CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Wren
I move back into the flat above the laundromat on the second Saturday in November, and it takes four hours and eleven wards and a screaming match with a cat.
"He's not coming," Mrs. Ocampo says, from the doorway of her kitchen, with Detective Meatball on her hip like a toddler. "Look at him. He's settled."
"He's my cat."
"He is Bantay."
"He's been Detective Meatball for three years—"
"That's not a name, anak, that's a sandwich."
I lose the cat. I want that on record. I survived a fledgling, a kidnapping, a marble bathroom and two pints down on a dock in the rain, and I lost custody of an eleven-kilo cat to a woman of sixty-eight in a housecoat.
Cassius carries eleven boxes up two flights of stairs in about nine minutes and then stands on the landing outside my door and will not come in.
"Oh, for—"
"You've warded it."
"I warded it yesterday, I did the frame and both windows and the fire escape—"
"Yes," he says. "I can feel it from the bottom of the stairs.
It's magnificent." And he's smiling, actually smiling, standing on a landing in a building that smells permanently of tumble dryer sheets.
"Wren. I've spent two months watching you cut those into other people's houses and worrying about who'd notice. And now there's one on yours."
"So take one out and come in."
"No."
"Cassius."
"Absolutely not." He folds his arms. "There is a woman in this building who is the only one of her line alive in the world and this door is the only door in Ashmoor with her name on it, and it stays as it is, and I will stand out here like a delivery."
So we do it the other way.
I take the paring knife, and I go along the frame, and next to the third mark from the bottom I cut something new — not a ward.
A gate. It's on page 143 in a hand from 1904, and it means this one may pass, and it takes a drop of my blood and his name, said out loud, and it took me three days of arguing with a dead woman's handwriting to be sure of it.
Then I stand back.
"Try."
He puts his hand into the doorway. It goes through.
Cassius Rook looks at his own hand in a doorway for a long moment.
"Say it properly," he says, unsteadily. "The old way. I'd like the old way, if you don't mind."
"Cassius Rook," I say, "come in."
◆ ◆ ◆
Here's what the next three weeks look like, and I want it written down, because everyone who tells stories about this stops at the dramatic part and that's a lie about how lives actually go.
We take four jobs. One's a hoarder clearance in Vane Heights that takes six days and nearly kills us both and pays for the deposit on a new van.
One's an unattended death in a bungalow where the daughter can't stop apologising, and I say what I always say, which is you've got nothing to apologise for, and I mean it more than I've ever meant it.
Mari puts a photograph of Sofronio Ocampo on the wall above her desk, next to the hazard schedules. She hasn't said anything about it. She doesn't have to; I can read that woman like a road sign, and the sign says I am going to look for him and I am not ready to say so out loud.
Vespera Thorne convenes the court twice and both times sits down to do it, which the whole vault notices and nobody mentions. She writes to eleven other Matriarchs across the continent. She does not tell them everything.
I sit in on the second one — in a cardigan, in a chair, on the record, as a party to the Covenant, which is a phrase that had to be invented for me in a hurry and which Ravensdale suggested and which I understand caused two of the older houses out east to have what he called an afternoon.
And Cassius resigns.
Not from the court. From the other thing.
"I've been the Matriarch's knife for a hundred and forty years," he tells her, "and I'm not doing it anymore."
"I see." Vespera, from the leather chair, with a cup of tea she isn't drinking. "And what will you do instead?"
"I'm going to find Halloway," he says, "and I'm going to find the van, and then I'm going to go to Salem and look at a floor."
"Alone?"
And Cassius says, "No," and doesn't look at me, and doesn't have to.
◆ ◆ ◆
On the third Tuesday I ward the office on Corvin Street, and Mari makes an occasion of it.
She buys a cake. An actual cake, from the place by the transfer station, with CONGRATULATIONS on it in blue icing, because they didn't have anything appropriate and because she says any excuse.
"Congratulations on what?"
"On the building," Mari says, cutting it. "On the building not being enterable by the undead. That's an achievement, mahal. People put less on LinkedIn."
I do the frame, the back door, the window that doesn't open, and the hatch to the roof space that neither of us has looked at in four years. Eleven marks. It takes forty minutes and I have to sit down afterwards and eat two slices of a cake that says CONGRATULATIONS.
"How's the thumb?" Mari says.
"It's fine."
"Show me."
I show her. She looks at it for a long moment — at the pad, where there are now six healed cuts in about the same place and one that isn't healed — and she doesn't say anything, and that's how I know.
"Say it," I say.
"I'm not going to say it."
"Mari."
"It's your hand." She puts the knife down.
"But I've watched you do about thirty of these in three weeks and every single time you go quiet afterwards for an hour, and last Thursday you did the launderette and then you sat in the van and you didn't turn the engine on for eleven minutes and you didn't know I could see you. "
The office hums. One window, facing a wall.
"It takes something," I say.
"I know it does."
"Not blood. The other thing. It's like the after of crying." I turn my hand over. "Mari, there are four generations in that book and not one of them made it past seventy."
"Yeah," she says. "I did notice that."
"So I'm going to do it anyway," I say, "and I'm going to keep a count, and you're going to be the one who tells me when it's too many, because I won't."
Marisol Ocampo looks at me across a folding table with half a cake on it.
"Okay," she says. "Then that's my job. On the record. Wren's hands are my job."
◆ ◆ ◆
On the last Friday in November I peel an orange in my own kitchen.
It's the fourth one from the bowl on my counter — I have a bowl now, I bought a bowl, it's ceramic and it was four dollars from the place on Corvin and it is the single most domestic object I have ever owned. The dryers are going downstairs. It's raining sideways off the Aldren.
Cassius is on my terrible sofa with a record on that he can't hear.
The peel comes away in one long spiral and the smell goes through the flat, and he closes his eyes.
It's been eleven days since my wrist. He can't smell it. He won't be able to smell it for another three days and then he will, for about a fortnight, and then it'll go again, and this is the shape of our life now and we both know it exactly.
"Tell me what it's like," he says, eyes shut.
"Bitter. Green. A bit like petrol." I split it and hand him half he can't taste, because that's a thing we do now and I refuse to explain it to anyone. "Cassius."
"Mm."
"When we go to Salem."
"If—"
"When we go to Salem," I say, "I'm the one who goes down the hole."
He opens his eyes.
"Because of the marks," I say, before he can start.
"Two hundred and six left. If somebody has to go down there and read them, and cut new ones, it's got to be a Verity, and I'm the only one there is.
" I put the peel down. "So I'd rather we had the argument now, in November, on a sofa, than in a basement in the dark. "
Cassius looks at me for a long moment.
And I feel him do it — the whole thing, all the way down, every objection lining up and every one of them getting looked at and put away, and underneath all of it a thing that has no words attached to it and that arrives in me as heat behind the breastbone.
"All right," he says.
"That's it?"
"You'll go down. I'll hold the ladder." His hand finds mine on the cushion. "And if anything comes up that isn't you, I'll be standing on it."