CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Wren
The emergency court sits at nine, and I walk into the vault under the Custom House on my own two legs in jeans and a cardigan, because it's cold and because I have lost a great deal of blood this week and have run out of interest in what these people think of my outerwear.
Mari comes with me. That's a fight I win by simply going through the door with her.
Nine of the ten are there. Ten, counting the empty space by the pillar where Lucien used to lean, which somebody has left clear on purpose and which nobody looks at.
Vespera stands up when I come in.
She has not stood up for a single person in a hundred and ninety years. She does it, and everyone in that vault sees her do it, and by the time I've crossed the floor the shape of the entire evening has been decided.
"Miss Kelleher."
"Matriarch."
"You look appalling."
"You should see the bathroom."
Somebody laughs — Ravensdale, that same swallowed bark, and I have decided I like him.
She does the formal part quickly, because she's angry and being angry makes her efficient.
The court records the events at Marlowe Terrace.
The court records the death of Lucien Ivo by his own choice at six-eleven yesterday morning.
The court records the disappearance of T.
Halloway, records-keeper, and there's a stir at that which goes round the vault like a draught, because he has sat in that room every Friday since Lincoln.
Then Cassius reads the note out loud.
All of it. Including the part about the lamp, and the part about watching me work for a year, and the part about a minute book read out loud through a hole in a floor.
When he finishes, nobody in that vault says anything for about eleven seconds.
"He signed it," Vespera says at last.
"Yes."
"After eleven years of taking a floor apart three boards at a time without one of us noticing, he wrote his name on a piece of paper and left it in a locker for you to find." She sits back down slowly. "Why?"
"Because he wanted an answer to something," Cassius says. "He's asked me the same question four different ways in that note and I've been reading it since six and it's this: why did none of you ever look at me."
"And the van south of Providence?"
"There is no van south of Providence," Cassius says. "Or there is, and he isn't in it. He's been eleven years ahead of this court on every single thing he's done, and I do not believe he told me his location by accident on the one occasion he chose to write to me."
Vespera Thorne looks up sharply.
And the lights go out.
◆ ◆ ◆
The vault has a gas main and a mains ring and a 1927 fusebox in a cupboard on the stairs, and Thaddeus Halloway has had two hundred years to learn where every fuse in that building is.
Blackout at nine forty-one.
Vampires see in the dark. That's not the point and it never was. The point is that nine of them all turn towards the fusebox at the same instant, and the harbour door is behind us.
I hear Vespera say "don't—"
Then a sound I have never heard and will hear for the rest of my life: something going into a body and not coming out again.
Eleven inches of eighteenth-century ship's board, in her side.
Vespera Thorne goes down on the floor of her own vault, and the wound does not close, and the whole room turns towards her — every single one of them, at once, because she is the only fixed point any of them have had for a hundred and ninety years and something has just put a hole in her.
And Halloway has me by the arm and is halfway to the harbour door.
He isn't fast. That's the thing I keep coming back to. He's a records-keeper made in 1806 who has never fought anybody, and he gets forty feet with me because everyone in that room is looking at the floor.
Everybody except Marisol Ocampo, who is standing by the harbour door with a bolo knife, because she has been carrying it in a canvas bag for two months and not one person in this court has ever once considered that a human being might be a problem.
She takes his hand off at the wrist.
Not cleanly. It's an appalling swing and it half-lands and it does not remotely stop him — but he lets go of me, and turns to deal with her, and by the time he's turned, Cassius is there.
They go through the harbour door together.
◆ ◆ ◆
The docks behind the Custom House are two hundred feet of tarred timber over black water, and it's raining, and I come out of that door about nine seconds behind them with a straight razor in my coat pocket because I have not been anywhere without one since Thursday.
Halloway is on his knees on the boards holding the end of his arm.
"You never asked me anything," he says.
"Where is he?"
"Two hundred and six marks." He's laughing. There's nothing in his face at all. "I've counted every one, and there are two hundred and six, and I have a van and eleven years of patience and a floor that's mostly gone—"
"Where is the van."
"Do you know what he told me? In the cellar.
Before." Halloway looks up. "He said the world would come back and it would stay.
And I have carried a minute book round this city for two hundred years waiting for it, and I sat at the back of that vault last month and listened to your girl explain that it never will, and I want you to know I heard every word and it changed nothing, because he'll know how to fix it—"
"He won't."
"He's the only one who was ever strong enough to—"
"Thaddeus." Cassius hasn't moved. "He drank her and it broke him worse than it broke you. He has been under a floor in the dark for two hundred years with nothing at all. Whatever's down there isn't a man with a plan. It's the hungriest thing that has ever existed."
Halloway stops.
And for about a second and a half, in the rain, I watch two hundred years of faith come apart behind an unremarkable face.
Then he goes over the edge into the harbour.
Cassius goes in after him and loses him in eleven feet of black water, because a four-hundred-year-old vampire still cannot see in the dark under the sea, and by the time he comes up on the ladder Halloway is gone.
◆ ◆ ◆
And I'm on the boards forty feet away, cutting.
I've got the razor open and my sleeve up and I'm on my knees on the dock putting a mark into a mooring post the size of a barrel, and another into the boards, and another, and another, because he went into the water on this side and if he comes back up it will be on this side, and because I can, and because it is the only thing in this entire two months that I have been able to do.
I don't feel it. That's the thing I want written down, because it nearly kills me and because I want any woman who ever reads that green book after me to know it.
It's on page 96, in my great-grandmother's hand, and I had read it, and I had thought it was about somebody else.
His blood shuts the door on the hurt. It does not put anything back. Child, you will not know how much of you has gone until you stand up.
A week ago I drank four ounces of Cassius Rook's blood in a brick vault in front of eight witnesses.
I have been running on it ever since — through Fennick Lane and a marble bathroom and eleven wards cut into a hundred-and-eighteen-year-old joist, through a night of watching a man walk into the sun.
And now nine more on a wet dock, out of an arm I have already opened twice this week.
I feel absolutely fine.
I have never in my life felt as fine as I feel in those eleven minutes.
"He can't come back up this side," I say.
And fall over.
◆ ◆ ◆
Here's the part I don't remember, so I'm going on what Mari tells me.
Apparently Cassius came up the ladder and saw me go over.
Apparently he made a sound that nine vampires inside the Custom House heard through a foot of Edwardian brick, and that Vespera Thorne — on the floor of her own vault with a piece of Aurek Vane's cellar in her side — described afterwards, in the minutes, as unbecoming.
What I remember is this.
Boards under my cheek. Rain. The harbour smell, which is tar and rope and diesel and rot and which I have hated since I was seven years old and which I would like to be very clear is the smell of home.
And Cassius on his knees over me, and my own hand in his — because that's what he does, that's what he's always done, four hundred years of holding somebody's hand while the worst thing happens — and I remember thinking, with great clarity: no.
Not this one.
Not this time. Not him, on a dock, holding another woman's hand while she goes; not after Hesper and not after Ilse and not after fifty years of a concrete box on a cliff.
"Cassius."
"I'm here."
"Not the hand."
He goes still.
"Don't hold my hand," I say. "Don't you dare hold my hand. Do the other thing."
"Wren—"
"Do the other thing," I say, and I can't feel my legs, and I get about four more words out and I'm fairly sure they're the ones I want. "I'm asking. I'm asking you. That's allowed—"
And Cassius Rook, who has stood in a doorway for four hundred years being comforting, opens his wrist with his teeth on the wet boards of a dock behind the Custom House, and does the other thing.
End of Act Three.