CHAPTER EIGHT
Wren
The house is a concrete box on a cliff and I hate that I love it.
Three storeys of poured concrete and black glass, built into the slope like something the cliff grew. No fence. No neighbours. Just the sea going about its business a hundred feet down.
Inside is worse. Inside is beautiful. Warm wood over the concrete, low lights, a wall of books that goes up two floors, and the whole seaward face in glass so the room is basically weather.
There's a record player. There's an actual fire, laid and lit, which means he lit it before he came out tonight, which means he expected to bring something back.
There is also, on the coffee table, a bowl of very good oranges.
"You don't eat," I say.
"No."
"So why—"
"They came with the house," he says, which is a lie, and we both let it be one.
He sets me up in a bathroom the size of my flat with a first aid kit, and I clean the scrape on my shoulder myself, because when I hold the antiseptic out to him he backs into the doorframe hard enough to move it.
"Noted," I say.
"Wren."
"No, I get it. Big feelings about the shoulder. Understood."
I look at myself in the mirror for a minute afterwards.
There's somebody else's blood dried in my hairline and my hands have started shaking now that there's nothing for them to do, which is exactly what they always do, four years running, on the drive home and never during.
I run the tap and put my wrists under it until it stops.
I come out in a T-shirt that is somehow both his and clean and enormous, and I sit on the ridiculous sofa with my knees up, and Cassius Rook stands on the other side of the room with a good six metres of engineered oak between us, and tells me about the world.
◆ ◆ ◆
It goes like this.
They're real. There are maybe four hundred of them in North America and eleven in Ashmoor, which is a lot for a city this size and is because of the port.
They were all people once. They don't turn into bats, they can't fly, garlic does nothing, and running water is "a canal problem, historically, and it was mostly logistics. "
Sunlight kills them. Actually kills them, no sparkling, no long dramatic monologue — about ninety seconds in direct sun and there's nothing left to bury.
They can't come in unless you let them in.
"That's real?"
"That's real."
"Why?"
"Nobody knows." He's looking at the fire, not me. "Best theory in four hundred years is that we're a kind of hole in the world, and a threshold is a kind of edge, and holes have trouble with edges. It's not physics. It's older than physics and it's rude about it."
"So my flat—"
"Is a threshold. Which is why I said they'd go to your flat, not that they'd get into it. They'll wait outside. They're extremely good at waiting and eventually you have to buy milk."
"That's the whole rule? Doors?"
"Doors and the sun."
"Then how has nobody—" I stop. Start again. "Cassius, there are eight billion people and a camera in every pocket. How are you not on the news."
"Because there are four hundred of us," he says, "and eight billion of you, and we have spent two hundred years being extremely boring on purpose.
" He turns from the fire. "That's the actual answer and nobody ever likes it.
There's no conspiracy. There's no ministry.
There's a treaty called the Covenant that says don't kill, don't expose, feed from people who've agreed and been paid, and a court in every city with an enforcer to make sure of it, and the whole thing holds together because being found out would be fatal to us and everybody knows it. "
"Feed from people who've agreed."
"Feeders. Ansel was one."
"You pay people to—"
"We pay them well and we don't take enough to hurt and they're free to stop, and yes, it is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds when you say it out loud in a room.
" His voice doesn't change. "I'm not going to defend it to you.
It's the best arrangement four hundred dead things have managed in two centuries and it is still an arrangement in which somebody's rent is paid by their arm. "
I sit with that.
"Who's the enforcer?" I say.
He looks at me.
"Oh," I say. "Cool. Cool cool cool."
"I've killed forty-one of my own kind."
"Is that a lot?"
"It's more than anyone."
"Right, but is it a lot, like, is that a Tuesday for you people, or—"
"Wren."
"I'm coping!" It comes out too loud. I put both hands over my face. "I'm coping, okay, I'm doing the thing where I talk until my brain catches up, it's how I've handled every bad room I've ever walked into and right now the bad room is the entire actual world, so give me a minute."
The fire pops.
When I take my hands down he hasn't moved, but something in the set of his shoulders has.
"Take your minute," he says.
I take about four.
◆ ◆ ◆
There's a record player against the far wall and about nine hundred records under it, and when I get up to look at them he says, from the other side of the room, "Don't."
"Why?"
"Because you're about to ask me about them and I'd rather you didn't."
"Cassius, there are more records here than in an actual shop—"
"There are eleven hundred and four." He hasn't moved. "I bought the first of them in 1948 in a shop on Marsh Street from a man who thought I was a serviceman, and I have bought roughly a dozen a year since, and I have never once heard any of them."
I turn round.
"Then why—"
"Because I could hear them in 1601," he says, "in a church in Bruges, and I have a very clear memory of what that was like, and every so often I put one on and stand in the middle of the room and concentrate, on the basis that four hundred years is a long time and something might have changed."
The fire pops.
"Has it?"
"No."
I look at eleven hundred and four records bought by a man who cannot hear one of them, and I have to turn back to the shelf for a second and be very interested in the spines.
"Put one on," I say.
"Wren—"
"Not for you. For me. I've had the worst week of my life and I'm sitting in a concrete box on a cliff in a stranger's T-shirt and I would quite like some music."
He puts one on.
He does it the way people did when it mattered — sleeve, inner sleeve, thumb on the rim and one finger in the hole, needle down with two hands.
It's something with a piano in it and a woman singing in French, and it fills the room, and Cassius Rook stands with his hand on the lid of the machine and his head slightly turned, and does not hear one note of it.
I sit on that sofa with a blanket over my knees and listen to a song in a language I don't speak, in a house on a cliff, with a dead man four metres away.
It's the first time in six days I don't feel like I'm falling.
◆ ◆ ◆
"Okay," I say. "The boy in the basement. He smelled me and he lost his mind."
"Yes."
"He said it stopped. The noise in his head. He said he'd been walking for eleven miles and it was screaming and then he got to Cadger Row and it stopped."
"Yes."
"And you." I put my chin on my knees. "You smelled me on a roof forty floors up and you knelt."
His head comes round. "How do you—"
"You said your knees had opinions and you'd knelt on a roof. In the car. To me. About the Volvo." I shrug with the shoulder that isn't ruined. "I told you. I notice everything. It's ruined my life."
He is silent for a long moment. Then he crosses the room and sits down on the floor — actually on the floor, back against the bookshelves, four metres away, hands loose over his knees, like a man deliberately putting himself somewhere it takes effort to leave.
"You're an anchor," he says.
"What's an anchor?"
"There was a bloodline," he says. "Verity. Nobody's sure how far back — Iceland, maybe, then Massachusetts. One in a generation, sometimes none. Their blood does something to us that no other blood does."
"Which is?"
"It gives us back the world."
I wait. He doesn't fill it, so eventually I do.
"You'll have to do better than that."
"When we're made, we lose our senses. Not sight, not hearing — those get worse, in that they get better.
I mean everything that lands. Taste. Smell.
Warmth. Music stops being music and becomes a very accurate list of frequencies.
" His hands are flat on his knees. "It's called the Long Hunger.
It's not the wanting-blood part. It's the part where nothing you get is ever anything.
You could drink the whole city and still be standing in a grey room. "
"For how long?"
"Four hundred years," Cassius says. "In my case."
The sea goes on down the cliff.
"And me?" I say.
"On the roof of the Aldren," he says, "I smelled rain for the first time since 1811."
My heartbeat does something stupid and I know, from the way his eyes flick, that he hears it.
"And that's — good?" I say carefully. "That sounds good. Why does that not sound good."
"Because there were nine hundred of us in America in 1800," he says, "and every one of us knew what the Verity line was, and by 1811 there was one left."