The sailor steps forward, and his hand grips my shoulder hard enough to bruise. My hand finds the small blade at my hip out of reflex, and then everything happens very fast.
The air pressure changes, and the light shifts. The shadow that falls over both of us is enormous.
The man looks up.
Whatever he sees in Droza’s face drains the color from his completely.
Droza steps forward until he is between me and the sailor. His large hands shoots out, grabbing the sailor by the throat and lifting him into the air. The sailor chokes and gasps, his legs flailing. Droza stays there, perfectly still, and the stillness is somehow worse than movement would have been. His wings have opened at the edges. His eyes are burning gold.
“What are you doing?” I ask, almost ready to panic. The sailor’s lips turn blue and his cheeks grow pale as Droza fingers squeeze even tighter.
“Stop it!” I shout. Droza growls, but he drops the sailor.
“Walk away,” Droza says. His voice is flat and final.
The sailor bolts without another word and without looking back.
The dock goes quiet except for the water.
I turn on Droza before the silence can settle. The fury is already up my throat before I have consciously decided to feel it. I’m not mad at him, not exactly, but at what happened. I’m angry at the fact that my fear read as a signal, and he responded like an alarm. It’s like he doesn’t trust me to handle myself.
“You felt it,” I say. “You felt me get uncomfortable, and you came running.”
“I felt you become afraid.” His voice is even. His jaw is not.
“I was startled. There’s a difference. I had my hand on my blade. But you almost killed him.”
“He was twice your size.”
“I am aware of that.” I step closer, which I know is somewhat illogical given that I am furious at him for protecting me, but the anger needs somewhere to go. “I have survived on my own for months. I have been cornered by things significantly more dangerous than a dockhand who doesn’t know how to take a hint. You cannot feel every spike of my adrenaline and treat it like permission to become something that will terrify an entire harbor.”
Droza remains quiet. The wings settle.
“I cannot help it. Every time the tether gives me your fear, something in me stops thinking. It does not ask whether you have a blade. It does not calculate whether you are capable of managing the situation.” He stops. His jaw works. “I cannot lose you.”
The words land simply, without performance.
“I spent decades feeling nothing.” He does not look away. “Not grief. Not fear. Not the cold. Nothing. The stone was quiet, and I was quiet inside it, and I had decided that was acceptable. It is not acceptable anymore. And I do not know what to dowith that except stand between you and anything that comes too close.”
“That’s not the same as keeping me safe,” I say, but my voice has lost its edge.
“No,” he agrees. “It is not.”
We stand there in the fading light, the tether warm and aching between us, and I understand that this is not a problem either of us is going to solve tonight.
10
DROZA
The sailor’s face stays with me longer than it should, but it isn’t about him. It’s the half-second before I moved, the moment the tether pulled tight with her fear and every rational thought I possessed went quiet.
I know what I am. I have always known. Gargoyles are not gentle creatures. But there is a distance between what I am capable of and what I nearly did to an unarmed man standing too close to a woman who is not mine to protect with that kind of violence.
Except the tether does not know the difference between a dockhand and an assassin.
That is the problem.
I sit on the shingles of the roof long after Selah has gone back inside, my wings folded close, watching the harbor move through its evening routines. Fishing boats return. Lanterns are lit along the market stalls. Rennic crosses the south dock for the third time today with his collar turned up and his eyes moving too fast. He is running another message. I track him without meaning to and then stop because tracking Rennic isnot the same as tracking the unease that has been settling over Gullhaven for the past two days like sediment.
