Chapter 4 A SLIP IN THE GLAMOUR

KIERAN

I pull my sword out of the Hollow Walker’s chest and exhale slowly, exhaustion washing over me.

Seven hours of work. One breach sealed, one Walker contained and eliminated, and the Conduit's seam temporarily stabilized with enough of my own energy poured into it to leave my reserves almost entirely drained. I will need to rest properly tonight, which I will not be able to do, because there are three other monitoring points that need checking before dawn.

I reach up and roll my shoulder, feeling the joint sting. The Walker had gotten one good strike in before I ended it. Nothing serious. Nothing that wouldn't resolve itself by morning. But still.

I am in the process of retracting my wings and sheathing my sword when I hear a sharp breath.

I go still for a second.

Someone is behind me.

Then I turn.

And just a few feet away from me stands a blonde woman frozen, her face drained of colour.

The trainee. Alvarez.

Still in the same clothes I had last seen her in across the conference room that morning, which means she came directly from the office, which means she had been walking home at this hour in this part of the city and had turned into this particular alley at this particular moment, and the precise sequence of catastrophically bad timing it had required for this to happen is, frankly, almost impressive.

She is not moving. Her blue eyes are wide, tracking the exact spot where the monster dissolved.

I do a rapid assessment of what she could have seen.

The sword is sheathed now, but she would have seen it drawn. She would have seen me standing over the place where the Walker had been. Whether she had arrived in time to see the Walker itself I cannot yet determine. However, the horrified expression on her face gives me a very clear answer.

And that raises more questions.

How?

How did she see any of this?

The glamour I had been running tonight was not the passive, ambient field I maintained in daily life. It had been an active concealment, specifically designed to redirect human attention away from this alley entirely, to make their eyes slide over it and find nothing worth noting and keep walking. It was the same working I had been using for well over two centuries. It had never failed on any regular human.

Until today

In two strides, I am across the alley, walking toward her.

She takes one step back, almost like she’s about to take flight.

"Don't," I say. "You can’t run away from me. Stand still."

She obeys and stands still. But lips are quivering slightly. And her hands, I notice, keep clenching and unclenching at her sides.

I stop a very close to her and slam my hand against the brick beside her head, cornering her in the shadows. She cowers a bit, and almost falls to the ground.

"How long have you been standing there?"

She opens her mouth, closes it. Stutters.

I don’t wait for her to speak. "You saw me, my fae self. You saw the creature."

"I..." She stops. Swallows. Starts again. "I... don't know what I saw... Please... I..."

"Yes you do."

Her chin lifts slightly at that. Interesting.

"There was something in this alley," she says, and her voice only wavers on the last word. "Some inhuman creature. And you..." She cuts herself off.

"And I killed it," I finish. "Yes." I study her face.

"How much did you... actually see?"

She hesitates, looking at me with an expression that tells that she is afraid that she would be risking her life by sharing the information. But she finally speaks.

"The wings," she says, and something in her expression shifts when she says it, like she is still not entirely believing that she actually saw what she saw. " The golden glow. The... the thing you were fighting. When you... turned it into ashes."

So. All of it, then.

Again... how?

I look at her for a long moment.

Panic, cold and sharp, spikes in my gut. Humans don’t see through the glamour. They can’t. It is a fundamental law of the universe. To her, this alley should look like, at most,  a homeless man scuffling with a shadow.

Unless…

No, not possible. I have been actively searching. If there was another… if she was… surely, I would have known.

Perhaps I was not holding as tightly to my glamour as I thought I was. Perhaps it was a slip in the glamour.

"I don't understand how you saw any of this," I tell her, and I mean it completely. "Humans cannot see through active fae concealment."

She stares at me. "Fae," she repeats.

"Yes."

"You're..."

"Yes."

A beat of silence.

"You shouldn't be able to see this," I finally say, more to myself than her. I force my features to settle. "You’re going to forget this, Lila. For your own sake."