30. Chapter 30
Serenity
The word I caught through the door last night was “dawn.” Dawn comes. The sky over the trees goes from black to gray, and by seven it’s blue and hard, with frost on the glass. The gravel at the top of the drive stays empty.
I’m in the study. I’ve been in the study all night. The fire went out somewhere in the small hours, and I didn’t get up to fix it. The cage sits on the floor by my foot, where I put it down.
He can’t travel in daylight.
That’s what I have, and I hold on to it. Whatever kept him, he’s stopped somewhere with the shutters closed, because no vampire moves in the sun. He’ll come up that drive after dark, and I’ll have spent a whole day making a fool of myself.
It doesn’t work. Because of the thing under my ribs.
It came a little after one. I know, because the drawing room clock—the one I wound my first week here—had just struck one, two floors down, and I was counting the strikes for something to do.
A few minutes later, this feeling arrived.
Low on my left side, under the bone. It’s heavy.
When I stand up, it stays where it is. It pulls.
It pulls in one direction, and the direction doesn’t change when I move.
It isn’t fear. I know my own fear. Fear goes to my hands and the backs of my knees and dries my mouth. I lived with it for a year, and I know everything it does to me. It has never done this.
And it didn’t come from me. One moment it wasn’t there. The next it was.
I’ve known where he is in this house since the night he opened his wrist over my mouth. I never said it out loud. I told myself it was my nose coming back, or my ears, or the floorboards. Two rooms away, three, the far end of the gallery. I always knew, and I never had to check.
Now it’s pulling, and he isn’t in the house.
My wolf has been on her feet since it started. She isn’t pacing. She’s standing with her head down, facing the window, and every so often she leans on my ribs from the inside.
Lie down.
She doesn’t lie down.
Marthe brings a tray at eight and takes it away untouched at eleven.
“You’ll eat before I go home.” She stacks the plates against her hip. “I’m not asking.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Nobody’s hungry.” She stops with the tray. “He’s stayed out before, love. He’s stayed out a week.”
“Has he?”
Marthe looks down at the plates, then goes off down the passage, and a moment later I hear the whole tray go down hard on the kitchen table.
Yves walks past the study door at noon. Then at one. Then at two.
By the fourth time, I’m standing waiting for him.
“That’s four times since noon,” I say.
“I’ve been busy, mademoiselle.” He has a cloth in his hand.
“There’s nothing near this door that needs cleaning. You’re checking that I’m in the house.”
Yves stops walking. He folds the cloth over twice before he looks up.
“Yes,” he says. “I am.”
“Why?”
“Because he asked me to.”
I go out to the yew hedge at three, because sitting doing nothing is worse than moving.
The cold is clean after a night of stale study air.
I walk the gravel path with my arms folded, and my wolf comes up the moment my boots hit the ground.
She wants to run down the drive. She wants to go out the gate at the bottom of it, and past the gate she wants to get on the road.
Her nose is pointed down the hill in exactly the direction the weight is pulling.
No. He’s coming back up that road, not down it.
She doesn’t argue. She pushes.
It isn’t like the ward, where she’d stir and settle because there wasn’t anything left in her. She’s fed now. She’s strong. She leans into the front of my chest with her whole weight, and my next step lands crooked, and the step after that isn’t mine.
“Wait,” I say out loud, to nobody. “Wait—”
She doesn’t wait.
The shift takes me down onto the grass. It’s fast, and there’s no pain in it—there never has been—just my hands gone before I finish falling, the ground swinging up close, my clothes tearing somewhere behind my shoulders because nobody asked me to undress.
The world arrives through my nose all at once.
Frost. Woodsmoke. Diesel off the men on the wall.
She runs.
We’re across the lawn before I catch up to what’s happening, past the fountain, down the slope with the gravel drive unwinding on our left.
The gate stands at the bottom, iron and floodlit, and there’s a man there turning toward us with his hand going inside his coat, and she doesn’t care.
She’s not going to stop. She’s going to go through him, or over him, and then she’s going to run north until her feet give out or she finds what’s pulling us.
Stop.
She doesn’t.
STOP. They’ll catch you. Lock you up. And then nobody goes to him at all.
That reaches her. Not the danger—she has never cared about the danger—but the last part. Nobody goes to him.
She breaks off the drive and pulls up in the wet grass, sides heaving, forty feet short of the gate.
The man by the gate stays very still with his hand inside his coat.
Smart. We stand there looking down the road where it curves away into the trees, and everything in her is pointed along it. I make us turn around.
It takes three tries.
I walk back up the hill on four feet, slowly, past the fountain, and she gives me the body back at the garden door, unhappy about it, one piece at a time. I come up off the grass on two legs with my breath steaming and nothing on.
Yves is standing at the door with a coat over his arm.
He holds it open for me and looks at the hedge while I put it on, as if the hedge is what he came out to see.
“The gate man will want an explanation,” I say.
“He’s had one, mademoiselle. Before you were down the first slope.” He closes the door behind us. “Come in by the fire.”
“Yves. She’s never done that before. Taken over.”
“No,” he says, and doesn’t ask who I mean. “It’s been that kind of day.”
The sun drops off the ridge at four. The floodlights on the wall come on, and the men under them stay where they are. There are more of them tonight than there were last night.
The light is gone by half past five.
At six, a car comes up the drive.
I’m at the top of the stairs before it stops, moving so fast I have to grab the rail. The weight inside me pulls hard enough that a short, cut-off sound gets out of me.
Then I hear the engine properly, and it’s the wrong one.
A whine builds in my chest. I have to bite down to stop it from turning into a howl.
The car that stops at the doors is older and darker, with mud up to the sills. The man who gets out is tall and barrel-chested, and moves lightly despite it. His coat has been rained on somewhere. It isn’t raining here.
I’ve never seen him before. The sound that comes up my throat is not human.
Yves has the front door open before he reaches the steps. The two of them stand there, and neither one says hello.
“Crowe,” Yves says.
“Is she here?”
“On the stairs behind me.”
Crowe looks past him and up at me. He goes slowly. My face first, then my hands.
There’s no heartbeat in him. Cold air around him. Another vampire, but not like the others. This one’s newer.
“You’re the one he bought,” he says.
“That’s a hell of an opening.”
“I didn’t mean to offend.” He steps inside and stops well short of the stairs, both hands where I can see them. “My name’s Gideon Crowe. I work with Bastien. I’m here to take you somewhere safer than this house.”
“Where is he?”
“He isn’t coming back tonight.”
He doesn’t soften it, and he doesn’t repeat it. He just waits, as if that sentence already covers whatever I ask next.
My wolf snarls, and it comes out of my mouth. Crowe doesn’t step back. He waits until I’ve finished.
“Get your coat,” he says.
“I’m not going anywhere with a man who won’t answer my questions.”
“You’ll go anyway. I have instructions, and I’m going to follow them. You can walk out to that car, or I can carry you out to it. I’d rather do the first one.”
“Try the second one.”
Yves comes around to the bottom of the stairs and clasps his hands.
“Mademoiselle. Please go with him.”
I look down at him. In all the time I’ve lived here, Yves has always been the voice of reason.
“You know something,” I say.
“I know what I was told. He said that if it went wrong, I was to get you out and not wait for word.” His hands stay where they are. “It’s gone wrong.”
The pull drags sideways under my ribs, and my knee gives against the rail.
Pull yourself together!
I straighten up and get my coat. I take the cage too. Nobody says anything about the cage.
The drive takes six hours.
Crowe puts me in the back seat and doesn’t talk. Every question I ask gets the same non-answer, so I stop asking and put my forehead against the cold glass.
The pull doesn’t fade with distance. It gets worse.
I keep turning to check it. Every time the road bends, I know exactly where the weight is pointing, and it’s never where we’re going. My wolf rides the whole way with her face toward the back window.
He’s that way.
I know.
Then why are we going this way?
I press my hand against my chest. It doesn’t help.
The road starts climbing after midnight. Trees on both sides, snow in the ditches. It levels out into a wide cleared space with rusting mining equipment scattered around. Then a gate cut into a rock face, with men and lights at it. Crowe holds something out of his window, and we go through.
The building is inside the mountain.
I feel the wards before we’re properly in. They come up over my skin and press down, and my wolf goes under them and hides.
Even flat, she keeps pointing.
“Built for protection,” Crowe says over his shoulder. “You’re not a prisoner here.”
They walk me down two flights and along a corridor with bare rock above the paneling. There are people everywhere, even at this hour. Coats on hooks. Boots. Coffee. Three conversations going at once, and it hits my nose in one lump, and my head goes light.
Wolves. Two dragons. Something that crackles with magic.