You return to Elton's flat a half-hour after sunset. You're both freezing, you because you managed to find every puddle of cold mud on the way out, despite using the lance as a walking stick, and Elton because he's barefoot and appears to be wearing only shadows. Once back up the narrow steps to the Shadow Lord's cluttered and dingy home, Elton gets you into his bathroom and runs the water in his clawfoot tub. Posters for old trip hop shows in Bristol and London line the walls.
"My dad," he says absently, gesturing to the dark face on one poster that's drawn your attention. Wasn't there a Jordan Dey track in a movie you saw as a kid, like The Matrix or that American Godzilla?
He peels off your button-down and examines your scalpel wound with a clinical eye.
"If you were human, you would've already bled out," he observes. In ten minutes, you're disinfected, bandaged, and numb from a combination of fentanyl and scotch. Then he steps outside with the door open a crack and interrogates you about your journey as you wash yourself with a towel, mostly to make sure that you don't pass out. When you've scraped off the blood and mud, you spend a few minutes drying off. When you look up, you find the world's oldest pair of pajamas waiting for you. They're more patch than original fabric, but they're clean, and so are the mismatched Turkish slippers, one green and one taupe.
"I took your clothes to the laundromat," Elton says. He's seated in his leather armchair in a corner of the room previously covered by a faded burgundy tapestry. A fire roars in an elaborate Art Nouveau fireplace under an oil painting. Life-sized and in a realistic 18th century style, it depicts an ethereally beautiful woman with dark eyes and a dress the color of storm-tossed seas. Curling golden ringlets frame a face with delicate features and an alarmingly high and broad forehead. A pale ring glints on one finger, lovingly rendered as her hand rests against a high-backed chair. She appears to be seated outside, since the Milky Way is visible behind her, forming strange patterns. Elton seems fixated on the image, the lance forgotten at his side.
"Who's the babe?"
"An ancestor?" Elton is Black, but sometimes on TV there are white people with British accents, too.
"Those are Garou glyphs in the stars, right? That's an impressive painting."
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