Levi-12 and Constantine-9 don't fight it when Lilith tells them to stay the night instead of going home—staying for dinner (god, that pasta bake was to die for) and sleeping in the nest again are things they won't pass up.
Besides, there is...
Something in her eyes.
Something that tells them not to question when Nai pulls them into the pile of blankets and cushions, something that tells them not to resist when the Warlock coaxes them to synch their cores, purring a lullaby frequency. Something that tells them to wait and sleep well.
Magenta optics watch over them from the balcony. Levi blinks, and they're gone.
He sleeps, safe and warm, and doesn't wonder why.
Shin Malphur leaps across buildings and over roofs, not daring to check behind him.
The Hunter has become the hunted.
He'd waited all day outside the apartment, watching, listening, waiting for them to leave so he could track them to where they lived. But no, the girl just had to have the uncanny knowledge that someone was there, and kept steering the conversation away from the address. And then she didn't let them go.
She'd shooed them out of the dining room, smiling and laughing, sending them to bed. Then she'd turned to the window and locked eyes with him.
He was off like a shot.
And now? She easily kept pace with him, chasing, just out of sight and out of sound, a whisper on the edge of his senses. She was truly a phenomenal Hunter, truly a Young Wolf—!
An Arc staff spears the concrete wall inches from his head. He springs to the left to avoid the searching electricity, scrambling and taken off guard, another Arc staff barely missing his boot.
They keep coming, and he keeps dodging, no choice but to go where she's herding him or be skewered. He dives off the rooftop and into a back alley in the poor judgement that he will loose her in the tight, winding streets, and only hems himself in even more.
Eventually, he's at a dead end. Walls on three sides—too high to clear with a double jump—Arc staffs blocking his way back, sparking an electric field that will surely fry him if he tries to get past them, and just beyond their blue Light, a shadow closes in.
"They aren't your Dredgens anymore, Malphur. You cast them out and we took them in. And you demand them back, now that they are whole and Light again?"
For one so small, so soft, her voice is everywhere, rolling like thunder accompanying her Arc. Thunder in her left hand, lightning in her right. This, she chooses to do, this, he has no choice in.
Shiiiing.
The last thing he sees, before the flashing silver fangs rip into his throat, is a pair of bright, magenta optics, burning like bloody sunset.
