Chapter One
May 2048 - San Francisco, The Elvish Protectorate
It was notthe first time Petra Zaskodna sat across from a murderer. It would not be the last.
The bar wasn’t filthy, not like many of the establishments she’d frequented since she was a little girl clinging to her father’s coattails, but it had the patina of grime that came from something other than spilled beer and sweat. It was the sticky residue of the wretched.
No matter how well she played her role, Petra knew she would always find her kin in the wretched.
There was something comforting about being unseen amongst the dregs of the world. While she couldn’t exactly say she missed it, Petra liked the honesty of the people who spent their time in bars like The Broken Tooth. Even when they lied, it was the honest sort: mumbled assurances that they had cut back on their drinking, outrage at being called out for cheating at poker, a cheerful assurance that they’d have the money soon, definitely, don’t worry.
Everyone in the bar knew the secret language of those lies, so really, they weren’t lies at all. Petra had learned that language early.
But in her new life, the stakes were a lot higher than a simple poker game in the back of a dive bar, or even a dispute over a botched blood delivery between two upstart vampire families.
In her world, the lies she told would get her killed. Eventually.
Not tonight.
Tonight, she relaxed in a dark corner booth Rasmus, the half-feral were who organized this meeting, had reserved for her. She pretended to nurse a glass of cheap red wine. A blues song buzzed through ancient speakers over her head and across the room. A cracked screen showed an endless loop of arena fights.
Petra canted her head to one side, scrutinizing the screen. The spray of cracks was definitely the result of a preternaturally strong fist. Or perhaps a head.
There hadn’t been any fights yet, but she’d only been waiting for ten minutes. There was still plenty of time for one of the temperamental weres to start a brawl. The bar was their territory, but the other factions who called the underbelly of San Francisco home were always testing boundaries, jockeying for a better place in the hierarchy. That tension made the air endlessly combustible. Fights were inevitable and — mostly — harmless.
Her parents had lived that way. They died that way, too.
Petra ran her thumb over the thick stem of her wine glass, her gaze on the door. The bar wasn’t particularly crowded and she wouldn’t be familiar with the man she’d come to meet, but she couldn’t help but be on alert. Demons weren’t common in the city, so she figured she’d be able to spot him.
But that wasn’t the only reason she scanned the bar again and again. Even with her glamour in place, she worried someone would recognize her at any moment.
When she usurped the position of San Francisco’s High Priestess, she didn’t anticipate the level of notoriety it would come with. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. Seeing as she so rarely ventured off of cathedral grounds, it wasn’t normally an issue, but when she set up a meeting with one of the most dangerous men in the entire United Territories and Allies…
The knot of unease tightened in her belly. It’d been there ever since she stepped foot in the bar and had only gotten worse as she sat waiting for a monster to show his face.
Your glamour is perfect,she assured herself for the hundredth time. It was the one thing her arrant father, unable to use magic himself, had made sure she knew how to do. He’d paid the old witch in the apartment above them to tutor her every Sunday.
“You can never have too many disguises,”he’d told her with a pat to her head before he sent her upstairs.
Petra had taken that bit of advice to heart. She’d welded it to her very soul, crafting armor layer by layer, mask by mask, until she knew she could survive anything — even a meeting with Shade.
Her glamour was more meticulously crafted than the average. Most were a simple smoke screen, a shifting, unfocused image of a face, but that in itself tended to attract attention in the same way a balaclava did. No, a much more effective but infinitely more magically difficult method was to create an illusion of a completely different face.
The woman sitting in the corner booth was not Petra Zaskodna, but a cute brunette with a snubbed nose, pale skin, and dark eyes. She wore Petra’s clothes, but not her robes of office. No one would think to connect the esteemed High Priestess with a beaten leather jacket, slim-fitted jeans, and sturdy snakeskin boots.
And yet…
Petra licked her lips, tasting the ghost of wine there, and casually turned her head to take in the other side of the bar. The hair rose on the back of her neck.
She was being watched.
Considering she’d spent the last three years under near-constant, hidden surveillance, she knew the feeling well.
Her heart beat a quicker rhythm, but she was careful not to breathe too quickly or change her expression as she observed the patrons of the bar weaving around tables. She’d been busy watching the entrance, thinking that Shade would waltz in at any moment, so she hadn’t done more than give the back of the bar a cursory look when she arrived.
Now she peered closer, into the smoky shadows that nearly obscured a beaten up pool table. A single light shaded by dusty stained glass hung over the table. Its glow barely penetrated the gloom in that far corner and, as she watched, it flickered, as if it struggled against the shadows.
It hadn’t been that dark when she arrived.
