CHAPTER TWO
Cassius
I am on the roof of the Aldren because Trevor Ansel was killed badly and I am the one they send when something is done badly.
Rain on my shoulders. Forty floors of wet glass under my boots.
Ansel was a feeder — a human on retainer, paid in money and forgetting, exactly the sort of arrangement the Covenant permits so long as nobody dies of it.
Somebody drank him dry on a rug and then took the trouble to carve a Ferrow sigil where the cleaners would find it, and if I don't know who by dawn, the Matriarch will start solving the problem herself, which historically involves a great deal of paperwork and several fewer people in the city.
So. The roof. The cold. The nothing.
That's the honest word for it. Four hundred years and the world has worn down to grey felt.
I can see everything — count the raindrops if I want, hear a heart three streets over — but taste, smell, the way a thing lands in you, all of that went out with Hesper on the cellar floor.
What's left is hunger with the flavour scraped off.
You feed because the body screams. You never once feel full.
I'm working out the angle of the sigil-cut when the wind changes.
And the world—
The world comes back.
It hits me so hard I go down on one knee on the wet gravel like a man shot.
Rain. I can smell rain. Cold and mineral and green somehow, and under it the tar of the roof, and diesel from the street, and cut grass from a park a mile east that I have walked past ten thousand times and never once known was there.
Colour floods the underside of the clouds — not grey, sodium-orange, and there are seven different oranges in it.
And beneath all of it, threaded through it, the reason:
A woman's blood, forty floors down, moving around a room.
I have not knelt for anything in two centuries. I kneel now, with my hands flat on the gravel and my mouth open like an animal, and I let it go through me.
It's her heartbeat I find first. Quick — she's frightened, or excited, hard to tell from up here, the two are cousins.
Then the shape of her: small, warm, standing under a table with her arms up.
And her blood saying the only word blood has ever said to me and meaning it for the first time since 1811.
Here.
Here. Here. Here.
Anchor.
There are no more anchors. That is the load-bearing fact of my entire existence. Aurek made sure of it, and I held her hand while he did, and the Long Hunger has been the price we all agreed to pay for it, forever, amen.
And there is one under my feet, humming like a struck bell, in the building where a man was murdered tonight.
My hands are shaking. I watch them do it with a kind of distant scientific horror, because this body does not shake; it has not shaken since Antwerp. There's water in my mouth. I have not salivated since the Regency.
Get up, Cassius.
I get up.
The smart thing — the thing four hundred years of survival is screaming at me to do — is go down there and open her throat before anyone else finds out what she is.
One anchor, one death, and the world stays grey and stable and survivable, and Vespera never learns, and the Ferrow never learn, and Aurek, in whatever hole he's sleeping in, never, ever learns.
Kill her and it's over.
I go to the roof edge and look down at forty floors of rain, and I can smell the rain, and somewhere below me a woman with a bell in her veins is talking to her friend about a rug, and her heart is going quick, and it's the most beautiful sound that has ever happened to me.
I don't go down.
I tell myself it's strategy. That I need to know who else knows. That killing her tonight would leave a body in a building already full of questions.
That's a lie and I'm four hundred years too old to be lying to myself, but I tell it anyway, and it holds, the way rotten ice holds right up until it doesn't.
I stay on the roof until the sky goes the colour of a bruise.
◆ ◆ ◆
The Ashmoor court sits under the old Custom House on Fenner Street, in a stone room that was a bonded warehouse when this city still smelled of whale oil.
Vespera Thorne has been Matriarch for a hundred and ninety of those years, and she conducts every meeting from a leather club chair with a cup of tea she never drinks, because she says the steam is company.
"Cassius." She doesn't look up. "You're wet."
"It's raining."
"It's been raining since 1698. Sit down."
I don't sit down. Standing is a language and everyone in this room speaks it. There are five others here: two of her seconds, a Ferrow attaché with his hands folded, a records-keeper, and Lucien Ivo.
Lucien is leaning on the map table with his ankles crossed, wearing a coat that costs more than a car and an expression of profound personal amusement. He was made in 1954 and he's never got over how well it went for him.
The records-keeper is a man called Halloway who has kept the minutes since Lincoln, and I could not tell you the colour of his eyes.
"The Ansel matter," Vespera says.
"Feeder. Drained on his own rug. Four, maybe five hours before I got there."
"And?"
"And a Ferrow strike-mark cut into the furniture."
The attaché's hands unfold. "The Ferrow did not—"
"No," I agree. "You didn't. The cut was fresh and it was wrong — the crossing goes right over left. Yours goes left over right. Somebody wanted a war and did their homework badly."
Vespera's mouth moves a fraction. That's her whole emotional range and I've learned to read it like weather. "Who?"
"Working on it."
"Was he taken by one of ours?"
"He was taken by something that didn't know how to stop," I say. "There's spray on the ceiling. That's not one of us in this room; anyone at this table could drain a man into a cup without marking the carpet. That's a fledgling, or it's someone doing an impression of one."
"How old?"
"Weeks. Possibly days."
The room takes that in properly, because a fledgling in a Covenant city with no maker attached to it is not an incident, it's a hole.
Somebody made a person in Ashmoor and didn't register it and didn't leash it, and every single one of us in that vault has spent two centuries maintaining a very expensive arrangement that depends on that never happening.
"Anything else in the room?"
And there it is. The question. Delivered flat, in the same voice she uses for everything, and my dead heart does not beat and my face does not move and I say:
"Nothing."
The cleaners were in and out by dawn. Two women, licensed, insured, unremarkable. I watched them leave with eleven bags of waste and a rug shampooer and one of them — the small one, the loud one, the one with a bell in her blood — has four photographs on her phone that could end the world.
"Nothing," Vespera repeats.
"Nothing worth this much of your tea going cold."
She looks at me then. A hundred and ninety years and she still looks at me the way a locksmith looks at a lock.
"You've been odd since you came in," she says. "Your shoulders are wrong."
"I knelt on a roof."
"Why?"
"Because it was raining," I say, "and I'm four hundred years old, and my knees have opinions."
The records-keeper makes a small noise. It might be a laugh. I don't look at him and I will think about that, later, for a very long time.
Vespera lets me have it. She picks up her tea, holds it near her face, and closes her eyes at the steam like a woman at a hot spring.
"Find who did it," she says. "Before the Ferrow decide they may as well have done it, since they're being blamed anyway. And find who made it, because that's the part that will cost us the city. You have a week."
"Four days," I say, and don't know why until it's out of my mouth.
◆ ◆ ◆
Lucien pushes off the map table as I leave and falls into step beside me in the stairwell. He smells like cedar and other people's perfume and I can smell it, I can smell it, and the novelty is going to get me killed.
"You lied to her," he says pleasantly.
"Go home, Lucien."
"You did. It was thrilling. I've never seen you do it before, it's like watching a cathedral tell a joke." He takes the stairs backward, in front of me, hands in his pockets. "What was in the room, Cassius?"
"A dead man."
"Mm. And yet." He tips his head. "You came in here with your pupils blown out like a boy at his first kill. Whatever's happened to you, it's happened tonight, and it's happened since Fenner Street, because I saw you at ten and you were your usual charming gravestone self."
I stop walking.
He stops too, one step below me, still grinning. Lucien is a hundred years younger than me and he'd lose, and he knows he'd lose, and it has never once slowed him down.
"Here's what I love," he says. "You're the Matriarch's knife. You've killed forty of us for less than a lie. And you just stood in that room and told her nothing with your whole chest." He puts a hand over his heart. "I'm so proud. What is she?"
"What?"
"It's a she. It's always a she or a bottle of something, and you don't drink." He starts backward down the stairs again, delighted, radiant. "Don't worry. I'll find her myself. I'm very good at finding things, it's practically my only quality."
He's gone before I can decide what to do about him, which is a mercy, because what I want to do about him would take an hour and a great deal of cleaning.
I stand in the stairwell of the Custom House with rain going through the grate above me, and I count the smells of the city coming down with it — salt, rust, bread from the bakery on Fenner that opens at five, wet dog, exhaust, someone's cigarette — a whole world I lost before the Civil War, pouring in through a hole in me the exact shape of one woman.
Four days.
I gave her four days because that's how long it will take Lucien.
I don't have the faintest idea what I'm going to do at the end of them, and that terrifies me more than anything has in two hundred years.