Page 41 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

“I’ve never worked up the courage to ask outright,” Gabriel admitted. “But that woman can do alarming things with a smirk, so I assumed that either she can, or she’s excellent at bluffing. Why, have you been having a lot of those dreams lately?” The fake innocent tone was back.

“If you must know,” I said primly, “I’ve been having them about you.” It felt weird talking about this out in the middle of the street, but it’s not like anyone was around to listen in on us. “I had one about you drinking from me, actually.”

Gabriel missed a step, and I stumbled. “When was this?”

“A little bit after the citadel thing. Why?”

Gabriel stopped walking and turned to face me. “We kissed. I was above you. Inside you. And then I drank from you.”

I could feel my face going red again. “What?”

He lifted a hand and touched the side of my neck, right where I could feel my pulse pounding. “I bit you right here,” he said. “In the dream.”

“We had the same dream?”

We stared at each other, Gabriel’s hand cool and gentle on my neck.

“We should get to my place,” I said finally. “I think I might have a book about this.” I was pretty sure I knew where it was, and it would make it easier to grab the slim book I had about magical burnout without Gabriel asking questions.

It sounded like we both had research to do.

15

GABRIEL

Iwas reeling from the revelation of our shared dreams, but like any good politician, I’d been trained to fall back on inanity when I needed room to think. If you got your companion talking, you could buy yourself time. Time was something I sorely needed if I was going to explore the implications of Evangeline’s dreams bleeding into mine.

“Are you looking forward to getting Pothos back?” I asked. Pets and children, I could practically hear my mother telling me. People always liked talking about their pets and their children.

“Yeah, I’ve missed that little guy,” Evangeline said. “If he was, uh, an actual cat I’d never leave him by himself for so long, but he’s pretty self-sufficient, and Chanel can handle the rest. He’s probably pretty bored, though. And he can get a little…” She winced. It was odd seeing Evangeline’s expressions on a stranger’s face. “I usually try not to let him get bored.”

I considered the range of abilities I’d seen from the small, green monstrosity the witches seemed content to treat like a normal cat. “I can imagine.”

“It’ll be good to see the place,” Evangeline continued. “That’s the weird thing about magical buildings. It makes being homesick worse because you’re also kind of missing a friend.”

“You’ve been living there a while, I assume?”

She nodded, and her glossy bob bounced. “Since I came to Eldoria. So, a couple years now. At first, it was because the rent was cheap, but I got attached. The cheap rent is still a bonus. I love doing paranormal private investigator stuff, but trailing someone’s spouse to figure out if they’re secretly a werewolf doesn’t really rake in the big bucks.”

I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t do something stupid like offer to shower Evangeline in riches. I knew instinctively that would not go well for me. If I wanted to shower her in riches—and I did, I wanted to see her in fine things that I had given her, decadent and happy, marked as mine… No. Not the time—then I would have to be more subtle about it.

Soon, the familiar façade of Evangeline’s apartment stood in front of us. The restaurant on the first floor had boarded up its windows, but the sign hanging in the door was still flipped to OPEN. Evangeline patted the brickwork next to the door that led upstairs like someone greeting a beloved pet, and the door swung open. The hinges creaked, and she frowned.

“Weird,” she muttered.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Chanel usually keeps herself in better shape than that,” she said. “I don’t like this. Keep your guard up.”

I fought the urge to go up the stairs ahead of her. Evangeline was capable. Evangeline did not want to feel coddled. She took the lead, posture shifting into something combat ready.

We climbed the stairs slowly and cautiously. The apartment door was closed, but at a slight angle, and upon closer inspection, I realized it had been taken off its hinges and propped back into place. How had Chanel allowed this to happen? Evangeline twisted the handle, more out of habit than anything else, and it turned uselessly.

“Please, allow me,” I said and moved the door out of the way.

Evangeline sucked in a breath.

The apartment was wrecked, and Chanel hadn’t attempted to clean up the chaos. Someone had searched the place. Books had been thrown from the shelves, and papers scattered everywhere. Someone had even slashed the cushions on the sofa and the large, patched armchair by the window. The plants in the window ranged from limp and pale to desiccated, which was, while not a priority, distinctly odd. I wasn’t an expert in magical dwellings, but one as developed as Chanel should have kept the plants from getting quite so close to death.

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