by Mindy Klasky
That job—clerk of court—had fit me like a piece snapping into the center of a jigsaw puzzle. I understood it from the first moment I stepped behind my desk. I helped mundane customers and imperials alike. I brought order out of chaos. I was good at what I did. I belonged.
And now, all of that was being taken away from me. The indictment threatened my employment. The Pride had cast me out of the Den. I was alone. And I’d forgotten how much it hurt to be cut off from the rest of the world.
But my life before the Den hadn’t been all bad. I hadn’t been a total failure. I’d had a friend: Allison Ward.
Allison was my best friend—or she had been, before I ruined everything by putting the imperial world before her needs. After everything had fallen apart in June, when she accused me of choosing my job over her, I’d given her the space she’d demanded. I hadn’t called. I hadn’t stopped by with cupcakes from the Cake Walk bakery. I hadn’t even acknowledged the birthday of Allison’s daughter Nora, my one and only goddaughter.
I thought I was reconciled to the loss.
But obviously not—because now I was standing on the doorstep of Better Kids Now. Allison was the head lobbyist for the adoption non-profit.
I stared at the sign in front of the townhouse, with its bright logo of red, blue, green, and yellow—stylized children holding hands in a circle. Those children were happy. Those children belonged.
Ten months was long enough for a best-friend stalemate.
I climbed the steps and opened the plate glass door. A receptionist looked up from a neat desk in the front room. “May I help you?” she asked with a smile.
“I’m here to see Allison Ward.” The instant I said the words, I knew they were right. They were the reason I’d walked halfway across the city.
“Is she expecting you?”
“No,” I admitted, “But I’m a friend. Sarah Anderson.”
The receptionist smiled again and gestured toward a padded armchair. “If you’ll just have a seat, I’ll see if Allison’s available.”
I sat.
Looking out the bow window at sunlight playing over the sidewalk, I smiled. It was a gorgeous spring day. The air was soft and warm. The sky was a deep blue.
The receptionist’s voice was as bright as the sunshine outside. “Hello, Allison. There’s a Ms. Sarah Anderson to see you. She says she doesn’t have an appointment, but—”
A cloud skittered in front of the sun. The reception area was suddenly wreathed in cool blue light. I rubbed my arms, aware of a chill for the first time since I’d completed my cross-city marathon.
“Of course,” the receptionist said. “No problem. No, no, I understand.”
I stood as she hung up the phone.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but she sounded angry rather than regretful. “Ms. Ward is in a meeting now.”
Not Allison anymore. Ms. Ward. “She isn’t in a meeting.” I said, and the receptionist looked uneasy. “You were just talking to her.”
My protest hardened something in the other woman. “Ms. Ward is unable to see you this morning.”
I took out my phone. I could call Allison from here in the lobby. I could tell her I needed to see her, that we needed to talk.
The receptionist stood, setting her palm squarely on her desk. “Have a good morning,” she said. Her tone cut off any possibility of further conversation.
I could press the issue. Even without my sphinx powers, without a hint of agriotis, I could push past the desk. I knew my way up the stairs, and down the hallway, into the office of the woman who’d been my best friend. I could insist that Allison finally hear my side of the story.
But that wasn’t the friendship I wanted. I didn’t want to force anyone to let me belong.
“If you could please tell Ms. Ward that I stopped by,” I said, opting to preserve the charade that Allison was totally unaware of my presence.
“Of course,” the receptionist said. She stayed on her feet.
Shaking my head, I retraced my steps. Through the door. Down the stairs. Out to the sidewalk.
From there, I looked up at the second-floor windows. Allison was staring down at me. Her hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her. At this distance, it looked like she’d lost weight, or maybe that was just the ripples in the old glass between us.
I raised my hand, palm up, a stilted, stifled wave. She turned and looked over her shoulder, as if someone had called her name from the corridor outside her office. She stepped away from the window without waving back.
Suddenly, I was exhausted. My feet screamed in my practical office shoes, complaining bitterly about my miles-long hike. My right shoulder ached, as if my purse weighed a metric ton. My lungs hurt when I tried to take a deep breath.
I needed to sleep.
I didn’t want to go to my own apartment. I still rented three rooms in the basement of a townhouse, just twenty minutes from the courthouse. Chris had walked me home just last week, after meeting me at the end of my shift.
We’d both been happy then, a little giddy with the scents of spring. He’d followed me down the stairs with a knowing smile on his face, and I’d led him back to my bedroom.
We hadn’t made love. We’d never made love, not in the classic sense.
Much to my initial mortification, Chris was the one who’d first warned me about the dangers of sphinx nookie. We children of Sekhmet were a fertile bunch, he’d explained. And no one—especially not the Sun Lion of the Eastern Empire—wanted a bouncing baby… whatever the hell I was, to complicate matters.
Actual sex was off the menu.
But over the past ten months, Chris and I had come up with a quite a few satisfying alternatives. No. I’m not the type of girl who kisses and tells. Suffice to say, we found plenty to do in the sexy times department. Chris was a sensitive lover. A creative one, too.
I couldn’t face the thought of lying in the bed I’d shared with him just five nights before. Not when he’d betrayed me to the Pride.
And I certainly wasn’t going back to Chris’s townhouse. I couldn’t turn the perfect lock with my perfect key. I couldn’t fold back the perfect bedspread with its perfect pleats. I couldn’t wake to Chris’s perfect understanding of everything that had gone wrong.
I walked a block, up to busy Pennsylvania Avenue. It took less than a minute to hail a cab. I couldn’t use Uber, not to reach my current destination. I didn’t want a computer record of where I’d gone.
I fought to stay awake as the taxi wove through city traffic. I would have given anything for the driver to drop me off on the doorstep of my goal.
Well, not anything.
I wouldn’t risk the safety of a vampire.
The cab dropped me at the back entrance of the National Zoo. I paid in cash and added a fifteen percent tip—a perfectly ordinary transaction, nothing the driver would remember.
After waiting for ten minutes, scanning the road to make sure I hadn’t been followed, I set off down one of the hiking trails that cut through Rock Creek Park. I wasn’t wearing appropriate clothes, but there was nothing to be done about that. I compensated by looking over my shoulder at regular intervals. I took a bench at the intersection of two paths. I doubled back and picked up a different trail.
All the while, I fingered the keyring in my pocket. It held my house key and Chris’s. But it held a third key too, a brass one with jagged teeth that pricked the pad of my thumb.
When I was ready to drop from exhaustion, I offered a quick prayer to Sekhmet that I’d avoided all detection, and then I headed for my true goal. I climbed a steep road that led out of the park. I walked past a row of townhouses with faux Tudor fronts.
The last one on the right was unremarkable. The lawn was slightly overgrown; its owner hadn’t completed spring cleaning. A weathered sign next to the door said, “No Solicitation.”
The brass key fit in the lock. It caught a little as it turned, but muscle memory came to the rescue. I pressed down slightly as I twisted.
“Hello?” I called softly, as I stepped into the entry hall of James Morton’s sanctum. “Anyone home?”
I didn’t call James’s name, though. The sun was still high in the sky. If anything was awake inside that house, it wasn’t a vampire.
No one answered. I hadn’t really expected a reply. I closed the door and secured the deadbolt.
I was a sphinx, no matter what the Den said. Caution ran in my veins. I walked through each room on the ground floor, checking to make sure they were empty. I tested the metal shutters over the windows, the enclosures meant to keep out any hint of burning sunlight.
Upstairs, I found two empty bedrooms. A king-size bed stood inside the third. The linens were musty, but clean. The pillow smelled faintly of dust.
My eyes welled up at the sight of such luxury. I was tired enough to sleep in the middle of a hog wallow, with nothing but a gravestone for my head.
I kicked off my shoes and unzipped my skirt. As an afterthought, I freed my blouse from my waistband and reached beneath to unhook my bra.
I thought I would fall asleep before my eyes could close. But I had longer than that. I had enough time to make myself a promise.
I was going to find Sheut. I was going to learn the true identity of my father, how he was like a sphinx, how he was different. We’d be a club of two. And the Pride and its exclusive rules could be damned forever as I fought to exonerate my name with the Eastern Empire Night Court.
5
I woke up with a raging thirst, an equally intense need for the bathroom, and a hunger so intense it felt like nausea. It took me a moment to untangle my feet from the sheets, and then I had to fumble for my phone on the nightstand.
6:37 pm. On Monday evening. I’d slept the clock around, and then some.
And I had to get moving if I was going to scare up food for breakfast and get to the courthouse by the start of my shift. I was still employed by the Eastern Empire—at least for now—and I couldn’t endanger my job by showing up late.
I scrambled for a light switch, then made my way down the hall to the bathroom. The toilet bowl was dry, but enough water remained in the tank to flush properly—no small relief. I found a scramble of clean towels in the linen closet. They looked like they’d been folded by a rabid raccoon with spatial relationship problems, but they smelled like fabric softener.
With a pang, I pictured James shoving those towels onto the shelves. Vampires weren’t good at organizing information or things. I should be grateful he’d done his laundry before he disappeared.
I did my best to fashion a sponge bath with cold water and no soap. My fingers had to take the place of serious hair care products, and I resigned myself to facing the long night of work without benefit of foundation, blush, or mascara. At least I had a lipstick in my purse.
I tucked my blouse into my skirt and slipped into my shoes before heading downstairs. Each step creaked like an old-fashioned haunted house. If anyone had come upstairs during the day, I would have heard them.
Looking around the dining room, I was blindsided by a sudden surge of memory. I could still recall my shock when James had trusted me with knowledge of his sanctum, his ultimate refuge against prying mundane eyes.
He and I had hidden here for nearly a week when we were trying to identify the creature who’d kidnapped Judge DuBois. We’d worked well together. We’d trusted each other.
Now I had no idea where he was. And I wasn’t likely to see him anytime soon. The computer we’d used to search for Judge DuBois was long gone; James had removed it when he’d scoured all identifying information from his sanctum. I suspected the monitor was consigned to a trash heap somewhere. Given James’s expertise in corporate security, the hard drive was probably shredded into metallic confetti.
What a waste. The computer was destroyed like so much else—James’s career, Judge DuBois’s legacy, the safety and security I’d once dreamed of at the Den…
Sighing, I headed toward the kitchen.
And I stopped dead in the doorway.
Breakfast sat on the counter. A plate held a scone—bacon, cheddar, and chive by appearance and scent. A small bowl was filled with soft butter. A larger one held strawberries, bright red, with perfect green caps. A carafe sat next to a mug.
“I stirred the coffee seven times.”
Chris spoke from the far side of the kitchen, from the doorway that led to the laundry room.
After a pause, he added, “Good morning.” He sounded almost natural, as if I’d responded to his initial greeting.
“Good morning,” I finally said. “How long have you been here?”
He shrugged. Instead of answering my question, he waved me toward the food.
“Aren’t you eating?” I asked, because that was easier than any of the other questions I had for him.
“I’m not hungry.”
A polite woman would have said she wasn’t hungry either. She would have insisted on sharing—some of the berries, at least, if not actually halving the scone. She would have found a second coffee cup and poured out some of the rich brew that was lightened by a generous pour of heavy cream.
I wasn’t a polite woman. I was a starving woman. Sphinx. Whatever. I fell on the food like a ravening wolf.
Last June, I’d kept a vegetarian diet, with an eye toward taming James’s most predatory instincts. But when one month of his absence had stretched to two, then three and four, I’d turned back to my preferred foods. After all, bacon was one of the four basic food groups.
I washed down the scone and fruit with two mugs of coffee. All the while, Chris watched from across the room. Only when I’d used my napkin to wipe stray crumbs from my lips did he finally say, “Sarah.”
I heard the urgency in his voice, as if he wanted to add a thousand things but was barely holding himself back.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, though, any response that wouldn’t have been awkward. But I should have realized that “awkward” was just getting started. A longer, uglier pause stretched between us.
“I wanted—” he finally said.
At the same instant, I summoned some basic courtesy. “Thank you for break—”
We both stopped at the identical second. “Go on,” he said.
“No, you,” I said.
This was worse than a first date. Worse than the breathless calculation before a first kiss—would he or wouldn’t he and do I have anything green stuck between my teeth? Worse than wondering if this was the night we ended up in bed, or this one, or this one.
He drew a deep breath and held it for a count of ten, and I knew he was calming himself through one of the rituals of order that made him a sphinx. By the time he spoke, my entire body was primed for his words. “You have to know I tried. Ronald read the Inquirer article, and he immediately called a private session for the Pride. By the time I got there, they’d already pulled a copy of the indictment from public records.”
Public records. I’d tapped the keys that had made the indictment available for the sphinxes who’d wanted to destroy me. My voice shook as I said, “You should have told me. Not Ronald Mortenson. You should have told me the instant you entered the study.”
“You’re right.”
I wasn’t expecting that. A protest—sure. Maybe even a lie. But absolute, complete capitulation?
“That’s it?” I asked. “You don’t have anything else to say?”
“Of course I have a lot more to say. I wish this had never happened. I wish The Inquirer had given us a little more time. I wish I’d been able to stop the Pride—”
“You’re the Sun Lion!” I couldn’t scrub the bitterness from my protest.
“I’m still a sphinx,” he said. “I’m subject to the Pride, just like every other sphinx.”
“That’s not true! You could issue a Command of the Hunt!” Like, the Pope speaking ex cathedra, the Sun Lion could be infallible. All he had to do was proclaim that I was a sphinx. I belonged in the Den. Ronald and every other member of the Pride w
ould have to accept me.
Chris shook his head, his frown telling me he’d considered—and rejected—my demand. “Not for this,” he said. “Not now.”
“Why not?”
“Dammit, Sarah! Issuing a Command isn’t like ordering breakfast! It’s only been done six times in the entire history of the Eastern Empire.”
“Seven is a perfectly good number.”
He looked me in the eye. “I can’t issue a Command just because I want to. Just because it would make my life easier. My life and the life of the woman I love.”
Love.
Well, that took all the air out of the room. Chris had never said that before. We’d both avoided labels.
Part of me wanted to squeal like a teen-aged girl in a bad comedy. I wanted to make him repeat it. I wanted to call my best friend and replay every word of his confession, dissecting each individual syllable for tone and weight and meaning.
But my best friend wasn’t talking to me. And I wasn’t a teen-aged girl. And Chris and I were caught up in a far larger drama, threatened by a much greater problem than whether I was supposed to respond immediately with my own recitation of three little words.
I nodded, because it felt completely churlish not to acknowledge his statement in some way. But then I said, “I don’t get it. Why is the Pride acting now? The indictment is a legal document, and now we know there’s going to be a trial. But they’ve known about that night for months. Hell, they only accepted me into the Den after I…”
Killed Judge DuBois. After all this time, it should be easy for me to say the words. But they still stuck in my throat.
Chris hesitated, and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to let me off the emotional hook. I thought we were going to have to discuss love and labels and intentions and futures… All the things I wasn’t sure I deserved.
He must have read my discomfort on my face, because he twisted his lips into a frown. He shook his head, just a little, but he spread his palms on the center island between us.
“It’s not about the killing,” he said. “It’s about what you did after the fact.”
