Page 93 of Katya and the Young God

She lets him. “How’s your power levels?” She asks, running her hand through his curls.

“Low,” he says simply, voice half-muffled by her neck. “Don’t expect much magic.”

“That’s why we’re bringing an Archdemon,” she says, feeling him shift against her in something close to unease. “I saw him do some pretty impressive things.”

He shifts again, so his arms are still wrapped around her, but he’s facing her, can see her face, and she’s noticing that about him. That he much prefers to see her face when they speak, to the point of almost inconveniencing himself during conversations.

“And you don’t think he’ll take her for his own usage?” He asks, his accent a low grumble behind his words.

“I know how to manipulate him pretty well,” Katya says, light, and he raises an eyebrow at her. “He’s pretty fond of Miri, and Miri’s pretty fond of me.”

He shrugs, clearly still uneasy about the whole thing, but it's not like she’s a font of self-confidence at the moment. “I’ll be able to break some guns at short distances, but that’s not much help,” Pieter says, like he’s defending his statement of not having power.

“It’ll be something.”

* * *

Sure enough,the moment she can call it sundown, Pieter stiffens, lifting his head towards the front door.

“Someone just tried to teleport in,” he says, smugness threaded through his voice. “Tried.”

Katya likes the hint of pride at his rune-work, but she springs to her comfortably booted feet, striding out towards the door.

Completely unaffected by the wind-chill, in just a simple white t-shirt and jeans, stands Not-Thomas, right at the border of where Pieter had laid his rune-work. His dusty blond hair tufts in the wind, and his eyes glow their shining, sinister red.

She waves in greeting, but he stares past her, where Pieter joins her on the porch.

“Clever,” Not-Thomas says, and Katya had forgotten how utterly inhuman he stands, how utterly wrong he sometimes seems. “Care to let me in?”

As if it’s nothing, Pieter nods, and Not-Thomas stalks across the yard to the porch, before finally, finally inclining his head in greeting to Katya.

“I left Miri at the safe house,” he says. “She is distressed she can’t see you right now.”

“You’ll have to bring her out later, when this is all over,” Katya says, before Pieter and Not-Thomas obviously size each other up.

Face to face, the two men are obviously different. Not-Thomas is still, uncomfortably so, while Pieter’s face moves with every thought that crosses through him. Despite being a few inches shorter, Not-Thomas exudes power so much more than the Demigod, and it’s never been more obvious that Pieter is not where he should be.

Not-Thomas tilts his head, still looking over Pieter, evaluating something Katya cannot see, and Pieter scowls at him in return. Like whatever’s happening is a test of wills, a test of strength, a magical dick measuring contest by two of the strongest people that Katya’s ever met.

She’s never had much patience for those.

She can see the temptation for Pieter’s shoulders to slump, in the protective stance he sometimes takes, but he’s obviously fighting it, fighting to keep his stance open.

“Your power levels are very odd,” Not-Thomas says, finally, after what feels like an eternity of standing in the cold. “I am almost certain they shouldn’t be doing that.”

“Encountered many Demigods?” Pieter retorts, and his jaw is tight.

“Not many,” the Archdemon says in return, eyebrow raised. “And none after a tragedy.”

A flicker of hurt crosses Pieter’s face, well buried.

“But the ways of gods and monsters are always a mystery, that no one has solved in a millennia, and you’re yet young,” Not-Thomas says, as an olive branch, before looking to Katya. “You have blueprints?”

Katya pushes past the two men to go inside, and they thankfully follow her inside with a minimal amount of posturing.

Not-Thomas’s eyebrows raise as he takes the plans in, focusing on the outside, on the perimeter, his eyes moving from sheet to sheet, from level to level.

Slow, tail between his legs, Stepan approaches Not-Thomas, before nosing at his knee. Without even breaking concentration on the blueprints, the Archdemon pats Stepan on the head, and the muscle in Pieter’s back unwinds, sudden.

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