I laughed to myself. Cindralis was a spooky city sometimes. And coming from a demon, that was saying something.
My heart raced, and I rubbed one of my horns as I sighed, trying to calm back down. But after a few minutes, I didn’t think I’d be getting any more sleep, so I got dressed and went for a walk to clear my head.
The night air was clear and crisp, cedar and pine filling my lungs and replacing the scents that somehow still lingered from the dream.
Why had my brain manifested such a strange vision of Sage? I was well and truly becoming obsessed with the little witch now.
I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was going, but when I finally looked up and found I’d made my way to one of my favorite bars, I took it as a sign from Ravaric himself that I must have needed a drink and headed inside.
I recognized a few regulars and nodded towards the bartender as I saddled up on a stool. “Hey Ambrose, can I get the usual?”
The corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk, the frog on his shoulder letting out a loud ribbit. “One Appletini, coming up.”
I took out my phone, now seeing I’d missed a text from Garrick.
Garrick: Any updates?
I rolled my eyes. Garrick had never micromanaged me like this on a job before; he must have really been anxious for the payout. Especially to text me in the middle of the night. Then again, he might still be on Noctis time.
Me: Sure, but first—how can I get in touch with Morgana Vale?
Garrick: Shit.
I snorted, hoping that would get him off my back for a while.
Ambrose slid my drink across the bar and I thanked him, taking a sip and then opening the MagikGraph app. I went to the page for the Sable House, wondering if there were any posts from the event in question. It was a long shot, I knew, but I had to check.
After scrolling down their photo albums for a full minute, I finally got to around the time Sage disappeared, flipping through all the pictures of the endless weddings, high society functions, and corporate events. I didn’t even know exactly what I was looking for, but I just kept searching, hoping maybe for another glimpse of my omega.
My omega… when had I started thinking of her like that?
When that was a dead end, I started looking at all the photos that had been tagged there, either by location or hashtag. It tookquite a few minutes to get to the right time frame I was looking for, and I nearly choked on my drink when I found a peculiar comment on a photo of a few rich-looking vampire women all dolled up in ugly hats.
“Had another wonderful evening at the #SableHouse! We’re looking forward to coming back next week for #PremierCorvane’s charity auction!”
Well, what do you know? Premier Corvane hosted an event at the Sable House around the time Sage was working there.
I went through the rest of the photos, but there wasn’t a single other mention of a charity auction or the Premier, and that definitely would have been highly publicized. Premiers could hardly take a shit without someone posting about it.
This fucker was really not telling me things, and it was pissing me off. If I was still in Noctis, I might have paid him a personal visit to make my displeasure known. But since I only had five days left, I wasn’t wasting them on unnecessary travel.
“Everything okay?”
I looked up at Ambrose, his familiar now in her other form beside him. Her eyes bulged out slightly, and her skin had a green, slick tinge. She took my empty glass and began wiping down the bar.
Familiars were a weird sort of Magik, one that never fit cleanly into the neat little boxes the rest of us were sorted into. They weren’t actually animals, like some believed, but were sentient, intelligent beings, fully capable of thought and choice like the rest of us.
They called themselves “deltas,” a designation all their own. Built for support, their empathetic and observant traits made them excellent companions without the added complications of heats or ruts.
Not that they didn’t have sex. They just didn’t have sex with their witches.
A familiar could only hold the shape of a person when they were close to their witch, the bond between them acting like a shared conduit for power. It wasn’t ownership or possession, though. It was an exchange only they could make.
Most other Magiks didn’t actually know that. Outside of Cindralis, familiars were still assumed to be nothing more than magically enhanced animals. The truth, that they were their own race of shapeshifters, wasn’t exactly a secret. It just wasn’t advertised or thought about.
What was common knowledge, though, was that witches bonded their familiars on their twenty-sixth birthdays.
Sage had been twenty-five when she’d disappeared, and still familiar-less when she’d resurfaced at thirty, which meant she’d missed it.
