Page 1 of Claiming Starlight
Chapter One
Sophie
Sophie didn’t feel the sting of her skinned knee until she was standing still, waiting for her ride back home. She reached down to scratch at an annoying tickle, and her hand came back sticky with just enough blood on the tips of her fingers to make her stomach hitch. Ever since she had caught Katya feeding off one of her human dates, the sight of blood bothered her; it was always related to something bad. She’d never forget seeing the dark red stain at the man’s neck and on Katya’s lips. Blood had power. She’d split her jeans and smeared hers on a rock somewhere, leaving her scent behind for predators to discover. Hopefully nothing bad came of it.
Today had not turned out like she had hoped. She’d spent weeks planning to get here, hoping to find out something, but came up empty. Everywhere she went, Sophie felt eyes on her, but no matter who she asked, no one offered to help her or gave her any information about her brother.
Alexi had come to South Bloc two months ago with friends looking for work. She received one message from him after that, then nothing more. He was all Sophie had in the world, her only family. When she looked at him, she saw her mother’s smile and heard her father’s laugh. He might be indifferent to their family connection, but Sophie was not.
She checked the boarding house first. South Bloc was a big neighborhood, but places where humans stayed were few. In his one message, Alexi told her he was staying in a Red House with a witched lock on the room door, so she shouldn’t worry about him.
When she got to the Red House, the unseelie fae behind the counter didn’t know who she was talking about. “What are you saying, human?”
The unseelie’s eyes sat abnormally far apart in her face and were too big for her head. The look of innocence it gave bordered on comical.
“No humans near that age in my Red House. No one with those names. Do you want a room to stay in?”
“Are you sure?” Sophie persisted. This was the only Red House with witch locked doors. This had to be where her brother was.
“Got a lock of his hair? Got a fingernail? Got picture?”
Sophie pulled back her coat hood and showed her own face. Two years younger than Sophie, Alexi looked enough like her to be her male twin. “He looks like me.”
“Pretty. Pretty. Do you come as a set?” the blue-blood snickered. Predators always thought that joke was funny.
Sophie hunted the neighborhood. The ward shop proprietor hadn’t seen him. The barman told her to get out of his place and not come back. The three hags running the meat market asked her if she checked the central square across from the empty school, but the blue-bloods gathered there looked too dangerous to approach.
Sophie checked with the shifter children teasing a captured rat nearby, but they refused to talk to her. And the men sitting outside the liquor store propositioned her before she opened her mouth to speak. She walked away with their leering gazes on her backside as she left. There were no other places a full human could conceivably go for work in a blue-blood run neighborhood.
Why did Alexi have to come here? All the humans she had seen traveled in groups, accompanied by naturals, usually a shifter. Only Sophie was foolish enough to walk around alone in this alien neighborhood. Alexi must still be with his friends. But she knew nothing about them or the mysterious job he was here for. Alexi’s vague explanations made it sound like something special, just for him.
She exhausted herself, going place to place. Asking questions. She got a lot of “Go aways, you don’t belong here.” But there were no answers as the sky darkened with a combination of moody storm clouds and the setting sun. It was going to rain.And she still didn’t know where her brother was.
South Bloc was bad. To be caught here after dark was deadly. Her red-blood made her nothing more than prey in a world of very hungry predators. Out of place, she had no protector, and no way to defend herself on this side of town.
Alexi complained that Sophie always played it too safe, didn’t make waves or take risks. He called her a coward and bragged he wouldn’t live under the thumb of the vampir like she did. Her choices to keep them both safe in a world of predators that wanted to eat them seemed to disqualify all her advice.
Alexi only listened to her when their goals converged, otherwise, she was just his irritating, perfect, rule-following sister. A puppet-nothing of the vampir. Alexi believed Sophie was willing to do whatever Katya and the archon told her just to keep food in their mouths and a roof over their head. Her opinions meant nothing.
Then Alexi made friends with Eli and Pek, acting so pleased with himself, like the world now recognized him and would open all its doors to welcome him. The men liked him, said he had possibilities, said they had a job for him.
If the guys wanted to harm him, they could have done that at their first meeting, Alexi had explained to with a grin when she expressed concern. As if it excused his stupidity in talking to Eli and Peck in the first place.
Sophie knew they wanted something else from her brother, maybe not the obvious, but they had a plan. She tried to stay positive and not worry. Their guardian, Katya, shrugged Alexi’s disappearance off. “He’s of age and it’s time that he pays his way. He does nothing but eat. The boy is useless to my archon, and the rent is due.”
Her archon, the guy-in-charge who made Katya their keeper, didn’t care, so Katya didn’t care. Blood and money were that woman’s only concerns. She’d been a part of Sophie’s life for as long as she could remember, but time had not softened Katya’s heart toward the humans in her care. Still considered a juvenile by vampir standards, the job the brood gave her disgusted her. She never let Sophie forget that.
Since Sophie held value to the archon that Alexi did not, Katya would not be happy to discover Sophie had left their safe side of town to look for her brother in South Bloc. Hoping to escape punishment, Sophie left on a day she knew Katya would be tied up with duties at the vampir brood house.
The plan had been simple: hire a ride to South Bloc and return before anyone knew she was missing. Sophie did the smart thing telling the driver she’d split the fee-half when he dropped her off and the rest when he picked her up—but it still hadn’t worked. The troll took Sophie under the broken overpass of eyeninety, just out of reach of home. With a blink of his veiny, bulbous eyes, he demanded all the money. Then told her he would be back if he had time.
The driver was not coming. She looked at the sky and knew. Even trolls didn’t come to South Bloc after dark. They might be blue-bloods, but they had the blunt teeth of cows. South Bloc after dark was filled with dangerous predator unnaturals.
Sophie started the day feeling determined, but now a worn-out despondency was settling in.
At the meeting point for the troll, she felt all the speculative eyes of the neighborhood on her. The men in front of the liquor store, the kids peeking from the windows of the old building behind her, and more, all of them watching the foolish human woman to see what she would do next.
Foolish, stupid, and desperate.
