Dimitri couldn't care less.
The Templar stops on the cracked asphalt of the loading dock and goes rigid. His head turns, tracking the scent trails, and Dimitri can feel the shift in him through the bond, the scattered post-battle haze sharpening into something focused and urgent. The man just got soul-bound to a demon and dragged back from unconsciousness twice in one night and his first instinct is to clock in for another shift. Unbelievable.
"The rifthounds," Blondie says. "They're loose in the city."
"Congratulations on your sense of smell."
"We have to track them down. Before they reach civilians."
Dimitri stares at him. "You're joking."
"Those things can bite through steel. If they reach a populated area—"
"I don't give a fuck about some lower-class demons." Dimitri jabs a finger at his own chest, where the pull of the bond throbs beneath his sternum. "I am bound to a goddamn angel. That is the priority. That is the only priority. The mutts can wait."
The Templar breathes in slowly through his nose. Holds it. Lets it out. It is the most deliberate, controlled breath Dimitri has ever witnessed, and he can feel the effort behind it through the bond, a conscious and willful tamping down of frustration that is so tightly managed it borders on performance art. Dimitri has known this man for less than an hour and he already wants to find every seam in that composure and pull until it comes apart in his hands.
"My name is Knox," the Templar says, his voice aggressively calm. "And I'd appreciate it if you kept your knowledge of my bloodline to yourself."
Dimitri raises an eyebrow. "How secret could it possibly be? You reek of divinity."
Something tightens in Knox's jaw. Through the bond, Dimitri catches the edge of something cold and sharp. Not anger exactly, but adjacent to it. The kind of feeling a person carries when they've spent a long time keeping a part of themselves hidden and just had it dragged into the open by someone who doesn't give a shit about the consequences.
Interesting. Dimitri files it away alongside the other collected observations he has no business keeping.
"Regardless," Knox says. "I'd appreciate your discretion."
Dimitri looks at him for a long moment. The Templar stands very straight in his coat, his long blond hair catching the distant glow of streetlights, his green eyes steady and serious and faintly luminous in a way that is probably imperceptible to humansbut is practically ablaze as far as Dimitri is concerned. He's small, slender beneath the heavy wool, and Dimitri has a good half a foot on him, which makes the fact that this man just cleared a warehouse full of rifthounds with a mace and sheer stubbornness both more impressive and more ridiculous.
"I've got no one to tell," Dimitri says, and means it more than he'd like. He turns on his heel. "Come on. Keep up."
"Where are we going?"
"I told you. I have a better idea."
He leads them through the industrial district and into the Old City.
The Old City is Haven's underbelly, the part the tourism boards don't photograph and the city council pretends doesn't exist. Narrow streets and crumbling architecture, buildings leaning against each other in states of mutual collapse, the whole neighborhood held together by stubbornness and structural denial. It's where the city's undesirable population congregates, not because they're forced to but because it's the one place where nobody asks questions and everybody minds their own business. Vampires drink at bars run by disgruntled humans. Fae operate the pawnshops filled with trinkets that are both magical and mundane. Witches sell charms out of basement apartments that smell of sage and bad decisions. Old City is where everyone is family–meaning no one wants to be together, but they’re all kind of stuck together regardless.
Dimitri knows the Old City the way a rat knows sewer tunnels. He's been in Haven long enough.
He stops in front of a narrow staircase that descends below street level, bracketed by graffiti-covered walls and lit by a neon sign that buzzes and flickers in shades of red and violet. The sign reads THE SABLE in letters that look as though they were written during a seizure. The staircase is crumbling, the stepscracked and uneven, and the sound of bass-heavy music pulses up from below.
Knox stops at the top of the stairs. His unease bleeds through the bond, a low steady hum of discomfort that Dimitri drinks in with petty satisfaction.
Dimitri grins back at him. All teeth. "Try to blend in."
Knox looks down at himself. He’s wearing an obviously Order issued coat with a red cross on the back, with blessing rings gleaming on his left hand, and his mace hanging on his hip. He could not be broadcasting his allegiance more loudly if he were holding a literal sign.
"I'll do my best," he says flatly.
They descend.
The Sable is exactly what it looks like from the outside: a den. Low ceilings, dim lighting, air thick with smoke and something sweeter underneath it, glamour maybe, or low-grade enchantment, the kind that loosens inhibitions and blurs edges. Booths line the walls in cracked leather. A bar stretches along the far side, tended by a man with too many fingers. Music throbs from speakers in the corners, low and rhythmic and wordless.
Every head in the room turns when they walk in.
Every conversation dips. A vampire in a corner booth pauses with a glass halfway to his lips. A pair of goblins at the bar swivel on their stools. A woman with moth wings folded against her back stops mid-sentence and stares. None of them are looking at Dimitri. They are looking at a soldier of the Order who just walked into a gathering place of criminals and appears by all accounts to be drastically outnumbered.
