CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Wren
Vespera Thorne looks at me.
It goes on a long time. The whole room lets it. And I watch a hundred and ninety years of politics do arithmetic behind a pair of very ordinary blue eyes — the smell of me, the bruise on my wrist, the way I'm standing, the fact that he's here at all.
"Your name," she says.
"Wren Kelleher."
"Do you know what you are, Miss Kelleher?"
"I'm told I'm an anchor."
"Mm." She picks up the tea. Holds it near her face. Doesn't drink. "And how are you finding it?"
"Honestly? Bit of a career change."
Somebody laughs. Actually laughs — a short sharp bark he tries to swallow and doesn't manage, from a neat man near the map table who I will later learn is called Ravensdale and who represents a family out east.
Vespera's mouth does a fractional thing.
"Sit down," she says.
"I'd rather stand."
"Everyone would rather stand. Sit down; it's forty minutes and your shoes are new."
I sit.
Cassius stays standing, which is the point, and Lucien Ivo detaches himself from a pillar with his hands in his pockets like a man arriving at a party where he knows the host.
"Before we start," he says, "I'd like it in the minutes that I said Friday and here we are on Friday, and nobody has thanked me."
"Sit down, Lucien."
"I'm making a point—"
"You're making a nuisance." Vespera sets the tea down. "Cassius. State it."
He states it. Formally, in a shape that's clearly very old.
"I claim this woman by blood. I have taken from her, witnessed by my own threshold, with her consent freely given and freely repeatable. She is not court property. She is not stock. She is under my hand and the price of her is me."
The room takes that in.
"And the second half?" Vespera says.
"Not yet taken."
Lucien's smile goes wide enough to hurt.
"Then it isn't a claim," he says, "it's a deposit."
◆ ◆ ◆
Here's what nobody tells you about being the most interesting object in a room: it's boring.
They talk about me for twenty minutes in a language that is technically English.
Provenance. Yield. Sustainable draw. A man at the back with a beard says the words "asset security" and my whole body goes hot, and I sit in a green dress on a chair in a brick vault and hold on to the arms of it and think about the shape of it — because if I think about the shape I don't think about the content, and if I don't think about the content I don't stand up and start screaming, and I have been doing this trick since my mother's hospice and I am extremely good at it.
Somebody asks whether the yield can be established without prejudicing the claim. Somebody else asks about longevity. The bearded man wants to know if there's documentation of the line.
Cassius stands at my left shoulder and does not move once, and I can feel him not moving, and I understand that the stillness is costing him something enormous.
"Miss Kelleher." Vespera cuts through all of it without raising her voice. "You've heard a great deal about yourself. Would you like to say anything?"
"Can I ask a question instead?"
"You may."
"How many of you have been in here since 1811?"
The room shifts. Vespera's eyes narrow about a millimetre.
"Three," she says. "Myself. Cassius. And Mr. Halloway at the back, who was made in 1806 and has been unbearable ever since."
I look at the back. There's a grey man at a small table with a minute book open in front of him and a fountain pen in his hand, and he does not look up, and his pen does not stop.
"Then you all remember Hesper," I say.
That does something. Not a gasp — they're too old for gasps. But something goes through the vault like a draught under a door, and Cassius, beside me, goes absolutely rigid.
"Yes," Vespera says.
"Then you know what you got when she died, and you know you've been living on it for two hundred years, and I'd like to hear one of you say out loud what actually happened to her.
" My voice is very steady. That's the hospice again.
"Because everyone in this room has been extremely comfortable with the word asset for twenty minutes and I'd like the minutes to show what the asset before me got. "
Nobody says anything.
The pen at the back has stopped.
"She was murdered," Vespera says at last, "in a cellar in Salem, by Aurek Vane, in front of seventeen witnesses who could have stopped him and did not. It took eleven minutes. She was twenty-six years old and she was a seamstress and she asked one of the men present to hold her hand, and he did."
The silence afterward is total.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me." Vespera picks up her tea. "I was in Baltimore. If I'd been in that cellar I'd have watched too."
And that's when I understand what I'm actually dealing with, and my hands go cold in my lap, because she isn't cruel. Cruel I could work with. Cruel I've met at fifty funerals. She's honest, and she's a hundred and ninety, and honest and old is so much worse.
◆ ◆ ◆
"Here is your position, Miss Kelleher," she says.
"You are the only one of your line in the world.
Every one of us in this hemisphere will be able to find you within a year, and the ones outside this room will not have had the benefit of this conversation.
Cassius has claimed you, which is inconvenient of him and possibly the first interesting thing he's done since the Ford administration.
Half a claim protects you from courtesy, not from appetite. "
"Meaning?"
"Meaning it holds against everyone who cares what I think, and there are perhaps two hundred people in North America who don't." She sets the cup down.
"You have two options. You may complete the claim, in this room, in front of witnesses, at the next Friday court — that's thirty days — and be his, and be my problem in a way I find tolerable.
Or you may decline it and place yourself under the court's protection, which is real, and which comes with a room. "
"With a window that isn't a window," I say.
Vespera looks at Cassius. "You told her that."
"I told her all of it."
"How unlike you." Back to me. "Yes. A room. Good food, a doctor, books, and the drawing of a pint a month divided fairly among the eleven of us under supervision. You would be safe, Miss Kelleher, in a way you have never been safe in your life, and you would never go outside again."
"For how long?"
"Until you die."
"Of what?"
"Old age," Vespera says, "if I'm running a good house."
Thirty days. A room. A dress that cost more than my van.
"I'll have to ask Cassius," I say.
I don't know what I expect. But Vespera Thorne, Matriarch of Ashmoor, looks at me for a second and then smiles — a real one, small and sudden and horrible — and says, "Oh, I do like you. That's a great pity for both of us."
◆ ◆ ◆
Lucien files his petition at the forty-minute mark, because he's been waiting all night and he can't hold it past the moment it stops being fun.
"Petition of intervention," he says, stepping into the middle of the floor. "On the grounds of coercion."
"Sit down, Lucien—"
"Matriarch, with respect — a claim requires consent freely given, and this woman met Cassius Rook eight days ago.
" He turns a slow circle, playing the room, and the room is enjoying it, because vampires are a great deal like everyone else and everyone else loves a fight they're not in.
"On the Friday she is a cleaner. By the Sunday there's a body in eleven pieces on Cadger Row.
By Monday she's in his house, alone, on a cliff, with no vehicle, no phone signal, and no threshold of her own to run to.
By Tuesday he's bitten her." He spreads his hands. "That's not consent. That's a siege."
Cassius doesn't move. But something happens in the air beside me, and eight people in that vault look at him at once, and I understand that Lucien has said something with a great deal of truth in it.
"And your proposed remedy?" Vespera says.
"Custody neutral to both parties for thirty days." Lucien's smile is warm as a bath. "My house is neutral—"
"Your house is a nightclub."
"My house is lovely—"
"Denied," Vespera says.
"Matriarch—"
"Denied, and if you put your hand up again I'll have Cassius escort you out through the ceiling." She turns. "But he's raised it and it's on the record, so it has to be answered, and I won't have the whole eastern seaboard saying Ashmoor rubber-stamped a coerced claim. Miss Kelleher."
I stand up.
"Thirty days," Vespera says. "You will not live in Cassius's house.
You will live where you choose, with whom you choose, and you will be free to leave this city at any hour without pursuit — that is a ruling, and every person in this room is bound by it, and if any one of you tests it I will do the thing you all pretend I'm too old to do. "
Nobody moves.
"At the next Friday court you will come back here and you will either complete the claim in front of witnesses," she says, "or you will take the room.
Freely. Having had thirty days and a locked door and a hundred chances to run.
" Her eyes flick to Cassius. "You'll feed as agreed and no more, and you'll keep your distance in a way that lets her know she has one. "
"Understood."
"And you'll find out who killed Trevor Ansel," Vespera says, "because I notice we haven't spoken about that in a week and I dislike being the only person in a room who remembers a murder."
The court breaks up at eleven.
Cassius gets me up the stairs and out the harbour door and into the air, and I make it eleven steps along the wet cobbles before my legs go, and he catches me under the arms and I put my forehead against his chest and say, "Don't say anything," and he doesn't.
Behind us, a hundred yards back, Lucien Ivo is standing in the Custom House doorway watching us with his hands in his pockets, and he is not smiling anymore.
And behind him, in the lit rectangle of the door, a grey man in a cardigan is standing with a minute book under his arm, looking at me.
I lift my head off Cassius's chest and look back at him.
He raises one hand — barely, at waist height, a small polite thing you'd do to a neighbour — and goes back inside.