thought statues had feelings. I’m not that crazy. But every line and edge of the stone beasts spoke of a captured melancholy. Power denied, hopes quenched.
I wondered if they’d look happier in the sunlight.
Doubtful.
We reached the front of the restaurant and Zayvion slowed the car. A valet wearing black and gray from head to foot appeared out of the fog, and opened his door.
“Ready?” Zayvion asked.
“I am if you are,” I said.
My door also opened, another black and gray held his hand down for me, and I took it, even though I didn’t really need any help getting out of the car.
Except my skirt bunched up beneath my long trench when I pivoted in my seat to get out. I got one boot heel on the pavement, and flashed calf, knee, and a hell of a lot of thigh.
The valet, male-model handsome, let just the corner of his mouth rise in appreciation. But when he looked away from my thigh back at me, I gave him a glare that would freeze his keys.
Undeterred, he bowed his head slightly and stepped back, allowing me to move and actually stand.
And right there, behind the valet, stood Zayvion. The man was darkness against stone-gray fog, his gaze burning with a heat that seemed impossible for anyone to contain.
Never looking away from my face, he offered me his hand.
I took it, and the moment we touched, everything else faded. I did not notice the valets, did not hear the car being driven away, did not even hear my own footsteps as we crossed the remaining few feet to the wide, carpeted entrance to the Gargoyle.
The two-story-tall doors, glass, gold, and rare imported hardwoods, opened at our approach. I briefly noted the attendants at the doors, black and gray with a touch of bloodred. And then the magic of the place surrounded and overwhelmed me.
Unlike the heavy scents that wafted to me in the car, the magic here was designed to stimulate every sense.
The dining area was huge, at least three stories high, with a domed ceiling where winged figures wheeled in the ever-shifting lights. I blinked, and the room seemed smaller, intimate, as if the restaurant ended a comfortable few yards ahead of me. We stepped in, and I was suddenly very glad to have a hold on Zayvion’s hand.
Magic pressed like soft hands against my boots, then up my thighs, my hips, my stomach, feathering out at my breasts with just the softest breath across my cheeks. Intimate, but unintentionally so, like a lazy summer breeze following the music that played, low and soft, the rise and fall of sweet strings over the haunting, distant rhythm of drums.
A woman framed by an arch of gold and colored glass smiled and stepped forward.
“Good evening,” she said, in a voice I was sure was either classically trained or had an Enhancement spell that made her sound like the lead alto from a choir of angels. “How may I help you?”
Zayvion, who seemed a lot less dazzled by the overload of magic, said, “Reservations for two. Jones.”
She blinked, and her eyes shifted from green to blue, then settled on a hazel too bright to be natural. Her hair shaded a little darker as she smiled up at him “Our pleasure, Mr. Jones. Ms. Beckstrom. Please, follow me.” When she motioned with her hands for us to follow her, she held herself taller. She was wearing boots a lot like mine.
Illusion, Glamour, Enhancement. Seemed like a hell of a lot of pain to pay for this woman to undergo subtle, and what she must assume were pleasing, transformations for her customers.
We followed the woman, who looked more like me than she had just a minute ago. I watched Zayvion’s body language to see if he noticed. If he did, he didn’t look impressed.
Good.
She led us between candlelit booths with subtle Shield spells that obscured the occupants as if a sheer curtain had been pulled. It begged the question: why didn’t they just curtain off the booths? Why make someone pay for the illusion of privacy?
Answer: decadence. This blatant overuse of magic was obscene, unattainable, forbidden. For every spell used, someone was paying the price for it in pain. In the approved penitentiaries, or maybe in the lucrative Proxy pits, where people hired themselves out to bear the pain of others’ magic use. And the only thing the diners had to do to enjoy this magical excess was pay a fortune in money.
The angel took us up half a dozen steps, and finally stopped in front of a booth decorated in natural woods, with silver, or perhaps lead and iron, worked in subtle glyphs that looked more like art.
“Is this agreeable, Mr. Jones?” the angel asked.
“It should be fine.”
The lady offered to take my coat, but I decided to hold on to it. My journal was in the pocket, and I didn’t want to lose it. I took off my coat, folded it, and placed it on the small bench along the back wall beneath the window.
I sat. Once in the chair, the level of magic went down about a hundred notches, and I exhaled.
“Too much?” Zayvion asked.
There was some kind of Shield spell on our booth too, but it had the added benefit of filtering out some of the magic overload. Maybe that was why they didn’t just hang curtains.
I took a drink of water so I wouldn’t scratch my gloves off. Magic pushed and rolled in me and made me itch. “It’s a lot,” I said. “But not too much.”
, I thought.
He nodded, and I realized he was worried about it.
“Do you like it?” I asked.
“The food is superb. Not magic. Excellent chef. Makes it worth the glitz. Plus the view. .”
I looked out the window next to us and the tension in my shoulders drained away.
A castle atop a mountain, the restaurant took up the expanse of the hilltop. The lights of Portland, electric gold and baby blue, spilled down the hill to gather like a tumble of diamonds on the valley floor, thickest along the winding cut of the river and the star-spray grid of downtown.
“Oh,” I said. “Gorgeous.”
“I thought you might like it. From this high up, all you can see is the beauty.”
He studied the city below us, the corners of his thick lips drawn downward. I wondered how much pain this man had seen. Being a Closer, someone who could take away a magic user’s memories or life, and being a secret part of a secret society of magic users that casually dealt with horrors like that thing back in the alley, must come at a high cost.
An echo of a memory-just the emotional wash of being in danger and knowing Zayvion was there, doing something to make that danger, that fear and pain, stop-pushed up from deep inside me.
That moment was broken by the polite throat clearing of our waiter.
He recited the chef’s specials of the evening for us, and we both turned our attention to ordering food and wine.
The waiter made approving sounds and melted into the swirl of magic and noise outside our booth. He reappeared within seconds with our sweet black currant liquor and canapes.
“Earlier today,” I said, after our waiter had left and I’d had a chance to let the sweet and dry Kir fill my mouth with the dark berry taste of autumn, “when I asked you if Violet hired you to body guard me. You didn’t answer.”
Zayvion finished a canape and took a sip of his wine. “I am not working for Violet. Not anymore. But if I were body guarding, you’d be at the top of my list.”
I opened my mouth.
“You,” he said before I could get any words out, “are rich. So at least you’d pay me well. Besides that, your father made enemies in both his public and private lives, and you seem to have inherited his knack for that, though you’ve mostly made your enemies through Hounding. So I certainly wouldn’t be bored. What?” he said to my glare. “Didn’t think I’d be honest? You carry more magic in your body than half of Portland’s cisterns combined, and you are the leader of a pack of Hounds, half of whom don’t like you, and all of whom are unpredictable addicts.”
