He said nothing. He still gripped his wand, neither putting it away nor raising it.
"What, did you come looking for trouble?"
Fairwood did not answer.
He opened his mouth. The flesh inside his lips had stuck together from dryness, then parted again with his own breath. Not a single word came out. He felt his lungs tightening, but the air seemed pinned down by some force from outside, lodged beneath his windpipe, unable to rise or fall.
He clenched his wand tightly, holding it at the angle where his grip had already stiffened, like a branch bent to its limit, as though one more ounce of force would make it crack somewhere and never spring back again.
His gaze remained fixed on Circe's face—she had not pulled up her hood when she stepped through the door.
The left half of her face was exposed to the afternoon sunlight. The dark scales gleamed with a cold sheen, and the pupil of her left eye had narrowed into a long, slender vertical slit beneath the daylight. The right half of her face still retained ordinary human skin and features, but her overall silhouette had become completely different from before—her shoulders were slightly broader than a normal woman's, and the way she stood carried a lower, more braced center of gravity, like a posture built to withstand impact at any moment.
He watched the outline of Circe's shoulder blades, watched her gaze shift from the half-open window behind him back to his face, as if comparing a photograph with the person standing before her.
Circe took a step forward. Her heel touched down first, then the ball of her foot. That pause seemed intended to give him time to react, to make sure he saw her approaching, so that the distance itself