Chapter 657 | A Walk in the Park

Chapter 657: 657 | A Walk in the Park

She stopped halfway back to her desk with her back to me. Her shoulders went stiff under the puffed velvet sleeves.

"Don’t call my bows cute when you’re the one wearing them, because it makes it weird." She climbed onto her desk and opened the parasol. "Plus five, for recognizing quality, and minus five for making it weird, so you’re still negative two hundred and fourteen."

Dralun stood up from his chair. The chair let out a sound of deep relief.

"Walk the block with me, Belmont, because those boots need breaking in, and I need to look at a stoop on Ninth."

"Is the stoop on fire or just broken?"

"Mrs. Alvarez says it’s leaning, and she’s been saying that since 2016, but she’s eighty-one now, so I go look."

He pulled the black vest off its hook and shrugged it on. The office immediately felt about four sizes smaller. I followed him toward the stairs, thunking all the way, and Ophelia called out from behind her parasol without lowering it.

"If he trips on a curb in my bunny ears, you have to film it for me, Dralun."

Dralun didn’t answer, which I suspected meant yes.

Downstairs, the restaurant smelled like scallions and the deep brown of something braising since dawn. Grandma Lin was behind the counter wiping down the cutting board, and the jasmine tea sat beside the register, three-quarters gone. She looked at my feet. Then she said something in Cantonese that was long and rapid, ending in a short bark that made a customer at the corner table look up from his noodles.

Upstairs, the floorboards creaked, and Ophelia’s voice floated down through the ceiling.

"She says you finally look like you live here, and she’s still mad about the mop!"

Grandma Lin pointed the cloth at me, then at the ceiling, and then she went back to wiping the board. I chose to take the first part as a compliment and ignore the second part completely.

Out on Halverson, the November sun was weak and yellow behind a thin layer of cloud. The boots were stiff at the ankle and loose at the heel, and every step sent a small jolt up my shin. The Demigod trait would turn whatever blisters were forming into fresh skin by tonight, so I decided to enjoy the pain as a learning experience. Somewhere under my sternum, the second heartbeat stirred once and settled back down.

The old man outside the barbershop lowered his newspaper as we passed. He looked at my jacket, and then his gaze dropped to my boots. A slow smile spread across his face, and he said a new line in Spanish that I didn’t catch. The barber inside laughed so hard he had to put the clippers down.

"He says you finally got real shoes, and now you only look half like a tourist." Dralun didn’t break stride. "He also said something about your socks, but I’m not translating it."

"Your whole block has a lot of opinions about my wardrobe for people who wear the same jacket every day."

"Ramón has had that jacket since before you were born, and it’s earned the right to judge you."

We turned onto Ninth. The street was quieter here, lined with low brick buildings with peeling paint and stoops that leaned at various stages of surrender. Kids on bikes shot past us, and one of them yelled something at Dralun’s tail that made Dralun lift it about a foot off the ground and swing it back down. The kid shrieked in delight and pedaled faster.

Mrs. Alvarez’s stoop was leaning about four degrees to the left, which by Eastside standards was nearly straight. Dralun crouched beside it and pushed on the bottom step with one hand. The concrete shifted half an inch and groaned. He pressed on the second step, then the railing, then crouched lower to look at the base where it met the sidewalk.

"It’s fine for another year, but the railing bolt’s rusted through, so I’ll come back Saturday and replace it."

"You’re going to fix her stoop yourself, on a Saturday, for free?"

"The city will fix it in four years, maybe five, and she’s eighty-one." He stood up and his knees popped loud enough to echo. "You do the arithmetic, Belmont."

A door opened above us, and a tiny woman in a floral housecoat leaned out to yell at Dralun about the railing. He told her Saturday. She told him he said that last year. He told her he had fixed the gutter last year, and she said the gutter had nothing to do with anything. They kept arguing for another minute and a half, and I stood on the sidewalk in my too-big boots and learned that every stoop in this neighborhood came with a whole relationship.

We walked back up Ninth toward the bus shelter at the corner of Rourke. It had a cracked plastic roof and one bench that tilted forward enough to slowly slide people off. An old man sat on it in a brown wool coat and a flat cap, his hands folded in his lap. He was looking down at something cupped between his palms.

It was a silver pocket watch. Its chain looped loose over his knuckles, and the case caught the weak light and threw it back up at his face. He turned the little crown on top between his thumb and forefinger, slow and careful, making four full turns and then a fifth. Then he closed the case with a soft click and held it against his chest. His eyes were wet, and he did nothing to hide it.

Dralun stopped walking. His tail went still on the sidewalk.

"Morning, Teodor."

The old man looked up and broke into a smile that took about twenty years off his face. He held up the watch so we could see it, swinging gently on its chain.

"Somebody put it in my mailbox this morning, wrapped in a sandwich bag, and there was a little note inside." His voice was thin and soft, with an accent that rolled the edges of the words. "It said wind it every morning, and don’t miss the bus, and it was signed with a tiny snake."

"That was very kind of somebody, Teodor."

"It smelled like strawberries, the whole bag, and even now the watch smells like it." Teodor laughed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "My Ilona would have hated that, because she said strawberries were for children."

The number nine bus came wheezing around the corner. Teodor stood up slowly, tucked the watch into his breast pocket, and patted it twice. He climbed on board, and the doors folded shut behind him. Through the scratched window, I saw him sit down and pull the watch back out to look at it again.

Dralun watched the bus until it turned the corner. Then he turned his head and looked down at me.

I kept my face pleasantly blank. I had kept it blank in front of a Commission director from Geneva and a woman who reads federal databases for fun. A dragon on a street corner should have been a walk in the park.

He leaned down until his nose was about six inches from my shoulder, and he breathed in through it, long and slow. His nostrils flared.

"Kask filed his report at six this morning, and it says somebody broke his front window and cracked his safe last night." Dralun straightened back up. "The whole haul was sitting on his desk in a canvas bag, every piece of it, except for one silver pocket watch."

"That sounds like a very confusing night for Mr. Kask."

"You were alone at the office last night, Belmont, while I was on Ninth Street getting old ladies out of a gas leak, and I told you to stay put."