He shouldn’t have suggested they travel together. Not only because she clearly didn’t want to, but because he’d only just managed to persuade himself to leave her, to try and sever this new little quirk he was experiencing. His people were renowned for their possessive, obsessive nature, but Keeran had never felt anything quite like this before, and he certainly didn’t appreciate it.
He’d been so close to knocking on her door last night, the uneasy disquiet he felt at leaving her driving him to try one more time, despite every logical thought telling him not to. Years of overriding his other side, his baser instincts, had meant that logic prevailed and he’d decided to leave Callodosis instead. It was just his luck that there was only one road out of the forest, and that she’d chosen to set out at almost exactly the same time as him. Wasn’t that just fucking typical.
Keeran looked at her from the corner of his eye and almost smiled. Aelia had both hands gripped onto her pack, her nose slightly wrinkled as she stepped over a particularly suspicious looking puddle.
“Not what you were expecting?” he couldn’t help asking, bracing himself for another rebuttal.
“Not at all,” Aelia admitted as she stepped closer to avoid being splashed by the dirty water kicked up by a cart loaded high with felled tree trunks. Keeran frowned as it passed a little too close to the pavement and pretended to squint at a street sign on the house opposite. Once she was a little ahead of him, he caught up, moving to put himself between her and the busy road.
“Drias is just a stopping point for people transporting timber from your forest. They only stay a night before moving on, so there’s even less money here than in Callodosis,” Keeran explained. He turned left as they came to a junction in the road, taking them away from the main street.
“Can’t say I blame them,” Aelia said, sidestepping a woman who’d stopped dead when she’d seen Keeran. Aelia took in the woman’s fearful glances, the way she instinctively pressed into the wall as she passed rather than come any closer to him than she had to, but Keeran stared straight ahead. People feared him, and rightly so. He’d made his peace with it, but right then, he couldn’t stand to see what Aelia might make of it.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, passing more derelict buildings than he remembered seeing the last time he was here. The Astraea were making fast work of anyone who wasn’t toeing the line they’d taken it upon themselves to draw, mercilessly ransacking any business that served humans. Keeran had witnessed firsthand how the Astraean influence had changed as he travelled the country. When he had first joined the Peregrinians they had only been targeting humans, and randomly at that. But now the Astraea were organised, anyone who so much as fraternised with a human found themselves on the wrong end of a blade. Or worse, their house was burned down, whole families still inside.
Eventually,he found it; an inn so foul that he pitied the sole of his boots. It wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice, but options were severely limited in Drias. Where there had once swung a sign, someone had scrawled its name in illegible paint. Keeran wondered why the person who’d painted it had bothered; the poor sod clearly couldn’t read or write. He pushed the dooropen, grimaced at the wall of heat that hit him, and stood back to let Aelia pass.
She peered into the dingy darkness beyond, looking thoroughly unenthusiastic as she stepped past him into the tavern. To her credit, she didn’t hesitate as she crossed the sawdust-covered floor, elbowing her way through the already heaving room to the bar. Keeran followed, taking note of the rowdiest individuals in the room, clocking the stairs to the right of the crowded space and the door behind the bar that presumably led to the back entrance.
Aelia squeezed herself between two heavily set men, despite the smell of stale beer and sweat that filled the space around them. She leant over the sticky surface to wave at the barmaid.
“We need two rooms,” Aelia shouted over the din, holding up two fingers to the girl who appeared to be working the entire room on her own. Her blonde hair was tufting free of its braid at every angle, and she looked in dire need of one of the drinks she was frantically serving.
“For how many nights?” the woman called back, grabbing another tankard and pouring it full of foaming beer.
“Just the one,” Aelia said, checking with Keeran with a glance. He nodded. They wouldn’t stay a moment longer than they had to. He was acutely aware of the glances directed at Aelia from several of the less-than-savoury looking men in the room. The darkness in him opened its eyes with an audible snick, its scaled lip curling back in a low growl.
The woman skimmed the foam off the top of the tankard and slid it down the bar to an outstretched hand. She reached into a cupboard and produced two keys, handing them one each.
“Up the stairs. Room numbers are on the keys.”
Keeran pulled Aelia out of the way, ignoring her protestations, and leant over the bar. He lowered his head soonly the barmaid could hear him. Her cheeks flushed, a coy smile playing on her painted lips.
“I’m sorry, I can see you’re busy, but would it be possible to get two rooms next to each other?” he asked, leaning in a little closer than necessary.
No way was he trusting the locks in a place like this, not when he could practically smell the intentions of some of the men leering at Aelia. The woman nodded, ignoring the shouts coming from down the bar demanding her attention, reaching back into the cupboard to swap keys. He didn’t miss the way her fingers brushed over his as she handed them over.
Yes, people could sense the evil in him, but he wasn’t ignorant of the way he looked either, and sometimes that had its advantages.
When he turned to hand Aelia her key, he was surprised to see her looking at the maid with a hard glint in her eye. It vanished almost immediately, but he’d seen it, his chest tightening a little as his mind went into overdrive.
Fortunately, he didn’t have time to overthink it too much because, just when they were about to head towards the stairs, Aelia stopped dead in her tracks.
“What is it?” Keeran asked, only just managing to stop without bumping into her.
Aelia raised a hand to point at a sign next to the bar.
Rest easy, no humans served here.
Without so much asa moment’s hesitation, Aelia turned and slammed her key down on the bar, making the woman next to her jump so much she spilled half her pint.
Keeran apologised as he reached past her to scoop up the key and followed where Aelia was carving a path to the door. He let her make it out onto the quieter street before grabbing her, pulling her round to face him.
“I am not staying in that place,” Aelia hissed, but it wasn’t the anger in her face that brought Keeran up short. It was the grief that hollowed her eyes, the first glimpse she’d let him see of the anguish she’d been in since he’d bumped into her on the road.
“We don’t have to, just hear me out first?” Keeran said, holding up his splayed hands.
Aelia threw her arm towards the inn, glaring at him as though he’d asked to spend the night in an Astraean camp.
