Blackthorne

10. The House that Watched

THE HOUSE THAT WATCHED

NICO

They put me in a room in the east wing and left me there, and I stood just inside the door for a while like a man who'd wandered into the wrong house at a party.

The bed was the first thing my eye went to, because my eye always went to the work.

Venetian walnut, a four-poster carved two and a half centuries before I was born, restored at least twice, once clumsily and once by someone who understood the piece.

I stood there reading the joins out of plain reflex before it landed on me that I was meant to sleep in a museum, and that this was, apparently, the normal way of things here.

The coverlet had the stiff newness of cloth that had never been on a bed before this one. It had been put here, clean, for me, and I didn't want to be the first crease in it.

The wardrobe stood open and empty and waiting, and I looked at my one duffel on the floor beside it.

The window should have given onto an airshaft or the back of the next building over, this being Manhattan and the city being what it was.

It gave me a garden instead. I stood at it longer than I meant to.

I was too tired to chase the wrongness of it, and some animal part of me suspected I wouldn't like the answer if I caught it.

I sat on the edge of the bed in my socks and didn't let myself lie down.

The shop sat at the edge of my brain like a kettle I'd forgotten on the stove.

I had texted Tomas, and Tomas had texted back a single word and then nothing else, because Tomas had been in this trade for forty years and knew the difference between a man taking a few days and a man asking for help. I would owe him for that later.

I decided I needed to start learning the manor, and I walked.

Drake came with me. He had been on the windowsill watching the gardens, and he was at my heel before I cleared the threshold, his small black shape pacing me with the proprietary air of a cat who had decided the east wing was, on balance, acceptable.

The wing was three windows wide from the street, and the inside had at least seven doors. The runner underfoot was old wool gone brown-red with age, the pattern still bright in the strips the doors had kept out of the light.

The lamps were brass sconces, and as I passed each one it brightened. I'd walked four lengths of the corridor before I worked out that the lamps were anticipating me, and I walked two more to be sure I wasn't making it up.

Mateo was a few paces behind me, close enough to count as an escort and far enough to pretend he was not hovering.

He had been waiting in the alcove at the end of the corridor when I came out, and when I passed, he gave me one of those cheerful little nods that suggested he had never once been assigned to babysit a thirty-year-old man and his emotionally complicated cat.

Drake did not appreciate the nod.

He stopped beside my boot, turned his head, and hissed at Mateo with the full force of his tiny, furious soul.

Mateo stopped too. “Wow.”

“Don’t take it personally,” I said.

“I’m absolutely taking it personally. We had breakfast together.”

“You watched him eat half a piece of ham and called it bonding.”

“It was bonding.”

Drake hissed again, then padded to a door at the bend of the corridor and sat down in front of it. His ears flattened. The small black line of his back lifted. He glared at the door as if it had personally insulted our entire bloodline.

I looked at him for a second.

“Buddy?” He did not move. “Drake?”

He settled more firmly on the carpet, plainly having decided to keep watch and just as plainly uninterested in my opinion.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. Noted.”

I stepped past him and made it three doors farther before I gave up and looked back.

He was still there.

He turned his head just enough to give me the flat, insulting look of a cat interrupted at his work, then faced the door again.

I sighed. “Mateo.”

“Yeah?”

“Is my cat doing security?”

Mateo looked at Drake, then at the door, then very carefully at nothing else. “Looks that way.”

“Is there something behind that door?”

“I am not allowed in that part of the house.”

“That was not an answer.”

“It was the beginning of one. The rest of it is that the door is not on my list, I do not ask about the list, and I intend to die peacefully of old age having never once asked about the list.”

I looked back at him. “You’re afraid of the door.”

“I am a professional who respects the organizational structure of this household.” He leaned slightly closer, lowering his voice. “Nico, the cat outranks me.”

I blinked. “What?”

“By at least two pay grades. Maybe three. He has access I have never been cleared for, and he showed up with an attitude problem. Frankly, I find it demoralizing.”

Despite myself, I almost smiled.

“Please do not tell Draco I said that,” Mateo added.

“Which part?”

“Any of it.”

I looked back at Drake. He was still watching the door. Behind me, Mateo stayed exactly where he was.

“Good boy,” I said.

Drake did not acknowledge the praise.

I kept walking, and the portrait corridor opened off the next turn.

I had been expecting another stretch of doors. What I got instead was a gallery. The ceiling lifted, the paneling gave way to a deeper paneling carved with vines, and along both walls, lit from below by hooded lamps old enough to be original, hung portraits.

I had to stop, because my eyes didn't know where to land first.

The frames were not consistent. I could see the difference in the varnish, the small islands of cleaner color where a restorer had been brave or skilled, and the larger fields of yellowed lacquer where no one had been brave enough.

“Nico.”

The voice came from behind me. Draco stood at the far end of the gallery. He was holding two glasses of wine. Red, of course. He stopped two paces from me and held out a glass.

I took the wine. His fingers didn't touch mine, but they came close enough that the skin on the inside of my wrist prickled, the heat of him arriving a half-second ahead of the touch that didn't land, and he watched me feel it and said nothing, and I drank.

The wine was unfairly good. I'd been raised on whatever was on sale at the Stop and Shop and had never developed the income or the patience for the tier above it, but even I could tell this had come out of a cellar.

It tasted like blackberry and old wood and a stone you'd held in your mouth as a kid because you wanted to know what stone tasted like.

“You can drink this?”

“I can.”

“It just doesn't do anything to you.”

“It does several things. None of them are intoxication.”

“Then why?”

He looked at me over the rim of his glass. “Because some rituals aren't about effect. They're about remembering what it felt like to be ordinary, or pretending to, and the pretending is its own comfort, sometimes.”

I drank again, and it went warm down through my chest and settled in the cold place under my ribs that hadn't warmed up since the basement.

He nodded at the wall behind me. “You're looking at Beatrice.”

“Beatrice?”

“The woman in the green. She tried to poison me in 1612. Aconite in the goblet, and she was clever about it, and it almost worked. Her nephew commissioned the painting the year after I declined to die, as a kind of apology, and I've kept it because the green is very good.”

“You kept a portrait of the woman who tried to poison you.”

“Her aim was better than her chemistry. I respected her enough to outlive her gracefully.”

“That is not a flex, Draco.”

“I'm not flexing.”

“That's an objectively crazy thing to say.”

“It is, in fact, my life. The two are sometimes the same.”

He was watching my mouth when he said it.

He set his glass on the ledge beneath Beatrice and didn't pick it back up.

“What did you think of me killing Ilya?”

The wine stopped halfway to my mouth.

“I keep waiting to feel worse about it. That's the thing.

I watched you open a man up in a basement and I waited to throw up and it didn't come.

I waited to be afraid of you, and I was, but not the way I should have been.

And some part of me looked at what he was and what he'd done and went, well.

Maybe. And I don't get to think that. I'm a guy who fixes chairs.

I don't get to stand in a room while a man dies and find a way to be okay with it.”

“And yet.”

“He's the reason Remy's like this. That's what I keep snagging on. You told me what he was, what he sold, and the first thing in me wasn't horror, it was, that's the man. That's the one who put the thing in my brother's arm. And I wanted him gone before I'd decided I was allowed to want it.”

He was quiet a moment.

“Ilya was mine for sixty years. He was good at his work, and I trusted him with things I trust very few people with.

Then he started moving a corrupted product through my territory, blood that had been altered into something it was never meant to be, and he sold it to anyone with the money and the appetite, and one of those people was your brother.

Blood like that doesn't pass through a body and go.

It moves in and it stays. You've watched Remy try to climb out of it.

That is Ilya's work, in your brother's veins, and in the veins of a great many people whose brothers aren't lucky enough to have someone sign a contract for them.”

I didn't say anything.

“Corrupted blood in my city is the one line I have never let anyone cross,” he went on.

“Not because I am good. I want to be clear with you about that. Because it is mine, and because a thing like that, left alone, eats everything around it, including the order that keeps the rest of us out of open war. Ilya knew the line. He crossed it for money, and when I gave him the chance to hand me the people above him, he chose not to take it.” He picked his glass back up, finally.

“I'm not going to tell you it kept me awake.

I've killed men for less and slept fine after.

I killed the man who's been poisoning my city and who happened, somewhere along the way, to poison your brother. The second part is the only reason you were in the room. You may do with that what you like.”

I looked at the glass in my hand. The wine was the same color as everything in that house that mattered.

He moved us along then.

“A banker in Amsterdam, the middle of the sixteen-hundreds.

He offered to sell me three of his sons for what he called consideration.

He believed I could make him eternal. He was wrong about a great many things, the worth of a son among them.

He died years later of an indigestion that had nothing to do with me, and I keep him to remember the price men will put on other men when they think they're bargaining with something larger than themselves.”

I looked at the banker's painted mouth, thin and a little too carefully composed, already shaping a number he meant to lie about. The painter had been better than his subject deserved.

“You knew them,” I said.

“Most of them.”

The lamps under the portraits had brightened a fraction since he'd come in. I thought, for the first time and with a clarity that was almost funny, that the house liked him, that it was glad he was here. Fine. Filing that under deal-with-later.

He told me about a singer in St. Petersburg in 1894 who'd owned half a room with her voice.

He didn't tell it the way storytellers tell things.

He told it like a man giving directions to a place he hadn't been in a long time, marking landmarks that weren't there anymore for anyone but him.

She'd had a husband she loved. He'd died badly.

She sang at his funeral and the men in the room wept, including, Draco said, with the smallest twist at the corner of his mouth, the men who had killed him.

I drank. I listened. After Ilya the story had a different floor under it, and so did all the others.

I understood, standing in that hall of dead faces, that they were the only company he had that didn't flinch when he told the truth, because they were paint, and paint couldn't flinch.

He'd just handed me the truth and watched me not flinch either, and I didn't yet know what I'd agreed to be by managing it.

I didn't notice I'd moved closer until I felt the cold coming off his coat, and I didn't move away. The wine in my hand had warmed to the temperature of my palm.

“You're calmer when you're looking at the objects.” Draco said.

I almost dropped the glass. “The frame on the banker is wrong,” I said.

“I know.”

“It's a hundred years too late for the canvas, at least. Whoever reframed him used a Victorian gilt and the proportions are off. The painting wants a darker, narrower frame, ebonized walnut probably. You can tell because the shadow at the edge of the canvas is doing all the work the frame should be doing.”

“The original was lost in a flood in 1867, and I haven't had the patience to commission a proper replacement.”

“You should.”

“I will, if you do it.”

I looked at him. “I'll think about it.”

“That's the most generous answer you've ever given me.”

“Don't get used to it.”

“I won't.”

The corridor breathed. The lamps did the small obliging shimmer I'd noticed twice now and would never fully unnotice.

He turned his head. “Mateo.”

Mateo had been at the far end the whole time, leaning on a pilaster with his arms crossed, doing a fair impression of a man not listening, which he had been, because that was the job. He pushed off and came forward. “Boss.”

“Take Nico to Lucien. He needs a wardrobe. Suits, coats, formal wear, whatever the house will require of him. Tell Lucien I want it done properly, not quickly.” He held Mateo's eyes a beat longer than the sentence needed. “And see that he has anything he asks for.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nico.”

“What?”

“The wine is yours. Take it with you. Lucien won't mind.”

He was gone before I'd decided whether to argue.

Behind me the house dimmed a lamp half a degree, like it was trying to help.