38. Chapter 38 #2
“That’s three,” she says. “Safety. Your conscience. My children. Every time I take one reason away, you hand me another. That’s how I know none of them is the true one.” She’s close enough now to touch. “Say what you’re really hiding from.”
The room is very quiet.
“I have buried everyone I ever kept,” I say.
“Three hundred years is a long list. I stopped adding names to it a long time ago, because I know what it costs. With you it would be worse than all of them together. There are two ways I lose you. The years take you, slowly, while I watch. Or somebody walks through a door and carries you out of it, because they worked out what you’re worth to me. ”
“So you sent me away before either one could happen.”
“Yes.”
“And then you came up here.” She looks past me, at the open door, at the gray coming into the sky behind it. “I saw it from the path, Bastien. A vampire on a ridge. Door facing east. No shutters. You weren’t going with Crowe, and you weren’t going home either.”
I don’t answer.
“Say what you were doing.”
“Waiting.”
Her breath goes out of her. She takes the front of my shirt in both hands, and this time it isn’t anger.
“Then your plan doesn’t even work,” she says. “Look at where we are. You gave me up so losing me couldn’t hurt you, and four days later you’re sitting at an open door waiting for the sun. You were losing me anyway. You just weren’t getting to have me first.”
I put my hands over hers. They’re not steady, and I let her feel it.
“There’s one more thing I did without asking you,” I say.
“The night I gave you my blood, it didn’t just bring you back.
It’s still in you, and it’s still doing something.
A wound like that should have taken you a month.
It took days, and the doctor stopped asking me questions about it.
” I make myself say the rest plainly. “Nobody can tell me what that means for how long you’ll live.
Not Faine. Not anyone. It might mean nothing at all.
It might mean you outlast every person you know.
I changed something in you that night, and I don’t know how big the change is, and you never got a say in it. ”
She takes that in. I watch her work through it, and I wait.
“You did it because I was dying,” she says.
“Yes.”
“If you had asked me, what would I have said?”
“You’d have said yes.”
“I’d have said yes.” She nods once. “So I forgive that. You saved my life. There was no time to ask, and you already knew the answer. That’s not the same as what you did afterward.”
“Serenity—”
“Taking me back to Aurora while I slept. That’s the one I’m angry about.
I wasn’t dying then. I was asleep in your bed, safe, and you had all night to wake me and ask.
You didn’t, because you were afraid of what I’d say.
One was saving my life. The other was deciding it.
They’re not the same thing, and I’m only forgiving one of them tonight. ”
“That’s fair.”
“Now think about what you just told me.” She pulls back far enough to look at my face.
“Half an hour ago you stood in this room and said you couldn’t keep me because the years would take me and you’d have to watch me die.
That was your last reason. And now you tell me your blood might give me four hundred years.
” She shakes her head slowly. “Bastien. You just took apart your own argument. And you did it like you were confessing to a crime.”
I open my mouth. I can’t think of anything useful to say.
“That’s what you do,” she says, and her voice has gone gentle.
“You saved those captives, and you hid on a ridge instead of letting anyone thank you. You set me free, and you did it in the middle of the night, with nobody watching. Now you might have given me centuries of life, and you’re apologizing for it.
Every good thing you do, you treat like something to be ashamed of. I’m not letting you do that with me.”
“We don’t know that it’s four hundred years.”
“No. We don’t. Maybe it’s sixty. Maybe it’s four hundred.
Maybe I get hit by a bus, and it’s one week.
Nobody can tell us.” She says it simply, the same voice she uses for anything she’s already decided.
“It doesn’t change what I want. However long I’ve got, I’m spending it with you.
So we won’t know, and we’ll be together while we don’t know. Can you live like that?”
“Yes.”
“Then there’s only one thing left. What happens if Faine finds out?”
“I think she’s known since the quarry when she saw the wound you survived. I think she saw it and realized what I’d done. She’s had over a week to report me to the Court. Instead, she signed her name as a witness on your contract and left without saying a word about it.”
“Is that permission?”
“As close as she’d give to something unsanctioned. But it only works while the secret stays a secret. Your sister can’t know. Viktor can’t know. The moment it spreads, Faine can’t ignore it, and then we’d have to face it.”
“Then it stays a secret. I kept myself hidden my whole life. I can keep this.” She’s holding my shirt. “Now say the rest back to me, so I know you heard it. Don’t protect me by disappearing. Protect me by keeping me close and guarding me. Buy the walls. Hire the people. Just don’t leave the room.”
“I can do that.”
“Say it properly.”
“I will do that.”
Neither of us speaks. Outside, the light is in the tops of the trees.
She’s standing between the doorway and me, and she hasn’t looked behind her once.
“You don’t have to do that anymore,” I say.
“I know.” She doesn’t move. “I’m not doing it for you. I like the view from here.”
Say it. You know the words. Just say them.
“I love you.”
Serenity takes my face in both her hands, and that’s always been my weakness.
“You’ve taken your time,” she says. There’s a catch in her voice.
“I have.”
“Say it again.”
“I love you, Serenity.” My hands are not steady on her.
Then she turns around and walks backward into the dark of the house, pulling me after her. We get to the passage where there is no window, and she puts her back against the wall. I lean my forearms either side of her head and put my forehead against hers.
“You’re shaking,” she says.
“Yes.”
“When did you last feed?”
“The quarry.”
“Bastien.”
“I hadn’t gotten around to it.”
She turns her head and pulls the collar of the coat off her shoulder.
“Get around to it.”
“No.”
“I’m offering.”
“I know. I’m taking you home first.” Two more days of shaking like this, and I’ve already decided it’s worth it. “Then I’ll ask.”
“You’ll ask.”
“Every time. For as long as I have with you.”
I kiss her.
She tastes of salt. Her hands come up into my hair and hold on.
Her heart is thumping against me through both coats, and she is warm the whole length of my body.
I keep it slow because I want it slow. She laughs against my mouth, once, barely.
I get one arm under her and lift her off the floor, and she puts both legs around my waist.
Behind us the sun comes through the open doorway and lies down across the flagstones in a long white shape. Neither of us is anywhere near it.
“Grace will want to see the house,” she says into my shoulder.
“Then Grace will see the house.”
“She’ll bring Decker. He eats an enormous amount.”
“Marthe will be beside herself.”
Serenity laughs, and it goes through both of us, and she puts her head down on my shoulder.
“There are seventeen stopped clocks in that house,” she says.
“Twenty-two.”
“I want to wind every one of them.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
“All of them, Bastien.”
“That will take some doing.”
“We’ve got time,” she says.
I came up this ridge ready to let the sun finish what it started. She drove six hours to stand in the doorway of a man who doesn’t deserve her, and I very nearly let her go.
“We do have time,” I say. “I don’t know how much.”
For the first time in my life, not knowing is the best answer I’ve ever been given.