As it turns out, you can't just tell a cabbie "anywhere" and expect to get anywhere at all, even in Roccia Nera. Though I had walked out of Fiume di Sangue unscathed and Ishcer himself had stated he doubted the reputation attributed to me, I was nervous enough not to want to return home. Not tonight, at least. I had watched Emial behead someone just hours ago—and even if that someone had been a perverse, rampaging vampire, I didn't like to think that the Baron knew my name, or knew that I even existed. 

Perhaps I was being paranoid and overcautious, but I wagered paranoia would keep me alive whereas foolishness wouldn't. 

I rattled off an address. It was the first address to leap into my mind that wasn't home. The cabbie grunted with displeasure but the taxi nonetheless jolted into motion. The rest of my evening had been horrid, but this was a stroke of luck. Most cabs wouldn't take anyone out into the county limits, especially after dark and especially if the destination was on the eastern side of the aqueduct. 

Curious, I released the stranglehold I had on my ability and allowed a thin tendril to fall across my driver. The spark of his magic burned my probing thought, causing me to wince. The overweight cabbie was a magi, and judging by the tight coil of his magic revolving just beyond his being, the man was a practicing magi. That was good to know. 

The cabbie never knew I was inspecting him. He just fiddled with the radio and dodged slower cars with ease. It took about fifteen minutes to cross the bridge over the aqueduct, but after we did the driver increased his speed and drove almost recklessly through the abandoned streets and byways.

Soon Roccia Nera and its persistent magical fugue were shrinking into the distance and the dim, pitted ruins surrounding the roads thinned. Civilization was replaced with craggy woods of parched long grass and hoary oaks, though the ugly glow of the city remained constant on the western horizon. We rose through the drab foothills clad in wilting foliage. In spring the hills would be garbed in lovely shades of juniper and sage—but in November everything was losing its color to the onset of winter. The car's heater was on full tilt and I was sweating into the snug collar of my sweatshirt.

The taxi came to a stop along a gravel road on the outskirts of Roccia Nera's county. I had just enough folded bills stuffed in my pants pocket to cover my fare, and as I got out of the backseat to stand on the roadside, the cabbie flicked the light atop the car to 'out of service' and drove away. I toed the edge of a weedy culvert and sighed.

The old ranch house was small and dilapidated, two of the front windows boarded and part of the siding torn to bits. A bulbous, rusted truck was parked on the lawn next to a freshly waxed and detailed 1969 Mustang hogging the driveway. I knew the specifics of that car because its owner had drilled them into my head enough times for the information to be remembered.

The snap of twigs and dried pine needles was loud in the quiet as I walked up the drive, my hands shoved into my sweater's pouch as my thoughts reeled after the events in the bar. My eyes slid from the house to the tipsy shed—then to the shadowed barn still standing at the property's border. 

The sight of the barn stirred unwelcome memories. I recalled kneeling inside of it, unsure of the time or the day, desperately trying to cover my glowing skin with the mud and straw comprising the barn floor as John and Trinity's voices keened through the night, telling me the only way to rid myself of the devil was to repent for my sins. I recalled the gritty texture of the dirt under my torn nails, the rank smell of damp earth and unclean animals. I remembered the bitter taste of my tears and the sound of my screams sounding endlessly through the dark, begging for forgiveness for something I couldn't control and didn't understand.

I could almost hear the sudden cessation of their voices and the sharp crack of the padlock breaking. I could almost see the silhouette of a man standing in the open doorway, framed by the moonlight—

Someone poked my shoulder and I yelped, twisting in place. 

Alfie smirked as he cleaned his hands on a spotted rag. "What are you doing out here, standing in the dark?" 

Alphonse Barone was a well-built man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a gray long-sleeved undershirt and a pair of grease-spotted slacks. His blond hair was almost brown and sprung in a shaggy mess around his head, his beard shot through with lines of silver and white. His eyes appeared to be a flat, unremarkable brown—until he tilted his head, and the reflective lens beneath his retinas caught the sheen of the porchlight and reflected it back. 

No, Alfie wasn't any more human than I was. He was a Were—a Panthera-Leo Were, a lion. I met him seven years ago, when I had been a twitchy seventeen-year-old bumpkin from the county limits considering enrollment at RNU and he'd been a clean-shaven, nontenured professor in charge of my application interview. I knew what he was instantly, of course. Weres have almost nonexistent control over their magical signature, and if it weren't for their exceptional senses they wouldn't be able to tell each other apart from humans and other preternatural. 

So, I knew what Alfie was the moment I caught a whiff of the dried, earthy scent of his magic—and, being the idiot that I am, I asked him about his pack. I'd only been trying to be polite, but when his face went white and his jaw dropped, I knew I had outed the man and myself in one swift move. 

Thankfully Alfie and I'd been the only people in the conference room at the time. After an awkward conversation where I was forced to confess I had certain...peculiarities of my own, we struck up an unconventional friendship. We've been friends for years, and when he went to prison for fraudulent species registration, I was one of the only people from the university who kept in contact with him. A small technicality in the law that faulted the university for not checking into the Were's registered pack status saved Alfie from the death sentence, but he still spent five years in a max-security detention facility with other criminal elements of the preternatural kind.

Needless to say, it was not one of his favorite topics of conversation. 

"I could ask you the same thing," I said, hand patting my chest to see if my heart hadn't leapt through it. "You scared me."

"Sorry." Alfie stuffed the rag into his dirty pants without thought. "I was out working on the truck and saw you walk up the drive. Why are you out here so late? You know it's not safe this far from the city."

"It's not like its safe in Roccia Nera, either," I pointed out. 

Alfie shrugged and started toward the porch with me at his heels. "No, I guess not. But it's safer than out here in the dead of night." He shoved the creaky screen door in and stepped aside for me to pass. As I did so, I heard the Were inhale sharply. "Do I smell...vampires?"

I grimaced. "Yeah. I don't know where to begin."

The screen closed with a clattered. "Damn, I thought you avoided them, Grae. Is that why you're out here? You need some dinner?"

I hesitated. "Um, yes, actually. I didn't have a chance to eat yet." 

Alfie disappeared into the kitchen after giving me a rough pat on the head. I stared after him, the muscle in my jaw working overtime as I ground my teeth and generally tried to ignore my surroundings. 

It wasn't coincidental that Alfie lived in this house. After being released from prison, he couldn't find a place to live and—as an ex-con and a Were—he couldn't find work. I knew this place, being so far out from the city in the ugly, untamed backroads of the county, was sitting empty and no one knew about it. So, I recommended it to the down on his luck lion and this was where Alfie lived now. He hadn't changed the interior much during his tenure as owner, so the décor was...unpleasant for me to see again.

I found my way into the living room, where I shoved aside a furry pillow to sit on the dingy sofa. I rubbed my itchy skin as I leaned into the lumpy cushion and my eyes rested on the wall above the bulky nineties television. There was a faded outline of a cross staining the wallpaper.

Roughly ten minutes later, Alfie returned with two microwaved dinners in plastic trays. "Alright," he said as he set both down on the coffee table without throwing something between them and the wood. I could see the stains where the heat of previous dishes had ruined the top. "Tell me what happened."

I did. I started at the beginning, in the graveyard with the mad vampire and the Seelie and Ishcer. I told Alfie about Emial's thugs grabbing me from the university and about the Baron's strange, ominous request. I told him about Havik being there, and his eyes darkened.

"He doesn't know what you are though, does he?"

That was the million dollar question.

My mind drifted as I chewed over my response, recalling an old, unpleasant memory. I remembered running along a gravel drive in the summertime, chased by wildflowers and the music of cicadas playing in the early evening. I'd been seventeen and foolish, my sleeves carelessly rolled past my wrists. I'd come into the shadow of a rundown ranch house with white columns supporting the porch's roof and an asymmetrical pentacle etched onto the gable.

I'd gone inside without invitation, knowing who'd be inside—but someone else had been there, too. A stranger. I remembered the long shadow falling upon me, blocking the light from the study, then the brute strength of a forearm pinning me against a wall as a vicious snarl instilled fear in every inch of my being.

I remembered fangs flashing and the pupils in two wide, golden eyes dilated with rage and terror. A familiar voice had yelled "No, Aurel! No!" 

Aurel Havik. The master vampire who'd caught a glimpse of the scars on my arms and had tried to kill me.

"I don't know," I confessed to Alfie as I poked my rubbery chicken and shivered at the memory. "That was only time we've ever...met, but I've seen him a couple of times after that, always at a distance, like across a street or in a market." Each time he'd stared me down until he disappeared from view.

"You've never gone to the Gilded Glass, have you?"

"God, no. I know it belongs to the Havik cadre." It was owned by Aurel. I avoided the entire street the stone building sat upon like it was plagued.

Alfie growled under his breath. The sound was more thoughtful than threatening, though that didn't stop the hairs on the back of my neck from prickling. "Do you mind if I have another look?"

I shook my head and, setting aside what remained of my dinner, rolled up my right sleeve. Alfie rummaged through the junk accumulated on the stained coffee table and unearth a slightly bent pair of spectacles. He plopped them on his nose before taking my arm in his hands like he was examining a particularly fragile vase.

He judged the largest cluster of scars on the underside of my forearm. They extended from wrist to elbow and wrapped around my arm like a gruesome vambrace. The two arcs mirrored one another: the ends at my wrist curled in upon the lines like spiraling ribbons, while the lines almost converged where they met by my elbow. The tops curved down and back toward the wrist.

"I haven't discovered anything yet," Alfie admitted as he traced an index finger along the swell of one arc. The touch was casual and professional, as if he really was just touching a pricey vase and not a friend's arm. "I'm still baffled by that. With it being such an obvious affliction, you'd think there'd be records somewhere."

Despite his exile, Alfie still had a few connections to some obscure academic circles, and he'd been pulling all sorts of strings over the past few years in search of more information regarding my ability—but, in all those years, we'd discovered nothing.

With scars that lit up like broken glow sticks, one would think others of my kind had been spotted and recorded before.

But we'd never found a thing. Never heard a whisper.

Sometimes, I feared I was alone in this world.

I blew air through my lips as I rolled the sleeve back into place. I adopted my best documentary narrator voice and said, "Though luminescent like a firefly on Redbull, others in the nerdy-cus nightlight-icus species simply could not be found."

Alfire smirked as he slid the glasses from his nose and turned his attention to his bland dinner. "You sound like Shatner in Star Trek."

I laughed. Together, we ate our dinners in comfortable silence with only a stray word or two shared between us. I'd witnessed a murder, had been kidnapped and coerced by vampires—and yet, in the lazy comfort of my friend's presence in that house I could never fully relax in, my evening seemed more surreal. Like it'd happened to someone else, or as if I'd watch a convincing movie. 

I had overreacted. Strange I may be, but I wasn't remarkable. No, I was just a plain girl seeking to live a normal, unassuming life in the country's supernatural mecca. I had nothing to worry about.

Right?