Blackthorne

THE WITCH WHO REMEMBERED

DRACO

The room had been finished an hour ago, and I was still in it.

A man with my responsibilities did not leave the preparation of a contracted asset to staff and good intentions.

I had a dozen clean reasons for being there and had rehearsed all of them, and not one of them explained why I stood at the foot of an antique four-poster smoothing the edge of a coverlet I had no business touching, three centuries past the age where I should have outgrown my own bullshit.

The walls were oxblood, the color that read black until firelight crawled across it.

The window should have given onto a brick airshaft by every law of Manhattan geometry, and instead it gave him the gardens, the old ones that bloomed at night and listened.

Blackthorne had decided that on its own, and I had not argued.

The wardrobe along the far wall stood empty, waiting on whatever a man like Nico brought with him to a house like this, which I suspected was exactly what he could carry and nothing more.

The thought of his whole life folding down into a duffel bag put a quiet, ugly weight in my chest that I did not examine.

“Practical,” I said aloud, to no one, and Blackthorne flickered a single sconce along the corridor outside the door, the way it did when it thought I was being an idiot.

“Don't start with me,” I murmured.

The sconce flickered again. Smug little bastard.

Amara's footsteps came down the corridor and she stopped in the doorway and leaned a shoulder against the frame.

“Well,” she said, in that low British rasp that could carry across a ballroom or fold into a whisper depending on how much she meant by it. “Are we satisfied with the accommodations for the debtor?”

“The room is acceptable.”

“Acceptable.” She stepped inside and observed. “The Venetian bed. The desk you had brought up from the third sub-cellar yesterday, which I'm told has not seen daylight in a hundred years. The curtains that match, let me get this right, the exact shade of his eyes.”

“They don't match his eyes.”

“They fucking match his eyes, Draco.”

I crossed to the window and adjusted the fall of the left curtain by perhaps an inch.

“Send a team to his apartment tonight. Two on the door, one inside, rotating. I want the locks reinforced, the windows warded, and a low-grade obfuscation laid over the whole floor so that anyone who isn't supposed to find him doesn't. No one enters without my clearance.”

Amara did not interrupt.

“His belongings stay where they are. Nothing is moved, catalogued, photographed, or touched. If he asks for something brought to him, it comes through Rowan or Mateo and no one else. And the shop stays open. If anything supernatural so much as sniffs at the door, I want to know within the hour.”

“Drake.”

“What?”

“His cat. Shall I have someone bring him along, or are we letting a black cat sit alone in an empty apartment to maintain the illusion that this is debt collection?”

I turned from the window. “Bring the cat.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I want the animal settled in this room so it smells familiar when he walks in.

Use the carrier from the hall closet, the soft-sided one on the second shelf, grey, he'll know it.

Bring the food he keeps under the kitchen sink, the ceramic bowl by the radiator, the scratching post by the bookshelf, and the blanket from the foot of his bed, the one that's mostly fur by now. Don't wash it.”

“Of course not.”

“And whoever you send, tell them to be gentle. The cat doesn't like strangers. He'll bite.”

“How do you know he'll bite?”

“Because he is a cat.”

She inclined her head, the smallest concession. “He's an asset under contract. Assets are preserved. I understood you the first time.” A beat. “I'm just enjoying watching you preserve this one.”

I poured a drink I did not need from a decanter I had bought in Edinburgh, and Amara took the chair opposite my desk and crossed one long leg over the other and watched me.

“All right,” she said. “Talk to me.”

“There's nothing to...”

“Draco.”

I set the glass down, and the fire moved, and somewhere past the glass a siren climbed and faded into the body of the city.

“You've been a storm in human skin since the night you came back from his shop,” she said.

“You haven't slept. You haven't fed, and don't tell me you have, because I can see it on you, you've got that look you get right before you stop being careful with people.

You moved a Venetian bed up three flights of stairs for a man you keep calling a debtor.

So say it, or don't say it, but stop pretending I can't see it, because I'm too old and you're too tired and we don't have the time for the pageantry.”

“His eyes,” I said.

“You felt it.”

“I felt him.”

She let that sit, and the fire took it and held it gently.

“And the shop,” she said.

“The shop knew me.”

“Mm.”

“There was a clock on the wall behind the counter, French, late seventeenth century, repaired by a hand I recognized. And there was a smell, beeswax and some kind of resin I don't even know the name of anymore, that I have not smelled since.” I did not finish it.

“Cassiel,” she said.

The name went through the room like a draft through an unlatched door.

The fire bowed flat to the grate and stood back up.

The books on the shelf nearest the window settled half an inch on their spines, and my hand closed around the edge of the desk hard enough that the old wood made a sound it should not have made, a deep grain-deep crack, and I made myself open my fingers before I took a piece of it off.

I had not said his name in this house in ninety-two years.

“Yes.” The word came out level. The rest of me was not.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“No, Amara, I am not sure, and that is the whole of the problem.

If I were sure he was, I would know what to do.

If I were sure he wasn't, I would…” I stopped.

“I've seen false returns before. You know I have.

Bloodline tricks, possession, witches with a grudge wearing borrowed faces.

Marcellus sent me a boy who could mimic Cassiel's handwriting.

His handwriting, Amara. I burned that boy in the gardens and I did not lose a night's sleep over it, and I would do it again tonight if I thought this was the same.”

“This isn't him.”

“That's not the point.”

“It's exactly the point. You're not a man who falls for tricks.

You're a man who's been alone so long that when something real walks past you, your first instinct is to call it a trick, because a trick you know how to kill.” She held my eyes, and she did not look away.

“Refusing to believe it doesn't make you rational, Draco. It just makes you stubborn with better posture.”

I looked at her for a long moment.

“I need a witness older than rumor,” I said. “Someone whose mouth is bound to truth and whose memory runs back further than mine. I am not going to make a decision about that man's life on the strength of a smell in a shop and the way a clock looked at me.”

She understood before I finished. “The witch,” she said.

“Yes.”

“She's still alive.”

“She's still alive because of me.”

“Tell me again how that works. I've never wanted the details before. I'd like them now.”

“She offered a pact, a long time ago. My blood, given once a year, to keep her alive past her natural span. In exchange she is bound to speak truth when I ask the right question. Not any question. Only the right one. She has refused to answer me, by my count, eleven times, and enjoyed it eleven times.”

“So she's a bitch.”

“She's a witch.”

“Same difference, in her case.”

I almost smiled. “We need her. Tonight.”

Amara stood, and she did not ask if I was certain. She had stopped asking that question about an hour before. She crossed to the door and paused with her hand on the latch.

“Rowan or Mateo?”

“Rowan. Mateo stays on Nico. I want a wolf at the gate while we're gone, and I want the one who bites before he asks.”

“And Nico? If he arrives while we're out.”

“We'll be back before he gets here.”

“We'd better be,” she said, and the way she said it was not a threat and not a comfort, only the truth, which from Amara was always the heavier of the three.

The witch lived north, in a pocket of land along the Hudson where the trees had been allowed to remember what they were before the road came through, and where the road, in turn, had been persuaded to forget the house was there at all.

One moment the road was empty. The next there was a gravel turn-off and a stone wall and a gate that had been there the whole time.

Rowan parked and stayed in the car, because he would not get out unless I called for him.

He had standing instructions for this address that pre-dated his employment with me by two centuries, inherited from his grandfather, who had inherited them from his, and somewhere back in that chain a wolf had decided the witch's threshold was no wolf's business, and the lesson had held in the blood ever since.

Amara and I walked up the path, and the wards around the property were not visible so much as felt, a pressure on the skin and a whisper at the base of the skull that told the animal part of a man to turn around while he still had the choice. The door opened before I knocked.

Elara stood in the doorway in a dressing gown the color of dried blood, her white hair loose down her back, her face a record of every century she had lived and several she had stolen. She had always been small. She had never once been anything I could frighten.

“Drakhar. You are late,” she said.

“I am on time.”

“Come in before you let the cold in with you.”

Her eyes flicked to Amara with brief interest and then came back to me, dismissing my second the way she dismissed weather.

The interior was warmer than it had any right to be.

There were bundles of dried herbs hanging from the rafters that I chose not to look at too closely, and a cat on a chair that was almost certainly not a cat.

She did not invite us to sit. She walked to the hearth and stood with her back to it and waited.

“Ask what you came to ask,” she said.

“You know what I'm going to ask.”

“I know what you want to ask. I want to hear you say it. Words have weight in this house, and I will not carry yours for you.”

I had prepared three versions of the question on the drive up. I used none of them.

“Is Nico Venn the soul of Cassiel returned?”

The fire pulled in on itself. The bundles in the rafters stopped swaying all at once, as though a hand had stilled them. The not-cat opened one eye and closed it again, and Elara was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, “Yes. And no.”

“Do not riddle me tonight.” My voice had gone down into the register that emptied rooms and I felt the points of my teeth come down behind my lips. “I am not in the mood to be played with, Elara. Not on this.”

She did not so much as blink. She had buried creatures older than me, and watched empires do what empires do, and a vampire showing her his teeth in her own kitchen was, to her, a young man raising his voice in church.

“Put those away,” she said mildly. “They do not work on me, and you embarrass us both. It is not a riddle, child, it is the answer. You asked me a question with two halves and I am giving you both. The soul that loved you on that field is the soul that lives in him. The flame is the same flame. I would know it if it had gone out, and it has not. But the man who carries it is not Cassiel. He is his own person.”

I heard Amara let out a slow breath beside me.

“The blood remembers what the mind forgets,” Elara said.

“You gave him your blood, Drakhar. You did not turn him. You tried, and you failed, but the blood was given, and the blood does not forget, and when the soul came back around the wheel it came back tethered to you. That is why you felt him in that shop. That is why he could not be made to fear you. A part of him has already met the worst of you and survived it.”

“How do I know for certain?”

“You will not like the answer.”

“Tell me.”

“Turn him.” The room went very still.

“I will not turn him.” The words came out flat and final. “He doesn't know any of this. I am not going to put eternity in a man's mouth because I cannot carry my own grief. Do you understand me? I am not going to.”

“Drakhar.”

I stopped. My hands were shaking, and I had not noticed them start.

Elara crossed the room and put one papery hand on my forearm and looked up at me with eyes that had watched me bury him the first time, on a field under a moon that would not set.

“I told you, on that field, that when the soul came back you must not make a cage of your grief. Do you remember?” she said softly.

“I remember.”

“Then hear me now, because I will not say it twice. If you love the man who has come back to you, let him come back as himself, not as the corpse you failed to keep. Let him choose you, or refuse you, with the whole of who he is now. Anything else is theft, and I have known you a very long time, child, and I do not believe you have it in you to be a thief twice.”

I closed my eyes and let her hand stay on my arm.

When I opened them, my phone was vibrating against my thigh, once, twice, in the pattern that meant Mateo, and the pattern that meant now. I looked at Amara. She was already looking at her own, her face gone smooth in the way it went right before she put a knife through someone's throat.

“Ilya Moroz,” she said.

“Where?”

“Two blocks from the Crimson Room. Celeste flagged him at the door of a side venue she keeps eyes on. He's moving the corrupted product again, and she thinks he's about to sell.”

“Go,” Elara said. “Your ghost will keep. The thin-blood will not.”

I looked at her one last time. I owed her thanks, and we did not do that, she and I, because she would have laughed in my face.

“I'll send the blood next month,” I said.

“You'll send it next week. You are sentimental tonight, which means you will forget.”

“Fine.”

“Go, Drakhar.”

Ilya Moroz, at least, was simpler.

Ilya could bleed.