CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Cassius
I have put off writing down what happened in that vault for as long as the shape of this will let me, and I am going to do it now, sitting in a concrete house on a cliff on the second night after Rimebrook, because she is forty minutes south of me in a box room on Ilana Street and I can feel exactly where she is and exactly how much she would rather I didn't.
That is the bond. That is what it actually is. Nobody tells you that the piece of string is at its loudest when the other person is trying to get away from you.
So. The Friday.
◆ ◆ ◆
There is no ceremony. That's the first thing, and everyone always assumes there is.
There's a wooden stool that somebody brings out of a side room, and a bowl in case, and Vespera Thorne standing four feet away with her hands folded like a registrar in a very small town, and eight people in a brick vault who have not seen a claim completed since 1913.
"State it," Vespera says.
"I claim this woman by blood. I have taken from her, freely given, twice. I am not a good bargain and I have told her so in detail. She is not court property. She is not stock. She is under my hand and the price of her is me."
"Miss Kelleher. Do you take it?"
Wren stands up in a green dress with a bruise on her throat four days old, and says:
"Before I answer, I want to say something to the room, and I want it minuted."
Vespera's eyebrow goes up a millimetre. "Go on."
And Wren turns round and tells eight vampires what the Long Hunger actually is.
I want to be exact about this, because the version that gets told afterwards is wrong in every direction.
She doesn't shout. She doesn't accuse. She stands in a warm brick vault with iron rings in the walls and she says: it's a wound, it was done to all of you in one room in one hour in 1811, it was done because a man took by force what he could have asked for, the woman's name was Hesper, and every one of you has been living inside her death for two hundred years without knowing it.
Nobody moves.
Halloway's pen stops at the back and does not start again.
"Miss Kelleher," Vespera says, and her voice is not quite right, "the answer."
"Yes," Wren says. "I take it."
◆ ◆ ◆
I take her wrist. Not her throat — never her throat, in front of them, and she understood why without being told, which is one of about forty things about that night I have not recovered from.
Twelve seconds. She doesn't look away.
And then I open my own wrist with my teeth, which is a thing no one should have to watch, and hold it out.
"You can still say no," I say.
"Cassius, I'm going to hit you."
"You can still—"
She takes my wrist in both hands and drinks.
Here is what happens to me.
I have spent four hundred years being the most contained object in every room I have ever stood in.
It is not a virtue. It is a wall, and I built it in a lane in Bruges in 1626 with my sister screaming through a door behind me, and I have maintained it with enormous care ever since, and its entire function is that nobody ever finds out what is behind it.
And a woman puts her mouth to my wrist in a vault under a Custom House and the wall goes.
Not dramatically. That's the horror of it. It just — stops being load-bearing. There is suddenly another person inside a room I have not let anything into since the Stuarts, and she is looking around it, and there is nowhere to put anything.
She comes off my wrist and stands up and says, out loud, in front of eight people:
"Oh. Oh, you idiot."
"Don't," I say.
"You're frightened—"
"Wren."
"You've been frightened this entire—"
"Yes," I say. "Welcome. It's an unpleasant gift and I told you I wasn't looking forward to it."
And Wren Kelleher looks up at me in a brick vault in front of the Matriarch of Ashmoor and eight of the oldest things on this continent, and she starts to laugh — helplessly, appallingly, with her hand over her mouth — and she says, "You're a wreck.
You're an absolute wreck and you've been standing there like a cathedral for two months," and Ravensdale makes his swallowed bark of a noise, and something goes round that vault that has not been in it since 1913, which is warmth.
That is what I have. That's the night.
And the reason I have not been able to write it down until now is that four days later she stood in wet grass in Rimebrook and shouted my name at something that was wearing my body, and both of those things are true, and I have to hold them at the same time for the rest of my existence.
◆ ◆ ◆
There's one more piece of that Friday and I have gone back and forth about writing it down.
Afterwards, in the passage at the top of the harbour stairs, when the vault had emptied and Marisol had gone ahead to get the car, Vespera Thorne stopped me with one hand on my sleeve.
"You'll want to hear this from me and not from a minute book," she said. "That was the fifth completed claim I have witnessed in a hundred and ninety years."
"I know."
"Do you know what happened to the other four?"
I waited.
"Two of the humans died of ordinary things," Vespera said.
"One in 1889, one in 1954. Cancer and a car.
And in both cases the vampire went to ground within a year and did not come out again, and I had to have one of them dug up in 1961 to establish that he was still technically alive, and I would not describe what I found as a person. "
"And the other two?"
"The other two ended badly and early, and the details are in the book and I am not going to recite them to you on a staircase.
" Her hand was still on my sleeve. "Cassius, I have never once in a hundred and ninety years told a member of my house what to do with their affections, and I am not starting tonight.
But I am the person who has to write down what happens next, and I would like you to know that the thing you did in that room is not survivable in every direction. "
"I know that too."
"Yes," she said. "I thought you might. That's what I found so upsetting about it."
◆ ◆ ◆
I drove her to Ilana Street at ten past two on the Monday morning and stopped at the end of the road.
"Wren."
"Don't."
"I'm not going to tell you it won't happen again," I said. "I could tell you it was a fight, and that fighting is different, and that no one on earth could come off a kill in the time you're asking for. All of that's true and none of it's the point."
"No," she said. "It isn't."
"The point is that you signed for it on the Friday and you saw it on the Sunday, and you did those in the wrong order."
The rain came off the roof of the car.
"I'll be at the house," I said. "The bond doesn't come undone — I want to be honest about that, there is no version of this where I hand it back, and I have spent two days looking for one.
But I can be a very long way away. I can be in another state.
It thins with distance and after about six hundred miles it's a rumour, and if that's what you need then say the word and I'll be in Nova Scotia by Thursday and you'll never feel me again. "
She got out of the car.
She got four steps and turned round and came back and put her head in through the window.
"I need you to know that I'm not frightened of you," she said. "That's not what this is. I want that on record, because in about a week you'll have decided it was, and you'll be wrong."
"Then what is it?"
"It's that I watched you not hear me," she said, "and I need a few days to work out whether I can live in that."
"That's fair," I said.
And drove away, which is somehow the worst thing I have done all year.
◆ ◆ ◆
The world goes grey on the second night at about four in the afternoon.
Not gradually. That's what I'm not prepared for. There's no fade — I'm standing on my own terrace with a list in my hand, and there's rain coming down, and I can smell it, tar and iron and the sea; and then I take another breath and there's nothing there.
Sixteen days since her throat.
I stand on the terrace for a while with my hand flat against the concrete.
Then I go back to work, because the alternative is to drive to Ilana Street, and I have made a number of promises, and the only thing I have ever actually been good at is standing still while something happens.