The night was quiet. The coterie’s diary was blank and the streets free of supernatural disaster. It was the perfect time to retreat.
Even with unnatural senses, Cass could barely hear the city above her. The abandoned meat locker where she had made her home was thick-walled and soothingly solid. The battery-fed lantern threw quesy orange light and dreadful shadows over her collection of junk: knickknacks and trinkets packed onto the stolen, slanting shelves, a rotten sofa bare of blankets where she spent her days, a stack of esoteric books.
She was a skinny thing, poorly fed before her death and now her bones were forever a little too prominent. Her hair too had been ill-kept and left to straggle in mismatched straw-blonde waves. She might have been pretty but it was hidden beneath the New York grime. Aged beyond her 15 mortal years, her earth-brown eyes raked over the collection, her only clues to the tangle of secrets which strangled her life. They whispered the future – she had to fight to hear it.