The thick mattress in Brad's assigned shelter bunk felt like a cloud after nights on concrete and alley gravel. Fluorescent lights buzzed softly above, casting sterile light on scuffed linoleum floors and pale green walls that tried to look calming. His corner had a small desk made of mismatched wood, a functional secondhand lamp, and a fold-up chair he'd repaired himself. A donated bookshelf now sagged under scavenged tech manuals, worn notebooks, and a cracked mug of pens.

  He sat up slowly, blinking in the artificial light. Everything around him was too quiet. The air lacked that dust-laced bite of violence. No burnt asphalt. No sirens.

  But that made no sense.

  Mrs. Williams’s van had been destroyed. The asphalt had been torn apart by fists that hit like siege weapons. Glass had glittered like thrown daggers in the rain.

  Now, outside the window, the world looked... perfect.

  The van gleamed, unmarred. The street, spotless. Even the grime looked curated, filtered and reapplied.

  But the ache in his shoulder from Butter’s shove told him otherwise.

  Brad stepped outside. The silence felt curated, too. A little too complete.

  Lucien’s work.

  Relief warred with dread. It hadn't been a hallucination. Butter had been real. Her candy-colored destruction, her impossible powers, her frantic kindness. Lucien’s icy smile. Winter’s unnerving calm. All of it.

  He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, seeking grounding.

  And found a thing that confirmed everything.

  Stiff paper. Fabric binding.

  Brad’s fingers curled around the edge of a small, cobalt-blue sketchbook, worn soft at the corners.

  He pulled it free. Not his. He flipped it open, and the world tilted.

  Each page was an explosion of wonder: a chubby dragon with rainbow sherbet scales and flickering nostrils; a fox woven from moonlight and pollen trails; a snail carrying a gingerbread castle patrolled by gumdrop knights. Rendered in soft pencil, highlighted with bleeding watercolor and ink.

  Alive. The pages danced with their movements.

  He stopped breathing.

  A line of tiny handwriting curled along the side of one page:

  “Static discharge potential? Fun for hair. Bad for Lucien’s suits. Maybe keep indoors?”

  Her energy.

  The sour-candy girl with danger coiled beneath her hoodie. The pink eyes. The raw vulnerability when she'd shoved him clear of an explosion. She had left him this. Not as a keepsake, but as a lifeline.

  Proof. Impossibly whimsical proof.

  The scent of ozone and sugar clung to the pages.

  Butter was real. And she was trapped. The impossibly powerful girl with the sour belts and the kaleidoscope heart needed someone to see her. And Brad, was determined to be that someone.

  He tucked the Aria to his chest, a protective reflex. The weight of it felt intimate, like a message only he had received.

  The street's perfect silence didn't comfort, it lied. Like a staged crime scene, every repainted scratch and replaced brick whispering nothing happened here in Lucien's curated tone. Butter’s world had rules, and someone was working overtime to cover the cracks.

  The Aria smelled like her.

  Brad sat cross-legged on his bunk, the cobalt-blue journal balanced on his knees. Dawn bled through the shelter’s grimy windows, painting the pages in weak gold.

  First: The Cover.

  Worn leather, soft as old denim. No title, no markings, just a thumbprint smudge near the spine, sticky with what might’ve been melted gummy worm. He pressed his own thumb over it. Too small. Her hands are tiny.

  Second: The Binding.

  Frayed threads, but not from age. Like something had burst from inside, straining the seams. He flipped to the middle, a faint indentation, as if a thick sketch had been ripped out.

  Or escaped.

  Third: The Handwriting.

  Tiny, cramped script filled the margins. Not notes. Conversations.

  "Dragon breath = cinnamon? Too obvious. Maybe cayenne?"

  "Hide says moth wings should taste like pretzels. Lies."

  "Lucien’s suit today: navy. Matches his ‘disappointed’ voice."

  Brad’s pulse hitched. Each word was penned in three distinct inks:

  1. Pencil (Logical): Measurements, formulas ("Static discharge potential = 0.7 kV?").

  2. Blue Ink (Whimsical): Doodles of creatures mid-motion: a fox with ember-tipped tails, a snail armored in candy wrappers.

  3. Red Gel (Desperate): A single line, buried under layers of erased sketches: "He’s not in the mirrors anymore."

  Fourth: The Paper.

  He held a page to the light. The fibers shimmered, not from gloss, but from residue. Like sugar water had dried there. He scraped a fingernail over a dragon’s wing, a faint crackle, static pricking his skin.

  Alive. Once.

  Fifth: The Missing Piece.

  The last sketch wasn’t blank. It was eaten. A hole bored through the page, edges blackened as if burned from within. Brad tilted it, the damage wasn’t random. Toothmarks. Tiny, precise, like a beetle had chewed a perfect circle.

  A sound escaped him. Half laugh, half curse.

  She didn’t just draw creatures.

  She fed them.

  Outside, a streetlamp flickered. Brad barely noticed. His fingers trembled as he traced the gnawed edges.

  This wasn’t just a sketchbook.

  It was a cage. And something had gotten out.

  ///

  The shelter's fluorescent buzz was Brad's 6:00 am alarm. He woke with his left hand already curled around the wrench under his pillow, a habit from alley sleeping, while his right groped for the cracked mug of pens on his makeshift desk. Morning inventory: three protein bars, a water bottle (refilled at the bodega sink), and the broken radio he'd been piecing together from dumpster finds. Its guts spilled across the desk like a dissected cricket, copper wires and capacitors waiting for his calloused fingers to give them purpose.

  He worked methodically, twisting frayed wires with teeth and pliers salvaged from the warehouse where he'd gotten his last paycheck. The radio wasn't about music. It was a compass, if he could get it working, maybe he'd catch a news blip about "unexplained phenomena" or "gas leaks" covering Butter's candy-colored destruction. The shelter manager called this hoarding. Brad called it archaeology. Every piece of junk was a potential breadcrumb back to the girl who'd folded reality like origami paper.

  By 7:30 am, his fingers smelled of solder and desperation. He tucked the radio pieces into his jacket. Yesterday's prize: a physics textbook with equations scribbled in margins by some dead student. Today's haul: a single wool sock and a waterlogged copy of Wuthering Heights. Brad pocketed both. The book could be barter. The sock? He'd unravel it for fishing line. In this city, even hopelessness had utilitarian value.

  ///

  Days after and the sketchbook still hadn’t changed.

  No new glow. No lingering spark. Just dead paper. And still, Brad checked it every night.

  He didn’t know what he was hoping for. Maybe a flicker of watercolor. Maybe the dragon’s eye opening again.

  But it stayed still.

  Bread and processed cheese sat in his stomach, as nourishing as drywall, as he rounded the corner near St. Peter’s. Barely worth the hours spent hauling metal scraps, but it dulled the ache.

  What hadn’t dulled was the sensation.

  Three days of being watched. A phantom pressure behind his shoulder blades. A shift in the air when he moved too fast. His mind, razor-honed by survival and pattern recognition, refused to dismiss it.

  And tonight? It was worse.

  Brad ducked down a narrow service alley, shortcutting toward the shelter. His sneakers scuffed the pavement under a flickering streetlight, shadows twitching like insects.

  That was when the air warped.

  A shimmer, like asphalt heat mirage, but wrong. Intentional.

  Brad didn’t look directly. He angled his body just slightly, peripheral vision catching the outline of something massive.

  It was there.

  Seven feet tall. Bleached driftwood skin, polished smooth and wrong. No nose. Lipless, grinding teeth in a jaw too wide. Jet obsidian eyes, depthless, hungry. Not grotesque. Worse, it was almost human.

  A creature.

  Brad’s body locked. Not fear. Instinct. The same primal wiring that freezes rabbits when the hawk’s shadow falls.

  His lungs burned. He hadn’t breathed since it appeared.

  Not real. Can’t be real.

  But the stench hit him, a physical blow, moldering pulp, wasp-nest rot, and beneath it, the sweet, coppery tang of old blood. His stomach lurched. Spit flooded his mouth, the prelude to vomiting.

  His mind, however, detached. A spectator behind his own eyes.

  Observation: Composition appears wooden, but movement is fluid, organic. Not a construct. A living thing.

  Hypothesis: Chitin? Mycelial network? The surface reflects light like polished bone, not bark.

  The teeth: Not for eating. For grinding. The jaw works laterally, not vertically. A milling motion. It doesn’t want to consume flesh. It wants to pulp it.

  The creature’s head cocked, click-click-click, a sound like a broken clock made of dried sticks. The dark beady eyes didn’t track him. They absorbed him. They weren’t windows to a mind; they were pits, and something at the bottom of them was looking out.

  A violent, irrational thought: If it touches me, I will forget my own name. This thing didn’t just want to kill him. It wanted to unmake him, to grind down the memory of him into nothing.

  Brad’s heartbeat was so loud he wondered if it could hear him.

  His fingers found the wrench in his pocket. Cold steel. Real.

  The creature moved fast. A lunge, a wild arc of its trunk-like arm.

  Brad didn’t block. He shifted, precise, low, behind an overflowing trash cluster. Dust and wall fragments exploded where he’d stood.

  He rolled to his feet. The creature turned, fixated on him.

  It flickered, vanished for a split second and reappeared closer.

  Not teleportation, light-bending, triggered by line-of-sight. Delay between flickers: two seconds, maybe less.

  He baited it, angled his movements into shallow arcs, kept one foot trailing to kick up trash. Creating noise. Shadows.

  It didn’t care. Another flicker.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Brad feinted left, baiting the lunge. Right on cue, the air warped behind him. He spun, wrench aimed at the empty space where its knee would materialize.

  CLANG. Metal met driftwood a half-second before the creature fully formed.

  Nothing. Not even a scratch. But it was data.

  No pain response. Surface level nerve endings non-functional. Armor? Or is the creature a shell?

  It roared. A sound like pressure grinding against stone.

  Brad backed up.

  His fingers closed around a rusted metal rod in the trash, three feet long, jagged at the end. Not a weapon. A vector.

  Pest lunged, its driftwood claws raking upward.

  Brad calculated.

  -Rod braced at 20-degree upward angle (optimal for eye-level strike).

  -Weight on back foot (ready to torque).

  PIVOT. NOW. The claws missed his ribs by half an inch.

  Brad drove the rod forward like a pool cue, not a stab, a guided missile.

  CRUNCH.

  The jagged end buried itself in Pest’s left eye socket. Black ichor sprayed, sizzling where it hit the pavement.

  For a heartbeat, the creature stuttered, its flicker-glitch disrupted.

  Brad didn’t celebrate. He calculated.

  -Rod still lodged (12 inches deep).

  -Pest’s head now tilted 30 degrees right (exposing the neck joint).

  -If he twisted now, with 70 pounds of force...

  The flicker started again.

  But the air itself turned warm, a sudden, dry heat that washed over Brad's chilled skin. It was the heat of a forge, not the sun, carrying the faint, electric scent of ozone. A low, resonant growl vibrated through the alley, a sound felt deep in the bones more than heard with the ears. It wasn't coming from the creature. It was coming from everywhere.

  Then the alley ignited.

  Violet flames surged downward like liquid fury, crashing into the creature’s back. It howled, genuinely staggered. Not invulnerable. Just stubborn.

  Brad squinted up, just as the rooftop figure dropped.

  Lóng Yán.

  The impact cracked the asphalt. He rose in a fluid motion, axes already blazing with inner fire, their edges shimmering with contained violence. Shoulder-length black hair, framed a face that was all sharp angles and simmering aggression, handsome in the way a blade was handsome.

  A fitted armored vest of crimson-red metal plates covered his torso and shoulders, lined with intricate silver filigree that shimmered like mother-of-pearl. They were sleeveless, exposing his arms covered in living ink: koi-fish that bled into spectral wolves, their eyes glowing faintly as they shifted under his skin. His trousers were loose, dark, and comfortable, gathered at the ankles and tucked into heavy combat boots laced with black thread and decorated with small ornamental patterns. Around his waist hung a broad utility belt laden with small pouches, vials, and scroll cases. A silver lip piercing caught the firelight, flashing like a sniper’s glint.

  The creature roared. Lóng Yán didn’t blink.

  "You disgusting pest," he growled, his voice a low, gravelly rumble with a distinct Northern tang. "Been tracking your stench for days. Zhen tao yan (真讨厌 - truly disgusting). Can't let a thing like you roam about freely."

  Yán’s speed was a blur, but not the kind that defied physics like Winter’s sonic strikes. Not the hesitant, math-heavy violence of Butter’s touches. This was practiced. Every swing calibrated, every dodge efficient. A man who’d burned through a thousand fights and learned the shortcuts.

  The creature lunged. Yán stepped into it, axes crossing like scissors. Living soulfire sheared through the pest’s arm, the severed limb hitting the ground as charcoal.

  The monster staggered from the force of its own aborted lunge. It was a fractional loss of balance, but Yán was already moving. He didn't step back; he drove forward, leading with his shoulder and ramming it like a battering ram into the creature's chest. The impact slammed the Pest back a step, its head snapping forward from the blow.

  In the same fluid motion, Yán was already pivoting, the soulfire axe in his right hand whistling in a vicious, horizontal arc aimed to cleave the creature's head from its shoulders.

  The creature flickered, vanished.

  Yán breathed, and the alley turned into an oven. A whip of hungry soulfire lashed from his mouth, striking empty air-

  -and the creature wailed as it rematerialized, its driftwood chest scorched where the living fire had predicted its reappearance.

  Then it screamed, a sound of grinding stone and shattered glass. The loss of its limb and the subsequent attack didn't create fear; it detonated a deeper, more primal fury. Its remaining hand blurred, fingers elongating into jagged, wooden shards that stabbed at Yán's face in a hypersonic flurry.

  Brad's mind, ever-calculating, registered the shift instantly: Attack velocity increased tenfold. Kinetic output now sufficient to rip through armored tanks like tissue paper.

  Yán didn't block. He became a ghost. His head weaved and tilted by millimeters, the killing points whistling past his cheeks, his neck, his eyes. Each dodge was a tiny, perfect economy of motion, his feet barely shifting as the air around him was shredded.

  The creature's arm hammered into the ground, and the asphalt boiled upward in a wave of corrosive black ooze. Yán was already airborne, a single, graceful backflip that carried him over the spreading pool, his axes leaving twin arcs of violet fire in the air.

  He landed silently. The Pest was already on him, its form flickering, its mouth unhinging to vomit a stream of psychic static that made Brad's nose bleed from five meters away. Yán didn't retreat. He flowed sideways, his body contorting around the invisible beam, the soles of his boots scraping along the wall as he ran two steps to bypass the attack entirely.

  The creature swung its arm in a wild, scything arc meant to bisect him at the waist.

  Lóng Yán met the blow head-on, Soulfire axes biting deep, but not enough. Brad watched concrete cleave where the axes missed, but the creature’s hide endured. The impact was immense, but Yán absorbed it not with a block, but by leaping with the force, letting it carry him into a spinning cartwheel that dissipated the energy, landing with his knees bent and axes still held tight.

  Durability: greater than reinforced concrete. Weakness: possibly internal.

  Brad’s mind, even in its terror, cataloged the shift in Yán’s form. It was no longer the efficient, practiced style from before. This was something older, more bestial. His stance dropped lower, his center of gravity sinking impossibly deep. His movements became a series of powerful, short-range explosions; low, whip-like kicks to disrupt the creature’s foundation, followed by brutal, close-quarter axe chops that used his entire body as a piston. It was aggressive, overwhelmingly direct, and rooted in a powerful, stable base. The philosophy was simple: dominate the ground, dominate the fight. It was Hung Gar.

  Lóng Yán leaped back with a snarl, muscles coiling like steel springs. In one fluid motion, he flung both axes with staggering force. They whistled through the air, soulfire trails painting violet streaks across Brad's vision before sinking deep into the creature's driftwood hide with wet thunks.

  The monster roared, a sound like splintering granite, as black ichor oozed from the wounds. Ravenous soulfire veins spread from the blades like roots, burning from within. But the pain tripled when Lóng Yán moved.

  He was on the creature in a blur, clawed fingers digging into its shoulders as he vaulted onto its back. Brad caught the flash of silver, that lip ring glinting, right before Lóng Yán's fanged jaws clamped onto its neck.

  The creature roared, staggering under the dual impact of axe and tooth. A sickening crunch. A spray of something too dark to be blood. The creature thrashed, its dark eyes rolling wildly as Lóng Yán tore free with a mouthful of its strange flesh. He spat it aside, already reaching for another bite.

  The monster bucked and spun, slamming itself backward against the alley wall in a desperate attempt to crush him. Yán simply released his grip, dropping to the ground an instant before the impact and sliding between its legs as the brickwork exploded.

  In a single, fluid bound, he was astride its shoulders like a king claiming a throne of nightmare flesh. With a roar that tore from a place deeper than fury, his clawed hands shot forward. They didn't strike; they plunged, fingers pistoning past the armored hide to sink wrist-deep into the gristly juncture where its neck met its spine. He braced his feet against its shoulders, his entire body becoming a single, straining lever as he tried to rip its head from its body.

  Pest flickered feet away, leaving Lóng Yán pulling on empty air. His axes remained embedded in the now-absent creature's hide, clattering to the asphalt. They steamed where they'd fallen, one blade still glowing cherry-red along its engraved channels, as if the soulfire remembered the taste of that otherworldly flesh and refused to let go.

  Enraged, the creature managed a final, wild swing of its arm. Lóng Yán didn't block. He dropped his weight, flowing under the blow with a fluid, almost dismissive head-roll that would've made a stuntman proud. As he came up inside its guard, his claws, were already buried to the wrist in the axe wound he had created in its chest.

  The creature's scream was cut short as Yán snarled, "Burn."

  He forced a torrent of concentrated soulfire directly into the creature's core.The Pest's body lit up from within, its driftwood skin glowing a horrific, translucent orange as it thrashed, internalized fire devouring its strange biology.

  Then it flickered again.

  Lóng Yán was empty-handed once more.

  The creature had vanished again, this time appearing further away, past Lóng Yán.

  But it was no longer the imposing horror from moments before. It flickered into existence unsteadily, its form wavering at the edges. The arm Yán had sheared off was a stump of blackened, smoldering charcoal. From the brutal wound in its chest, thick, sizzling ichor oozed like hot tar, and a faint, angry orange glow pulsed from within, the last embers of the soulfire Yán had forced down its throat. Its movements were jerky, uncoordinated, a marionette with its strings cut.

  It was dying. But a cornered, dying animal is often the most dangerous.

  It was facing Brad.

  Shit.

  Its hand raised, not to strike, but to pull. Brad gasped.

  It was draining him.

  No. Draining the sketchbook. Its magic.

  A violent tug, like something vital being ripped out of his ribs. The sketchbook in his jacket pulsed, the pages glowed sapphire for a split second, then the ink vaporized, leaving behind the acrid stench of burnt sugar.

  The monster vanished. This time... gone.

  Black ichor dripped from Yán’s lips, sizzling where it hit the asphalt. He wiped his mouth with a snarl. ’Tastes like rotten libraries.’

  Brad scrambled, yanked the book free, flipped it open.

  Empty.

  Every page. The creatures. The colors. The life. The dragon’s scales had been the exact pink of Butter’s eyes when she’d laughed.

  And now it was gone.

  Only the indentations remained. Echoes of her hand. Brad's heart ached.

  His fingers traced the grooves where her pencil had pressed too hard, where the dragon’s scales had once shimmered. Now just hollows. Like scars. Like graves.

  The paper was cold. Not just blank. Hollow. Like a voice ripped from a throat mid-song. He’d seen that hollow before. In the alley after Lucien took her. In the silence of a shelter cot that still smelled like candy and sugar.

  Lóng Yán was in front of him before the shock settled. Massive. Imposing. The axes had cooled, but the heat of him remained, anger and suspicion in human form.

  Brad’s eyes, refusing to meet the man’s burning gaze, darted over him instead, cataloging, classifying. It was the only way to keep from screaming.

  The Claws: Retracted now, but he’d seen them. There was no sheath, no visible slit in the skin. One moment, Yán’s fingertips were blunt, calloused, human. The next, in the heat of combat, five bone-white blades had slid forth with a sound like sharpening steel, each one a perfect, lethal curve.

  Now, retracted, they left no trace. Just the memory of their existence.

  Observation: No visible seam or pore at the fingertip. The skin simply... parts and reseals.

  Conclusion: The mechanism is subcutaneous. The claws are not extensions; they are the final digit, the distal phalanx itself, transformed into a blade and sheathed within the flesh of the finger. A total anatomical rewrite.

  Implication: This isn't an add-on. This is his base state. His body was built, or evolved, for this. The human form is the disguise. The claws are the truth.

  The sheer, visceral wrongness of it made Brad’s stomach clench. It was one thing to see a monster made of driftwood. It was another to see a man with a lip ring and tattoos whose fingertips could turn into scalpels.

  His eyes flicked up to Yán’s mouth. The snarl was gone, the fury banked. And with it, the fangs had receded.

  Just a moment ago, they’d been a glistening array of sharpened bone, designed for tearing. Now, they were just... teeth. Sharp canines, yes, but within the realm of a human who’d had them filed. The transformation was seamless, instantaneous.

  Observation: Dental structure is mutable. Can shift from human-passing to fully predatory and back.

  Conclusion: Not a fixed state. A controlled metamorphosis, likely tied to adrenaline or intent. The predator is always there, just hidden behind a smile.

  The Soulfire: It wasn’t external. It bled from his skin, his lips, his very pores. The color was wrong, violet core, yellow-white embers, a heat signature that defied natural combustion. It didn’t consume him; it was a part of his circulatory system. It felt alive, a sentient heat that responded to his will. Assessment: Not a power he wields. A power he is. Endothermic? A biological process that generates immense internal heat, manifested externally as a living plasma.

  The Tattoos: The koi that bled into wolves. They weren’t static. They moved. Their eyes glowed with the same inner fire he breathed. Not ink. The art wasn't on his skin; it was in it, a part of the ecosystem of his body. The ink didn’t look applied. It looked grown. Tied to Yán’s emotional state? The wolf emerged during aggression. The koi during calm? Or was it autonomous? This wasn't a tattoo. It was a symbiote. A captured spirit. A story written in living flesh and fire. And it was watching him.

  The pieces clattered together in Brad’s head, forming a terrifying profile. This wasn’t a man with powers. This was a different species altogether. A predator from a different branch of the evolutionary tree, one where living fire was a bodily fluid and claws were standard issue.

  He wasn't a hero. He wasn't a monster.

  He was a beast.

  Lóng Yán snatched the journal, flipped through, face tightening. The wolves in his tattoos coiled, their eyes burning with something feral.

  "Little Moon’s dream journal," he said quietly. "Felt it. Her magic bleeding. That flickering twig wasn’t after you, street rat."

  His grip faltered for a fraction of a second, just long enough for Brad to see the wolves in his tattoos still. Not snarling. Grieving.

  He dropped the book back in Brad’s lap like poison.

  Yán's fingers flexed, still smoking faintly from soulfire. Brad noticed something he didn't see before, a polished black hoop etched with glowing veins like fissures in a dam holding back floodwaters of living soulfire.

  "It was feeding. Slowly. On the echoes in that book. On her. Every line she draws contains a thread of her soul, that thing wanted to unravel it."

  He leaned in, close enough that Brad could smell smoke and iron on him.

  "Now tell me, why was her magic in your hands?"

  The koi in his arms twisted into snarling wolves, their ink-dark eyes locking onto Brad’s.

  Brad’s eyes, desperate for anything to focus on besides the feral tattoos and soulfire gaze, dropped to the man’s ear.

  The hematite earring.

  It was a polished black hoop, but that was a lie. Up close, it was a web of fine, glowing veins, like fissures in obsidian. They pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light, a heartbeat that was not Yán’s own. The light wasn’t the violet of his soulfire; it was a sickly, sullen orange, the color of a dying coal.

  Observation: The stone is not decorative. It’s a container.

  Hypothesis: The fissures aren’t cracks; they are seams. Something is inside, fighting to get out. The glow is a containment field at maximum strain.

  Conclusion: It’s not an earring. It’s a prison. And whatever’s inside is breathing.

  The realization was a cold knife in his gut. This man didn’t just wield soulfire; he wore a captured explosion as jewelry.

  Brad didn’t flinch.

  He stared back, jaw set, fingers closed over the now-empty book like it was still alive.

  And said, "Because she trusted me."

  The axes' flames flickered as he studied Brad, not with pity, but the grudging recognition of a man who knew what it cost to be trusted by broken things.

  A long, tired breath escaped him, steaming in the suddenly cold air. "I need a cigarette."

  He pulled a crumpled pack from a vest pocket, selected one, and placed the filter between his lips. With a practiced, indifferent motion, he touched the tip to the smoldering skin of his forearm. It lit with a sharp hiss, the paper blackening and curling as it caught from the living soulfire within. He took a long, slow drag, the ember glowing like a demon's eye in the alley's gloom before he exhaled a plume of smoke that carried the scent of a recent lightning strike.

  He offered the pack to Brad, his gaze unreadable. "You?"

  Brad shook his head, his voice quiet but firm. "I don't smoke."

  Yán gave a slight, dismissive shrug and tucked the pack away. "Suit yourself." He took another deep pull, the tension in his shoulders easing a fraction. He tapped a claw-tipped finger against his own sternum. "No point worrying about my health. The furnace is already lit."