CHAPTER TEN
Wren
He sits. That's the first surprise. I say chair and Cassius Rook, four hundred years old, forty-one confirmed kills, sits down in the chair like a man reporting to a headmistress.
"A blood-claim is the oldest thing we have," he says. "Older than the Covenant. It predates the courts. It means: this person is not a resource, this person is mine, and the price of touching them is me."
"And that stops them?"
"It stops most of them. It's not sentiment — it's economics. Nobody wants a war over a meal." His hands are on his knees. "But Lucien's right. It isn't finished."
"The second half."
"A claim is two directions. I've said you're mine, in front of my own threshold, which counts. For it to hold in front of a court, you have to say the same." His jaw works. "And it isn't words. It's blood both ways. I drink from you. You drink from me."
The fire does its thing. Somewhere down the cliff the sea rearranges itself.
"Okay," I say. "Follow-ups. One: what does drinking yours do to me?"
"Nothing permanent. It's a mouthful, not a turning. It heals what's wrong with you at the time and it makes you very hard to lie to for about a week."
"That last one's a side effect?"
"You'll know when I'm frightened," he says. "It's an unpleasant gift and I'm not looking forward to it."
"Two." I hold up two fingers. "Does it make me — is this a leash? Am I going to be following you around going yes master with my eyes all glassy?"
"No."
"You said that fast."
"Because it's the question everyone asks and the answer is no, and because the men who want it to be a leash are the reason everyone asks.
" He looks at the fire. "You'll feel me.
Roughly. Direction, mood, whether I'm alive.
I'll feel you the same. That's all it is.
It's a piece of string between two people, and you'll be able to feel exactly how far away I am and exactly how much I'd rather you didn't."
"Three." My voice does something I don't authorise. "Does it hurt?"
He doesn't answer for a second.
"Yes," he says. "The first time it hurts. After that it doesn't, and that's worse, because you'll start to want it, and you'll hate yourself for wanting it, and I won't be able to help you with that because I'll be worse than you are."
"Great. Amazing. Full marks for the pitch."
"You asked."
"I did ask." I sit down on the arm of the sofa, because my legs have quietly resigned. "Four. And this is the actual one, so look at me. If we don't do this, what happens on Friday?"
He looks at me.
"Vespera will assess you," he says, "and she will conclude that an unclaimed anchor in a port city is a security risk and a strategic asset.
She'll be pleasant about it. There's a room under the Custom House with a bed and a window that isn't a window.
Feeders get twenty years and a pension. You'd get somewhat longer. "
"How long?"
"As long as your blood keeps working. Sixty years. Eighty. We're good at keeping people alive, Wren. It's the one thing we're genuinely excellent at."
The dryers thump in a laundromat forty minutes south, in a life I had a week ago.
"And if we do it," I say, "and it works, and they all back off — then what? I'm your — what am I? Your girlfriend? Your bank?"
"You're a woman I can't be in a room with," he says, "who I have to put my mouth on twice a month to keep alive."
"Wow."
"You wanted it accurate."
"I wanted it accurate, I did not want it like that—"
"There is no version of this that is kind.
" He's on his feet now, and his voice has gone rough at the bottom.
"I have been in this house since 1974 and no one has ever crossed that threshold.
Do you understand? Not one. I have kept myself absolutely alone for fifty years because it is the only reliable method I have found, and last night there was a woman peeling an orange in my sitting room and I could smell it, and the smell of that orange is going to be in my head for the rest of my life, which is forever.
" He stops. Gets it back down. "So no. It isn't kind.
But it is Friday in six days and Lucien is going to talk. "
I look at him for a long moment.
"You know what's mad," I say. "Out of every single thing that's happened this week, the part I'm struggling with is that you have a record player and you can't hear music."
He blinks.
"That's what you're struggling with."
"I contain multitudes."
◆ ◆ ◆
I do not say yes that night, and I want credit for that, because I nearly do.
What I do instead is get up at two in the morning and go and stand at the glass wall and look at black where the sea is, and run the numbers the way I run them on a quote.
Option one: I get in a car and go south.
I have four hundred dollars, a van that isn't mine, and a business partner whose entire family lives on one street in this city.
A year, he said. Maybe two. And Mari on Ilana Street with a mark her grandmother drew in chalk and eleven people who now know my face.
Option two: I walk into a basement on Friday and let a hundred-and-ninety-year-old woman decide what I am. Sixty years. A window that isn't a window.
Option three is standing behind me in the dark, not breathing, being extremely careful not to come any closer.
"You're doing sums," he says.
"How can you tell?"
"You've stopped talking."
I laugh, and it comes out wrong, and then I'm crying, which is not on the schedule.
He doesn't come over. He doesn't say anything reassuring, either, which is the only reason I get through it — he just stays exactly where he is, six metres back, and lets it happen without treating it as an emergency, and after a while I wipe my face on the shoulder of a T-shirt that isn't mine and say:
"Right. Terms."
"Terms."
"You want blood, we're doing this properly, I'm not a vibe, I'm a licensed contractor." I start pacing, because pacing is thinking. "One: you never take it while I'm asleep. Ever. If I'm unconscious you wait or you find another way, I don't care if I'm dying, you ask."
"Agreed."
"Two: you tell me the truth even when it's disgusting, which — congratulations, you're batting a thousand so far, keep it up. Three: Mari's protected. Whatever this claim thing does for me it does for her, and if it doesn't stretch that far then you personally stretch instead."
His mouth moves. "Agreed."
"Four." I stop pacing. "My grandmother. When Friday's done, you take me to Rimebrook."
"That's two hours north through open country—"
"Cassius."
"It's a very bad idea."
"Everything is a very bad idea. It's Sunday, I've been headhunted by a hedge fund of corpses, and the only person in four generations who understood what I am left me a set of instructions in a letter I bled on." I fold my arms. "Take me to the house."
He looks at me the way you'd look at weather coming in over water.
"Agreed," he says.
"Right." My throat's gone dry and my heart's going like a rabbit's and I make myself say it anyway. "Then let's get it over with, because I've been standing here for ten minutes being brave and it's got about four minutes left in the tank."
◆ ◆ ◆
There's a chair by the fire and he puts me in it, because standing is how people fall.
"Sit forward. Hair to the side." His voice has gone somewhere else. "Not the throat. The wrist first — always the wrist first, with a new one, because the throat is fast and I need to know how you take it."
"How I take it. Like a whisky."
"Wren."
"I'm coping!"
"I know." He goes down on one knee in front of the chair. "You're doing it very loudly."
I laugh — one crack of it — and then my breath goes uneven, and I put my left arm out, palm up, and roll the sleeve of his shirt back past my elbow.
My wrist in the firelight. The two veins in it. My own pulse going quick and shallow and honest, and both of us looking at it.
"You're shaking," I say, very quietly.
"Yes."
"Is that a normal amount of shaking or should I be—"
"Wren." He looks up at me. "If I ask you to stop me, you stop me. Say it back."
"If you ask me to stop you—"
"Not if I ask." His eyes on mine. "If you want.
If it's too much. If you change your mind at any point including halfway through, you say my name and I come off you and there is no version of this where I don't. That's not a promise, it's a mechanism.
I've been doing this a very long time and the stopping is a muscle. Do you understand?"
I nod.
"Say it."
"I say your name," I say, "and you come off me."
"Yes."
"And if you don't?"
"Then I'm a thing that needs killing," he says, "and there's a house in Rimebrook that probably tells you how."
That gets me the strangest look off my own face — not fear. Something else. Something that goes into me and lodges.
"Okay," I say, and turn my face away, and offer him my wrist.
◆ ◆ ◆
He's careful.
That's the appalling part. He's careful, and it's gentle, and it still tears something open in both of us — because the second his mouth closes over the inside of my wrist I hear the sound he makes, and it is not a sound a person makes about food.
It hurts for about a second and a half. Then it doesn't.
Then it's the strangest thing that has ever happened to me: a slow warm pull, and a floating feeling out at the edges of my hands, and a feeling in my chest like a door left open in winter.
There's a hand around my forearm that could break it and doesn't, and I can feel him counting — actually counting, I can feel it in the way he holds on, three, four, five —
And then he comes off me.
He puts his forehead against the arm of the chair and holds on to the frame until the wood makes a sound, and does not move for a long time.
"Cassius?"
"A minute."
"Take two."
The fire pops. My heartbeat is high and quick and stupid, and I have a hand that isn't quite working and a bruise coming up already, and I have never in my life been more awake.
When he looks up I've got my wrist against my chest and my eyes are wet and I am, unbelievably, grinning at him.
"What," he says.
"You made a noise."
"I did not."
"You absolutely made a noise, it was like—" I stop, and swallow, and my voice wobbles right off the road. "Sorry. Sorry. I'm going to cry now for about ninety seconds and I need you to not make it a thing."
He doesn't make it a thing.
He sits on the floor by the chair with his back to it while I do it, close enough that I can put my hand down into his hair if I want to, and after about forty seconds I do, and neither of us says anything about that either.