17. Everly
EVERLY
There's a hand at the small of my back that didn't come from inside my own body, and it's six in the morning, and I have exactly one hour.
That's the part I keep circling. Not the warmth of him along my spine, not the way the gray light comes through my window the color of weak tea—the hour.
Ren fed the mark false blood sometime in the dark, Sanguis lying to the thing on his hand, telling it he's still asleep in Vitae Hall, that he never left, that the second heartbeat it keeps for him is ticking along under a blanket across campus. The lie holds for one hour.
He told me that last night with his mouth against my temple like it was nothing, like a man mentioning the weather, and I heard the thing he didn't say underneath it, which is that the boundary is burning his hand the whole time he's in this house anyway.
Fed or fooled, the leash still pulls. He pays it and doesn't mention the bill.
So. One hour. Forty minutes of it left.
I roll over to face him and the bond rolls with me—warmth arriving from the wrong direction, from outside my skin instead of under it, his blood answering mine before either of us has decided anything. I've stopped being startled by it. Mostly.
"You're counting minutes," he says. His eyes are still closed. "I can feel you counting."
"I'm rationing." I put my hand flat on his chest, over the real heartbeat, the one the mark isn't keeping track of. "Forty minutes. I'm deciding how to spend it."
He opens his eyes at that. Brown, steady, that wariness he wears like a second skin already gathering at the edges of them, because Ren's first instinct, always, is to weigh what it might take from him and pull back before it takes more.
I've watched him do it a hundred times. The library.
Every session. Every time he set himself near a door so he'd have somewhere to retreat to.
I don't let him retreat this time. I push him onto his back and follow the push down.
"Everly." Low. Not a no. A man bracing.
"You went down on me in the stacks," I say, "and then you left before I could even say thank you. That was rude." I'm already moving, the sheet sliding off both of us, the cold of the room raising the hair on my arms. "I have manners. My mother raised me with manners."
I take him in my hand first and warm at how he answers it: the full-body breath that goes through him, the way his abdomen pulls tight under my other palm.
He's hard already, has been since I rolled over, and I drag my thumb up the underside of his cock and watch his jaw work.
Then I lower my mouth and put the flat of my tongue against him, root to tip, slow, the way you'd taste something you wanted to remember.
His hand finds my hair. Doesn't push. Just rests there, fingers spreading, like he needs to know where I am.
"That's—" He stops. Tries again. "I can feel what you're—"
I know. That's the thing about Ren that the others don't have.
His blood sense reads me from the inside, every flicker, half a second before I'd show it on my own face, so when I take him deeper and like it, he feels that I like it the instant before my own body tells me, and it loops back into him, his pleasure and the echo of mine braided so tight he can't find the seam.
I feel it land in him as warmth, pouring back across the bond, and I do it again because of the sound he makes—not a word, just air leaving him like something gave way.
This is what he likes. Now that I know, I do it more.
He's careful even now, even like this. He keeps the grip in my hair gentle.
He says my name twice more and both times it costs him something to keep it that quiet, this man who never loses control, who held the noise of other people's blood off since he was fifteen and never once asked for anything—and I have his cock in my mouth and my hand at the base of him and I am unmaking that control on purpose, watching it go, and God help me, I like that too.
His breath is climbing. The warmth in my chest that isn't mine is climbing with it. He's close, I can feel it, the bond practically singing it at me—
The stair creaks.
Not the wind-creak the house makes settling. The other one. Weight. Something coming up.
We both go still.
I am off him and across the room with the sheet clutched to my chest before I've decided to move—the body's faster than the brain, always—and Ren is upright with his shirt already half on, blood-quiet, the wariness snapped back into place so fast it's like the last ten minutes happened to two other people.
The thing on the landing stops outside my door.
I know the gait by now. I've lived under these watchers for weeks.
The cat works the ground floor and the raven keeps the upper hall, but the fox—the fox keeps the parlor, and the fox has no business on this stair, and I can hear it: the small dry clicking of taxidermied claws on old wood, patient, deliberate, the sound of a thing that reports what it sees back to Wheeler and then to Catalina.
Ren's hand closes around my wrist. We don't breathe.
The fox sits down outside my door. I can feel it through the floor more than hear it, the settling weight of it, glass eyes I can picture exactly aimed at the gap under the door where the light is.
It's looking. It is absolutely, certainly looking, and there is a half-dressed Sanguis president in my room who is supposed to be unconscious in Vitae Hall, and that story ends exactly one way: all four of them expelled, and me alone.
A laugh climbs up my throat from nowhere, pure hysteria, and I clamp it down with my free hand.
Ren shoots me a look—do not—and his own mouth is doing something at the corner that isn't fear, and that's worse, because now I might actually lose it.
We are two adults hiding our nakedness from a dead fox at six in the morning.
The dignity of magic. Nobody puts this part in the brochures.
The fox sits there for a slow count of thirty. Then it gets up, turns—I hear the claws reorient—and clicks back down the stairs, unhurried, the job apparently done.
I let the breath go. Ren doesn't, not all the way.
"It saw the light under the door," he says quietly.
"It saw two heat-shapes in a room that's meant to hold one.
" He's pulling his shirt the rest of the way down, but he's looking at the door like he can see through it to the thing descending.
"By every rule of this house, Wheeler should know by tonight. "
"But he won't." I'm starting to understand the shape of it as I say it. "He never has. Atlas throws a whole storm to fool the mark and it works, but the fox—the fox sees everything, it's seen all of us, and nobody's ever come for us over it."
Ren goes very still, the stillness he gets when his blood sense is reaching for something.
"Because something eats what they collect.
" His voice drops. "Helena said it last night.
The chimera. It cleans the plate." He looks at me and the wry edge is entirely gone now.
"Everly. Our whole cover—every time one of us has reached you and the watchers logged it—the only reason we aren't already finished is that a thing in a cage somewhere in this building is being made to swallow it. "
The cold of that gets into me deeper than the morning air did.
I'd thought we were getting away with it. We've been getting away with nothing. Something has been suffering on our behalf the entire time, eating the evidence of every stolen hour, and I never once stopped to wonder where the watching went after the watchers saw it.
"Forty minutes," I say. It comes out flat. "It's more like ten now."
"I know." He catches my hand, the one with the sheet, and presses his mouth to my knuckles—the way I did his, manners, a thing returned—and for one second the warmth comes back across the bond, steady under everything.
"Tell the others I'll come tonight if I can.
There's something I need to look at first."
He's gone before I can ask what. He always is. I've learned that isn't coldness. It's a man getting out the door before the boundary burns through the back of his hand.
***-
By the time I make it down to the kitchen, dressed, hair wrestled into something that doesn't announce my morning, Helena is at the table where we left her, exactly where we left her, and I don't think she's moved.
That's the thing about Helena Grimoire I can't get used to. She doesn't sit the way the living sit, shifting, settling, getting comfortable. She sits like a held breath. Ninety-six years floating four feet above a stone platform in the Deep and she still hasn't remembered what to do with a chair.
Atlas is here, and Callum, and Felix loose-limbed in the corner with his deck going, all of them having beaten the mark to be in one room, every hand burning low the whole time, which is its own kind of statement none of them will make out loud.
The kettle's on. The good cinnamon's out on the counter where I left it, because when the world is ending I bake, and last night the world was ending, so there are snickerdoodles going stale on a plate that nobody has the stomach to eat.
Helena's journals are open on the table. Three of them, leather gone soft and dark, the pages crammed edge to edge in a cramped hand a century out of date.
"In 1930," she says, when I sit, without preamble, like we're partway through a conversation we never started, "Cordelia and I worked out what the Well actually is."
The kitchen goes quiet. Even Felix's cards stop.