KHURZOG
The city still slept, mostly.
Streetlamps bled weak light onto slick cobblestones. Mist clung low — curling around tires, wrapping iron fences.
Layla sat stiff in the passenger seat. Not touching the window, but close enough for it to frost near her breath.
“Left on Hudson,” she said. Voice clipped. Soft, always soft, but sharpened now. Like she was sanding the words down so they wouldn’t cut either of us.
“Keep straight past the rail yard.”
She didn’t look at me. Hadn’t since we got in.
The bond buzzed low under my ribs. Her magic rode it hard this morning, riding me with it — static crackling faint along the seams of the car, brushing steel and bone like warning heat before a storm.
Every time she exhaled, the scent hit me: ozone, salt, witchlight.
She kept her eyes forward, jaw tight. Her lips looked bitten.
I gripped the wheel tighter.
“Rail yard’s next,” she murmured.
I nodded. She was holding herself together with both hands and a spell.
I remembered what Shuraka said back in Harlem.
“You don’t finish the ritual soon — the backlash might kill you both.”
I let the car roll slower than it needed to — not because of the mist, or the turns, or the potholes that could swallow a dwarf cart whole. I just couldn’t stop watching her reflection in the glass.
Cheekbone. Lash. The dark sweep of her hair caught in half-light. A flicker, then gone again when we passed under another streetlamp.
She hadn’t spoken since we left the precinct except for the directions. She hadn’t touched me. Not once. Not even brushed my sleeve when she reached for her gloves. Like she was afraid skin might remember too much.
I didn’t blame her.
If I were her, I’d be angry too.
But she didn’t yell. Wouldn’t. Not her way.
The air between us buzzed like wire. She didn’t have to say a damn thing.
The river was coming up. I could smell the water before I saw it — rust, rot, something dead caught in the current.
I turned off the street, tires crunching over grit and frost, and eased us down toward the yellow glow of lanterns near the cordon.
The docks stretched out like an open jaw — cranes like broken teeth, fog curling between them. Gulls screamed overhead, sharp and stupid. Chains clinked against metal. The river wind cut straight through the coat.
I killed the engine. The silence that followed felt louder than the drive.
Layla stepped out before I did.
Didn’t wait. Didn’t speak. Just pulled her coat tighter at the throat and walked toward the cordon like the cold didn’t touch her.
I climbed out slower. The air hit hard — river rot, rust, faint magic and the sharp stink of machine oil.
The cordon was up. Yellow tape half-snapped in the wind. Two human beat cops stood near the body, bored out of their skulls, trying not to look too interested in the witch on her way toward them.
I felt the other orcs before I saw them.
Three of them, posted by the trucks — Arcane Division uniforms, steam still rising from their breath. Shoulders hunched against the cold, but alert. Low rank, but not useless. They saw me and straightened.
Grins broke out like sunrise.
One of them clapped the other on the shoulder.
“Look at that,” he muttered in Orcish. “One of ours finally made it.”
“’Bout time.”
I gave them a nod. Half a smile. It felt good for half a second.
Then the wind changed, and they caught the scent.
It was subtle — to humans. To us? Might as well have been a bonfire.
Their nostrils flared. Faces changed. Pride turned to confusion, confusion twisted quick into something colder.
Their eyes went from me — to her — and back.
One squinted. The tallest. He stepped closer. Sniffed the air again like he didn’t believe it.
“What the hell, man?” he muttered.
The second made a face. “Yo. That ain’t right.”
The third — youngest, still had softness around the mouth — stared like I’d sprouted a second head. “You smell that? Gods below — tell me that ain’t what I think it is.”
I held my stance. Didn’t look back toward her.
“Undercover job in Chicago,” I said, flat. “Mob case. They made us fake a bond for cover. Didn’t know what it would do.”
A lie wrapped around a half-truth. The only kind that held.
Scar-neck snorted. “You bonded a witch? For real?”
“I said fake,” I snapped.
“Fake or not,” the young one said, voice low, “ain’t no cover story gonna wash that off, brother.”
They turned away eventually.
But I felt it. Their burn stayed behind. Like a second skin.
I straightened my coat, rolled my shoulders once, and followed her to the tape.
I moved slow. Heavy. Careful. The dock had that feeling — like it remembered drowning someone recently.
The crate was marked AURUM IMPORTS. Stamped in gold foil that hadn’t weathered well. Blood clung dark to the bottom corner, already crusted.
The body was curled near it like a discarded coat.
Female. Late twenties, maybe. Pale blue-gray under the skin, but not stiff yet. No waterlogging. No swelling. Whatever killed her, it wasn’t the river.
Her hair was stuck to the boards. One eye half open. No bruising. No breakage.
The human sergeant stood over her, thick-jawed and useless, arms folded tight under a damp greatcoat. His mustache looked like it had frozen solid. He squinted at the corpse.
“Probably a dock accident,” he muttered. “Slipped. Drunks come down here all the time, you know how it is —”
Layla was already crouching.
Gloves off.
Fingers bare.
They glowed as they moved. Witchlight. Not a spell yet. Just prep. The start of one. Her lips moved.
Controlled. Clean. Measured.
Gods, she was good at this.
Her face went flat — not blank, but focused.
I didn’t move closer.
This was her work. Her ground. For all the heat and mess between us, this was the place where none of it touched her — the moment before magic became verdict.
She looked small out there. Fragile, even.
But the air bent around her. Bent hard. The magic was coiled low in her spine, waiting to unspool.
I stayed where I was.
Watched.
Then came the voices.
Low. Slicing. Dockside accents and the contempt that didn’t need volume.
I turned my head.
Men in flat caps, reeking of fish and cold cigarettes. Hunched in the fog near a winch cable, arms crossed. Too many eyes on her. All wrong.
“Witch filth.”
“Female cop. Waste of boots.”
They weren’t brave. Just familiar with the system that let them talk like that.
The sergeant didn’t flinch. Didn’t even twitch.
My teeth ground together before I knew it.
The scent of their fear hit me sharp — not sweat, not yet. Just the oily tang of human nerves. But the stink of it made something old in me stir.
They were lucky she didn’t hear it.
She wouldn’t have flinched either.
She’d have just swallowed it like poison and gone back to her spell.
The glass came out of nowhere.
A bottle — green, thick-necked — whistled through the fog and cracked against the dock half a foot from her shoulder. It exploded on impact. Glass skittered across the wet planks like ice shards, spinning wild.
A sliver cut her cheek — just below the eye. Thin line. Shallow. But it bled fast, bright against the cold pale of her skin.
She blinked.
I was already moving.
The air split around me as I crossed it — boots heavy, coat snapping back. Voices died. Footsteps scattered. The dock crowd opened without meaning to, without realizing. Like they’d seen a predator and didn’t know which way to run.
I found him before he knew I was there.
Skinny. Patchy beard. Fish guts on his coat. His hand hadn’t dropped yet.
I grabbed his collar and lifted.
He came off the ground like dead weight. Boots dangling, arms flailing to catch air. His cap went sideways. His mouth worked but no sound came out.
“Which of you bastards threw it?”
It echoed under the dock planks. The gulls went silent.
The man wheezed. Tried to speak. Couldn’t. I smelled it on him — fear, sharp and ripe. He pissed himself.
My fingers tightened.
He squirmed.
Behind me — a step. Light. Sure.
Then her hand. On my arm.
“Put him down,” she said. Voice low. Firm. “Now.”
It cut through everything. The way she said it made the whole goddamn dock stop breathing.
I dropped him.
Hard.
He hit the boards with a grunt, scrambling back like a crab on dry wood, legs not quite working. I didn’t look at him.
Layla wiped the blood from her cheek with the pad of her thumb. Didn’t even glance down at it. Just turned and faced the crowd.
Flat caps. Heavy coats. Cowards behind calloused hands.
“One bottle won’t stop me,” she said and turned back to the body.
I stayed between her and the crowd.
I stepped in closer to her.
Not close enough to touch. Just close enough for her to feel me.
My heat. My weight. The bond humming under the skin of the world like something alive.
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t look up. Just reached for the woman’s hand — blue fingers curled in stiff arcs — and let the glow build at her palm.
That was the thing about Layla.
Everyone expected witches to show teeth. Fire. Flash. Drama.
Not her.
She worked like someone building a lock — careful, precise, not one wasted motion. And the closer I got, the more I could feel her magic curling up her spine, steady and stubborn. Unshaken.
She didn’t understand.
Didn’t know that every drop of her blood was a promise my body remembered — a shape my senses had already carved space for. Every spell she pulled made the bond tighten like a knot soaked in heat.
Now every man on that dock had seen it.
The orcs.
The humans.
The gulls.
Hell, even the river was watching.
They didn’t know what they were seeing. Not exactly. But they knew enough.
I almost smiled.
***
The workers thinned out like breath in cold — one by one, two by two — called off by brass or chased off by shame. The dock started to quiet again, the hum of labor replaced by the wet scratch of pens on report slips.
Under the awning of a cargo shed, the orc officers scribbled their statements, all business now, but not looking my way. Not anymore.
I didn’t mind.
Their opinions weren’t mine to carry.
What I did notice was the kid — human, skinny, not green behind the ears but close. Uniform rumpled, fingers trembling around a cigarette he wasn’t really smoking.
He stood a few feet off, boots half-sunk in tar grit, pretending not to stare.
Finally he gave up pretending.
“Bad case,” he said, voice low like he didn’t mean for it to carry. “That’s the third witch they’ve pulled out this week.”
I glanced at him. He looked away, then back.
“Two down by Battery Park. This one makes three. One man, two women. All with the same marks, they say.”
He flicked ash to the side, missed, didn’t notice.
“No one wants to work with her, detective Peterson I mean,” he added after a second. “Magic’s too wild. Makes things… go wrong.”
He didn’t say cursed.
“She’s been passed around the precincts like bad coin. Bounced off half the department. You’re the first one who hasn’t argued it.”
His cigarette twitched in his mouth.
“You sure you know what you’re doing, detective?”
I didn’t answer.
Just turned back to her.
She was still kneeling by the body, gloves stained, voice low and firm as she gave instructions to the forensics team. Told them how to preserve, what spells not to trigger by accident. Said it was going back to our precinct morgue. That doctor Voss, whoever that was, would want a look.
Her hair had come loose on one side — a curl clinging to her temple, wet with sleet and blood.
The morning light caught her. Lit her from behind.
Made her look like something divine and doomed all at once.
No.
I wasn’t sure what I was doing.
But I wasn’t leaving.