“It was a big tent!”
Mira leaned against the counter, watching the exchange with warmth that she carried when all three of us were in the same room. The bond pulsed faintly through me, a secondhand echo.
The new marking on her throat was barely visible above the collar of her shirt. My eyes tracked to it before I could stop them. Two puncture points, already healing, ringed with the faint bruising of a claiming bite.
A muscle in my chest tightened.
“Diner,” I said.
Three heads turned.
“Route 7.” I pushed off the counter where I’d been standing. “They don’t burn the pancakes.”
Mira grinned. “Solomon, are you voluntarily suggesting we go somewhere with other people?”
“I’m suggesting we eat food that hasn’t been carbonized and they can fix themselves a meal at the station.”
“He’s evolving,” Percy stage-whispered to Lucian. “Next he’ll start making small talk.”
I walked past him toward the door. “Don’t push it.”
The drive was quiet. Mira sat in the passenger seat while I drove.
She’d stopped dyeing her hair. The brown had washed out over the past weeks, replaced by copper that caught every angle of morning light and turned her into a signal fire. And the contact lens was gone.
I’d noticed the change immediately. The town would too.
The diner parking lot was half full. Sunday morning, the regular crowd. I scanned the lot before cutting the engine. Three trucks, a sedan, two motorcycles. No unfamiliar vehicles or scent anomalies beyond the usual human noise.
The bell above the door chimed when we walked in.
Every head in the building turned.
I’d been prepared for stares. Mira and I had been seen together before, and the town’s gossip network operated faster than any intelligence service I’d encountered in three centuries. But the reaction wasn’t the usual whispered speculation about the quiet firefighter and the bookshop girl.
It was recognition. Or rather, the lack of it.
The woman behind the counter, the one who’d been serving me coffee for eight months, looked at Mira and her eyebrows climbed toward her hairline. A couple in the corner booth stopped mid-conversation. Two women near the window exchanged a glance that I catalogued as surprised, reassessing, envious.
Mira without the disguise was a different creature entirely. The copper hair, loose around her shoulders, caught the diner’s warm light and turned it into a halo. Those mismatched eyes, finally uncovered, gave her face a striking asymmetry that made people look twice.
She was beautiful in a way that demanded attention, and she had no idea.
“Table for two?” The hostess recovered first, smiling too brightly.
“Booth,” I said. “Near the back.”
The back wall gave me sightlines to both exits and the parking lot through the window. I let Mira slide in first, then tookthe outside seat. My shoulders filled the space, blocking casual approach from the aisle.
She noticed. “You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“Sit between me and the door.”
“Habit.”
“Enforcer habit?”
