Chapter 7 #2
But two other things happened in the same two nights.
Catherine handed Celeste the story of my window vigil, unprompted, at her bedside; Celeste gave me the whole visit before we slept.
And tonight a worry about Celeste taking field assignments while she carries the twins reached my ears through two guards and a kitchen staffer, and nobody can trace where it started.
Maybe both are nothing. A lonely woman talking.
A compound talking. Maybe they’re moves.
If they’re moves, then the pain in front of me and the work behind it belong to the same woman, and Konstantin’s keeping is exactly where she’d have learned to run both at once, because nobody questions the motives of someone visibly in pain.
Pain earns access. Access earns information.
Information becomes leverage. And the leverage would be aimed at me.
I can’t prove a sentence of it tonight. So I file it as a hypothesis and treat her as both until the evidence retires one. It’s the discipline I’d apply to anyone who arrived in my house from his. She was shaped somewhere. So was I.
The worry traveled from the guards to the kitchen staff to Elena, who passed it to me during a supply briefing without knowing what she was carrying.
Here’s what troubles me about it. I have that same fear.
Celeste in the field, carrying the twins.
It was said out loud once, in a closed briefing, to the team that walked out with her, and nowhere since.
Tonight it came back to me in a stranger’s phrasing.
Either it drifted out of that briefing the ordinary way, one trusted mouth at a time, or Catherine planted it, aiming at a fear she had no way to hear.
I don’t like either. I can’t decide which I like less.
She watches me across the deliberate distance.
“Say it,” she says. “I heard you stop outside the door. You always did that. You decide what you’re going to say before you open a door. So say it.”
“I grieved you for three centuries.” The speech I built outside was longer. This is what’s left of it. “I built a life on the grief. And I don’t know what I owe the woman who makes the grief a lie.”
She’s quiet a long while. Then she says, “You held the blade for one night. Konstantin held everything after. Three hundred years is long enough to decide which of you I blame.”
She doesn’t tell me which. I don’t ask. I file the sentence with everything else, and I can’t tell whether it’s mercy or a blade of her own, set where I’ll walk into it.
“What do you need?” I ask her. Commander’s grammar. It’s all I have.
“Someone who knew me before,” she says. “And time to learn what I am now. You can give me the first. The second is mine to do.”
The rest of the visit is quieter. I let her talk about the blade, about the waking, about the dark. Her pain looks real. Her purpose, if she has one, never breaks the surface. I leave with both possibilities intact.
When she settles, I stand. “I’ll tell Dalton to leave the hall light on,” I say. “If the dark is the trigger, we take the dark away.”
“Thank you.” Soft. A softness I remember. I note it with everything else she’s given me since the door opened.
I walk back. If Celeste has surfaced at all tonight, the bond has already given her the direction I went.
She’ll know which end of the compound held me.
The smell of the medical wing is in my clothes and my hair, and I could stop and change before I reach our quarters.
I don’t. She’ll have the direction from the bond and the rest from the smell, and I want her to have all of it.
I’m not going to hide any part of this from her.
Somewhere on the walk back I make myself answer the question I’ve been stepping around since the hub.
What do I feel for Catherine. I loved her once.
That man is gone, and the love went with him.
Gone like a room where the candle burned out and nobody relit it.
What remains when I look at her is grief, and guilt, and a careful tenderness for someone I failed.
It isn’t love. Celeste is the whole of it.
Catherine is what I owe. And I have never once confused the two.
Celeste is awake.
I know it before I’ve finished opening the door. The bond shifts from the low warm frequency of her deep rest to the bright edge of alert attention, and the shift is not gradual. She surfaced fast and deliberate.
She’s lying where I left her. She doesn’t turn over. She doesn’t ask.
I take off the boots. I lie down behind her. I fit my chest to her spine and my arm over the curve of her and I pull her closer, and the heat of her floods the cold of the hallway, and the antiseptic fades under the scent of her.
Her hand finds mine where it rests. She laces her fingers through.
The crack in the plaster runs its dark thread above us.
She doesn’t ask where I was, and I don’t volunteer the information, and the fact that she could ask and doesn’t is a trust I can feel settle in my chest beside the other thing I’m carrying, the one sitting in a medical wing room with her arms around her knees, and I hold both, and neither cancels the other, and that’s the ground I’m learning to live on.
The heat wakes her at four.
I feel her distress through the bond before I understand what’s causing it, a flare of discomfort that spikes through the low hum of her rest. Then the heat hits, physical, radiating off her in waves I can feel from six inches away.
She’s moving before I’ve placed it, fast, throwing the sheet off with a sound that’s half gasp and half fury, her skin so hot the sheet warms in the shape of her after she’s gone.
“Don’t,” she says when I reach for her. Her voice is tight. Her jaw is clenched. “Don’t touch me. I’m on fire. I’m actually on fire. Cold water. Now.”
She’s up and moving toward the bathroom before I’ve finished sitting, and I hear the shower turn, the knob cranked hard, and the sound of water hitting tile, and then a sound I haven’t heard from her.
She gasps. I hear it from the bedroom, clear through the wall and the running water, and it stops me where I sit.
A vampire who hasn’t felt cold since the night she turned, and she felt it.
Her body dragged back to the human register where temperature is a thing that can hurt, the pregnancy pushing her past what vampire physiology was built to hold, and now the correction is water cold enough to ache and a woman who forgot what aching from cold feels like.
I’m up before the sound finishes. She said not to touch her, and I won’t until she asks, but there was never a version of this where she shakes in cold water and I stay in bed.
The bathroom is fogged despite the cold water, the heat coming off her body meeting the cold air and producing a low ground-level mist that clings to the tile.
She’s standing under the spray with her back to me, both hands flat on the wall, her head down between her arms, and the water is running over her and she’s shaking, fine tremors through her shoulders and down her spine, and the sound she’s making is barely audible, the furious private sound of a body being betrayed by its own biology.
“I hate this,” she says. She hasn’t turned around. She heard me come in, her hearing is as sharp as mine, and she’s keeping her face to the wall. “I hate that I can feel it. I hate that it helps and I hate that I’m standing in here like a human who forgot her coat.”
The tiles are cold and wet under my feet.
The mist curls at my ankles. The water splatters off her shoulders in droplets I can track individually, the vampire precision of my vision turning each one into a separate event, and her skin is flushed red across her shoulders and her spine and the small of her back where the heat runs strongest, and I can see the crimson glow of the crescent throwing light against the tile in front of her, the mark over her heart bright enough to stain the water pink where it catches, and she’s shaking and miserable and furious and carrying my children and she won’t turn around.
I step into the spray. The cold does nothing to me. I close the distance behind her and press my chest flat to her back, and the effect is immediate and total.
Her whole body goes still. The trembling stops. The sound she was making cuts off on an inhale that fills the bathroom, and her head drops back against my shoulder, and the groan that comes out of her has nothing to do with cold.
My skin against hers. My cold against her impossible heat.
The temperature differential is bigger than it’s ever been, her heat against a cold that goes all the way through me, and the contact is relief so complete she sags into it, her hands coming off the wall and finding my forearms where they cross over her chest.
“There,” she breathes. “God. There. Don’t move.”
I don’t move.
The water runs over both of us. Her heat seeps into my skin and my cold answers hers and where we meet the temperature is something new, something neither of us runs on our own, and I can feel the bond flare open at the contact, the marks pulsing in sync, the crimson glow filling the stall through the water.
Her heartbeat is rapid against my forearms. The two faster ones folded inside her are rapid too, all four running high, and my own matches hers in time and I stand in the cold water and hold her and let the relief do what it does.
What it does is change.
The relief doesn’t crest and settle. It crests and keeps climbing, the gratitude of cool skin against hot skin tipping into something hotter than the flash that drove her here, and her breathing changes, and her fingers tighten on my forearms, and when she presses back against me what comes out of her is not relief anymore.
“This is your fault,” she says. Her voice has gone low and rough. “Your entire body temperature is a provocation.”
“I’m standing still.”