She cried.
The tears falling from her eyes onto the floor of the room, her hands flat against the stone, her body trying to make itself smaller against the wall.
Outside the frosted window of the small house on the edge of the village, the ice floor was cold and dark.
And somewhere across it, in a wooden apartment that smelled of coffee and demon and milk, a man sat on a couch with two women on his legs and his hands full of their breasts and thought about a zone master named Vekar.
His jaw moved once.
"When," he said quietly, "did you say the village is reachable from here?"
The succubus looked at him.
At his face.
At the expression on it — not the warm, lazy expression of the last several hours. The other one. The warehouse expression. The one she'd seen when he snapped his fingers and converted water to fog and looked at the labyrinth notification in his peripheral vision with the flat eyes of a man processing an acquisition.
"Tomorrow," she said carefully.
