Chapter 16
"That's the idea. As long as they pay, they eat."
Liri looked skeptical. "They are not your tribe," she said, her voice tinged with disbelief. "Why do you feed them if they are not yours?"
"Because that's how this kind of work works," he said, rubbing his chin. "It's the deal. It's a trade. Food for currency."
Liri glanced down at her empty plate, where crumbs of bun and smears of sauce were the only evidence of her meal. Her expression fell.
"We did not pay," she said softly, shame coloring her cheeks.
Marcus waved a hand dismissively. "First meal is on the house. Always."
Both of them looked around, scanning the ceiling and the walls as if the building itself was about to rise up on chicken legs and demand payment.
"On the... house," Eira repeated carefully, testing the idiom. "Your house sits on the debt?"
"No, it just means it's free," Marcus clarified. "My treat. You don't owe me anything for that food."
Eira shook her head slowly, her gaze intense. "We owe you a lot," she said. "Food. Protection. Our lives. These are not free things, where we are from. Everything has a cost."
He ran a hand over his face, feeling the grit of the day. "Where I come from, if someone is in trouble and you can help, you help. You don't send them a bill after. If I charged you for burgers ten minutes after pig men tried to eat you in my dining room, I'd be a pretty terrible person."
Liri leaned toward her sister and whispered loudly, "Is he saying he is not terrible? Or is he saying the pig men are terrible customers?"
"Quiet," Eira murmured, nudging her, though her lips twitched with amusement.
"Look," Marcus said, locking eyes with Eira. "If you really want to pay me back, start by not dying in my booth. That'll put us ahead of the curve. Dealing with corpses is bad for business."
"We will do our best," Eira said solemnly. "Not dying is also our preference."
They sat in a companionable patch of quiet for a moment, the hum of the refrigerator the only sound.
"Also," he added, a thought striking him, "someday, if you insist on paying your way, you can take the breakfast shift. I hate mornings."
Liri perked up instantly. "You mean we would feed the people? The strangers?"
"If they can handle it," he said, eyeing her enthusiasm. "We'll work on 'not calling the coffee machine an angry water god' first. Customers get nervous when you talk to the appliances."
Eira glanced toward the kitchen door, listening to the gurgle of the brewer. "Is it not?"
"It's close," he admitted with a grin. "Very close."
Flashbacks
The conversation drifted into comfortable silence. The neon sign buzzed. A car rolled past outside, the heavy bass of its stereo rattling the front windows like a heartbeat.
Marcus's mind drifted with the sound.
He saw it again—that village girl in the rain, years ago and miles away. He felt her hand pressed to his chest, the warmth of her palm seeping through his uniform. He heard her voice telling him his breath belonged to her now. He remembered the look on Kane's face—cold, professional disappointment—when the intel leak came out.
Pretty and grateful is still a potential threat, Hale. Don't confuse a victim with an ally.
He looked at Eira across the table. Her dress had slipped slightly off one shoulder, revealing smooth, pale skin. Her hair fell in loose, golden waves around her face. Her eyes looked like they held whole forests, deep and ancient and dangerous.
Best looking woman you've ever seen, the unhelpful part of his brain commented. And she owes you her life.
He shoved the thought aside violently.
Do not be stupid. Hunters. Magic gates. Markers. This is not the time for that. She is a refugee, not a date.
He realized only when Eira's hand came up to brush her cheek self-consciously that he'd been staring again.
"Is something on my face?" she asked, touching her jaw.
He blinked, snapping back to the present. "No," he said quickly, looking away. "Just thinking."
"What about?" she asked, her gaze piercing.
He almost told her. He almost told her about the girl in the rain and the squad that died because he trusted too easily. He didn't.
"Tomorrow's supply delivery," he lied smoothly. "I don't know how to explain 'please clean up any pig-man dust you see on the floor' to the guy from the food service company. He gets cranky if the loading dock isn't swept."
Liri giggled, the sound bright and unexpected.
The tension eased, the ghosts retreating into the corners of the room.
Where They Sleep
Outside, the sky had gone full dark, a heavy curtain of indigo dropping over Texas. The neon OPEN sign glowed red in the window like a warning beacon or an omen. Crickets started their nightly chorus near the back dumpster, a rhythmic chirping that felt reassuringly normal.
Marcus checked his phone. It was later than he thought. The adrenaline crash was imminent.
He looked at the sisters. Liri's head kept dipping, her chin hitting her chest before her eyes snapped open, wide and startled, as she jerked herself awake. Eira hid her fatigue better, sitting upright with a warrior's discipline, but the slight, constant tremor in her fingers gave her away. They were running on fumes.
"Alright," he said, slapping his palms on his knees. "Logistics. You can't go back through the Gate tonight. Even if I knew how to open it on purpose—which I don't—I'm not sending you into horror woods after dark."
Eira didn't argue. She looked relieved.
"You've got no place on this side," he continued, listing the tactical realities. "No money. No ID. No idea how our world works. You can't just check into a Motel 6."
Liri's face scrunched up in confusion. "Eye-dee?" she whispered.
"Identification," he explained. "A little plastic card with your face on it that says who you are so people pretend to trust you. You don't have one."
She nodded solemnly. "We have that. It's called a name."
"Here, names aren't enough," he said.
Eira glanced around the empty diner, her eyes assessing the space, then looked back at him.
"Where is your cave?" she asked. "The place you sleep. Where you keep your small treasures and your rest."
Marcus laughed, a short, sharp bark. "Cave is one word for it. It's less majestic than it sounds."
He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. "So my choices are... you sleep curled up in a booth like crash-landed cats, which will wreck your backs... or I put you in the back room where I sleep, and I take the office couch."
He raised a hand before they could protest. "For the record, if either of you suggests you'll take the couch and I take the bed, I'm going to feel like garbage. Hospitality rules apply."
Liri opened her mouth to argue. Eira bumped her sharply with an elbow.
"We will not steal your bed," Eira said, her voice firm but grateful. "You are host. Host sleeps last. But we will accept the shelter."
He nodded toward the hallway that led past the kitchen. "There's a small room back there. One bed. One bathroom that complains loudly when you flush. I'll bring extra blankets and pillows. You two get the bed. I get the couch in the office. It squeaks, we've had a long relationship, it'll be fine."
Liri tilted her head, looking at him with genuine confusion. "You do not sleep near us?" she asked. "In your new family circle? To share heat?"
His ears went hot. He could feel the flush rising up his neck.
"In my world," he said carefully, choosing his words like he was defusing a bomb, "putting two women I just met in my bed and then climbing in with them sends a very different message. Usually the 'let's not sleep much at all' kind of message. I'm not doing that to you tonight. You've had enough shocks for one day."
Eira considered that, her eyes narrowing slightly as she translated the cultural subtext. "Ah," she said, enlightenment dawning. "You mean mating."
He choked on his own spit. "Wow. You just say it, huh."
"You made it sound worse by dancing around it," she pointed out, a hint of amusement in her voice.
She smiled then, a softer, more genuine expression than he had seen yet. "Thank you for not taking what you could take," she said simply. "It tells me more about you than many words. A man who holds back when he has the power is a rare thing."
He shrugged, uncomfortable with the praise. "Bare minimum, if you ask me. Common decency."
She stood up, smoothing her skirt. "Show us the snail house," she said. "We are ready to rest."
Snail House
The back room of the diner was less a bedroom and more of an afterthought, a small, square space partitioned off from the storeroom. It was a functional box designed for a tired man to crash in, not to host guests.
A narrow twin bed was shoved against one wall, dressed in simple gray sheets and a faded blue comforter that had seen better days. A cheap dresser stood opposite, the second drawer permanently crooked because it always stuck on the runner. A clip-on reading lamp was attached to a plastic milk crate that served as a nightstand.
The door to the en-suite bathroom was slightly ajar, revealing a cramped space that hummed like an annoyed bee whenever the exhaust fan ran.
The air smelled faintly of Irish Spring soap, old coffee grounds, and whatever lemon detergent had been on sale at the dollar store last month. It was the smell of bachelorhood and budget cuts.
Marcus reached in and flipped the light switch. The single bulb in the ceiling fixture flared to life, casting a harsh, yellow glow over the worn carpet.
"Welcome to the glamorous back half of The Slipgate," he said, sweeping his arm in a mock-grand gesture. "No minibar, no room service, but the rent is decent."
Liri padded past him, barefoot. Her toes curled into the thin, worn carpet as if testing the texture of moss. She walked to the bed and poked the mattress with two inquisitive fingers. It bounced.
She giggled, a bright sound in the small room. "Soft," she pronounced, pressing her hand deeper into the foam. "Not roots. Not stone. I approve."
Eira walked in more slowly. She took everything in with a tactician's eye—the folded T-shirts stacked on the dresser, the laundry basket half-full of dirty clothes in the corner, the battered paperback novel lying face-down on the crate. She was mapping his life through his objects.
"This is where you sleep," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah," he said, leaning against the doorframe. "When I don't fall asleep in a booth like a raccoon."
He walked to the small closet and pulled the door open. It creaked. He reached up to the top shelf and hauled down two extra pillows and a spare fleece blanket still in its plastic packaging.
"Drawers are fair game if you want something more comfortable than fighting dresses," he said, tossing the bedding onto the mattress. "I don't have much, but it's clean."
Liri's eyes lit up. She moved to the dresser and picked up a black cotton T-shirt from the stack. She held it up against herself; it was enormous, reaching down to her knees like a dress.
"I want Marcus armor," she said decisively.
"My what?"
She pinched the fabric between her thumb and forefinger, bringing it to her nose to sniff it unabashedly. "This," she said. "Smells like smoke and soap. Better to sleep in than travel clothes. Travel clothes smell like fear."
Marcus raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. "Knock yourself out. It's not armor, kid, it's just cotton."
He grabbed another clean shirt from the drawer—a gray one—and tossed it onto the bed near Eira. "There. Official Slipgate sleepwear. One size fits all, mostly."
Eira watched him from near the door. Her gaze was steady, devoid of the earlier panic.
"You trust us," she said quietly.
"Enough," he said. "It's not like I gave you the alarm codes or the combination to the safe." He smiled faintly, trying to lighten the mood. "Besides, if you were going to stab me for my stuff, you had easier chances earlier when my back was turned."
She thought about that for a moment, her expression serious, then nodded once. "True. If you must lock something," she said, her voice dropping to a murmur, "lock your Gate. Not your guests."
Marcus swallowed hard. "Working on that part."
He backed toward the door, giving them space. "I'll be in the office just down the hall. Knock if you need anything. Or if the bathroom starts making a sound like it wants to leave the wall. That's normal. Mostly. Just kick the pipe under the sink."
He stepped out, pulling the door until it clicked shut, leaving a sliver of light at the bottom.