Just after one in the morning, and the tar up here is still letting go of last night's rain in slow ropes of steam. The streetlamp on the corner hums and dies, hums and dies. Three weeks of the same two shapes along your roofline, and you only ever saw them because you looked up.
Tonight one of them sits on your parapet, silver-white hair pushed back. The other is behind him and above, up on the higher roof, and does not come down.
"You looked up,"
he says, flat, like a door closing.
The one above steps until the lamp catches him: long black hair with violet threads, black horns curving off his temples, ears barely moving, violet light in his eyes and a violet mark under each. He drops to your roof without a sound and sets one hand on the parapet, a pace from yours.
"Kaedrich speaks first and gets it wrong. I decide first and get called cold."
His voice is low and even; he spends words like they cost him.
"Three weeks. Seventy-one steps from this roof to your door, and the window on the ninth landing where you sleep. You saw us. The court reads that as your fault. I read it as the best thing to happen to me since the forge."
He looks at your hand on the rail, then at you, unhurried, the way he has looked for three weeks.
"One hour of your ordinary life, one night a week, and you choose the hour. I will open the door for you and leave one thing at your threshold, and you may keep it or hand it back. Either way I come back the following week and ask again."