14. Chapter 14
Bastien
I take the stairs to Crowe’s office two at a time and catch myself halfway up. I have never taken stairs two at a time. Stairs wait. Everything waits when you have forever.
I stand on the landing with my hand on the rail and make myself climb the rest at a civilized pace.
“It’s open,” Crowe says before I’ve knocked.
The desk hasn’t moved. The chairs haven’t moved.
Even the crack in the yard window is the same crack.
Below, a kid in overalls is working late under the floodlight with a radio going, some song with more optimism than talent.
Crowe has a ledger open and a pen capped beside it.
He looks at me, then at the door behind me, then back.
“Now you’re the one arriving unannounced,” he says.
“You started the fashion.”
“I had a reason.”
“So do I.” I don’t take the visitor’s chair. I stand at the window instead and look down at the kid coaxing something out of an engine. My fingers are tapping the sill before I feel them doing it. I stop them, flatten my palm against the cold glass instead.
“Before you start,” Crowe says. “A Meridian client turned up dead behind a club on the south side. New suit. Sixty years old at the outside. There wasn’t enough left of him for his sponsors to bury.”
“How unfortunate.”
“Name of Sterling.” His eyes stay where they are. “You sat beside him at an auction not long ago.”
“I sit beside a great many people.”
Crowe waits.
“It’s time to move,” I say.
“Is it?”
“I’ve been inside over two weeks. I know the intake schedule.
I know the draw quotas and who sets them; not the name, but the level, and the level is enough to work with.
” I turn around. “The Court wanted the source. Pull the thread I’ve given you and the source comes out holding the other end. We move.”
Crowe listens all the way through without touching the pen. When I finish, he sits back, and the chair creaks under him, and he looks at me for longer than the answer needs.
“No,” he says.
“No?”
“You told the Court months. It’s been weeks.
” Crowe taps the ledger once. “What you’ve given me is a branch, its manager, and two rungs of a ladder.
Good work. But a ladder with two known rungs isn’t a source.
Move now, and the top desk clears out the same night.
Or the stock gets drained and dropped in a river, because dead inventory doesn’t testify.
Tell me I’m wrong about what they’d do with the evidence. ”
The kid in the yard tries the engine. It turns over, catches, dies. My jaw is tight. I loosen it.
“Then we take the branch intact,” I say. “Fast, sealed, nobody warns anyone up the ladder. You have people for exactly that. I’ve seen two of them work.”
“And the other branches? You said yourself there have to be several. Faine’s intelligence has already seen signs of them.
” He shakes his head once. “Take one, and every other branch is warned. The people in the ones we haven’t found pay for our impatience…
your impatience, since I’m being blunt. This can’t be rushed.
You knew that when you stood in front of Faine and gave her the timeline yourself. ”
“Timelines change when the intelligence outruns them.”
“They do.” He picks up the pen, uncaps it, and lays it back down, which from Crowe is a speech. “Yours hasn’t. Nothing you’ve brought me tonight is new. It’s the same picture you gave the Court, with more detail filled in. Whatever changed, it wasn’t the intelligence.”
The radio in the yard sings on. I turn and watch the kid lean into the engine bay. I don’t answer, because the answer is two floors above a ward in a compound I can’t control, asleep behind a bolt I ordered onto a door.
“The operation’s exposure grows every week I’m inside,” I say. “Vasile is spreading my name around as we speak. The longer this runs, the more of the trade knows my face. That’s a risk.”
“A risk you undertook,” Crowe says. “You. The man who told a table of sixteen elders he doesn’t file itineraries.” He stands and comes around the desk, unhurried, then leans against the front of it with his arms folded.
“Here’s what I’ve watched instead. Eighteen months you were a rumor: no Court, no auctions, no tables, wouldn’t cross your own study for anyone’s business, including mine.
Then one evening inside that house, and now you’re back, louder than ever.
The whole Court thinks the Seigneur got bored of being bored.
” He tips his head, reading me. “I don’t.
Corpses don’t sit up on their own. Something woke you, and I’m guessing that it’s inside that building. ”
“You’re guessing.”
“I’m assessing. It’s my trade.” He unfolds his arms. “All the time in the world, and suddenly you’re in a hurry. What’s her name?”
The yard, the radio, the engine. I keep my face where I put it.
“There’s no her.”
“Mm.” He doesn’t move. “The house holds one asset they wouldn’t sell you. Rare classification, kept off the open list. Vasile’s been whispering it to the right rooms for weeks; that’s how good the cover is.”
“Vasile’s playing the game we want him to.”
“Is he? Magic-blood does exactly this. You’ve watched it happen. Marchetti fed on his own supply and lost his holdings inside a year.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“You told me the lesson was don’t get caught.
I told you it was don’t be stupid.” A pause.
“Witch-blood, wolf-blood, whatever this one carries, it’s addictive.
First you feed. Then you’re standing in a fixer’s office at midnight trying to move a Court operation, because the operation is standing between you and what you want.
” He says it without heat. “You’re fixated, Bastien. You’re slipping.”
“I don’t slip.” It comes out too flat. “I’m an ancient,” I say, quieter.
“I was crossing this continent before your Guild had a name. Mortal blood doesn’t hold me.
Nothing mortal holds me. That isn’t pride, Crowe.
It’s fact. I have faced far worse, and I have walked away from everything, every single time. ”
“You have,” Crowe says. “Every time.” He goes back around the desk, sits, and pulls the ledger toward himself.
“So walk away from this one for a month. The arrangement’s paid for either way; you made sure of that.
One month, then come back here and tell me about acceleration, and I’ll listen with both ears. ”
The floodlight in the yard snaps off. The kid’s done. A door rolls down on its track. The radio dies mid-chorus. The office goes quiet between us.
“How I handle this isn’t up to you,” I say.
“That’s a no, then.”
“It’s the way I work.”
“Right,” says Crowe, and writes a line in the ledger. I can’t see what it says from here. For the first time since I’ve known him, I want to.
I take my coat from the hook. He doesn’t look up.
“Val-Serein.” His pen keeps moving. “The Court can survive you bored. It survived you bored for a decade. What it can’t survive is you interesting.
Interesting ancients end up as case studies.
” Now he looks up. “It can’t be rushed. Whatever you’re thinking of doing instead—and you’re thinking of something, you were thinking of it before you reached my stairs—think carefully. ”
“Good night, Crowe.”
The street outside is wet and empty. Yves is waiting at the car.
“I’ll walk.”
He doesn’t ask why. Of course he doesn’t. “Bien entendu, mon seigneur.” He closes the door. The car pulls away, taillights doubling on the wet road. I shove my hands in my coat pockets and walk.
Crowe is wrong. He watches money and appetite move through this city, and in his trade every strong current is an addiction. It’s the world he lives in.
He has never been what I am.
Everything he knows about appetite, he’s learned from mortals and the newly Turned. What I do in that stinking place makes no difference to me except to ease my boredom.
I could stop tomorrow.
I notice the sentence after I’ve said it to myself. Every addict I’ve ever known said it in exactly those words.
Coincidence.
A side gate opens in the yard fence ahead of me, and the kid comes out with a canvas bag over his shoulder, locking up one-handed, keys in his teeth. Twenty, twenty-two. He takes the keys out of his mouth and nods at me, easy, a workman’s courtesy at the end of a long shift.
“Evening.”
“Good evening,” I say.
He walks ahead of me toward the bridge, and everything about him filters to me on the air. The heat coming off the back of his neck. The heartbeat, slow and strong, a young heart with decades left on it. Engine oil and soap and clean sweat. Under it, the blood, healthy and full of youth.
It would be sweet.
I know exactly how sweet. I’ve drunk from a thousand of him, dockhands and footmen and soldiers on leave, and the young working ones are always the best of the ordinary run.
The street is empty. The river is thirty feet away and runs hard under the bridge this time of year. I could take him between this lamp and the next—quiet, quick—and be home before dawn. I could take all of him, if I chose, and no one would ever find enough of him to ask questions over.
I haven’t done it in a long time. That’s a choice, not a limit. It has always been in my power. It is in my power tonight. I haven’t fed in days. The thirst is there. I can feel it, dry at the back of the throat, present and accounted for.
I look at him, and I don’t want anything.
A sweet, easy, open evening’s work and I’m not interested, because he isn’t—
I stop the sentence there.
The kid reaches the bridge and goes left along the river, whistling the chorus the radio didn’t finish. I turn right.
Your standards have risen.
That’s what age does to a palate. I’ve lost interest in the ordinary. It’s the most natural thing in the world.
I walk home along the black water. Crowe can keep his month, his timeline, his ledger. Timelines belong to operations. Operations belong to the Court. My own dealings, on my own evenings, at my own price, belong to me alone.
There’s more than one way to move a single asset out of a building.