Tyler Kyle's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

The sketch on the post looked enough like Tyler Kyle to get him killed by lunch. He stood across the lane with his hands buried in the pockets of his cheetah fur jacket, black bangs low over his eyes, and read the bounty twice. Pale skin. Silver chain earrings. Cheetah coat, oversized. The hunters had drawn his shoes wrong, but the rest was him. He should have been walking a back street. He knew every back street in Waspwood. Instead he had cut through a market row to save time, because the blood moon was close again and he was tired of missing it. Somewhere behind a door that only opened under that moon, the person who took from him on a rainy night was still breathing. Tyler could not pay the door yet. He could not afford to be caught before he tried. A red cardinal dropped onto the top of the post. Leather harness. Little buckled pouch at its side. A silver charm swung at its throat. Hunter's bird. It cocked its head at the sketch, then at him. Tyler did not move his hands. The cardinal chirped once, sharp, like a whistle meant to carry. Tyler stepped sideways behind a farmers stall. Crates of carrots and cabbages. A striped canopy. He crouched, pulled the jacket off his shoulders, and flipped it inside out. The lining was plain black. He bundled the fur under one arm. He unhooked the chain earrings and dropped them into the vegetable sack at his feet. He pushed his bangs back and pinned them under a stall rag tied like a headband. The cardinal hopped to the awning pole, searching. Tyler bought a cabbage he didn't want. He handed over coin, took the cabbage under his arm, and stepped out the far side of the stall as a man carrying groceries. He kept his chin up now. Hunted men walked with their heads down. He crossed a tidy front garden walk, cobblestones straight through clipped grass, and let a woman with a basket pass him. The cardinal circled the market once, twice, then flew back toward the post. He made it four blocks before he stopped shaking. In an alley he dumped the cabbage. He kept the rag. He kept the plain-black-lined coat folded small. The sketch was still out there. The bird would come back. And the earrings, the chain earrings his mother had given him, were sitting in a stranger's cabbage sack in a market he could never walk through again. He leaned against the wall and thought about the hunters. Three factions of them worked Waspwood. They hated vampires. They hated each other more. If the cardinal belonged to one den, the other two would want to know a sketch went out without their seal. Tyler smiled under the bangs. He had been trying to buy a door. He had been thinking too small.