Page 84 of Obsidian and Frost
~Cassius~
“Not again.”
I looked up from my meal—a chicken pot pie that Ketheron and I had actually managed to make rather well. It wasn’t only just barely edible food this time, it was delightfully scrumptious.
A laugh burst from me when I saw that his fingers were coated in marshmallow stickiness.
“You were playing with them too much again before consuming them.”
“I was,” he admitted.
He rose to wash his hands, only to halt at the heavy thud on our apartment door.
I frowned. We’d already spent a great deal of time with Ariana and one of her loves, Nyx, today, so it wouldn’t be her. And she wouldn’t knock so harshly. Even though she could literally punch her fist through both the ward and the door in one definitive move.
It wouldn’t be Vorzyr because he would never come to see me. We’d technically made our peace after I’d assaulted him, his loves, and taken Ariana from them briefly when I’d firstdescended to this plane to do the Celestial Plane’s bidding, but he still held a bit of a grudge.
And it certainly wasn’t Kai. Even hisknockwas sarcastic and drenched in ego. Not fierce and brutal like this one we’d just heard.
As for Ryker Morgan or anyone else from the higher echelons of the supernatural world’s command structures, they always warned us if they were intending to come by.
“Who is it?” I asked Ketheron.
He frowned and then scented with the vampiric and draconic aspects of his multi-hybridized nature. “The same scent you had on you after you visited the Wraeven Academy campus a couple of nights ago and cloaked yourself in that pit.”
“Graverun.”
“Yes. That.”
“It’s Lazriel?”
He nodded. “That’s the name you mentioned. The wolf-vampire hybrid.”
I raised an eyebrow. This was a move of attempted dominance on the youngling’s part.
Not the normal way a wolf—or a young, impetuous vampire—would assert dominance. It was much more restrained and civil, yet also calculative.
Of course.Sylas Morgrave.
He’d very likely encouraged this.
With an irritated grunt, I rose to my feet.
Ketheron swiftly rinsed his hands, then followed as I strode to the door and opened it to find the hot-headed chaos machine that was Lazriel Thaine on our doorstep.
He was dressed in his tactical gear, his ready-for-anything garb, which I considered violently provocative to all those around him—his need to ensure everybody knew he was readyfor battle at a moment’s notice. Both a challenge and a deterrent in equal measure.
And dangerous.
Dangerous and foolishly volatile.
His eye twitched as he took me in, seeming surprised at the sight of me in merely a charcoal tee and a pair of black lounge pants, slippers on my feet.
“Cassius,” he uttered, like he could barely stand to say my name.
“Wolf hybrid,” Ketheron spoke. “Hello. Nice to meet you.”
Lazriel looked to the side of me to take in Ketheron standing there in his sweats. He raised an eyebrow at the molten slivers all over his skin—perhaps they reminded him of the scars all over his own body, many that were visible on his arms, his throat, even his face.
