"You're late," Aldric says.
He is standing in the middle of my living room with his coat still on, which means he has been here long enough to get comfortable and you chosen not to. That alone tells me his mood before I see his face.
I close the door behind me. "I'm alive. That should count for something."
"You were supposed to be back two hours ago." He turns. His eyes move over me the way they always do, fast and thorough, checking for damage before he allows himself to be angry. Two centuries of knowing me has trained him into that order whether he likes it or not. "What happened?"
"I didn't run."
The room goes quiet.
Aldric has been a vampire for four hundred and sixty years. I have seen him react to a great many things. What crosses his face right now is not anger and not relief. It is the specific look of a man who has been dreading a particular phone call and just received it.
"Vesper."
"He didn't fire."
"That is not the reassurance you think it is." He pulls his coat off now, drops it on the chair, sits. When Aldric sits down without being asked it means the conversation is going to take a while. "Tell me exactly what happened, leave nothing out."
I tell him, the basement, the weapon halfway lowered, the three minutes I asked for. I do not tell him about the scar, I don't know why I keep that part. It sits in my chest like something I am not ready to hand over yet.
When I finish, Aldric is quiet for long enough that I can hear the street outside, a truck moving through the intersection at the end of the block, someone's music bleeding from an upper window.
"He reported you dead," he finally says.
I go still. "How do you know that?"
"Because I have been monitoring pack communications since the moment you told me his name." He looks at me evenly. " Two words, target eliminated, filed forty minutes after you left that building." His voice is careful in the way it gets when he is frightened and will not show it. "He lied to his alpha for you. A Duskborn hunter. Do you understand what that means?"
I understand it better than Aldric knows. But I say, "It means we have time."
"It means you are in more danger than you were this morning." He leans forward. "Whatever stopped him tonight will not hold. These men are built from the ground up to finish what they start, when he comes to terms with what he did, when the pack starts asking questions, he will come back and he will be angry and he will want to fix his mistake."
"Or," I say, "he will come back because he wants answers."
Aldric looks at me for a long moment. "You're going to let him find you again."
It is not a question. He knows me.
"Yes," I say.
He closes his eyes briefly. Opens them. "There is a sealed message on the table. It arrived an hour ago."
I cross the room. The envelope is black, no return mark, sealed with wax pressed into a shape I recognize. Rufin. Elder council. I pick it up and do not open it.
"It's a summons," Aldric says.
"I know."
The council is watching the faction lines shift, they want intelligence on the pack's movements. He watches my face. "Rufin specifically requested you. He knows your access to wolf territory is better than anyone else they have."
Rufin requesting me specifically is not a compliment, it is a reminder that they consider me a tool with a particular use. I have been careful for two centuries to let them think that, because the alternative is being a threat, and tools get assigned tasks while threats get eliminated.
I set the envelope down without opening it. "I'll deal with it."
Aldric's eyes stay on me, he wants to say something else. I can hear it in the way he breathes, the small pause before he decides against it. After four hundred and sixty years he has learned which arguments I will actually hear.
This is not one of them.
"Get some sleep," he says instead, which is his way of saying be careful, which is his way of saying I cannot lose you, which he will never say directly because we are both too old and too practiced at surviving to speak that plainly.
"I'll be fine," I say, which is my way of saying I know, I know, I know.
He leaves.
I stand in the quiet of my apartment and I think about a hunter who sat down on a basement floor six feet from a vampire he was sent to kill and chose to listen instead. I think about the scar on his jaw. I think about the two words he filed with his alpha and the silence that must have followed them inside his own chest.
I should not go back to that warehouse.
I already know I will.
>>>
Across the city, in a building that smells like woodsmoke and old stone, Soren stands in front of Broderick.
The alpha sits behind a desk that has been in this room longer than most supernatural entities in the city have been alive, he is not large the way Soren is large, he is large the way old things are large, the kind of presence that fills a space without moving.
Gosfrid stands at the far wall, he has not said anything since Soren arrived, he is watching Soren the way he watches everything, quietly, with the patience of someone collecting information he has not decided how to use yet.
"Clean?" Broderick asks.
"Clean," Soren says.
Broderick nods once, he picks up a file from the desk and holds it out. "Next assignment. Target has been active in the east district for three weeks. The council wants it handled before the faction review."
Soren takes the file. He does not open it yet.
"Good work," Broderick says. The words land flat, the way they always do from him, approval delivered like a receipt.
Soren turns to go.
"Soren."
He stops.
"The Mournier vampire." Broderick's voice does not change. "You're certain."
"Yes," Soren says.
He does not look back, he does not let the pause stretch long enough to mean anything, he walks out with the file under his arm and Gosfrid's eyes on his back and Broderick's certainty sitting in his chest like a coal.
In the corridor, he opens the file, the address printed at the top stops him cold.
He reads it twice.
The target's location is four streets from the warehouse.