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“Boss?”
Jim doesn’t look up, but every line of his body communicates his attention, an elegant ‘Yes?’ curved into his neck, carved into his spine, scribed in the pulse-quick flutter of skin over the delicate bones of his wrist.
Sebastian scans the stone-walled room before entering all the way. Candlelight dusts midnight into a drowsy glow. Shadows dance in the corner, sleepy, slow, and empty – but Seb does not believe that emptiness. He’s never sure where the Boss’s Vaelin may be lurking, watching, waiting to test him or his Ajra.
The serpent, slick line of sin, is nowhere to be seen.
This does not encourage, but the Boss is not one for patience – he can build a web and wait, his Vaelin can lie unmoving for hours until the unwary draw closer – but none of that equates to patience with Seb or Ajra.
They circle in, together and separate, sweeping the room like the soldiers they have been and will – Jim willing – be again.
“We tracked them to the edge of the oil fjord. The Glasgukke will catch them and kill them, or they will die in the waste, or they will turn back.” Ajra, his sand and smoke shadow, wolfen-formed and battle-minded, comes to stand by Seb, solid, steady, not twining like a cat or shifting like a bird, but still like stone, like ice, like the tiger long ago.
Ajra is his explosion waiting to happen, his bullet waiting to strike. He doesn’t have to sink his hand into her rangy ruff to tell her she is his. She doesn’t have to tear out his throat to mark him hers.
It is not needed.
“Such a shame,” Jim purrs, and it should be a hiss, given his nature and his daemon, but he purrs like a big cat, a deep and thrumming sound in his incongruously thin and fragile chest. The man is an oil lamp, a bright flame waiting to crash and crack into a house fire. Crash, crack, and burn the whole bloody Stadt down – the world if he can.
Seb wants to be there when it happens.
Ajra wants to be with Seb.
Neither of them see Vaelin before it’s too late.
Patterned like a gray fog morning, like the belch of chimneys and the wheeze of steamboats, she drops from the chandelier above them, and her weight, all 3 kilograms and all 4 metres of her gunmetal body, slick like a tailored suit, smooth like a scoped shot, hitting Ajra square across the shoulders.
Ajra yelps – can’t help it, and Sebastion grunts in surprise, closer even to a bark than Ajra’s reaction.
Seb falls to his knees as Vaelin tightens around Ajra’s neck – her thick mane makes the serpent’s grip a tenuous one, but the tightening laces both their hearts with panic.
“Boss?” Seb gasps as Ajra goes to work, trying to free herself.
Slender fingers twine into Seb’s smoky blond hair, just past regulation length, tighten, and pull, revealing his throat and forcing him to tear his eyes from their daemons’ struggle.
Jim gives no sign that he can feel Vaelin slipping, gripping, hissing, tightening. Seb wonders, not for the first time, if it was true that this man had crossed the nameless lake, let unnatural distance rip asunder the bond between man and daemon.
The silver in his eyes and the gleam in Vaelin’s lidless glare seem to be a form of evidence.
“Stop struggling. Both of you.”
With an anguished sound trapped in their throats, Seb stills his body and Ajra collapses to the floor, barely breathing. Immediately, Vaelin begins an undulating, coiling and uncoiling, endless motion, stroking and calming and touching every inch of Ajra’s fur.
The fingers in Seb’s hair only tighten. One nail is scratching along the scalp, fit to raise a welt, to pull blood up in rosy blush and shiny drops.
Only when Seb’s shallow breathing evens out and he reminds himself to lean into the pain, does Jim speak again:
“Sherlock and his pet will not perish in the North. The oil will not consume them, nor the Glasgukke, nor the cold. It is a shame you underestimate them so.”
“My words weren’t idle speculation.” Seb’s tongue, treacherous as the serpent coddling his Ajra, robbing him of his reason and defenses, would be the death of him just as easily, he thinks, delirious from the twin sensations of touch through bond and skin. “I made sure they left a blood trail.”
“Oh?”
Seb can hear the elegant lift of eyebrow, the eloquent turn of chin. The fingers in his hair drag free of his scalp, leaving lines like a signature. The hand that held him reaches out to Vaelin, who coils and arranges herself in luxurious loops along her human’s too thin frame.
Silent as always, her words only for Jim’s ear, she turns and opens her mouth at Seb, who looks away. Her silver teeth, almost translucent against the black velvet of her mouth, offer a poor grin for humour.
Ajra stands and comes to lean against Seb, and he dips his hand into her hair.
It is needed.