A Red-Rose Chain

“What is it?” asked Tybalt.

“I don’t know.” I took a deep breath, but all I could smell was sugar. The lingering taste of maple didn’t help. “Look around. Try to be sort of casual about it. Just . . . tell me if anything seems off to you, okay?”

Tybalt nodded before leaning over to put an arm around me and kiss me theatrically on the cheek. Then he settled back on the bench, an expression of pure smugness spreading across his face. If I hadn’t been close enough to see the worry in his eyes, I would have believed that he was the happiest man alive.

After a moment, he murmured, “By the door. There is a man, blue shirt, brown hair. He has walked past three times. Each time he pauses just long enough to see that we remain, and then moves on again. If he’s not watching us, he’s planning to mug us later.”

“Let’s hope for a mugging,” I said, and shifted to rest my head against Tybalt’s shoulder, pretending to take a bite from my maple bar as I watched the spot he’d indicated. People wandered past, some going inside, others escaping the lure of fried dough and sticky frosting. Almost a minute ticked by, long enough for me to start considering an actual bite of my donut, before the man Tybalt had described appeared.

He was average-looking, almost to the point of becoming unrealistic. Brown hair, brown eyes, tan skin, and clothes straight out of a Macy’s ad—jeans, a polo shirt, and plain white tennis shoes. The smell of sugar was too strong to let me pick up any hints about his heritage, but now that I was looking, the faint glitter of his human disguise was impossible to ignore. He glanced our way, confirmed that we were still sitting there, and walked on.

“He’s not of my kind,” murmured Tybalt, voice close to my ear. “If he were, he would have come to announce himself to me. I have no authority here, but I am still a danger to those who would surprise me.”

“Right,” I replied, equally quietly. The man was continuing onward, apparently following a preset loop. “As soon as he turns that corner, we move. Got it?”

“Yes.”

The man turned the corner. We moved.

Dropping the maple bar back into the pink box—which I regretted leaving, I really did, but we couldn’t slow ourselves down with almost a dozen donuts, no matter how weird they were—I pushed myself off the bench. Tybalt rose at the same time, grabbing my hand, and together we took off across the little plaza and down the street, nearly knocking several bystanders over in our rush to get away. We weren’t being subtle; if our observer wanted to ask where we’d gone, plenty of hands would be pointed in our direction.

That wasn’t going to be a problem. We turned a corner, running onto an empty stretch of street, and Tybalt grabbed my hand. He didn’t bother telling me what was going to happen next: I already knew, and had time to take a deep breath before the world dropped away and we were running through the dark. It only lasted for a few seconds. Then we were back in the mortal world, in a parking lot behind what looked like a large grocery store. Tybalt stopped, his heels skidding in the gravel. I ran on for another few feet, using my momentum to turn myself around and start scanning for signs that we had been followed.