Page 54 of Problematic

Let them watch.

I crouched beside the body and dipped two fingers into the blood spreading across the pavement from where her head had split open on impact. The word took three strokes.

CULLED.

Right across her forehead. My shadows lifted the body easily and carried it to the iron streetlight at the corner of the block. Ten seconds later she hung there. High enough to see. Low enough to read. I stepped back onto the curb and studied the result.

Clear message with appropriate irony. My phone buzzed quietly in my pocket.

I turned away again and walked back to the car. I had places to be. Because the quiet girl with the stack of filthy books and the nervous smile had no idea she had just acquired a very large problem.

And I was starting to enjoy the role.

Chapter 8

Liv

Kalon insisted on walking me home. Not in a subtle way. Not in a polite way. No. He shut the shop down like a man locking the doors to a war bunker and planted himself beside me.

Which was rude . . . and also weirdly comforting. The city got colder at night, the streets uneasy, the other side of New Abaddon appearing once the humans went home before their mandated curfew and the demons stopped pretending they were civilized.

Kalon stayed half a step behind me, a very large bodyguard-not-bodyguard.

“You know,” I said, glancing sideways at him, “this is how rumors start.”

He didn’t look down at me. His attention kept moving over the street, the alleys, the rooftops, the dark windows of parked cars.

“What rumors?”

“That I have a seven-foot Deathdrinker escort.”

“I’m not seven foot.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, squinting up at him. “You’re what . . . six?”

“Six six.”

I stopped walking and turned toward him to look at him properly this time. My head dipped back farther than I liked when I looked up at him.

“Six six,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“That’s worse.”

His brow furrowed. “How?”

“Because seven foot is cartoon-villain tall,” I said. “Six six is terrifying but still technically possible.”

He stared at me like he was deciding whether that was an insult. Then his mouth tightened. “You had someone threaten you today,” he said.

“I had someone threaten me with an opinion,” I corrected. “Which honestly happens a lot online.”

“That wasn’t online.”

“Fair.”

We kept walking. Streetlights buzzed overhead, throwing long yellow pools across the pavement while the rest of the block sat in shadow. Somewhere down the street, a car engine turned over, grumbled, and faded away, leaving in its wake a silence that made the back of my neck itch.