Lex Hortensia Novels & Stories

Deliberately, carefully, with skill and sustained effort. And underneath it, held so tightly it was barely present, held the way you held something at the bottom of a current with both hands and all your weight, something else entirely. Something that smelled of open ground after rain and running cold water and the particular clean-iron scent that belonged to a bloodline with significant age in it. Not warm-blooded. Not the human register. Something older than both, something that had been here before the categories existed and had continued regardless. I pulled back and looked at her face.

She then walked away, waving her left hand free of the wine she had chosen towards Maxim, who had chosen to enter through a little entrance to the Sims family's backyard door at Ivan's direction. Sidney was watching them from one of the small alleys that separated the Red Gorge neighborhood's residents' buildings, as Ivan had previously stated. Despite the fact that Sidney was wearing a scarf wrapped around her long blonde hair, similar to how women in other Middle Eastern countries wear hijab, Maxine recognized the girl right away. Because Sidney always wore a wolf-shaped brooch encrusted with black diamonds on her sleeve.