Chapter 9: Wings

Leander was breathing hard from the stairs.

His tie was gone and his shirt was open at the collar.

His golden eyes had gone all pupil.

He looked past Orrin's wing at me in my sweat-soaked T-shirt on the floor of the doorway.

His nostrils flared.

"There," he said. "Look at her. That's my bride, burning, and you've had her up here all night."

"He's been in the hall," I said. "All night. On the floor."

"Sure he has."

"Your scent doesn't reach me," Orrin said. "Neither does yours."

He said it the way he'd say a block of stone was too wet to cut.

He didn't step forward.

He didn't raise a hand.

He just stood there, wings open from wall to wall, and he did not move.

"Get out of my way," Leander said.

"No."

"She's mine. The Council said so yesterday, in front of the whole city."

"The Council said she's bonded to you," Orrin said. "It didn't say you could come through her door."

Leander's lip curled back off his teeth.

The growl that came out of him was low and huge, a sound that belonged on a savanna, not a stairwell on Pell Street.

Up and down the building I heard doors opening.

Across the street, a window went up.

"Last time," Leander said. "Move."

Orrin didn't.

Leander hit him.

It was a real punch, a lion's whole weight behind it, right into the middle of Orrin's chest.

There was a crack.

It wasn't Orrin.

Leander staggered back against the banister holding his right hand, his face gone white.

His knuckles were already swelling.

Orrin looked down at his own shirt, where the dust from the stoneyard had puffed out in a little cloud.

"Stone blood," he said. "I should have mentioned."

Somebody upstairs laughed out loud.

It was Wilda, in her bathrobe, on the landing above us with her phone up.

"Oh, I'm so glad I'm awake for this," she said.

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