She expected Kizros to lead her toward the front door, but instead he gestured beyond the front desk. “My apartment is upstairs. There’s a second room with all the amenities you’ll need… I think.”
“Is there somewhere I can take a bath first? Or collect the water?” She didn’t even want to think about the challenge it was going to be to carry it upstairs with crutches.
He raised a brow. “You have your own bathing chamber. With running water at whatever temperature you desire. Why would you need to collect it?” At her dumbfounded look, Kizros shook his head. “That’s new to you, isn’t it?”
Aofe nodded silently.
“Well, then,” he said, gesturing to the hallway and the stairs. “I’ll leave some of my clothes for you when you finish, and while you’re resting, I’ll get to work on securing your own wardrobe. Anything upstairs is free for you to use, eat, or borrow.”
She was too enticed by the idea of a hot bath, too exhausted from such a change in her life, she didn’t even ask about how she’d pay him back for his generosity. First, she’d conquer the stairs. Then, she’d sleep until her body decided to have a proper freak-out about her situation and new problem of a missing sun.
4
RUNE-ING THE MOMENT
Kizros
Humans had an interesting concept of rest.
Kizros had kept the shop closed for the remainder of the afternoon, instead puttering about the apartment cleaning. It’s not like he had woken that morning with intentions of bringing someone back to his apartment. And it had been months since he’d had to live in the space with another.
Except Aofe wasn’t justsomeone, was she? She was a human, a colorful and interesting one, and she wasliving with him. She was just beyond that wall, poking about in her new bedchamber.
It gave him the perfect opportunity to… well, it wasn’tspying. It was simply… paying closer attention whenever a noise came from inside her room. She did have those crutches, and with how exhausted she’d looked when he’d given a tour of the living area and kitchen, it was his duty to make sure she didn’t fall. Right? That’s what he was making sure of as he pressed an ear to her bedchamber wall.
He’d snuck in while she’d run the bath, dropping off a pile of clothing at the edge of the bed, but now he regretted not leaving a glass of water or some food. He’d secretly hoped she’d come back out for dinner, seeing as it was only early evening, but there was only heavy breathing coming from inside. Asleep.
Kizros wasn’tdisappointed, really, but when she was still sleeping the next morning, he reminded himself this was a good thing. He knew humans didn’t have the same stamina as demons, let alone after the traumatic events to bring her into their realm. They were smaller, more fragile—even if Aofe claimed it was an insult. How awful would it be if he broke the human on her first day in Heck?
So when she’d come nearly tumbling downstairs an hour later in a rush, shirt on backward and blue hair sticking up in every direction, he’d promptly turned her right around.
“You can take a day, Aofe,” he’d said, pushing her gently back toward the stairs. Not that he didn’t want her company, but he was relieved she accepted. It gave him time to prepare the shop. Get some commissions done before he worried about training her.
Which should not have been a worry, because thefollowing day when hedidlet her into his workroom, she’d been familiar with the basics beyond what he’d expected.
“It’s not formal,” Aofe reminded him, grinding the mortar and pestle. It wasn’t strong, and it would take several more strokes to turn the leaves into the right consistency, but her hands fell into the pattern easily. “I was in and out of infirmaries a lot. I got to know some of the nurses and… alchemists, I guess you’d call them. They showed me some things while I was waiting so I wouldn’t be bored.”
“You were there alone?” Kizros asked, offended on her behalf. While he didn’t know the full extent of her disability, she’d given him the basics after he’d asked… perhaps a little too forcefully, but he assumed she’d have some kind of support. Still, she hadn’t closed herself off with those answers like she suddenly did at this question.
“Yes.”
As clueless as he sometimes was, Kizros was desperate for this human’s words, and he could tell this was not the conversation she was ready to have with a relative stranger. He didn’t know what it was about her—the color, the bluntness, the dedication she was already showing to her work—but he was drawn to it. He ached to fill the silence she left, but not so much that he made her feel trapped.
“Would you like to learn a rune?”
Aofe perked up, former shadows gone from her face as she beamed up at him. “Really?”
Well, now he was slightly regretting the offer. What if she wanted to know the rune for unlocking herprotection cuff? What if she resented him when he said no? What if he didn’t have the spine to say no, and she left him?
“A preservation rune, for the contraceptive you’re making,” he amended.
Kizros had gathered the ingredients she’d requested, making substitutes where demon plant life suited the potion better. He wasn’t sure how humans could ingest such awful flavors, but perhaps their sense of taste was different. He’d have to ask to look at her tongue later.
“Runes are magic?” she asked, watching with interest as he took the stool next to her.
He grabbed the vial she’d be using, running a thumb over the seal where they would write the rune. “It’s one of my specialties, actually.”
In the past, he’d been a little too proud of that fact. Boasted a little too often before he realized that not everyone wanted to listen to him talk for thirty minutes on the intricacies of soil composition or how the star charts played into some of the more challenging aspects of an earth-bound magic like runes.
