26. Chapter 26
Bastien
There’s a man on my gate who I don’t know, and I’m the one who put him there.
He came the night the message did. Since then he’s stood at the top of my drive from dark until dawn. One of his people walks the south wall where it drops to four feet. My own staff have stopped asking me about it.
The message was four lines. The duty desk at the compound logged an inquiry against the Sangrey designation. Someone wanted to know which client holds it now and where the asset is being kept.
I read that at eleven at night with Serenity sitting beside me, still weak.
I went out and found Crowe. By two in the morning, there was a security team on my property.
She asked me where I was going. I told her out. I never woke her to tell her I was back.
I’ve been in the study for hours, working, and the work is the same as it’s been since I started.
More detail now. More threads to follow.
But not enough. Compound six answers to a duty desk.
The duty desk answers to an office we haven’t been able to track down.
Above that office we don’t know anything, and that’s the information Faine wants.
Yves comes in at three with the post and stands there after he’s put it down.
“She’s out on the woodland track again, my lord.”
“I know.”
“She went past the yew this time.”
“She’s allowed to.”
“Very good, my lord.” He straightens the papers I’ve already straightened. “I’d rather she was inside before the light goes.”
“So would I. Tell her that yourself. She listens to you more than she listens to me.”
He goes.
I give it a quarter of an hour. Then I get up and cross to the window.
The shutters are closed, and the sun is well above the ridge, so I stand back and put my eye to the gap where the shutters meet. The light lies across the boards a foot short of my shoes. I don’t go nearer than that.
The lawn runs down to the trees, and there’s nothing on it for a long while.
Then something comes out of the treeline.
Gray, low, moving at a good pace with its head down. It comes into the open. The sun catches the coat along the spine, and the whole animal goes half silver. It crosses the grass at an angle. Halfway across it slows, then stops.
Then the shape of it goes wrong at the shoulders. It comes up off the ground into a woman, on her feet in the grass, pushing her hair back off her face with both hands.
Then she isn’t there.
The grass where she was standing is empty. I try to focus on where she’d been, but there’s nothing. I set my hand on the shutter frame and look at nothing at all for four seconds.
Then she’s back, ten paces further on, walking toward the house without a stitch of clothing on.
Her strength is coming back. That’s worth confirming.
I stand at the shutter for another minute, which doesn’t confirm anything.
She’s in my doorway before I’ve heard her in the passage. Her hair is tangled. Her hands are filthy. There’s cut grass on one shoulder, and she smells of a thing I gave up before her grandmother’s grandmother was born.
Sunshine.
“You’re back.”
“I am.”
“There’s a strange man at the top of your drive,” she says without asking where I’ve been.
“There is.”
“He smells like the city, and he’s carrying something under his coat.” She drops into the chair across from me. “And there’s another one who was at the south wall at about two in the morning.”
“You were out at two?”
Merde!
“I was out at two.” She isn’t apologizing for it. “Who are they?”
“They work for a man I trust.”
“Why are they here?”
She waits. I let her wait. It doesn’t last long.
“You could tell me,” she says. “Whatever it is. I’ve had worse news than most people.”
“I know you have.”
“Then tell me.”
“No.”
She sits back. Her hands are on the arms of her chair, and one thumb is working at the dirt on the other, over and over.
“Fine.” She stands up. “But I’d rather know what’s going on than be locked away and kept ignorant.”
She’s at the door before I have anything worth saying to that.
“Serenity.”
She stops.
“Put on my jacket,” I say. “Yves is old, and his heart may not handle a naked woman walking through the halls.”
Tell her.
She isn’t finished looking at me.
“Yves can handle anything.”
Then she goes, and I hear her on the west stairs, while I sit in a sealed room, surrounded by her sun scent and wishing I could give her answers.
Yves brings Crowe up at dusk.
He comes in and stops two steps inside the door. He looks at the fire. He looks at the papers. Then he starts toward the chair across from mine, and stops.
The cat is on it. Black, sleek, and unbothered by the other predators in the room.
“I’ve told you before, Crowe. That’s Maximilian’s seat.”
“Since when do you have a cat?”
“Always. Are you going to sit, or just stand around ruining the decor?”
Crowe takes the other chair and perches on the edge of the seat.
“Brandy?” I nod at the decanter on the sideboard.
He waves it off. “Your gate’s covered,” he says. “The wall’s covered. But we can’t do anything if she’s roving around at night.”
“I know.”
“Then she isn’t safe.” He puts both hands on his knees. “I’m saying it again because maybe you didn’t hear it the first time. Every hour she’s outside is an hour I can’t do anything about.”
“Noted.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” I stand. “Tell me about the inquiry.”
“People are asking about Sangrey blood,” he says. “More than they were. A lot more, and it started the week she went off the market.”
“Because she’s gone.”
“Because she’s gone. You don’t want something a hundred people can buy. You want something twelve people know exists, and only one of them has access to.” He doesn’t move while he says it. “That’s how scarcity works, and it’s working on your compound right now. There’s a hunt on for where she is.”
I’ve been waiting for that sentence since the night I bought her, and hearing it out loud doesn’t make it easier to hear.
“Do they know it’s me?”
“Not yet. But you’re the client who kept coming back after he’d bought exclusive rights, and that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t make sense unless somebody works out why. People notice what doesn’t make sense. It’s a matter of time, not a matter of if.”
“Then we end it. Now.”
“End what?”
“All of it. The compound, the people running it, and every creature who’s ever bought from it.” I come round the desk. “If the trade’s gone and the Court’s come down hard on anyone caught with that blood in their mouth, there’s no reason to hunt her. She stops being worth finding.”
“Faine won’t go for it. Not yet.”
“Why not? I thought she wanted those people out of there.”
“What she wants is for drained bodies to stop turning up. Twice this year already, somebody’s turned up dead in a way that got a human investigation started before anyone could stop it.
She doesn’t care what happens to the people in that ward.
She cares what happens to our kind if this keeps surfacing where humans can find it. ”
“What I’m proposing will resolve that.”
“What you’re proposing could jeopardize the whole thing.”
“Then we want the same ending. We disagree about how fast.”
“We do.” Crowe stands. “And here’s my half of it.
You’re compromised. You bought her outright, and a man who already owns something doesn’t keep going back to buy more of it.
Every visit you make now is a visit somebody could ask a question about.
The clean way through this is you stop. Everything.
I put someone else into that building over the next six months; they carry on from what you’ve already built, slower, and your name never comes near any of it. ”
“Six months is too long.”
“Six months is safe.”
“Six months is six months for whoever’s hunting her to find her first.” I put both hands on the desk. “I’m not stepping back while that clock is running.”
“Then what’s your plan instead of mine?”
“I’ve spent my time there letting Vasile believe I’m exactly what he thinks I am.
A man with money and no restraint, who’s found something he can’t stop buying.
He trusts that version of me enough that he’s already talked about taking me to the people above him; not the ones who run one building, the ones who run all of them.
I don’t need six months. I need him to make one phone call. ”
“Why wouldn’t he wonder why you’re going there when you already have her?”
“Because he thinks I’m an addict, Crowe. Someone who gets off on variety. Stopping cold the day I bought her would have told him more than continuing ever could.” I straighten. “He calls me his best client. He’s said as much to my face.”
Crowe lets that sit. Not for long.
“Why did you buy her?”
“Because she was going to die in there if I didn’t.”
“And that’s all?” he says.
I don’t give him anything else, and he doesn’t ask twice.
“So how does that get us in with the upper levels?”
“I’ll tell him I’m interested in more options, that I want to see what other stock they have in the system. Getting him to arrange the introduction is a matter of asking. Not persuading.”
Crowe doesn’t move.
“You’d be walking into a room full of criminals on the word of a man who sells people for a living.”
“Yes.”
“And there’s no six months of careful work standing between you and them if it goes wrong. There’s just you.”
“Then I’d better not let it go wrong.”
He doesn’t have anything to say to that. He picks his coat up off the chair, and at the door he stops.
“I still think six months is the safer number.”
“Safer for who?”
He doesn’t reply to that either, and we both know why. He goes.
Yves sees him down.
I stand at the shuttered window with my hand on the latch until the car’s gone off the drive. Then I go back to the desk and stare down at the notes I’ve been making.
I have to get Vasile to make that call. Soon. Before whoever’s looking for her gets any closer. I saw how Rouvel and Tavora looked at her the night they came here. And they were allies.
I think back to the young one who got his hands on her that day. I think of how I drank without being able to stop just nights ago.
I’m not going to let that happen.
I don’t care what I have to walk into to stop it.