Page 15 of Dragon Kissed

“Go home early,” Margaret said. “Pack. Get some sleep.” She paused at the door. “Veronica — I’m here if you need me. Just call. This is an amazing opportunity, and we’ll still be here when you’re finished.”

Nica nodded.

She took the N-Judah home to the Outer Sunset, the car rocking through the tunnel under Duboce Park and out into the gray afternoon with the usual jolt, the wheels shrieking on the curve and the window fogging with the breath of thirty tired commuters. She stood in the aisle with one hand on the overhead bar, the pole cold and slightly tacky under her palm, and thought about what to pack. Two suitcases, if she was careful — one for work clothes, the good blouses and the single blazer that still fit; one for everything that made her apartment hers instead of a furnished room she was temporarily occupying, which was how she’d thought about every place she’d lived since she was fourteen. The Saint Basil icon from the Richmond flea market that Baba Yelena would have scolded her for buying —a reproduction, Veronika, you have the eye of your grandfather and the budget of a fool— but that she’d bought anyway, because it had made her feel, for half an hour on a Sunday, like she was not entirely alone. The two photographs. Her grandmother’s pendant.

The pendant.

She put her hand to her collarbone, and there it was under the collar of her coat, the wrist so fine she sometimes forgot she was wearing it. A small enamel medallion, oval, not much larger than her thumbnail, in Romanov-era colors — cobalt and cream and a fine line of old gold at the border. It was warm fromher skin, the way it always was, the one small heat she carried against her sternum all day. She’d never been able to identify the tiny figure on its face, though she’d looked at enough Fabergé-adjacent work in three years at WMS to know whoever made it had been working at a level on par with the imperial workshops.

Baba Yelena had given it to her the last Christmas before she died. She’d sat on the edge of Nica’s bed and pressed it into her palm and closed her fingers around it and said, in Russian, in the old formal mode,This belonged to my grandmother, and to hers before that. It is the only thing I have from the old country. Now it is the only thing you have from me. Do not lose it, Veronika. It is all that is left of where we come from.

Nica had not lost it. She’d worn it every day for fourteen years — even the days she hadn’t eaten properly, even the days she’d considered selling everything she owned that could be sold. It was not for selling. It was the whole of her family in a single oval of enamel and old gold, and she pressed her thumb to it now through her coat, the way she did a dozen times a day without noticing, the way another person might touch a scar.

She tookthe trash out at six-thirty — one bag, the detritus of living alone: coffee grounds, last Tuesday’s groceries, a broken umbrella she’d been meaning to deal with since March. She carried it down and around to the alley where the bins were, the fog already thick and cold against her face, beading on her lashes, carrying the flat mineral smell of the ocean two blocks west. The Outer Sunset was doing what it always did in the early evening — going gray and still, the fog rolling in off the water, the Vietnamese place on the corner putting out its sidewalk menu in a wash of lemongrass and hot oil, the man at thebodega on Forty-Fifth giving his awning crank the three turns it always needed, the metal ratcheting loud in the muffled quiet. Ordinary. The neighborhood she’d lived in for three years, in a studio above a surf shop, in a city she’d never left and never had reason to.

She lifted the bin lid, dropped the bag in, straightened, and looked down the street. The alley opened onto Forty-Fifth. From where she stood she could see the block both ways, the streetlights coming on early in the fog, hazed to soft orange globes, the parked cars slick with dew.

The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and a chill raced through her that had nothing to do with the fog.

Something moved. A shape. Not a person, not anything she could name — more like a density in the fog across the street, a pressure in the air, the sense of beingregardedthat prickles between the shoulder blades before the mind knows why. She stared for a long moment, frozen, one hand still on the lid, her breath held. Then the fog moved, a car turned onto the block, its headlights swept the street — and there was nothing across from her. A parked Honda. A bike locked to a pole. A fire hydrant. Nobody.

Nerves, she told herself.You’re leaving your apartment tomorrow for a stranger’s house, and you’re seeing things.

She went back inside. An hour later both suitcases were packed and breakfast was waiting in the fridge for the morning. She washed her few dishes, wiped down the surfaces, and stood in the middle of the studio, looking at the small, spare life she’d lived until now: the narrow bed, the bookshelf with gaps where the Russian volumes had come out like missing teeth, the one rusted hook by the door.

No one will even notice I’m gone.Sad, but true. Or not entirely true — one person would. Margaret would notice by noon if she didn’t show up, though Margaret wouldn’t be lookingfor six to nine months. If she was being generous, the barista at Trouble Coffee on Noriega might notice a regular had stopped coming in; he liked to flirt. Then again, within a day he’d have replaced her order in his memory with the next person’s. Her landlord would come knocking if the first of the month arrived with no rent. That was the whole list. Three people.

She’d lived in this city her entire life — school here, work here, these trains, these avenues, these restaurants — and she could vanish, and almost no one would know she’d ever existed.It’s sad and depressing and entirely my own fault, because I don’t much like people.She’d always known this. Made her peace with it long ago, across a string of foster placements and social worker offices and community college lines where no one knew her last name until she said it.

Books are better than people anyway.She’d told herself that same lie more than once, and as she stood there sipping hot tea, the mug warming her cold hands, she still chose to believe it. Her life sat in two suitcases by the front door, and she felt the aloneness settle over her the way the fog settled over the avenues, soft and total and familiar, one hand on the edge of the sink, looking at the yellow streetlight through the window above it.

The fog outside was very thick, the street below quiet, and she watched it the way she sometimes watched things when she was too tired to look away — unfocused, passive, just letting the shapes move.

There.

Her hands tightened on the sink.

A shape in the fog across the street, two stories down. Still. Not a car, not a bike, not a fire hydrant. The fog blurred any edge, but through the blur she could make out the vertical line of a standing figure. A man’s height. A man’s stillness. The wrongness of it crawled up her arms. Then the fog shifted, andshe blinked, and he was gone. The street empty, the streetlight hazy.

Nica stood at the window a long moment, her heart going faster than it should have.Nerves. You’re exhausted, and you’re leaving, and you are seeing things.

She went to bed.

And in the dark, somewhere past the edge of waking, he came to her.

It didn’t feel like a dream while she was inside it. It felt like heat — like she’d been lowered into warm water that breathed, water with a pulse and a scent and a will. Demetri was there in the way of dreams, suddenly and completely, with no door and no beginning, his body a long line of dark heat above her, his mouth already at her jaw, and she knew the scent of him the instant it reached her: cedar and smoke and something hotter beneath both, the same scent that had wrapped around her in the storage bay and refused, all day, to leave her. In the dream there was no ladder to fall from, no Margaret, no missing button, no reason at all to hold herself apart from him. In the dream she was already his, and the knowledge of it moved through her like the warm water, and she turned her face into his mouth and let it.

Mine, he said against her throat, low and doubled, more rumble than voice, and she felt it travel down through her chest to pool low in her belly.

When his mouth found hers there was nothing tentative in it. He kissed her the way a starving man eats, open and deep and certain, one hand sliding up to cradle her jaw, tilting her head to take her deeper, and she opened for him and tasted him — smoke and heat and something dark and ancient she had no name for. She heard herself make a sound into his mouth, needy, unashamed, a sound the waking Nica would never have let out.He answered it with a growl that vibrated through her teeth and down her spine.

In the dream she could feel all of him at once, the way you feel things in dreams — the fever-heat of his skin, the iron weight of his body, and somethingmorebeneath the surface of him, vast and coiled and watching. When she dragged her eyes open his had gone red, kindling in the dark like coals, and smoke curled from between his lips as he kissed her, and she was not afraid. In the dream, there was nothing in him to fear. In the dream, the beast in him was already hers.

Mine,he said again, low and doubled, the man’s voice and the deeper one braided together.Mine. Say it.

“Yours,” she breathed, and did not question it, because in the dream it was simply true.

His hand left her jaw and moved down, slow and deliberate, tracking over her collarbone, the curve of one breast — pausing to roll her nipple until she gasped and arched — the flat of her stomach, and lower, until his fingers slid between her thighs and found her already slick and swollen and aching for him.