Between Shadow and Skin

CHAPTER FOUR: Coincidence Is a Lie

SERAPHINE

Three times.

She had seen him three times in four days and she was starting to think the universe had a sense of humor.

The coffee shop she'd chalked up to proximity — Carroll Gardens was a neighborhood, people had routines, she didn't own the blocks between her apartment and the F train. The subway platform she'd been willing to call coincidence, mostly because he'd been on the opposite platform going the other direction and had not appeared to notice her, which she'd found simultaneously relieving and irritating in equal measure.

The bookstore was harder to explain.

Mercer & Vine was not a bookstore you stumbled into. It was three stories, narrow as a thought, packed floor to ceiling with books organized by a system only the owner understood, accessible through an unmarked door on a side street that even regulars sometimes walked past. Sera had found it at nineteen and had been coming back twice a week ever since. It was her place. It was the place where she went to be left alone.

He was standing in the architecture section on the second floor.

She stopped at the top of the stairs and stared at him for a moment that stretched two or three seconds longer than was defensible. He hadn't noticed her yet — he was reading, actually reading, holding a large hardcover open with one hand and turning pages with the focused attention of someone who was not there to perform being in a bookstore but was genuinely in a bookstore.

He looked different here. Less alarming. The same height, the same contained quality of stillness, but something about the low light and the smell of old paper made him seem more present somehow, more real. Like the gallery had been a context she couldn't quite fit him into and this one made more sense.

She was staring.

She turned around and went back down the stairs and found the section she'd come for and spent fifteen minutes looking at the same page before she accepted that she wasn't going to absorb any of it and went to find the owner.

"There's a man upstairs," she said, keeping her voice very even.

The owner, a woman of approximately ninety who claimed to have opened the store before Sera was born and showed no signs of slowing down, looked up over her reading glasses. "There often is."

"In the architecture section. Tall. Suit."

"He comes in sometimes. Good taste." She went back to her book. "Stop lurking and just talk to him, dear."

Sera felt her face do something involuntary. "I'm not—"

"Third time this week you've had that look in my store. It's not a big store."

Sera went back upstairs. She had decided to be a normal person about this, which meant walking past him to the mythology section and pretending he was furniture. This was a completely reasonable plan. She had almost executed it when he spoke.

"You dropped your scarf."

She turned. He was holding it out — she hadn't even felt it fall from where she'd had it draped over her bag. He was closer than she'd calibrated for, and up close he was — he was a lot, was what he was. Up close she could see that his eyes were dark brown with something deeper behind them, something that caught the light in a way that made her think, briefly and inexplicably, of a cat's eye in the dark.

She took the scarf. Their fingers didn't touch. She was unreasonably aware of how close they'd come.

"Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome."

He went back to his book. She stood there for one beat longer than she needed to, then turned and went to find mythology.

She didn't get any reading done.

••••

He was still there an hour later when she went to check out, which was not something she had been tracking.

She was almost to the door when he fell into step beside her — not aggressively, not in the way that would have made her reach for her keys. Just easily, like it was a decision they'd both made at the same time.

"I've seen you before," he said.

"I know." She pushed through the door onto the street. The evening air hit her, cool and faintly damp. "The gallery. And the coffee shop. And the F train."

A pause. "You noticed."

"I notice things." She glanced at him. "Is there a reason you keep appearing?"

He considered this for a moment, in the way of someone who was deciding how honest to be. She'd found, over the years, that she could usually tell when someone was doing that — there was a particular quality of silence around it, a slight change in the texture of a pause.

"I wanted to speak to you at the gallery," he said. "I didn't."

"Why?"

"I was being cautious."

She snorted, which she hadn't planned. "Cautious. You spent three days following me around Brooklyn as a cautious alternative to saying hello?"

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Close enough to be dangerous. "I wasn't following you. We kept being in the same places."

"That's either an incredible coincidence or a very poor excuse."

"It's neither," he said, and something in his voice had shifted — still measured, but with something underneath it now, something that she felt in her chest before she could name it. "My name is Kael. Kael Ashvane."

"Seraphine Voss."

"I know," he said.

She stopped walking. "Of course you do."

He stopped too. He was watching her with that quality of focused attention she'd noticed at the gallery — like she was the only thing in his immediate radius worth tracking. Under different circumstances it might have been unsettling. Under these circumstances it was doing something else entirely, which she was choosing not to examine.

"I'm not a threat to you," he said.

"Funny thing for a man who's been quietly orbiting me for three days to say."

"I know." He tilted his head slightly. "Are you frightened?"

She thought about it honestly. The honest answer was no, and she wasn't sure what to do with that. She'd grown up in the foster system. She'd learned to read danger young, and what she was reading off this man was not danger — or not the simple kind. What she was reading was something more like gravity. The kind that pulled rather than pushed.

"Not frightened," she said. "Skeptical."

"That's reasonable."

"Would you like to do something about it?"

He looked at her for a moment. Something moved in his eyes — she almost expected them to catch the light differently, amber instead of dark, and then the moment passed.

"Yes," he said.

"Then buy me a coffee," she said. "And try to be less cryptic."

He almost smiled again. This time it made it all the way. It was brief and slightly reluctant-looking, like it had gotten out without his permission, and it rearranged his face into something that made her glad she was already standing still.

"All right," he said.

They walked. The city moved around them. She told herself, with the practiced discipline of a woman who had learned not to want things she couldn't keep, that this was just coffee.

She'd never been a convincing liar, though. Not even to herself.