39. Chapter 39
Serenity
The house ticks now. When they brought me here in a locked car, this house was silent. Every clock in it had been stopped for longer than I’d been alive. We’ve been winding them in the evenings, two or three at a time, him carrying the keys and me doing the winding because I like the feel of it.
The house is filling up with small sounds. Yesterday I stood in the gallery and listened to four different clocks disagree about the time, and I laughed until I had to sit down on the stairs.
Nobody locks anything anymore. I checked. On my first morning back, I went along the corridors and tried every door I was never allowed through. Every one of them opened. Most of the rooms were furniture under sheets.
“You could have just asked me,” he said, watching me from the end of the hall.
“I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to try the handles.”
He didn’t say anything to that. He’d understood it before I finished saying it.
Grace and Decker come at the end of the first week.
I hear the car from the front steps, and I hear Grace’s door open before the car has properly stopped. Then she’s got both arms around me and her face in my neck, and for a while neither of us can talk.
Decker gets out slowly and stands by the car with his head back, taking in the whole front of the house.
“Big place,” he says.
“Wait until you see the dining room.”
Marthe takes one look at Decker’s empty plate and adopts him on the spot. She brings out a roast that was meant to last the staff two days, and he works through it steadily. Every time his plate empties, Marthe is already crossing the room.
“At last,” she says to me, watching him start on the third helping. “When is he coming back?”
Bastien and Decker barely spoke to each other at the door. Decker looked at him for a moment without saying anything. Then he put his hand out, and Bastien took it, and that was the whole conversation.
Now Decker eats, Grace talks, and Marthe ferries dishes, and Bastien sits very quiet at the head of his own table. He’s not drinking anything, and he’s not talking, and he doesn’t look away from any of it.
I know what I’m looking at. It’s been a very long time since this room was used for anything but a performance.
After lunch, Grace and I walk the gallery, past all the dead people on the wall. She stops at the worst of the portraits and pulls a face at it. Then we sit on the window seat at the far end with our feet up.
“So,” she says.
“So.”
“You’re staying.”
“I’m staying.”
She looks out the window. The lawn is white and unmarked all the way down to the trees.
“I had a whole speech,” she says. “I worked on it in the car. Decker heard it four times.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“No. It fell apart around the second hour.” She looks at her hands. “It was mostly about how you’ve only known him a few months, and how you’ve been through something huge, and how nobody should decide their future in the state you’re in.”
“That’s a good speech.”
“It’s a great speech. There’s one problem with it.” She turns and looks at me straight. “My wolf chose Decker before I’d said ten words to him. And if anyone had stood in front of me with a speech, I’d have walked through them.”
“Grace—”
“Wolves attach once.” She says it quietly. “That’s real, isn’t it? That’s what this is.”
“That’s what this is.”
“Then I’m not going to stand in front of you.” Her eyes have gone bright. “I spent months keeping you alive from the outside. I’m not going to spend any time making you feel bad about being alive. That’s the speech now. That’s the whole speech.”
I slide my arm around her, and she puts her head on my shoulder, and we sit there while the light moves on the snow.
“There’s something else,” she says, after a while. Her hand settles on her stomach, and this time she knows she’s doing it.
“I know.”
Her head comes off my shoulder. “What do you mean, you know?”
“Since I woke up at Aurora.” I tap under my own ribs. “The wolf found it before I did. It’s so fast. Much faster than yours.”
“You knew,” she says, “and you let me build up to it the whole drive down?”
“I wanted to hear you say it. I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”
“You’re the worst sister alive.”
“I’m the only sister alive who already loves your baby.”
She cries then, and laughs while she’s doing it, and hits me once on the arm, hard, and I deserve it.
Then she wipes her face and gives me the look I’ve known since we were small. The one that means she’s going to say the thing everyone else has decided not to say.
“Maybe if I’d told you before you went to him, you would have stayed,” she says.
“Would you have preferred me to let him go?”
She shakes her head. “I’d never do that. We’ll always be sisters, wherever we are. And you need to be with your mate.”
Mate. I like how easily she says it.
Her hand is back on her belly when she goes on. “You know what he can’t give you,” she says. “Don’t you, Sery? Children.”
“I know what he can’t give me.”
“And?”
“And I spent a year in a room where I owned nothing, not even my own blood. I know exactly what I have now, down to the last clock.” I hold her eyes so she can see I’m not hiding anything. “I chose him knowing everything, and I don’t regret a thing, Grace. I’ve checked.”
She searches my face.
“All right,” she says. Then she pulls in a breath. “Besides. There’s about to be a baby in this family regardless. It just isn’t coming out of you. You’ll be the aunt with the terrifying house.”
“I’m going to spoil it senseless.”
“Marthe will get there first.”
They leave in the early afternoon, because it’s six hours back and Decker wants as much daylight as he can get. At the door, Grace holds on to me one second longer than a goodbye needs.
“Come up next month,” she says. “Both of you. Viktor won’t love it, but he’ll allow it. That’ll be half the fun.”
That night, Bastien closes the bedroom door and stands with his back against it, watching me light the last candle.
“What is it?” I say.
He crosses the room slowly. He takes my face in both hands and tips it up, and for a moment he just looks—at my eyes, my mouth, the line of my throat.
“May I?” he says.
He has asked every night since we came home. Six nights, six times, and every single time he does it the way he did it the first night, as though he has no idea what the answer will be.
And I let him ask. Every night. I’m not going to be the one who makes it ordinary.
“Yes.”
He undresses me slowly, and I return the favor. We take our time. We have all night, and nobody is coming to take anything from either of us. When he finally lays me down, I’m shaking, and it’s not fear.
He kisses my throat first. Just his mouth, a long while, until I’m shaking again and my hands are fisted in his hair.
“Bastien.”
“Yes.”
“Now.”
His fangs go in, and heat spreads from the punctures down through every part of me.
There’s no pain. When I think about it, there never has been with him.
But every other time, I held something back.
Some part of me stayed braced. That’s what hurt.
Now I don’t hold anything back. He feels the difference within the first swallow.
He groans against my throat, and his arm comes under my back to hold me up into his mouth.
The pleasure moves through me with every draw, deeper each time.
I can feel his body coming back to life against mine, the tremor going out of his hands, warmth coming up under his skin where there was cold.
In that place, feeding meant being emptied.
This is different. I’m giving it, and I can feel exactly what that does to him.
My wolf rises through the middle of me and doesn’t fight anything at all.
Mate, she says.
I know, I tell her. We got there.
He seals the wound with his tongue and lifts his head. His eyes have the light back in them, and there’s color in his face I haven’t seen since before the quarry.
“Thank you,” he says, and his voice isn’t steady.
“You’re welcome.” Mine isn’t either. “You’re going to do that every night until I say otherwise.”
“Am I?”
“You rationed yourself for too long. We have to make up for lost time.”
He laughs, and his forehead comes down on my shoulder, and then neither of us sleeps for a long time, and it isn’t the bite keeping us awake.
Afterward, lying across his chest with his hand moving in my hair, I tell him.
“Grace is having a baby.”
His hand stops. “I know,” he says.
I lift my head to look at him. He’s looking at the ceiling and not seeing any of it.
“In the summer. You’re going to be… I don’t know what you’re going to be. Whatever you call the man who belongs to the aunt.”
“Nothing,” he says. “I’ll be nothing to it.”
“You’ll be the man with the house it gets lost in every summer.
The one with the clocks, and the pony—you’ll have to buy a pony—and the library it hides in when its mother says it’s time to leave.
” I rest my chin on his chest. “You’re about to have a family, Bastien. Nobody planned it. It’s coming anyway.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. His hand starts moving in my hair again.
“Playrooms on the garden side,” he says at last, mostly to himself. “The light’s better.”
We’re awake when the sky starts to change.
“Ready?” I ask him. He nods and gets out of bed and takes my hand.
We do this now, every morning. In the last hour of the night, we move the chaise to the far side of the bedroom and sit down together.
I draw my magic around us, and we watch the light arrive.
It comes up the lawn and through the bare trees and finally in through the glass, down the floorboards in a long gold line that stops six feet from where we sit.
He watches the whole of it, every morning, start to finish. And I keep him safe from it.
A year ago, I stood in a cell and couldn’t remember what morning looked like. A week ago he sat in an open doorway inviting the sun in to kill him.
Now we meet it here, every day, together, on our own terms.
“You’re staring at me,” he says, without turning his head.
“I’m allowed.”
“The sunrise doesn’t interest you?”
“I’ve got the better view.”
He turns then, and looks at me instead of the sun, and doesn’t say anything at all. I lean my head on his shoulder and watch the gold line reach toward our feet, close enough to feel the warmth of it, and no closer. The magic holds.
The telephone rings downstairs while the light is climbing.
Yves knocks two minutes later and hands Bastien a folded page, and stands waiting while he reads it.
Bastien reads it twice. Then he passes it to me.
Found the trail. She was alive three days ago. Don’t wait for me. — G.C.
I read it twice too.
Hold on, Kalli. He’s coming.