#effervesvents

she couldn't believe he was there, that sav had crawled out of his picture perfect home and into the very town he'd warned her against venturing off to. her entire frame buzzed with untampered excitement as she waited for him to show, no fear or worry beneath, because he was one of the few people in the world that had never let her down.

it was only when she spotted him that she moved forward, her feet carrying her without thought until her frame crashed into his and her arms curled tight around him too, as if anything looser and he'd curl into the air like smoke. "i can't believe you're here," she muffled into his chest, the smell of his cologne filling her head. she lingered there for a beat before forcing herself back on the balls of her feet, the ground beneath her feeling more solid than it had before. "want to grab a drink and something to eat?" she wanted to tell him about xavier, tell him that the man had found his way into her apartment, but she couldn't. not without the weight of wine on her tongue.

zayden stared into the bottom of his wine glass as if the scarlet liquid filling it had all the answers he felt he needed. he'd grown accustomed to wines over the years, some of his best clients preferring the bitter and sweet blends over the bold taste of aged liquor. zay, on the other hand, wasn't all that picky.

"what's your favorite?" he questioned, voice low as his gaze drifted to the woman closest to him. "wine," he added with a faint, friendly smile that clung to his mouth far after the words had rolled off his tongue. it was a shot in the dark and as he awaited a response, he braced himself for the worst.

One for sorrow, two for joy... she'd heard that once, somewhere — a rhyme associated with magpies. It wasn't that Perdita Otero believed it exactly, the idea that something as novel as a bird could indicate something as trivial (and unprovable) as luck. But that never stopped things from ringing true on occasion. Even if that occasion had been years and years ago. Another lifetime of hers, one that had been far lonelier somehow, ached to be remembered. That of Celia Mendoza, the icy artistic socialite of the 2000s who had a tendency of leading the most corrupt of men to their untimely deaths. Not that they'd ever had her heart.

Was she avoiding Alma? If you asked her, she'd deny it (hell, the pettiest, most vengeful side of her would claim that she hadn't even known that Alma was in Portum). She took a little bit of respite in her plausible deniability, or the fact that her life was so... isolated at the best of times.

Recent events in Portum had impacted her in a few ways, but the significant change in her had been a sense of responsibility and purpose, and it accompanied all her fear and dread in equal parts. Perdita felt compelled to roam the streets again, to partake in that unspoken tradition of patrolling that the gorgons had become known for. And though the weather may have turned sour, the sense of justice she'd felt from a vampire's death hadn't been quelled by it in the slightest.

She didn't know what time it was, but she knew it was late, and cold, and lashings of the wind against her skin had started to take a toll on her. And so, a few hours into a rather uneventfully miserable patrol, Perdita caved. And she caved in more ways than one.

Perhaps if whichever manager was currently on shift at the town's overnight tea shop was listening very carefully, they might have heard her sigh a deep, shaky breath before pushing the business's door open. She just had to pray that it wasn't going to be Alma... or perhaps that it would be, such a simple encounter after years of dancing around each other. Even after settling in Portum, Perdita hardly had a clue about what she truly wanted.