CHAPTER SEVEN
Cassius
Her blood is on my hands.
Not from her. From the suit, from carrying her, from where the seam tore — a smear, maybe a gram, across my right palm and the inside of my wrist. It is the single largest crisis of my adult death and I am driving a Volvo.
That's the other thing. I'm driving a Volvo.
Her van's still on Cadger Row and I couldn't put her in it, so I have taken the estate car belonging to the sleeping landlady, and I am doing forty-two miles an hour through the wet with an unconscious woman in the passenger seat and my hands at ten and two like a driving instructor, because if I let myself go faster I will let myself do other things.
Do not look at your hand.
I look at my hand.
The smell comes up off it in waves and it isn't a smell, it's a place.
Every time it hits me I'm somewhere: a kitchen in Bruges in 1631 with my mother's forearms floured to the elbow; the hay smell of a stable I slept in as a boy; the sea.
Four hundred years of nothing and this woman's blood is handing me my own life back in pieces, out of order, without asking.
The hunger under it is so vast it's almost calm. Like standing at the edge of the ocean. There's no snap to it, no red, just a slow certainty that I could put my mouth to her throat and drink and never have to feel this again.
Seventeen of us in that cellar. Not one of us stopped Aurek.
I roll the window down and hold my hand out in the rain until the smell is gone, and drive with it out there, and the water strips it away one degree at a time, and I feel every single degree leave.
◆ ◆ ◆
There is a thing I have not said yet and I will say it here, where she cannot hear it.
The boy in the basement was three weeks old and did not know his own name, and I took him apart against a wall in under two seconds, and I did it because he had his face at her throat.
Not because of the Covenant. Not because he was a hole in the city's arrangement, not because Vespera would have sent me to do it anyway inside the week. I have executed forty men and every one of them was a decision; there is a form to it; you speak, they answer, and then it happens.
I didn't speak.
I have been the Matriarch's knife for a hundred and forty years on the strength of the fact that I do not do things for reasons like that, and on a Friday night in a basement on Cadger Row I found out what I am underneath it, and the answer took less than two seconds and did not consult me.
The woman asleep in this passenger seat thinks she has been rescued.
◆ ◆ ◆
She wakes when we're crossing the Skell Bridge.
I hear it happen — the change in the heartbeat, the catch of breath, the little rustle as her hands find the seatbelt — and I keep my eyes on the road.
"Am I in a Volvo," she says.
"Yes."
"Whose Volvo?"
"Mrs. Alaimo's."
"You stole Mrs. Alaimo's car."
"I'll return it."
There's a pause. Long enough for me to hear her get from there was a boy in the basement to the boy in the basement came apart.
The heartbeat goes; the breathing goes shallow and fast; and then — and this is the thing that will not leave me alone — she gets it back under control.
Deliberately. In about nine seconds. Like a woman resetting a dislocated finger.
"Okay," she says. "Talk."
"You're safe."
"Everyone who's ever said that to me has been the person I wasn't safe from."
"That's likely still true."
"Great. Fantastic. Love that for me." Her hand's at her shoulder, feeling the tear. "What was he?"
"The same thing I am."
"And what's that?"
There are nine words for it in six languages and every one of them has been ruined by a film. I take the ramp down onto Vane Street and give her the shortest one.
"Vampire."
She's quiet. I count six of her heartbeats.
"Right," she says. "Yeah. No, that tracks. That actually tracks, that's — you know what, I've been sitting here for a minute trying to build a version of tonight that doesn't have that word in it and I've got nothing. I've got nothing." Another beat. "Are you going to eat me?"
"I don't know."
"That's not the answer!"
"It's the true one."
"You could have picked no! No was right there!
" Her voice climbs and cracks and comes down again, and there's a wet edge under it now, the shock arriving late the way it always does.
"God. Okay. Sorry. It's been — I found a mark under a table, and my nose bled on a letter, and a child in trainers tried to bite me, and now a man who does not blink is driving me somewhere in a stolen Volvo—"
"You noticed the blinking."
"I notice everything, it's my entire personality and it's ruined my life." She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Where are we going?"
"My house."
"Absolutely not."
"They'll go to your flat tonight."
"Then I'll go to Mari's—"
"And they will go to Mari's tomorrow." I take the turn onto the coast road.
The wipers go. "Whatever you did in that basement, whatever you are, there is a man in this city named Lucien who has been looking for you since Monday, and he will find you, and he is very charming, and you will be alive for a long time afterward. "
I let that sit.
"What's your name?" she says at last.
"Cassius Rook."
"Wren Kelleher." A shaky breath. "This is the worst introduction I've ever had and I once met a man at his own mother's decomposition."
And I do it again — the laugh, that rusted-open sound — and she looks at me sideways in the dark of the car with her arms wrapped round herself, and neither of us says anything about it.
◆ ◆ ◆
I take Mrs. Alaimo's car back at half four.
That is not sentiment; it is procedure. A stolen vehicle is a police report, and a police report is a name, and a name is a thread, and I have spent a hundred and forty years making certain that no thread in this city has my hand at the end of it.
But I will admit the rest of it, since I am admitting things.
I park it exactly where it was, nose in, front wheels turned toward the kerb the way she had them.
I wipe the wheel and the door. And then I stand on the pavement outside a rowhouse on Cadger Row at twenty to five in the morning, and there is a guitar on the passenger seat of a van with a cracked scratchplate and a capo still on the second fret, and it has been sitting out in the rain with the window down for six hours.
So I take it out and put it inside the front door of the house, where the landlady will find it.
And I stand there for a moment with my hand on a door frame I cannot cross, listening to a woman of sixty asleep upstairs who is going to wake in two hours and find her tenant's guitar in her hall and no idea how it got there, and who will, I imagine, decide that she must have brought it in herself.
Then I go down the outside steps and deal with what is left in the basement, which takes forty minutes and which I am not going to describe.
There's a stack of paperbacks against the wall in there. Forty-one of them, alphabetised, and somebody has run a torch beam along them at some point in the last twelve hours, because the dust is disturbed in a stripe at eye level.
She looked at his books.
That's what she was doing down there while a three-week-old thing stood in the road outside working up the nerve. She was on her knees on a floor she was about to spend nine hours cleaning, reading a dead man's spines.
◆ ◆ ◆
We come off the coast road at three. The house is twenty minutes past the last streetlight and she looks at it the whole way up the drive without saying anything, and then she says, "Do you own the sea," and I understand that I am in a very great deal of trouble.