BOUND BY THE ALPHA’S SIN

Chapter 2

By nine o’clock the Ember Diner had exactly four customers, which Dot Calloway called a miracle and Ariana called a warning.

The four old men at the counter nursed their coffee and said nothing. Dot had salted every windowsill herself at sunset, muttering, and now she stood by the register in her cardigan with her purse already on her shoulder.

“I’m paying you time and a half,” Dot said. “Don’t make me regret it.”

“You always say that.”

“And you always make me regret it. Lock the back door when Hector goes on break. Don’t open the front for anyone after midnight, I don’t care if it’s the Pope.” She squeezed Ariana’s wrist, which was as close as Dot ever came to a hug. “Close at two. Straight home.”

“That’s the second person today who’s told me straight home. Am I planning a detour?”

Dot looked at the window, at the black line of trees beyond the highway, and then she was gone, the bell jangling behind her, and the diner seemed to shrink around Ariana by a size.

Booth six was empty.

It belonged, in the unofficial way of such things, to a man whose name she had never learned. He came in one night every month, had done so for years, built like a doorway with scarred knuckles and a flat, watchful face. Black coffee, apple pie, a tip far too large to be anything but an apology. He never said more than thanks. But she had felt his eyes on her back more times than she could count, patient and steady, the way you watch a house you have been paid to guard. She had decided long ago that he was lonely, or retired police, and that the staring was harmless.

Tonight he had not come, and she was annoyed to find she felt the absence like a missing tooth.

At 10:47 the bell over the door chimed, and the temperature dropped ten degrees.

He did not look like anyone from Ashfall. Tall, dark hair damp as though he had walked through rain under a cloudless sky, a black coat that fit like it had been cut for him alone. He moved the way very large cats move, loose and unhurried. The old men at the counter went silent as one and discovered a sudden fascination with their cups.

He walked straight to booth six and sat down as though it had been waiting for him.

Ariana picked up the coffee pot because her hands needed something to do. Cedar smoke reached her first, then rain on warm stone, then something darker underneath that made her stomach tilt, an animal warmth she wanted, absurdly, to lean toward. Against her collarbone the pendant ticked with heat.

“Coffee?” she managed.

“Please.”

His voice was low and rough at the edges, like it had not been used in a while. She poured. He did not look at the cup. He was looking at her, and when she finally met his eyes the diner lights seemed to stutter, because they were gold. Not hazel, not amber. Gold, molten and bright, the color of a forge at full heat.

It was the neon, she told herself. The sign in the window threw red and orange across everything. It was just the neon.

“Ariana,” he said.

Her name in his mouth sounded like something he had said many times to himself in the dark.

“It’s Ari.” She tapped the plastic tag on her apron. “Says so right here.”

“I know what it says.”

A chill walked down her spine, though not entirely from fear. “Close early tonight.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Send the cook home. Lock the doors. Go to your apartment on Cinder Street and stay there until sunrise.” He did not raise his voice. He did not have to. It landed in her chest like a hand.

“I never told you where I live.”

“No,” he agreed, and offered nothing more.

The sensible thing, she knew, was to scream for Hector. Instead she set the pot down and heard herself say, “If that is a pickup line, it is the worst one I have ever heard.”

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, so brief she might have imagined it. “It isn’t.”

“Then what is it?”

“A warning. There are things in the woods tonight that do not care what you believe.” His gold gaze held hers. “Please. Whatever you’ve heard in this town, it’s closer to true than you think.”

Ariana looked at the empty stools where the old men had been. She thought of Mr. Okafor’s nails, Dot’s salt, the dogs. A shiver crawled up her arms, and she hated it, because she had spent seventeen years learning not to be frightened of the dark, and she would not let a stranger with pretty eyes undo that in one night.

“I can’t close early,” she said. “I need the hours. And I don’t take orders from customers I met five minutes ago.”

He reached into his coat, drew out a folded hundred, and laid it on the table beside the untouched coffee.

“That’s for the coffee.”

“Coffee is two fifty.” She slid the bill back across the Formica with one finger. “I’ll bring your change.”

For a long moment he only looked at the hundred, and she saw something move behind his face, something raw and tired and close to pain. Then he closed his eyes.

“Then I will have to hope you are stubborn enough to survive it.”

He stood. In the narrow aisle he seemed to take up all the air. The space between them hummed like a wire pulled tight, and her whole body leaned a fraction toward him before her mind could object. His gaze dropped to her throat, to the chain just visible above her collar, and he went completely still.

She closed her hand over the pendant without knowing why.

“Stay out of the woods,” he said at last, and his voice had gone strange and low. “Whatever calls you. Do not follow it.”

He turned and left. The bell chimed. Through the window she watched him cross the highway without checking for traffic, a black shape walking toward the black line of trees, and the dark closed behind him like water.

Ariana let out a breath she had not realized she was holding. Her hands were shaking. She wiped down a counter that was already clean, rearranged the sugar caddies, and refused to think about the sound of her name in that voice.

The hundred lay on booth six’s table where he had left it, and when she picked it up, it was warm, as though it had been held against skin for hours. She tucked it into the register drawer to give back later, though something told her he would not return.

Eleven o’clock came. Eleven thirty. Hector, the night cook, clattered his pans in the kitchen and sang along to a radio that crackled out an old country song, and the ordinary noise of it steadied her. She made herself busy. She did not look at the window more than twice a minute.

At 11:52 the radio died.

Not a fade, not static. It cut out mid-note, and the silence that replaced it was so complete that she heard the neon flame in the window buzz, stutter, and go dark. In the kitchen Hector’s singing stopped.

The diner went black except for the weak orange wash of the lone streetlight outside.

Ariana went to the window. She told herself it was a blown fuse. She told herself a lot of things.

Three men stood in the parking lot, in a line, beneath the lone streetlight. They were tall and utterly still, arms hanging at their sides. Black masks covered their faces, plates of bone carved into open jaws, and on each throat, just above the collar, a fang had been burned into the skin.

She knew those masks. They had walked through her sleep for seventeen years.

None of them moved. None of them seemed to breathe. And against her chest, the pendant began to burn.