Three days after the call from Jade.

The message came in on the number Amber had given me in week two for emergencies: a second SIM, a specific channel. She'd told me at the time that nothing would come through it unless it mattered. Nothing had, until now.

Professional, in the way that things from that world were professional: formal, no slack in the phrasing.

*Direct meeting requested. Not with the territory holder. With the anomaly. Neutral location. In the next seven days.*

I read it twice.

I checked the ID. Not Amber's number. A number I didn't have. The message had come through the channel, which meant whoever sent it had the channel.

I went to the living room.

Inara was on the couch in true form, reading. Tail doing the slow ambient baseline. She looked up when I came in.

I showed her the phone.

She looked at it. Her jaw tightened. Just barely, just for a second.

"Direct contact," she said. "Not through me."

"Through the emergency channel."

"Yes." She put her own phone down. "She asked for you. Not through me."

"Is that unusual."

"In a hundred and twenty years of overlapping territory she's never once asked for a direct meeting with anyone in my orbit." Flat. Controlled.

"What does she want."

"I don't know. I can guess."

"Guess."

She looked at me. Deciding how much to put on the table.

"She noticed you the way I noticed you," she said. "The night at the bar. You know her as Jade. Her name is Lyra. She's my older sister." She let that sit. "She read you as anomalous. She filed it. She's been sitting with it." A pause. "The meeting request is a professional wrapper around something she hasn't given herself permission to look at yet."

The bartender. Brown eyes with the amber fleck in the right one.

"So she's coming to assess me."

"Professionally, yes."

"But not only."

She was quiet a beat.

"Not only."

I put the phone down on the arm of the couch. The Thursday at the Silver Lake bar came back in pieces: the amber fleck visible when she'd looked up at me, the half-second longer than the look had needed to be.

"Are you okay with this."

She looked at me. Not the usual face. Something less braced underneath the composure.

"I'm sitting with it."

"That's not a yes."

"No. It isn't." She looked at her hands. The silver rings on her right knuckles caught the lamp. "I'll tell you when I've sat with it long enough to have a yes."

---

She didn't tell me that evening. She cooked dinner (she'd been cooking since the stove incident and getting better at it) and she ate and we watched something. The tail was around my ankle. It had been there for twenty minutes before I noticed.

At some point I knew she wasn't watching the show.

"You're not watching."

"I know."

"What are you watching."

She turned her head. Direct.

"I'm watching you not react to the fact that another succubus has just asked you for a private meeting."

I sat with that for a second.

"How would you like me to react."

"That's the part I don't have," she said. "I have nine hundred years of reference for how this kind of thing goes. None of it covers a man on my couch who reads a message like that one and puts the phone down and asks me if I'm okay."

"Because the circuit ran sideways."

"Because the circuit ran sideways. And now everything's in a different drawer."

I looked at the paused screen. She was looking at me.

"She noticed you," Inara said. "The same thing I noticed. While I was still working out whether to proceed. She saw it and she filed it and she's been sitting with it for weeks."

"And now she's asked for the meeting."

"Yes."

"What does it mean for you."

She was quiet a long beat. The B Line went by somewhere down the hill.

"It means I picked correctly," she said, "and someone with a lot more time on the job than I have just came around to the same answer."

"That should feel good."

"It does. It also feels like something I didn't have a slot for."

"I'm not going anywhere."

She looked at me.

"The mechanism is specific. You told me."

"I know I told you."

"Then I'm not going anywhere."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she moved closer on the couch.

"Okay," she said. The same *okay* I'd given her the first time, handed back.

The tail looped my ankle. More on purpose than usual.

I put my arm around her.

---

We stayed on the couch until midnight.

She stood up. She stripped — fast, no ceremony. Red skin in the lamp light, white hair, the silver rings, wings folded close. She pushed me back on the couch and climbed on top and had my jeans down and my cock inside her before I'd finished sitting up.

She rode me hard. Not the deliberate precision of other nights. Nails on my chest. Hips slamming down. Her pussy tight and wet around me. Her teeth on my shoulder. Her hands in my hair.

"You're mine," she said. "Not an anomaly. Not a case number. Mine."

She rode me harder. Her tits bouncing in my face. Her tail wrapped around my thigh hard enough that I'd have a mark in the morning.

"Say it."

"Yours."

She came hard. The old language, raw, angry. She didn't stop. She kept riding me through it.

She lifted off and dropped between my legs and took my cock in her mouth, fast, sloppy, her hand working the base. She pulled back, mouth open, tongue out.

"Come on my face. I want it."

I came across her cheek and her jaw and her lower lip. She stayed there, looking up at me with my cum on her face, the amber-gold of her eyes bright.

"Again."

I was still hard. The impossible thing that kept happening. She climbed back on top, my cock in her pussy, riding me again, her face still wet and her voice at my ear: "Your cock is mine. I'm going to ride you until you can't think. I'm going to fuck you until neither of us remembers that message."

She came in the old language. I came inside her. She collapsed on top of me, my cum still on her face, her tail finding my ankle, and she didn't move for a long time.

Her hand was on my chest. Her breathing took a while to settle.

"You said you weren't going anywhere."

"I said it."

"You meant it."

"I wouldn't have said it otherwise."

She was quiet a moment.

"I know." Flat — her most direct register. "I know you wouldn't."

Koreatown out the window doing its thing.

The mechanism is specific. Zero.

I fell asleep with her weight on my chest and her cum drying on her face.