Noctis remained in the private room after telling the den leaders to start with Rome, while the club beneath them continued to shake with music and the tinted glass carried long red reflections across the low table.
Vivienne, Marek, and Dante stayed kneeling in front of him. None of them had tried to rise after his order. The memory of the E-rank vampire being consumed whole still lived in their eyes, and the cuts on their wrists and palms had barely finished sealing from the blood he had drawn. Downstairs, humans danced and drank without knowing the ownership of the den above them had changed, while vampires moved through the crowd pretending to be bouncers, hosts, lovers, and beautiful strangers. The music made the glass tremble slightly in its frame, but inside the private room, every movement still belonged to Noctis.
Marek was the first to speak, but he did not lift his head fully. "If you want to enter Italy without forcing your way in, we need time."
Noctis looked at him.
Marek chose his words carefully, and the caution in his voice made it clear he understood the cost of sounding useless. "Passport, identification, travel history, a payment trail, and probably a clean name that does not collapse the second airport security scans it. If you only need a cheap fake, that can be done quickly. If you need something that survives a border system, that takes longer."
Noctis rested one arm against the back of the couch and looked past the three vampires toward the cracked window. The club lights kept shifting below, careless and bright, and the music still forced itself through the speakers with the persistence of an insult. He could reach Italy without documents if he truly wanted to. This world suppressed Genesis Step, but it did not make him helpless, and borders were only human ideas enforced by human systems. The problem was not whether he could enter Rome. The problem was whether entering loudly would waste time and attract the wrong kind of attention before he knew what powers hid behind the surface.
"How long if you do it properly?" he asked.
Marek hesitated. "A few days, maybe less if we use the right people and do not ask too many questions at once. The kind of papers you need depends on how clean you want the route to look."
"I want it clean enough that I do not waste a night dealing with airport security."
Vivienne nodded quickly. "We can arrange it. We have people who handle identities for the club and for movement between cities. International travel is more difficult, but not impossible."
"Then do it properly," Noctis said. "Rome can wait a little. I do not need you rushing and handing me something that falls apart because someone scanned it twice."
Marek lowered his head. "Understood."
Noctis let his gaze move over the three of them. Their usefulness was limited, but not nonexistent. Vivienne knew how to run the club and speak to vampires who thought in terms of territory, blood, pleasure, and fear. Marek understood routes, contacts, forged systems, and the less glamorous structure that allowed predators to survive inside a modern city. Dante was useful as muscle if fear managed to restrain his stupidity. Noctis did not need devotion from them tonight. He needed accurate work.
"While you work on the documents, I want everything you can find about Rome, the Vatican, the Volturi, Church hunters, holy relics, vampire routes into Italy, and anyone who buys or sells supernatural objects," Noctis said. His voice remained level because there was no reason to perform authority in a room that already understood it. "I do not need fairy tales unless the fairy tale comes with a name, a place, or a body count."
Vivienne answered first. "Yes. We will gather what we have and reach out carefully."
"No outside warnings," Noctis said. "If you contact someone, it is for information, not to tell them I am here."
"We understand."
Noctis looked toward the tinted glass again. The crowd below was still moving, and the humans inside the club had no idea how close they were to becoming evidence, victims, or collateral damage. He had no sentimental obligation to protect every drunk clubgoer who wandered into a dangerous place, but careless feeding created missing people, police activity, cameras, witness statements, and attention. The Crucible had already placed him in a world with hidden supernatural forces and a modern information network. It would be foolish to let low-ranked vampires create problems with sloppy hunger.
"Until I leave, this place keeps running like nothing happened," he said. "I do not want police outside, missing bodies, or videos online because one of your people got careless."
Vivienne's hands tightened against her knees. "We can keep the club quiet. The staff already know how to handle problems."
"Then handle them without creating new ones."
"Yes."
His gaze moved to Dante. The violent vampire kept his head low, but his shoulders shifted when he felt the attention land on him. He had the expression of someone trying very hard to look obedient while anger waited under the skin for a safer place to return. Noctis recognized the type easily. Fear could make him useful for a while, but not trustworthy, and Dante had already shown that his first instinct under pressure was to hit whatever made him feel small.
Noctis's gaze settled on him. "You are angry enough to do something stupid after I leave."
Dante went still.
"So I will make this clear now," Noctis continued. "Do not contact your branch family. Do not ask someone else to do it for you. Do not send a message through the staff, the guards, or anyone downstairs. If I find out you warned someone, I will not bother questioning you first."
Dante lowered his head. "I understand."
"Make sure you do."
Noctis then looked toward the unconscious woman on the side couch. Her pulse remained weak but stable, and the bite at her throat had stopped bleeding. Her body had the heavy stillness of someone drugged, fed from, and abandoned before death, but not yet beyond recovery. He did not know her name, and he did not need it. The point was not mercy as a performance. The point was that killing her now helped no one and risked attention the den was supposed to avoid.
"She is still alive," Noctis said.
Vivienne followed his gaze quickly. "Yes."
"Then keep her that way. Have someone sober enough to be careful take her somewhere safe. No more feeding from her, no body in an alley, no police report tied back to this club."
Vivienne nodded at once. "I will handle it."
"Do it quietly."
Noctis stood, and the three vampires lowered themselves further without being told. He walked toward the door. The guards outside shifted when it opened, then lowered their heads so fast that one almost struck the wall with his forehead. Noctis ignored them and moved down the private corridor toward the stairwell. Behind him, the three leaders remained in the room for several seconds before rising, their voices low as they began assigning tasks, calling staff, and trying to repair the shape of a night that had gone completely outside their control.
The stairwell vibrated beneath his boots as he descended. The red strip lights along the wall made the shadows shift whenever the music changed. Vampires stationed near the landings stiffened and stepped aside before he reached them. Some did not know exactly what had happened upstairs, but word had moved through the den faster than speech. The hierarchy had changed, and every vampire with enough instinct to survive lowered his gaze as Noctis passed.
The club opened around him again at the bottom of the stairs.
Music, heat, perfume, alcohol, sweat, smoke, and blood crowded the air. Humans still danced, laughed, shouted over the track, and lifted drinks to one another as if the night had never contained anything stranger than bad decisions. The vampires among them noticed Noctis immediately now. Several turned their faces away. One who had been leaning too close to a human woman's neck withdrew as if he had suddenly remembered somewhere else to be. Another bouncer near the bar lowered his head and pretended to adjust his earpiece.
Liz saw him before he reached the main floor.
She had returned to the booth with her friends, but she had not fully settled back into the group. One hand held a drink, the other rested near her phone, and her eyes had kept drifting toward the stairwell despite whatever the blonde beside her was saying. The moment Noctis came down, Liz's face brightened in a way that had nothing to do with caution. Whatever strange feeling the club gave her, whatever private-room drama she had imagined, none of it had outweighed the fact that the most attractive man she had seen all year had come back downstairs alive, untouched, and somehow treated differently by the men who looked like they owned the place.
She pushed away from the booth before her friends could stop her.
The blonde grabbed at her wrist and said something that was lost under the music, but Liz slipped free and waved her off without looking back. Her eyes stayed on Noctis as she moved through the edge of the crowd. She was not as drunk as she had acted earlier. Her steps were steady, her smile deliberate, and her confidence returned the closer she got to him.
"You're leaving?" Liz asked when she reached him.
"Yes."
"Perfect. I'm coming."
Noctis glanced toward the booth. "Your friends?"
Liz looked back. Her friends were already watching, one laughing behind her hand while another gave her an exaggerated thumbs-up. The blonde mouthed something that looked like a warning and encouragement at the same time. Liz lifted her phone slightly so they could see it, then turned back to Noctis with a smile that made it clear she had already decided.
"They know I'm leaving," she said. "If I disappear, they'll blow up my phone in five minutes and call me stupid in the group chat for the next month."
Noctis looked at her for a moment. "That is your safety plan?"
"It is a very modern safety plan."
"It depends on your friends being sober enough to notice."
"They are not that drunk yet."
"That is not reassuring."
"It is New York. We work with what we have." Liz looked him over again, more amused than offended. "Also, I called dibs, and I am not letting a twenty out of ten walk out alone just because my friends are pretending to have standards."
Noctis studied her for another second. Liz was human, unaware, bold, crude, and clearly driven by attraction more than caution. She did not know what the club was. She did not know the men upstairs had been vampires. She did not know the room above her had almost become a killing chamber. To her, Noctis was a strange, beautiful man who had gone upstairs with dangerous VIP security and returned without looking worried. That made him more interesting to her, not less.
Noctis turned toward the exit. "Then walk."
Liz smiled as if she had won something. "That was almost an invitation."
"It was permission."
"I can work with permission."
One of the guards near the exit looked uncertain when Liz moved beside him, but Noctis's glance made him step aside and open the door. Liz noticed the reaction, though she did not understand it. Her eyes moved from the guard to Noctis, and her smile sharpened with curiosity rather than fear.
"You have a weird effect on people," she said as they passed through the doorway.
"Only on the ones paying attention."
"That does not make it less weird."
The night outside struck differently after the club.
The air was cold enough to clear some of the smoke from his senses, though exhaust, damp concrete, street food, old trash, and hot metal replaced it immediately. Steam rose from a grate near the curb. A taxi rolled through a puddle and threw reflected light across the street. Two men argued near the corner about which train would get them home faster, while a woman in a long coat walked past them speaking into earbuds and looking furious at someone who was not physically present. Sirens moved somewhere in the distance, not approaching, only reminding the city that urgency existed at all hours.
Liz hugged her arms for half a second against the cold before slipping closer to Noctis's side. "So, are you always dressed like a vampire prince, or was tonight a special occasion?"
Noctis glanced at the traffic. "Something like that."
"That answered nothing."
"It answered enough."
"No, it really didn't." Liz looked him up and down again under the streetlight, clearly taking advantage of the better view. "But fine. Are you from New York?"
"No."
"Have you been here before?"
"No."
Liz stopped walking for half a step. "Wait. You came to New York for the first time and your first stop was that freaky basement club?"
"Not intentionally."
"That is somehow worse."
Noctis continued walking, and she fell into step beside him. He kept his pace slow enough for her without making it obvious. The city opened around them in layers of traffic, voices, storefront light, wet pavement, and people moving through their own night with no idea that a vampire den sat behind them. Liz looked comfortable in the street in a way she had not looked completely comfortable in the club. Her confidence belonged here, among crosswalks, taxis, street vendors, and late-night noise.
"So when did you get here?" she asked.
"Several days ago."
It was not true, but it was close enough to explain his unfamiliarity without explaining anything real. Telling Liz that he had arrived through a demonic Crucible trial from another world earlier that night would create more questions than useful answers. Several days sounded plausible, especially to someone who had already decided he belonged to some category involving wealth, strangeness, danger, or all three.
Liz narrowed her eyes at him. "You said that very smoothly, which makes me think there is a lot you are skipping."
"There is."
"At least you admit it." She pointed down the avenue. "Okay, then you need me."
"For what?"
"A tour. Food. Basic survival. Also, because I am hot and you clearly have no idea where you are going."
"Several of those are unrelated."
"Not in New York."
Noctis glanced at her, and she smiled back with complete confidence. There was nothing shy in her expression. She was not frightened enough to leave, not sober enough to be cautious in the way most people would call wise, and not foolish enough to miss that Noctis was dangerous. Her attraction had simply overruled her survival instincts for the moment. Humans did that often enough in every world.
"Then show me the city," Noctis said.
Liz looked pleased, though she tried to hide it badly. "Good. First thing, you cannot judge New York by that club. That place was trying way too hard to be mysterious."
"It succeeded more than you know."
"See, that is the kind of line that makes women make terrible decisions."
"That sounds like their responsibility."
"It is absolutely not. Men who look like you are a public hazard."
Noctis did not smile, but there was a faint shift in his expression that made Liz look victorious for half a second. She led him past a row of storefronts where metal shutters covered some entrances while others remained bright and open. A convenience store glowed with harsh white light. A narrow pizza place still had several customers inside, one eating alone near the window while another argued with the cashier over extra sauce. A man in a suit walked past carrying his shoes in one hand and speaking into his phone in a voice so tired that even anger had given up.
Liz talked as they walked, not in the polished way of a guide, but like someone who had opinions about every street corner she had ever survived. "That coffee place is terrible, but it stays open late, so people pretend it has value. That deli is better during the day. Do not eat from that pizza place unless you hate yourself or you are too drunk to know better. That subway entrance smells worse in summer, which sounds impossible until you experience it."
Noctis followed her gaze to the subway stairs. Warm air rose from below with the scent of metal, oil, old water, and too many human bodies passing through the same tunnels for too many years. The sound of a train moved faintly under the street, a deep mechanical rush that stirred something old in his memory.
"How late do the trains run?" he asked.
"All night, technically. Whether they go where you want, when you want, without making you question your life choices is a different issue." Liz looked at him. "Why?"
"I prefer knowing how a place works."
"You ask questions like you are planning a heist."
"I am not planning a heist."
"That was not as reassuring as you think. Most people would say, 'Why would I plan a heist?' You just said you are not planning one."
"I answered accurately."
"You are very committed to being suspicious."
They reached a corner where a food cart steamed under a streetlight. The vendor stood inside a metal-framed cart with a thick jacket zipped to his throat, serving a man who counted change too slowly while talking into his phone. The smell of grilled meat, onions, warm bread, mustard, and street steam mixed with the cold air. It struck Noctis with unexpected force before he even stopped walking.
Liz noticed his attention shift and immediately took advantage of it. "There. First real New York lesson."
"The cart?"
"Yes. You cannot say you have been here until you have eaten something from a cart that may or may not pass inspection."
Noctis looked at her. "That is supposed to convince me?"
"No. It is supposed to make you brave."
"I have fought worse things than health-code violations."
"Good. Then you are emotionally prepared." Liz stepped up to the cart with the confidence of someone taking responsibility for a sacred civic ritual. "Also, if I am going to make terrible decisions around you, I need to know whether you are the kind of man who puts ketchup on a hot dog."
Noctis looked at her. "That determines terrible decisions?"
"It determines whether I regret them before or after."
The customer left with his food, still arguing into his phone, and the vendor looked at Liz first, then at Noctis. His expression paused for half a second, but he recovered quickly in the way New Yorkers seemed trained to do around strange sights.
"You filming something?" the vendor asked.
Liz answered before Noctis could. "He always looks like that."
The vendor shrugged as if New York had provided stranger explanations. "Good for him. Hot dog?"
Noctis looked at the steam rising from the metal compartments, the buns stacked in a plastic-covered tray, the packets of mustard and ketchup, and the napkins held down by a cracked plastic weight. The scene was ordinary enough to feel almost intrusive.
"One," he said.
"Mustard?"
Liz pointed at him. "Say yes."
"Yes."
The vendor nodded. "Smart."
Liz reached for her purse, but Noctis placed a bill on the counter first. The cash came from the wallet he had taken earlier, folded among other bills in his coat. The vendor accepted it without interest, made change, and handed over the hot dog wrapped in paper.
Liz looked from the bill to Noctis. "Okay, so you do have money."
"I acquired some."
"That is a suspicious way to say that."
"It is an accurate way to say that."
"Did you acquire it from the guy who tried to rob you?"
Noctis accepted the hot dog from the vendor. "He offered compensation."
Liz stared at him while the vendor pretended very hard not to listen. "I am going to leave that alone because I like not being involved in crimes I cannot explain."
"That is a healthy instinct."
They moved away from the cart and continued along the street. Liz stole one napkin from the cart stack with the ease of long practice and handed it to him as if he had failed some basic test by not taking one himself. Noctis looked down at the food in his hand. The smell was cheap, salty, warm, and familiar in a way he had not expected from a world that had just given him vampires beneath a club and Gaia's stolen references.
He took a bite.
The hot dog tasted like salt, mustard, cheap bread, steam, and meat that had no ambition beyond being convenient. It was not good in any refined sense. It was ordinary, almost aggressively so, and that was what caught him unprepared.
A small smile touched his face before he noticed it.
The taste brought back a kind of memory that had nothing to do with power. Late nights. Cheap food. Wet pavement. Traffic noise. Someone complaining too loudly nearby. A world where the biggest problem after midnight might have been bad weather, a dying phone battery, a missed ride, or whether the food stand had napkins. The memory did not arrive as a single event. It came as atmosphere, as a life once taken for granted because it had seemed too ordinary to lose.
Liz stopped chewing on the end of her straw and stared at him.
"Oh, wow."
Noctis looked at her. "What?"
"You smiled."
"People do that."
"Not you." Liz pointed at him with the stolen napkin. "You have been walking around with the face of a man judging the entire city and finding it disappointing."
Noctis looked back at the hot dog in his hand.
Liz leaned slightly closer, studying him with amused curiosity. "That was not a normal hot-dog smile either. That was the look of someone finding something they lost years ago."
Noctis said nothing at first.
Then he sighed, but there was less distance in it than before. "Something like that."
Liz's grin changed, not losing its boldness but gaining a little warmth. "Damn. I thought I was giving you street food. Apparently I handed you an emotional support hot dog."
Noctis glanced at her. "Do not ruin it."
"Too late. I ruin everything charmingly."
They started walking again, slower now. The street opened ahead of them with traffic lights shifting from red to green, a delivery bike cutting too close to a taxi, and a couple arguing near the curb about whether one of them had flirted with a bartender. Noctis took another bite, and the nostalgia settled into something less sharp but still present. His body remembered the world even if his current body was not the one that had lived in it.
Before the accident, this kind of world had been normal. Screens, traffic, takeout, games, bad weather, crowded streets, late nights, and the simple assumption that tomorrow would arrive in the same kind of world as yesterday. After the accident, normal became a hospital bed he could not wake from and a Neuro Link system designed to keep his brain active while his physical body recovered. The explanation had sounded simple when it was first given to him inside the simulation. Keep the mind engaged. Keep the neural pathways firing. Let the body heal. Let the game become the bridge between coma and recovery.
Simple explanations became harder to believe after a person killed monsters, built armies, evolved bloodlines, loved someone, watched worlds bleed, and argued with an artificial goddess while her clones fought a system virus with nuclear alerts in the background.
Liz watched him from the side as they passed under another streetlight. "So what did it remind you of?"
"A life before all of this."
"Before New York?"
"Before the accident."
The word changed her expression just enough to show she had heard the weight in it, even if she did not understand the rest. Her steps slowed for a moment, then matched his again. "That sounds serious."
"It was."
For once, she did not immediately make a crude joke. The restraint lasted only a few seconds, but it existed, and that made it more noticeable than her flirting had been. She looked ahead at the street instead of at his face, giving the answer room without making the silence heavy.
Then she said, "Well, for what it is worth, that hot dog was probably not worth emotional damage, but I am glad it helped."
Noctis looked at her.
Liz lifted both hands slightly. "What? That was me being sensitive."
"I noticed."
"And?"
"You may need practice."
She laughed, and the sound carried easily into the city noise.
They continued walking, and Liz resumed her tour with less aggression than before but no less personality. She pointed out a bar where her friend had once cried in the bathroom for forty minutes after a breakup, a building that looked expensive but supposedly had mice, a corner where she insisted every taxi driver became possessed by the need to block pedestrians, and a store that sold terrible souvenirs at criminal prices because tourists forgot reason when confronted with bright magnets. Noctis listened more than he spoke, letting her human knowledge fill the spaces his Devour memories had failed to cover.
"How much of the city is watched by cameras?" he asked when they passed a storefront with a small black dome fixed above the entrance.
Liz gave him a sideways look. "That is a weird question during a tour."
"How much?"
"A lot. Stores, traffic cameras, apartment buildings, doorbells, people's phones. If something happens outside, assume someone recorded it badly from three angles."
"That matches what I have seen."
"You are definitely planning something."
"I am learning the city."
"Again, not less suspicious."
"How fast do police respond?"
"That depends where you are, what happened, who called, and whether they feel like caring." Liz glanced at a passing police car. "Why?"
"Because public incidents create problems."
"Most people learn that before adulthood."
"Most people are not followed by the same kind of problems I am."
Liz opened her mouth, then closed it. "You know what? I believe that too."
The brighter district rose ahead with enormous screens fixed to building faces, turning the night into moving advertisements and shifting color. Tourists stood in the middle of the sidewalk to take pictures while locals cut around them with visible irritation. Street performers occupied corners. A man dressed as a superhero argued with another costumed man over territory. Two teenagers filmed themselves dancing badly while a friend held the phone. The entire place looked designed to overwhelm the eye until attention became useless.
Liz spread one hand toward the lights. "Welcome to the bright mess."
Noctis looked up. "This is Time Square?"
"Close enough to the version tourists want. Technically everyone hates it, but everyone also brings visitors here because it is loud, stupid, and somehow still impressive." She glanced at him. "You count as a visitor."
"I thought I was not a tourist."
"You are tourist-adjacent."
"That sounds worse."
"It is."
Noctis looked over the moving screens, the crowd, and the advertisements. Memories moved under the surface again, not as specific events, but as old familiarity. The idea of crowds gathering under giant screens. The absurdity of advertisements larger than homes. The way people looked small beneath their own inventions and still acted as if the whole city existed for their immediate inconvenience. He had lived in a world like this once. He had taken it for granted because everyone did, until the accident turned the ordinary world into something unreachable.
The demon realm announced itself through power. The academy sorted life into status, blood, and ambition. The fortress had smelled of holy stone, old prayers, battle, and death. The demonic city beyond the portal carried the constant awareness that every bargain had teeth. This place had teeth too, but it hid them under traffic lights, food carts, nightclubs, police reports, and people pretending not to see what happened beside them.
Most humans did not know enough to fear him.
That was strange after so many places where power shaped every glance. Here, humans passed him with their own problems, their own small disasters, their hunger, exhaustion, bad dates, work calls, rent worries, and drunk confidence. Some stared because of his appearance. Some looked away because staring was impolite or because New York trained people not to involve themselves in strangers. Most kept moving.
The world felt natural.
That bothered him more than if it had felt false.
Liz leaned against a railing near a pedestrian area and looked at him instead of the screens. "You are doing that thing again."
"What thing?"
"Looking at everything like you recognize it and do not recognize it at the same time."
Noctis turned slightly toward her. "That is closer than you think."
"Am I going to get an explanation that makes sense?"
"Probably not tonight."
"Honest, at least." She studied his face under the shifting advertisements. "Are you in trouble?"
Noctis considered the question. "Usually."
"That was too calm."
"It happens often."
"Do you want help?"
The question came out more casual than serious, but not completely. Liz tried to bury it under attitude, and the attempt made the sincerity easier to notice. Noctis looked at her for a moment, then back at the crowd.
"You are already helping," he said.
Liz blinked. "I am?"
"You know the city."
"Oh." She looked pleased before she covered it with a smirk. "So this is a professional arrangement now."
"No."
"Good. I charge too much."
Noctis finished the last of the hot dog and folded the paper wrapper once before dropping it into a nearby trash can. The act was small, absurdly ordinary, and for that reason more unsettling than walking through a vampire den. The vendor's impatience, Liz's perfume fading under the smell of street food, the cold metal railing beneath his hand, the mustard lingering on his tongue, the distant train under the street, all of it had weight. A fantasy world could feel like a game because it was far from memory. A modern street corner with cheap food and bad traffic felt close enough to hurt.
Nocthyrael would have hated the number of women who looked at him and then pretended not to. The thought brought a faint change to his expression, almost another smile but not fully. She would have held his arm with that possessive softness of hers and stared down every human woman bold enough to look twice. Claire would have become obsessed with phones, cameras, search engines, and the fact that ordinary humans carried tiny devices capable of storing libraries and broadcasting humiliation worldwide. Bahamut would have considered traffic an insult to flight and common sense. Rengar would have vanished into the alleys and returned with a complete map of every predator hiding within several blocks.
Liz noticed the shift. "That one was almost another smile."
"I was thinking about how badly some people I know would handle this city."
"Friends?"
"Some."
"Girlfriend?"
"Wife."
Liz stopped walking for half a step. "You're married?"
"Yes."
She stared at him, then looked back toward the direction of the club as if replaying the entire night in her head. "You let me flirt with you that hard and did not think to mention the wife?"
"You were the one that hit on me first."
"You should have still told me sooner!"
"Don't make it like it was my fault. Besides, if you remember, I tried to refuse you at first. I just never had the chance to completely explain."
Liz gave him a long look, then laughed despite herself. "Unbelievable. Of course the twenty out of ten is married."
Noctis looked ahead at the crosswalk. "You recover quickly."
"I am wounded, not dead." She sighed and started walking again. "Fine. Tour only. I'll behave. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
"Do not ask for miracles in New York."
They walked away from the brightest screens, and Liz kept pointing out pieces of the city with the same blunt confidence she had carried all night. She showed him which corners tourists blocked, which late-night places were actually worth eating from, which subway entrances smelled worse than they looked, and which streets she would not walk alone after two in the morning. Noctis listened, asked questions when they mattered, and let the city keep working through him in small pieces: steam from a grate, tires through puddles, the taste of mustard still on his tongue, and the ordinary noise of people living without knowing what moved beneath their streets.
Rome still waited ahead, along with the Volturi, the Vatican, and whatever relics this world had hidden under old stone and older lies. But walking into Italy blind would be careless, and New York was not finished showing him what kind of world Gaia had built or stolen.
Liz bumped his arm lightly with her shoulder as they crossed another intersection. "Welcome to New York, married goth runway guy."
Noctis looked at the crowd ahead and the lights reflecting across the wet pavement.
"Yeah," he said, and this time there was less distance in his voice. "I noticed."
Rome could wait.
For tonight, he kept walking.