Chapter 8
EIGHT
He had been rearranging the apartment around his fear, a little more each day.
He kept the windows shut now against any smoke that might drift up from the street, so the rooms held the day’s heat long past dark.
The box of kitchen matches had migrated to the top shelf, where lighting the stove meant asking him to reach it.
He had taken to leaving a glass of water on every surface she might pass, set there by his own hand against a fire that was not coming, for a thirst that was really his.
She had noticed all of it and said nothing, until this morning.
She caught him watching her over the rim of his coffee, and she did not let it pass.
“You have done it again,” she said.
“Done what.”
“Watched me instead of hearing me. I asked you the same question twice.” She tipped her head toward the shut windows. “You have closed us in here. I have to ask you to reach the matches like a child. You are watching me more than you are listening to me, and you have been at it for three days.”
He set the cup down. She was not angry. That was what made it land. She looked at him with a patience that had cost her effort, and he understood that his fear had begun to take up the room they used to share.
“I am sorry,” he said, and meant it. “I do not know how to do anything else right now. Every time you go quiet I think it is starting again, and I lose the thread of whatever you were saying because half of me is already bracing to catch you.”
“I know. I feel you do it.” She reached across the table and took his hand.
“And I love you for the reason behind it. But I need you to hear this, because it matters. I am frightened too, Bastien. I wake up some mornings afraid to walk past the stove. But I am not going to spend whatever is left of my ordinary life sitting still, waiting for the next terrible thing to come and take me. If I do that, the terrible thing wins even on the days it never shows up.”
“I am trying to keep you safe.”
“I know that too. But there is a version of keeping me safe that is just a smaller cage with nicer bars, and I will not live in it, not even one you built out of love.” She squeezed his hand. “Watch me less. Listen to me more. I am still here. I would like to be talked to like I am still here.”
He turned her hand over in his and looked at it, the freckles, the short clean nails, the small scar on the knuckle she could not remember earning.
She had handed him the exact shape of his mistake, gently, and asked nothing for it but his attention.
He had spent two centuries certain that holding someone close enough meant holding them still.
She was telling him that was not the same thing as loving them, and she was right, and the rightness of it stung.
“I will try,” he said. “I am not good at it. But I will try.”
“That is all I asked.” She lifted his knuckles, kissed them, and let him go. “Now. You were about to tell me what Maya wants.”
Maya wanted what she always wanted lately, which was an answer neither of them had.
“Task force convened this morning,” she said when he called her back.
“Which means I now have a lieutenant, a press liaison, and four detectives, and not one of us can tell the city anything except that a person is doing this on purpose. The accelerant tied all three together. I have the link. I have the pattern. What I do not have is a face, a name, or a reason, and the longer I go without one, the louder it gets out there.”
“Three families on that street with nothing left,” she added, lower.
“The last house had a grandmother who got out in her nightgown and stood at the curb watching forty years of her life go up. That is who I am working for, in case you ever wonder why I keep calling a man who tells me nothing. Find me my piece.”
“What do you need from me?”
“The same thing I keep asking. Tell me your side turned something up. Tell me there is a piece of this only you can see.”
“There is nothing I can prove,” he said, which was the truth, and the whole frustration of it lived in the word prove.
He had three burned houses with no trace of his world in any of them, and a woman who dropped into a dead woman's life every time the smoke reached her, and he could not lay the two facts side by side and make them into one story.
“I am still working it. I am working it from an angle I cannot show you.”
“I figured.” She did not push. She had learned long ago which of his doors stayed closed. “Work it faster, Durand. This one is not going to wait for us to be ready.”
Tib met him on the steps of the cathedral, because the wolf refused on principle to talk business indoors when the morning was fine.
“We went back over both blocks,” Tib said.
“Wider this time, the whole quarter around each scene. Same answer as before, only I am more sure of it now. No scent that should not be there. No other pack, no court, no witch working a corner, nothing dead walking where it ought not. If somebody from our side of things lit those fires, they did it without leaving one hair of themselves behind, and I have never met the creature that careful.” He squinted out at the square.
“I will tell you what I think, for what it is worth. I think you have been asking the wrong neighborhood. You keep looking at the ground where the fires happened. Maybe the thing you are hunting was never standing there at all.”
“Meaning what.”
“Meaning my nose has done all it can do, and you have got friends with stranger talents than mine. If it were me, and it was eating at me the way this is eating at you, I would stop walking the same two lots and start knocking on every door I had.” Tib clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“Go bother your people. That is what people are for.”
Tib held his look a moment past what the talk required.
“You look bad, Durand. Not tired. I have seen you tired across a hundred years. You look like a man with skin in the game, and I never once saw that on you before her.” He let his hand drop, not unkind.
“Whatever she is to you, she has made you breakable. I did not think anything left could.”
“She has,” Bastien said, because there was no use denying it to a creature who could smell a lie at ten paces.
They spent the afternoon in Jackson Square because he had promised himself their life would not become only this.
The square was full of its usual trade. A tarot reader under a striped umbrella.
A man making animals out of balloons for a ring of children.
The cathedral throwing its long shadow across the flagstones as the sun came around.
He bought her a praline she did not need and split it with her on a bench, and for the length of it he managed what she had asked of him.
He listened. He watched the square instead of watching her, and he let himself believe, for an hour, that they were only two people in love with nowhere they had to be.
A street musician had set up near the corner of the garden fence with a violin tucked under his chin. He had been working through the easy crowd-pleasers, the songs that filled a hat. Then he eased into an older tune, a slow waltz in a minor key, and Delphine went still on the bench beside him.
Not the deep stillness. The other kind. She turned her head toward the music with her lips parted, and when she spoke her voice had gone soft and far away.
“You always hummed that one,” she said. “Before you asked me to dance. You would hum the first few bars under your breath, and that was how I knew to put down whatever I was holding.” She blinked, and her own words seemed to startle her back into the afternoon.
“I did it again. I do not know where that came from. The violin started, and I just knew.”
He knew the tune. Of course he knew the tune.
It was the one he had hummed over the washing-up and over a thousand breakfasts, the one she had carried in her sleep without ever learning its name, the one he had turned her around a kitchen to with no music at all.
Here it was on a stranger's violin in the middle of a bright afternoon, and it had reached into her again and handed back one more small true thing.
He kept his face easy for her. He filed the moment away with the others, where it joined a record that was getting longer and made no more sense for its length.
“Dance with me, then,” he said, because she had asked him to live and not only to guard. He stood and held out his hand.
She laughed, surprised, and took it, and he turned her once under the violin in front of the tarot reader and the balloon man and the indifferent pigeons, and for the space of a waltz neither of them was afraid of anything at all.
Walking home with her hand in his, she said it without looking at him.
“The little ones do not scare me. The ones that come and go without pulling me under. I have started to want them. Is that mad? Each one is a piece of a life I get to keep.” Her fingers tightened around his.
“It is only the long ones I am afraid of. The dark on the far side of them.”
He did not tell her that the long ones frightened him for a reason she did not yet have. He only held her hand and walked her home through the blue of the evening.
That night he wrote the waltz into the notebook, the violin and the minor key and the few bars under his breath that had told her to set down whatever she held.
Then he spread it all out in front of him, everything he had, and made himself look at the whole of it at once.
Three fires, set by a steady human hand, carrying no breath of magic he could find.
Three times the smoke had reached her and taken her into a life that had ended before this one began.
Two smaller moments, a hummed tune and a violin, that had slipped past without taking her under at all.
Maya's evidence pointed clean and hard at a person with a can and a purpose.
His own senses pointed at nothing. And underneath both of those, refusing to line up with either, was Delphine, remembering more of a dead life with every fire that burned.
None of it told a single story. The fires would not explain the memories.
The memories would not explain the fires.
The absence of magic explained least of all, because in two hundred years he had never once met a true working that left no trace, and he had also never met a grief that reached out of a grave to climb into a living woman without one.
Both things were impossible. Both things were happening.
He was missing the piece that made them one, and he had walked the same two lots and questioned the same two friends until there was nothing left in either to find.
He closed the notebook and held his hand flat on the cover, and he made the decision quietly, alone, in the dark, where every choice that had ever mattered to him was made.
Tib had been right. He had been asking the wrong neighborhood.
Tomorrow he would stop walking the ground the fires had touched and start working the only resource he had not spent.
He would go to every ally he had earned across two centuries, the practitioners and the old things and the keepers of records no human had read, and he would lay the whole impossible knot in front of each of them and ask the question he could not answer alone.
If there was magic in this that he could not see, then somewhere in this city was someone who could see what he could not.
He slid the notebook back into the drawer and shut it. The evidence in front of him refused to tell one story, and there was only one thing that meant. He had not yet spoken to the right person.