Alle Kapitel von Never. Say. Yours.: Kapitel 21 – Kapitel 30

The city was different when you knew what lived in it.Josie walked Beacher Street on equinox morning and saw things she'd missed before. The way certain buildings had the claw symbol carved above their doors, subtle, worn, easy to miss if you weren't looking. The way certain people on the sidewalk moved, not quite right, not quite human, a stiffness in the joints or a brightness in the eyes that flickered wrong in the sunlight.She saw a man on Drayton Street whose shadow was too long. A woman on Merchant Row whose reflection in a shop window had the wrong face. A dog on Calloway Street that looked at her with eyes that were too intelligent, too knowing, and she thought: that's not a dog.She went to Grindstone. She opened the shop. She made coffee. She didn't pull any cards. She'd left the deck at home. She couldn't look at them right now. The cards had been telling her the truth for weeks and she'd been reading them like a horoscope, like a game, like a

Seven forty-three. The torches in the stone room flickered. The air pressure changed. Josie felt it in her ears, a popping, a shifting, like the world had taken a breath and held it.The equinox.Margit came through the tunnel. She didn't walk. She flowed. Her body moved like water, like something that had learned to pretend it was solid. Her silver eyes caught the torchlight and threw it back wrong, bent, like light through ice. Her grey dress rippled without wind. Her white-blonde hair floated around her face as if she was submerged.Behind her, the tunnel filled with water. Not flowing in from outside. Generating. From her. From whatever she was. The water rose on the stone floor, an inch, two inches, cold and dark and smelling of the harbor. Of brine and rot and deep places."The unclaimed seer," Margit said. Her voice echoed off the stone, multiplied, like three voices speaking at once. "Standing between the wolf and the bull. How predictable

The knot went down at two in the morning.Harlan pulled out slowly, carefully, and the release of pressure made Josie gasp. His cum spilled out of her, gold, glowing faintly in the dark bedroom. Dane's cum followed, amber, thick, and the two colors mixed on the grey sheets and glowed like embers."Your cum glows," she said. "Both of you. I still can't get over that.""It fades," Harlan said. He was shifting back to human. The fur receding. The claws retracting. His face shortening, his teeth pulling back. But his eyes stayed gold. They'd been gold since she'd said the words. Since the claim. Since the binding. He said they might stay gold permanently. The beast didn't want to hide anymore.Dane shifted back too. The horns receding, the hide pulling back under skin. His cocks, still dual, slowly compressed, the lower one retreating, until he looked human again. Almost. His tongue was still longer than it should be. And when he opened his mouth wide

She went back to Grindstone on Wednesday. Three days after the binding. Two days after the Hollow meeting. One day after she'd moved her clothes into the house on Whitfield Lane and realized she owned four shirts, two pairs of jeans, and a tarot deck, and that was the sum total of her earthly possessions. Harlan had offered to buy her clothes. She'd told him if he tried to buy her a single pair of socks she'd lock him out of his own reinforced shifting room and let the beast pace all night. He'd shut up. Dane had offered to cook her breakfast. She'd let him. The pierogi were excellent. She walked to Grindstone at five-thirty in the morning. The city was dark and wet and hers. She could see things she hadn't seen before. The claw symbols above doorways, subtle, worn. The way certain streetlights flickered when something non-human passed beneath them. The way the shadows moved wrong in certain alleys, like they were occupied by something th

Thursday night. Harlan was out. A Hollow meeting. Something about the seventh chair and the humming and whether or not they should be worried. Josie had told him to go. She could feel through the bond that he was anxious about leaving her, even now, even after the binding, even after Margit had acknowledged the claim. The wolf in him didn't like her out of his sight. She told him she'd be fine. She told him she had Dane. She told him to stop being a four-hundred-year-old mother hen.He'd gone. Reluctantly. The bond hummed with his unease, fading as he went underground, the stone dampening the connection.Dane was in the kitchen. He was always in the kitchen. The man cooked like other people breathed. Tonight it was something Polish, something his grandmother had taught him that he wouldn't name because the name was unpronounceable. It smelled like cabbage and sausage and comfort.Josie sat at the kitchen table with her laptop. The novel was done. She'd fin