Chapter 33
Serenity
Crowe drives up out of the vehicle bay with the lights off, and for the first minute he’s silent.
Then: “Before I hand you to the people I’m about to hand you to, I need to know how you’re doing this.”
I chew the inside of my lip. “I’m not completely sure, but I think…it could be my wolf?”
What am I saying? Of course I’m sure.
He shoots a look at me. “Wolf. Right. Of course.”
“I think she chose him when we were back at the facility. I just didn’t think she’d be strong enough to fight for him yet.”
“You were weak after being in there.”
“Yes. For a while. But then my magic came back, and she was stronger. I was stronger. Everything was stronger. More than before.”
Another look my way. “When did this happen?”
I consider this. “A little while ago. After he… After…” I stop.
“After what?” He looks over again. “After he what, Serenity?”
I’m looking down at my hands.
“He gave you his blood.” He’s not asking me.
“Just once,” I say quickly, as if it’ll make a difference. “One night he took too much from me. I was dying, and he opened his wrist and made me drink. Why?”
“Because shared blood makes a tie. His blood is in you, and it knows where he is; across a room, across a country. It doesn’t guess, and it doesn’t fade.
” He watches the road. “It’s also against Court law.
His law, not yours, and it falls on both of you.
That’s a problem for another night. Tonight it makes you the only one who can pinpoint where he is. ”
“Then you believe me.”
“I believed you in the garage. Now I understand you.”
He drives silently for another minute, then shakes his head and mutters something under his breath.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. It’s…” He almost laughs. “Wolf. Witch. With old-line vampire blood.” He shakes his head again. “And he asked me to take care of you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You will.”
We come down off the mountain road, and at the highway he turns south.
“North’s the other way.”
“I know where north is.”
“Then turn around.”
He doesn’t. He drives on, snow coming at the windshield out of the dark.
A few miles down, he turns in at a lodge set back off the highway.
No lights in the windows. The sign by the road is unlit.
It’s the kind of place that closes for the season, and it looks closed…
until we come around the back. Cars are parked nose-out in the lot with the snow brushed off every one of them.
He kills the engine and sits with both hands on the wheel.
I’m out of the car before he’s moved, standing at the hood.
“What the hell, Crowe? You said tonight.”
“I said tonight.” He comes around the front of the car. “I didn’t say just the two of us. You and I go up there alone, and we get as far as the gate. Then they kill me, and they put you in a cell.” He pauses. “If they have one strong enough.”
“So what is this place?”
“Where Faine is. She came out here after the first mission failed. She wouldn’t stay under Viktor’s roof; not with somebody under it handing plans to the enemy.
She took this place instead. Nobody knows she’s here.
Including Viktor.” He takes the handle of the back door and stops with his weight against it.
“Whatever you feel in there, don’t run. Don’t turn your back on anyone.
Stay by me. If I put my arm out, you get behind it. ”
“Crowe—”
“Sleeves down. Collar up.”
He opens the door.
Warm air comes out at me, which is wrong for a building that’s supposed to be shut.
There’s one long room taking up most of the ground floor, a fire burning, lamps at both ends, the furniture pushed back against the walls.
No coffee. No wet coats. None of the noise of a building with people living in it.
People stand at both ends of it anyway.
There isn’t a heartbeat in here except mine.
I hear it. Then I understand that all of them can hear it, and it gets faster.
Slow down. Slow down.
Every face in the room turns.
A man near the left-hand lamp puts down the glass he’s holding. He’s young, shaved head, heavy coat over powerful shoulders. He turns his head toward me. He does it slowly, with his chin lifted. His eyes were brown a moment ago. Now there’s no color in them at all.
The man behind him does the same thing.
Crowe’s arm comes across my chest.
“That’s enough.”
“Who is she?” The young one is three steps closer than he was, and I didn’t see him take them. His hands are open at his sides. “Crowe. Who is that?”
“She’s Val-Serein’s. Sit down.”
“Val-Serein isn’t here.”
“No. I am.”
My wolf comes all the way up the front of me with her hackles going. The growl starts in the back of my throat before I’ve decided anything about it—low, rolling, no words in it—and it doesn’t stop when I want it to. Every one of them hears it.
The young one stops walking.
“She growled,” he says, and he’s delighted.
“Sit down, Aubrey.”
The voice comes from the far end of the room. It isn’t loud.
There’s a woman in the chair by the fireplace.
Tall, even sitting down, dark hair pinned back off her face, dressed in dark wool and boots, a coat already over the arm of the chair.
She could be fifty. She could be anything.
She hasn’t gotten up and hasn’t turned her head.
Aubrey sits so fast the chair legs go across the floor.
“The rest of you, the other end of my room,” she says.
They go without one word.
One of them doesn’t.
There’s a woman by the window in a black coat down to her ankles, her gloves lying on the sill beside her. The whole room moves, but she stays exactly where she is, and Faine doesn’t tell her twice.
I know her.
“Odile.”
“Serenity.” She comes away from the window and focuses on me the whole way across the room.
“How are you here?”
“Ysabelle sent word the night he didn’t come out. I was on the road before the call was over.” Her face doesn’t move. “Whatever she meant to do about it, she knew I would come. She knows what he is to me.”
Crowe’s arm comes down. He walks me the length of the room.
“Ysabelle Faine,” he says.
Up close, she’s immobile. Her hands stay folded in her lap the whole time she’s looking at me.
“He’s alive,” I say.
“So Crowe tells me.”
“Say that again.” Odile has come down the room behind us. Her voice is very quiet.
“He’s alive. I know which direction he’s in, and he is alive right now.” My voice comes out with more of the wolf in it than I meant. “Nobody at Aurora will listen to me. I’ve stopped asking them to.”
“Bastien,” Odile says, to nobody, and puts her gloves down on the table. Her shoulders drop a fraction. It’s the only part of her that moves.
I turn back to Faine.
“Aurora’s going in for the captives, but not before the end of the week. He hasn’t got that much time.”
“No,” Faine says. “He has until the sun comes up.”
My knees go. I lock them and stay standing before anyone sees it.
“What?”
“If they kept him alive this long, it’s because they wanted something from him. Val-Serein won’t give anybody anything unless he wants them to have it. So now he’s a liability.” Her hands don’t move. “They’ll put him in a room facing the sun, and they’ll go home to their beds.”
I get my hand onto the back of the nearest chair.
“When?”
“First light is at twenty to seven. The sun is up nine minutes past.”
“How long does it take?” To kill him. I don’t say that part.
“That depends where they’ve put him in the room. It takes a while. But it’s effective.” She looks up at me. “That’s why they use it.”
The clock over the door says twenty-five to twelve.
Seven and a half hours.
“Then I need people, and I need a car,” I say. “Now. Tonight.”
“Sit down and tell me what you can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Finding him isn’t going to be difficult if Viktor already knows. I don’t need you to get in the way. Unless there’s something you bring to the table.”
“I can make people not see me.”
“Convenient. For you. How does that help me?”
“I… I can hide things around me. People.” I’m improvising, but I’m not letting them go out there without me.
“Really?” She tilts her head, interested now. “How many people can you take with you?”
“I’ve never held it over anyone but myself,” I admit. “Four. I can take four.”
“You’re guessing.”
“I’m guessing high. If I say two, you’ll send two, and two won’t get him out of a building.”
Faine considers this. “It’s a risk…”
“Of course it’s a risk. But why do you need me at all?” The clock over the door keeps moving. “That man by the lamp crossed half this room, and I never saw him do it. You’re faster than anything alive. Go over the fence yourselves.”
“We would be fast.” Her voice doesn’t change.
“For about a minute. Then somebody sees one of us, the lights come on, and the people who run that place do what they always do when a building is touched. The captives go onto trucks or into the ground. And the man we came for is already sitting in a room the sun is about to enter. They wouldn’t have to fight us.
They’d have to hold one staircase for half an hour. ”
“With the same sunrise at our backs,” Odile says. “If it goes slow, the light finishes all of us. Him first. They’re already set up to handle our kind. They could slow us.”
I look from one of them to the other.
“So you have to be inside before anyone knows you exist.”
“Which none of us can manage, and you can.” Faine unfolds her hands for the first time.
“Aurora could do it another way: numbers, vehicles, a plan built over days. That can’t be done by dawn, and it can’t be done quietly, and somebody in that mountain has been handing their plans to the people in that quarry.
It’s why I’m here instead of there. So we go the other way.
A small number, on foot, from the trees, and nobody sees us cross the ground. ”
“You’ll do it.”
“I sent him in there.”
“You’ll have my people as well,” Odile says. “And me.”
“Odile.”
“He is two hundred years of my life, and he is lying in a room somewhere waiting for the light.” Her voice hasn’t gone up at all. “Don’t make me say it twice at this hour.”
Faine stands. Standing, she’s taller than Odile.
“Thirteen, then, counting you and Odile,” she says. “That’s the number. Nobody adds to it after this.”
“I said four.”
“You said four was guessing.” She picks her coat up off the arm of the chair.
“Fewer than thirteen can’t take that building once the shooting starts.
So you’ll cover what you can, and we’ll find out what that is at the fence, while there’s a choice about it.
Whoever you can’t hold stays in the trees. ”
The room starts moving after that.
They bring bags down the stairs, long canvas ones, and two hard cases that open flat.
Somebody spreads a map on the table with the corners weighted down by a lamp and a glass.
Crowe is arguing over the north side of the quarry with a man who has a torn ear, and Odile ends the argument by putting one finger on the map and holding it there.
A woman I haven’t spoken to hands me a coat that almost fits, a pair of boots, and a knitted hat.
“Hair up,” she says.
I put the boots on sitting on the edge of the table because there’s nowhere else, and nobody watches me while I do it. The boots have been worn by somebody with a wider foot.
Crowe comes over with a knife and sets it down.
“Do you know how to use one of these?”
“No.”
“Then leave it.” He takes it back and puts it inside his coat. “You get us in. You keep us covered. When it starts, you get behind me.”
“And if it goes wrong?”
“You drop everything, you run, and you hold the glamour until you fall over.” He crouches down to my level, his hands on his knees. “That’s what I promised him. Don’t make me break my promise.”
Twenty past twelve.
My wolf wants out. Whatever she’s feeling is in me too, and it isn’t fear.
Mate.
The word comes out of nowhere, but I can’t think about it now.
Odile comes to stand beside me while I’m getting my hair under the hat.
“He’ll be badly hurt,” she says. “Be ready for that. They haven’t kept him in there without harming him.”
“I know.”
“You don’t. You will.” She pulls her gloves on, finger by finger. “I’ve watched that man walk away from things ever since I’ve known him. He has never once wanted something enough to be stupid about it.”
“And now?”
She waits until I’m looking at her. “He bought a woman, locked her in his house, and then tried to take down an entire criminal organization on his own because they were after her. What do you think?” She flattens the leather at her wrist. “Twenty-five past. Get in a car.”
Outside, the vehicles are running in the lot with their lights off, and the snow has already stopped settling on the hoods.
Thirteen of us. Nobody at Aurora knows we’re going, and nobody is coming after us. Back inside that mountain, my sister is asleep a day after we found each other again.
I’m sorry, Grace. I have to do this.
Faine stops beside me at the door with her coat on and her hands folded again.
“Five hours to the quarry,” she says. “That puts us in the trees before six, with an hour we can’t afford to spend. You go in ahead of us.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do. Everything past that fence depends on a thing you’d never done until tonight.” Faine looks out at the snow. “Get in the second car. Don’t speak to anyone in it.”
I get in. Crowe gets in beside me, and we pull out onto the highway.
Under my ribs, the drag is harder than it has been all day, hauling at me up the northbound road. I put my hand over it and hold on.
We’re coming. Stay alive until I get there.