CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Wren
"Where's my cat," I say.
There's a man's voice going "oh God," and hands on my face, cold ones, and I get one eye open and there is Cassius Rook approximately four inches away looking like the last day of a very long war.
"Your cat."
"Yeah."
"Your cat."
"He's a big cat, Cassius, he needs supervision—"
"Wren, you have been unconscious for three days—"
"And who's been feeding him?"
Cassius puts his forehead down on the mattress next to my shoulder and stays there for about a minute and a half, and I get my hand into his hair, and neither of us says anything.
"Mrs. Ocampo," he says eventually, into the bedding. "He answers to Bantay now. He sleeps on her feet. He has never been happier and he has entirely forgotten you exist."
"That absolute traitor."
"Yes."
"Cassius."
"Mm."
"You're so frightened," I say, "that I can taste it, and I'd quite like you to stop, because it's making my teeth ache."
He lifts his head.
And here's the thing about the bond that I have only fully understood since the dock, which is that it goes both ways and there is no possible way for either of us to lie about anything ever again.
He knows exactly how much it hurt. All of it. The dock and the razor and the bathroom floor and eleven seconds in wet grass in Rimebrook.
And I know — sitting up in a strange bed on Ivory Hill with four units of somebody else's blood in me — exactly what three days on the other side of a shut door did to him.
"Right," I say. "Well. This is going to be unbearable."
"Yes."
"We're going to have to have an actual conversation."
"Apparently."
"Like people."
"So it seems," says Cassius, and something in his face comes apart, and I have to sit up and put my arms round his neck and hold on to him for a while, and the doctor comes in at some point and goes straight back out again.
◆ ◆ ◆
They tell me the rest over the next two days, in pieces, in the order they think I can take it.
Vespera Thorne has a hole in her side that will not close. She was stabbed with a piece of my grandmother's porch.
Thaddeus Halloway went into the harbour on the fourteenth and did not come out of it in Ashmoor.
There's a van somewhere with eleven years of ward-timber in it, cut into eleven-inch lengths and sharpened, and there are two hundred and six marks left on a cellar floor in Salem, Massachusetts, under a nail salon that Vespera Thorne now owns.
Lucien Ivo's house on Marlowe Terrace has been left to the court, which is a thing nobody expected, and there is a garden in it with roses in.
And on the fifth day Cassius comes in with a photocopy of a page from a minute book, and sits on the end of the bed, and says: "This is for Marisol and I'd like you to give it to her, because it's going to be a difficult afternoon and I think it should come from you."
OCAMPO, S. — entered city 11.74, presented by ship's agent, unclaimed, no maker recorded. Fed under supervision 11.74–03.76. No Covenant breaches. Left city 03.76, destination not recorded. NOT KILLED.
Somebody has written NOT KILLED in capitals, in 1976, in a hand that isn't Halloway's.
"He's alive?"
"He was in 1976." Cassius is watching me.
"Which is fifty years, and fifty years is a long time in this life, and the honest answer is that it's a coin toss and I won't pretend otherwise.
But there's no death recorded, and we record deaths obsessively, and that's the last line anyone ever wrote about him. "
I look at the photocopy for a long time.
"Where did you get this?"
"Halloway's desk. It was in the tray. Squared to the corner.
" He doesn't blink. "He pulled it in the second week of the thirty days, Wren, because I asked him for it in a room where I have never once thanked him, and he found it and he set it aside and then a month later he put a woman on a drop cloth. "
"That's—"
"Yes."
"That's horrible."
"It's the most horrible thing in this entire business," Cassius says, "and I would like Marisol to have it anyway, because it's hers."
She loses her mind, obviously. She reads it standing up in the kitchen at Ilana Street and then sits down on the floor with her back against the cupboards, and Mrs. Ocampo stands over her with a tea towel in her hands and doesn't say a word for about four minutes.
"He was here," Mari says. "He was in this city for sixteen months and my abuela sat on the floor against a door in 1974 and he was — Wren, he was four miles away, being fed under supervision."
"I know."
"'No Covenant breaches.'" She's laughing and it's a bad laugh. "He didn't hurt anybody. That's what that means, right? Sixteen months and he didn't hurt anybody, and then he left."
"Yeah."
"Why did he leave?"
And nobody in that kitchen has an answer.
◆ ◆ ◆
We have the conversation on the eleventh day, at that same table, at three in the afternoon, with the blinds down.
Mrs. Ocampo makes coffee that neither of the two people who can taste it will drink, and goes upstairs, and closes the door that everyone in the house hears.
"Right," I say. "Terms."
"Terms."
"You've been sitting on something for four days and I can feel it, and it's like living next to a fridge, so out with it."
So he puts it on the table.
"I want you to have the house on the cliff," he says.
I blink.
"Not to live in with me. To have. It's in a company and the company can be yours by Thursday, and there's money in it, and I want you to understand that this is not a gift, it's the removal of a variable.
" His hands are flat on the table. "You said yes in a vault six weeks after meeting me, under a court ruling, with a room in a basement as the alternative.
And then four days later you found out what I am, and you did not get to revise it, because a claim doesn't come undone.
" He looks up. "So I'm giving you the money and the house, and then in a year you can decide again, with your own front door and your own bank account, and I'll believe it. "
I look at him.
"You've been saving up a speech."
"I've been saving up a speech."
"Cassius, I don't want your cliff."
"I know. That's rather the—"
"No, listen." I lean forward. "I don't want your cliff, I want my flat.
I want the one above the laundromat with the dryers going all night and the crooked rain, and I want to ward it myself, and I want Mari and me to keep taking the jobs nobody else will take because it turns out we are extremely good at going into rooms that other people can't." My jaw sets.
"I'll take money for the business. I will absolutely take money for a van, because ours is nineteen years old and the offside door doesn't shut.
But I'm not being set up, mate. I've buried two people and run a company through a recession and I'm not going to be a woman in a house on a cliff waiting for someone to come home at dusk. "
"That's not—"
"I know it's not what you meant." I reach across and put my hand over his.
"That's the problem with you. You're four hundred years old and every single kind thing you've ever done has been a departure.
Buying corn. Standing outside a bakery. Parking a hundred and forty feet from a job.
Standing outside your sister's house for forty-three years on her birthday.
" I squeeze. "You've got a lot of ways to love somebody from outside a threshold and basically none from inside one, and I need you to learn the second lot, because that's the actual thing I said yes to. "
The fridge hums.
"What does that look like?" he says.
"It looks like you having a key."
"Wren—"
"It looks like you coming in at nine on a Tuesday because it's Tuesday, and me being in a bad mood about the invoicing, and you sitting on my terrible sofa listening to a record you can't hear while I do the VAT return.
It looks like you and Mari having an ongoing argument about the Philippines that I refuse to mediate.
It looks like Christmas at this table with four kinds of juice you can't drink because you panicked at a garage.
" My thumb moves over his knuckles. "That's it.
That's the offer. It's very boring and it's the whole thing. "
He doesn't say anything for a while, because he can't.
"And the blood," he says eventually.
"Twice a month. In my flat, on my sofa, with the telly on." I shrug. "Cassius, that's the smallest part of this and you know it. That's about nine minutes a fortnight. The rest of it is a month of you texting me about cardamom."
"And in fifty years," he says, "you'll be eighty."
"Yeah."
"And I'll be this."
"Yeah, I've done the maths." My chin comes up.
"Here's mine. In October I had two days.
On the fourteenth of this month I had about eleven minutes.
If I get fifty years out of this, Cassius, then it is fifty years more than the arithmetic gave me on a Friday in a penthouse with a very clean rug, and I am not going to spend a single one of them being sad in advance. "
"That's not—"
"And when I'm eighty," I say, "you're going to be there.
That's the deal. You don't get to do the noble disappearing thing at year forty because you can't stand watching it.
You stay." My voice goes and I let it. "You hold my hand at the end, like you held hers, and then you go and buy a corn off the man on Fenner Street, and you keep going. "
Somewhere in the middle of that his composure comes off entirely, and I get up and come round the table and hold a dead man's head against my stomach in a kitchen in South Ashmoor while he makes a sound nobody has heard out of him since Bruges.