Page 38 of Kazimir

She drew a breath and seemed to catch a hook inside it. “The night I crashed through the doors to your… place,” she said, and she did not say club; I noticed; I filed it, “I knew you were in the building. Not like a stalker vibe thing. Like…like when a storm is too far away to see, but you feel a pressure change. I was on the floor, and I kept…looking at the door as if something was coming for me. Something I’d been waiting for. That’s dramatic. I know.” She shook her head, frustrated with herself, and more tears leaped at the motion. “When you walked in, it was like my body put a book back on a shelf where it had always belonged. I don’t even know if I believe in…” She pressed her lips together, mouth folding on the word fate before it could betray her. “This. But I felt you. Before I saw you. Then, I knew that I knew you.”

“I will help you,” I said. “With all of it. The remembering. And whatever the remembering brings, you won’t face it alone.”

She made a sound that wanted to be a sob and a laugh at the same time and failed at both. “What if I did something—” She swallowed the rest of it.

“Even if you did,” I said, “I will not forsake you.”

She nodded bravely; the motion making her tears fall with more dignity than the first. She set her jaw and took another breath, like it were heavier than the last one and carried it anyway. “Okay,” she said. “I—okay.”

Tilden found us without making the garden feel observed. He stopped at a distance polite men of a better century still practiced and cleared his throat just enough for me to hear and Devon not to startle. “Sir,” he said, “your guest has arrived.”

Chapter 11

Devon

Kazimir offered his arm in the corridor, and I clung to it like a lifeline. My feet barely touched the marble. The farther we got from the garden, the more unreal everything felt, as if the house was shifting underneath us, or as if my body was moving without my consent. I half-expected to float off the floor and bump my head on the chandeliers. The hellhound had vanished somewhere in the corridors—probably slunk off to hunt phantom foxes or whatever hellhounds did in mansions—but I didn’t have the capacity to care. All my focus narrowed to the meeting ahead, and the way Kazimir’s hand covered mine, thumb rubbing the inside of my wrist.

The butler—Tilden, right?—waited at the door of the sitting room. He gave a tiny bow to Kazimir, then to me, his gaze politely neutral but still assessing. I squeezed Kazimir’s arm so hard he could have popped like an over-inflated balloon, but all he did was pat my hand, then push open the double doors.

The room had been transformed for the occasion. Instead of the usual museum-grade gloom, the velvet drapes were drawn wide, letting dusk’s purpled light pour in. All the lamps were lit, casting gold onto every blue and ivory surface. On the far side of the room, standing with his back to the window, was the most physically impossible man I’d ever seen. No—“man” was the wrong word. This was a living pillar, carved from pure white marble and then dipped in the unfiltered light of a dying sun.

He must have been close to seven feet tall. His hair, long and loose, shimmered white-gold down past his shoulders, catching the light and throwing it into the air. He wore white linen pants and a tunic with gold trim so fine it looked like starlight caught in fabric. The cut should have been ridiculous, but it hung on him with the gravity of a god. His hands were behind his back, and his bare feet pressed perfectly flat to the floor, the toes long and elegant and weirdly beautiful. His eyes were the worst part. They sparked with liquid gold, ringed with a violet so intense I had to look away. He radiated not just power, but some kind of—fuck, I don’t know—majesty. Even Kazimir seemed… smaller, in his presence.

But that wasn’t the only reason I stared. The strangest, most horrible familiarity crawled over my skin. My own hair was this shade in the right light. My own eyes, just on the edge of that unearthly quality. Something in my bones recognized him in the way a starving dog recognizes its first real meal: with awe, and panic, and lust, and terror.

Kazimir cleared his throat, formal. “Archon, King of Angels. May I present Devon Wade?”

I opened my mouth to say something witty, or at least “hello,” but nothing came out. My knees buckled. Without even thinking, I bent my head, a reflex drilled in deeper than muscle memory. Not a full-on curtsy—that would be too on-the-nose—but a bow that had to have come from another life. The urge to kneel was nearly physical.

“Majesty,” I whispered, and it came out raw and unfamiliar.

King of Angels. The title made sense. He was a cathedral wearing human skin.

He regarded me with no trace of judgment. When he finally spoke, the words shimmered through the air and made every molecule of my body vibrate.

“You do not remember me,” he said, and his voice wasn’t deep so much as resonant. Like it echoed inside your head instead of in the room.

I managed to lift my eyes. “No,” I croaked. “Should I?”

His head tilted, birdlike, as if he were sorting through files in some astral filing cabinet. “Not necessarily. I did not expect you to bow, though I appreciate the gesture. Please, be at ease.”

At ease. As if that were even remotely possible.

Kazimir drew me to the nearest couch, a navy blue cloud of velvet, and sat me down beside him. Only then did I realize my hands were shaking. He laced his fingers through mine, grounding me. Archon remained standing, haloed in window light, but I felt less threatened and more… protected? Even my panic responded to his presence by flattening into something dignified.

The silence was weirdly comfortable, or maybe just thick enough to block out any other sensation.

Kazimir broke it. “Archon has done me the courtesy of investigating your circumstances. He is… uniquely qualified.”

Archon’s gaze never left me. “What I am about to tell you,” he began, “may precipitate a crisis of memory. It could trigger a restoration of your past—or, if you are not prepared, an episode of considerable distress.”

“Does this mean I get my memories back?” I asked. I sounded about twelve.

He considered. “It is possible. But it is also possible that the very act of attempting to recall them will create a disturbance, an energy signature, if you will, that can be traced by those seeking you.”

I wanted to ask “who” so bad it hurt, but for some reason I didn’t dare. Instead, I looked at Kazimir, whose fingers squeezed mine just a shade tighter. For the first time, I realized he was anxious, too.

Archon continued. “You have spent the last six months under a sort of cloak. Someone, or something, severed your connection to the network of memory and power that binds our kind. It is not easy to do, and it is rarely benevolent. You have been hidden, but if you emerge from that shadow…”