you. For you, I surrender."There was no smile on his face. The dark in his eyes had gone almost soft, and that softness frightened her more than any cruelty would have. She could have hated a monster. She could have fought a monster. But this man made her pancakes and bandaged her in words and knelt at her feet and said surrender like it was the only word in his language that meant anything."You can sacrifice," he said, quieter. "But never for the damn rules. You'll say it yourself, one day. I'm just saying it first."

Outside the window, a pane of glass shattered.Kael didn't look. His hand moved — once, casually, like swatting a fly — and a blade of dark light left his fingers and crossed the room. There was a wet sound, a choked noise, the thud of something heavy hitting the balcony rail.Lynn was at the window in two steps. A figure in black lay crumpled on the fire escape, a dark blade through its chest, already dissolving into ash, a silver mask with a red bat crest rolling loose on the boards."A blood kin," Lynn said. Her voice had gone flat. "What — why —""Elder Council's hound." Kael had not moved from the table. His tone was the tone of a man discussing delivery times. "They breed them for this. Sent to find you.""Find me? I've been awake for two days. I'm a college student. I have a participation grade problem. Why would —""Because you awakened." Kael finally turned, and for the first time something in his face was not bored, not soft, not anything she could file away. "An anchor doesn't just wake up. You lit a flare over every dark street in the world. The Conclave wants you alive — to drain you. The Covenant wants you dead — and grateful." He smiled, and the smile had an edge of the madness she'd been waiting for all along. "And me?"Lynn held her breath."I'm the only one who wants you to live."The wind came in through the broken window, lifting his black hair. Lynn looked at him, at the ash on the balcony, at the pancakes going cold on her counter, and felt her worldview get run over by a truck, slowly, in reverse, so it could be run over again."Why," she heard herself ask. "Why me? We've known each other for two days."Kael didn't answer. His gaze slid past her, across the room, to the desk — to the photograph propped there, the one from St. Agnes's, taken in the orphanage garden. A six-year-old girl in a faded dress, missing a front tooth, squinting into the sun, laughing at nothing.He looked at it for a long time. Long enough that Lynn started to feel unsettled."What are you looking at?" she asked."Looking at my rent," Kael said. His voice was very soft. "Worth every penny."Across the street, on the rooftop opposite, a figure in a silver mask lowered a pair of field glasses and made a note in a small leather book.