Chapter 376: An Evening Stroll

"Very well." She tilted her head slightly. "Keep your secrets, human. I will not press. One day, your true realm will reveal itself, whether you intend it to or not."

She turned to go. At the doorway she paused, one hand on the frame, and glanced back over her shoulder. Her red eyes glittered with the small private satisfaction of a woman who had, in her own private assessment, finally caught him.

"I knew it," she said, quietly, almost to herself.

Then she stepped out into the hallway.

Stan watched her go. He waited until the small sound of her footsteps had receded down the hall.

’...She’s completely convinced.’ He let out a slow breath. ’Perfect.’

He tipped his head back against the bed, closed his eyes, and let the small warm quiet of his own apartment settle over him for the first time in what felt like an eternity.

Outside the glass, the sea had gone from gold to a deep soft blue.

The city lights, along the coast below, were beginning to come on.

Meanwhile, Camilla found her coat where she had draped it over the arm of the sofa in the living room.

She lifted it. Shook out the small creases. Drew it around her shoulders with the fluid, unhurried grace she brought to every physical motion. Then she started, in unhurried fashion, toward the door.

Stan looked up from the sofa.

"Where are you going."

"Out."

"Out?"

"Out, human. Into the city. To walk."

Stan uncrossed his legs and rose in one smooth motion. His hand lifted slightly, the small automatic gesture of a man about to raise a reasonable objection about a Royal Blood vampire wandering unsupervised through a modern coastal city at nightfall.

Camilla stopped at the threshold.

She turned her head. She looked at his half-raised hand. She looked at his face. Then she smiled, the small elegant private smile of a woman who had, for the entire afternoon, been waiting for exactly this expression.

"What," she said, softly. "You are not confident in your blood contract?"

Stan’s hand froze midair.

He was, in fact, entirely confident in the blood contract. It was airtight. She could not act against him. She could not lie to him. She could not, by any Old Era rule that had ever governed a Royal Blood’s binding, betray the terms of what they had sworn to one another on the ice.

He was also, in general, of the disposition that rather safe than sorry was a life philosophy that had kept him breathing this long and did not need revising this afternoon.

But she was not wrong.

And there was, he recognized with a small tired resignation, no productive way to make her be wrong out loud.

He lowered his hand.

He waved her off. "Enjoy the walk."

"I intend to." She inclined her head in mock gravity, produced a small satisfied scoff at the corner of her mouth, and stepped through the door.

It closed softly behind her.

Stan stood in the middle of the living room for a long moment, looking at the door.

Then he sighed, sat back down on the sofa, folded his legs beneath him, and resumed his meditation.

Inksea in the early evening was, Camilla decided within the first three blocks, a strange city.

Not strange in the way a foreign kingdom in her own era might have been strange, with its own tongue and its own customs. But strange in a deeper way. Strange in the way that the entire substrate of ordinary life had, over several thousand years, drifted into shapes she had no vocabulary for.

The pavement was smooth and even, laid in the small clean geometric patterns of a place designed by people who cared what pavement looked like. The lights above the streets came on at their own schedule, without any lantern-lighter passing to touch them. The vehicles that moved along the roads made no sound of hoof against stone, only the soft continuous hum of the small clever mechanisms she had been quietly cataloguing since the sedan ride.

She walked.

She did not, in her own honest self-assessment, know where she was walking. She did not care. The point of the walk was not the destination. The point of the walk was the walking.

She let her red eyes move across everything.

The advertising screens on the sides of the taller buildings, cycling their patient loops of colour and text. The small groups of young people moving in and out of the small warm-lit shops along the main avenue, laughing at something one of them had said. The old man walking a small ridiculous dog on a leash. The couple sharing a paper cup of some frozen dessert. The woman in professional dress standing at a corner speaking into a small handheld device with the small controlled irritation of a person who had already explained something twice.

None of them, at first glance, appeared to notice her.

That, in itself, was interesting.

Not because they were incapable of sensing her.

But because she had given them almost nothing to sense.

Her aura was folded so tightly against herself that it scarcely extended beyond her own skin, every instinctive pressure of a Royal Blood deliberately retracted. Had she allowed even a fraction of it to leak into the air, this street would have changed within moments. Conversations would have faltered. Children would have gone quiet. Dogs would have tucked their tails. Every ordinary mortal within reach would have felt the inexplicable certainty that something ancient and dangerous had entered their world.

Instead, they saw only a woman.

Or rather, they believed they did.

She watched, with the small unhurried attention of a scientist, as one young man walking toward her on the pavement raised his eyes to her face in the ordinary passing way of a stranger, held her gaze for exactly half a second, and then flinched.

It was subtle. He did not stop walking. He did not make a sound. He simply flinched, some small deep part of his lizard brain registering the presence of a predator his conscious mind had never been taught to recognize, and looked away, continuing on with his evening at a very slightly accelerated pace.

Camilla catalogued the flinch.

She continued walking.

A woman coming out of one of the small warm-lit shops looked up as she passed, and paused, one hand still on the door handle, the small unfocused smile of a person who had been thinking about something else fading from her face. Her eyes settled on Camilla’s for one held moment. Camilla let her look. The woman’s small unfocused smile did not return. She stepped back inside the shop.

Interesting.

At the corner two blocks further down, a small handful of teenagers standing around a low stone bench went visibly quiet as she walked past. One of them, a girl of perhaps sixteen, with the small bright fashion sense of a young person who had put visible thought into her outfit that morning, muttered something to her friends after Camilla had passed that Camilla, with her spirit sense idling at low sensitivity, chose not to hear.

Something about her eyes, she suspected.

The eyes were, she was slowly beginning to understand, the one thing no amount of carefully restrained presence could entirely conceal. Her clothes were, by modern standards, somewhat old-fashioned, a small dark high-collared thing Stan had allowed her to wear from his own closet with a scarf borrowed from the coat rack over one shoulder, but not so out of place on the streets of a stylish coastal city that anyone would look twice.

But the eyes.

The eyes were a very specific shade of red, and no modern human on Earth had that shade as a natural eye colour. Even with her aura hidden, every ordinary mortal she passed lingered on them for a heartbeat too long, their instincts whispering that something was not quite right before reason dismissed the feeling and carried them onward.

She was, she decided, going to find it more entertaining than annoying.