CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Wren
Days eighteen to twenty-eight are the strangest, happiest, most quietly terrifying stretch of my adult life, and I want that on record too.
Because here's what nobody tells you about the end of the world: you still have to do the invoicing.
I work. Kelleher & Ocampo takes four jobs, one of them awful, and I bill for all of them from a box room with a boy band poster.
I go to the launderette on Pell and sit in the window watching my own front door across the street, because I'm not allowed to live there and it turns out that watching your own life from across the road is a thing that will absolutely wreck you at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.
Detective Meatball moves to Ilana Street and immediately becomes Mrs. Ocampo's cat. Total defection. He sits on her lap and purrs at her and she calls him Bantay and he answers to it, the traitor.
And every night at about nine, my phone lights up.
CASSIUS ROOK There is a man selling roast corn on Fenner Street. I have walked past that cart for eleven years.
CASSIUS ROOK It smells like a field.
WREN did you buy some
CASSIUS ROOK I bought four.
WREN WHAT DID YOU DO WITH FOUR ROAST CORNS
CASSIUS ROOK I gave them to a man under the bridge on Skell and he asked if I was all right.
WREN WERE YOU
CASSIUS ROOK No.
He never comes to the door. Not once. Vespera's ruling said distance and Cassius Rook keeps to a ruling like it's a load-bearing wall, and so instead I get this: a dead man walking around my city at night, sending me the world.
CASSIUS ROOK The bakery on Fenner opens at five. I have stood outside it for two centuries and never once known what it was.
CASSIUS ROOK It's cardamom. It's been cardamom the whole time.
WREN cassius
CASSIUS ROOK Yes.
WREN are you standing outside a bakery at 5am crying
CASSIUS ROOK I am standing outside a bakery at five in the morning conducting an inventory.
WREN oh my GOD
CASSIUS ROOK Go to sleep, Wren.
And here's the thing I don't say to Mari, and don't say to him, and can barely stand to say to myself at four in the morning:
Every single one of those messages is a man describing what my blood has done for him.
Every good thing he's felt in two hundred years is me. The cardamom is me. The corn is me. The rain on the roof of the Aldren is me.
And I don't know — I genuinely, sincerely, at three in the morning with my hands over my face do not know — whether what's happening in my chest is a person falling for a person, or whether I'm a bottle of something being fallen in love with by a man who's been sober for two hundred years against his will.
◆ ◆ ◆
I ask Mari on day twenty-two.
She thinks about it for a long time, which is how I know she's taking it seriously, because Mari has an opinion about everything within four seconds.
"Okay," she says. "Two things. One: yes, that's a real problem, and anyone who tells you it isn't is selling something."
"Great. Thanks."
"Two." She holds up a finger. "He's had you twice.
Twelve ounces, total. And instead of turning up at this house every night like a starving man, which he absolutely is, he's out there in the rain buying corn for a guy under a bridge and texting you about cardamom.
" She looks at me. "That's not appetite, mahal. Appetite doesn't do the washing up."
"That's not what appetite—"
"You know what I mean."
I do know what she means.
◆ ◆ ◆
On day twenty-four he breaks the ruling.
It's half eleven at night and I'm in the yard at Ilana Street with a mug going cold because I can't be in the house, and my phone doesn't light up, and instead there's a sound at the gate.
He's standing on the other side of it. Not in the yard. On the other side of a four-foot wooden gate with a broken latch that a four-hundred-year-old vampire could remove with two fingers.
"This is the corner of the property," he says.
"That's not a ruling, that's a survey."
"She said keep your distance in a way that lets her know she has one." He's got his hands in his pockets. "You've had one for twenty-four days. You know exactly where the edge is. I'm standing on it."
"Cassius."
"May I come into the yard?"
And that's the thing that does it. Not the corn or the bakery or a man parked a hundred and forty feet from a job. It's may I come into the yard, at half eleven at night, from something that could be through that gate before I finished the vowel.
"Yes," I say.
He opens the gate like a person and comes in and sits down on the step, and I sit down next to him with about a foot between us, and for a while neither of us says anything.
"Six days," he says eventually.
"Yeah."
"Wren, I'm going to say a thing and it's going to sound like I'm taking it back."
"Okay."
"Don't do it."
I turn my head.
"Don't complete the claim," Cassius says.
"Take the ruling. It's real — you can walk out of this city on Thursday and Vespera will hold that door open because she said it in front of eight witnesses and she's spent a hundred and ninety years being a woman whose word is the whole architecture.
" He's looking at the wall. "I'll give you money.
I'll make certain nobody follows you. You'll have a year, maybe two, and in that year you can find the rest of the green book or whatever's in Rimebrook and you can learn what you actually are somewhere that isn't a basement full of people pricing you. "
"And you?"
"I'll be here."
"Grey."
"Yes."
"Forever."
"That's not a factor," he says.
"It's entirely a factor—"
"It is not a factor, Wren, it's a symptom.
" His voice goes somewhere I haven't heard it.
"Do you know what I have actually been doing for twenty-four days?
I've been standing outside bakeries. I have been walking around a city I have policed since the Grant administration finding out that there's a park a mile east of the Aldren, and a corn cart on Fenner, and that the laundromat under your flat has a vent that smells like nothing else on earth, and every single one of those things is a thing I lost in 1811 and got back on a roof in the rain.
And I want you to understand what that has done to me, because it is the reason I am sitting on this step telling you to leave. "
"Which is what?"
"It's made me want things," he says. "I haven't wanted anything since Bruges.
I have gone four hundred years by not wanting, it is the whole method, and eight weeks ago it came off me like a coat and now there is a version of the next fifty years in my head that I take out and look at, and in it there's a flat above a laundromat and a Tuesday.
" He puts his head back against the wall.
"And I have absolutely no right to it. And on Friday I would stand in that vault and take it anyway, in front of witnesses, and call it protection.
So I'm telling you now, six days out, on the wrong side of a gate: don't."
I sit on a step in South Ashmoor with my hands round a cold mug.
"Cassius."
"Mm."
"When I said I'd say yes in that room with the lights on." I put the mug down. "I meant it, and I've had twenty-four days, and I've spent most of them working out whether I'd still mean it if you were awful, and the honest answer is no. If you were awful I'd have gone to Duluth in week one."
"That isn't—"
"So the question isn't whether the blood made you love me," I say. "It's whether the blood made you good. And it didn't, because you were standing on a roof forty floors up on night one with the whole thing in front of you and you went home instead."
He doesn't say anything for a long moment.
"I went home on the second night," he says. "I went to Pell Street on the second night to kill you and I stood across the road for two hours and eleven minutes."
The yard is very quiet.
"Yeah," I say. "I know."
"You know?"
"You told me you'd been watching me for three days, in a car park, in the most threatening voice I've ever heard.
" I pick the mug back up. "And you've never once explained what you were doing on the first two, and I've had a month, Cassius.
I do the invoicing for a living. I'm extremely good at noticing when a number's missing. "
He puts both hands over his face.
"Right," I say. "So that's the actual answer, isn't it. That's what I'm saying yes to on Friday. Not the man who didn't do it. The man who stood there for two hours and then didn't do it and then told me about it on a step because he thought I might say yes for the wrong reason."
"Wren—"
"Also you're a coward and you parked a hundred and forty feet from a job like a Victorian," I say, "and I'm going to bring that up at my leisure for the next fifty years."
◆ ◆ ◆
He leaves at one. He stops at the gate.
"The claim," he says. "On Friday. When it's done — the second half, mine to you — you'll feel me."
"You said. Direction, mood, whether you're alive."
"Yes." He's got his hand on the latch. "I want to give you the warning I'd want.
It isn't a summary. It's not going to arrive as words and it will not be tidy.
You are going to find out how frightened I am, all the time, underneath everything, and you have known me eight weeks and you have only ever seen the top of it. "
"Cassius."
"I'd rather you knew before Friday than found out at nine-thirty in a vault."
"Okay," I say. "And you'll get mine."
He stops with the gate half-open.
"Yeah," I say. "Bit of a two-way street, that, isn't it.
You'll get mine. All of it. Every bad room and every bit of the last month and the nine days I sat on my mother's diagnosis.
" I fold my arms. "So we'll be even, and it'll be horrible, and I'd rather be horrible with somebody than accurate on my own. "