31. Chapter 31
Bastien
My eyes fly open at the exact moment the sun goes down.
Wrong ceiling. Concrete, water-stained, one caged bulb. I’m in a chair that’s bolted to the floor, and my wrists are locked behind me in runed iron.
The last thing I remember is the van. I tracked ten turns north off the compound road before the drug took me under. Everything after that is gone. I have never lost time in my life, and the missing day frightens me more than the iron does.
I test the cuffs once. The burn runs up to my shoulders and stays.
My left arm is broken above the elbow. It hasn’t started to heal, and that’s the iron’s doing. They knew what they were up against and planned for it.
I’m also thirsty. The back of my throat is dry in a way water wouldn’t touch, and my gums ache up into the bone. This isn’t normal. I’m an ancient. I can go weeks without blood. I’d bet money on this being the drug at work too.
The door opens before I’ve finished taking stock.
The man who comes in has been smoking since he was a boy. He stops out of reach, holds a cup out at arm’s length, and doesn’t look at my face.
I know the smell before it reaches me. It’s the same stuff they gave me before.
“Drink it,” he says.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then four of us hold you, and it goes in anyway.”
His heart is fast. He’s close enough that I can hear it, and under the tobacco he smells like a frightened man. I have to sit very still while he holds that cup out.
I drink it.
It’s the same as the glass in the lounge. Blood with something underneath. The heat comes up my arms and settles, and the strength goes out of them.
He’s barely closed the door before it opens again, and Ecaterina comes in carrying her own chair.
She sets it facing me, sits, and opens a notebook on her knee. She’s dressed the way she was in the lounge, and she looks like she’s slept.
“Good evening,” she says. “You’ve been out for a day. You were not harmed in that time; you were unconscious, and we had ground to cover.” She clicks her pen. “I told you my two questions. Let’s start with the first one. What has been traced beyond the building we met in?”
“The only thing I could tell them about was the building that you emptied.”
“That’s not an answer. You spent time inside our operation with the Nocturne Court behind you and Aurora beside it. I need to know what they’ve mapped. Which of our other houses. How far up. What your Court plans to do about it.”
“You have a source inside Aurora. Ask them.”
“My source is on the wrong side of that mountain.” She says it without any embarrassment. “They can hand me a raid plan. They can’t tell me what your Court knows, or what your Court will do next. You can. You’re the only person in my hands who’s sat in both rooms.”
“Then you know what I’m worth, and you know better than to make me useless.”
“Nobody is going to hurt you tonight.” She turns a page. “The other houses. Which ones do they know about?”
“I never saw another house. I asked your manager to show me more stock, and that’s when he arranged the meeting with you. I suspect there’s a lot more to see.”
“My manager is the least of what you saw.” She writes something. “The paperwork that travels with a sale, then. Has anyone outside this operation seen it?”
Vanya’s blank form, sliding down the table toward me.
“I signed it,” I say. “I didn’t study it.”
She writes that down too. She doesn’t look annoyed. She doesn’t look anything.
“Let me try it another way,” she says. “The delivery schedule your Court was given—the corridors, the timings. How much of it did they keep, and how much did they hand to Aurora?”
“You’d have to ask the Court.”
“I’m asking you.”
“And I’m telling you I carried a map to one meeting, put it down, and answered questions about fences. What the Court keeps and what the Court shares is decided by people above me.”
“You’re a Seigneur. There is no one above you.”
“There are three, and one of them is Faine. You’ve been selling to my kind for years. You should know how little we tell each other.”
She’s patient. She never raises her voice. And she has time, which is the one thing I don’t.
Somewhere in the second hour I say, “You have a good hand.”
The pen keeps moving. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your handwriting. They taught that in convent schools in the east until about 1960, and almost nowhere since. Most people let it go.”
“The other houses, Seigneur.”
“I’m complimenting you. I have very little else to offer, and I dislike being rude.”
“You’ve been perfectly civil.” She turns the page. “The other houses.”
Her face is impassive.
The man with the cigarettes comes back with another cup. I don’t bother fighting it. My arms go heavy again as the drug does its work. Ecaterina waits through it without comment, and when my mouth works, I use it.
“I have a great deal of money.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“More than this operation will see in ten years. I could put you somewhere with no extradition and no Court presence. You’d be on a plane before anyone here noticed you were gone.”
She writes for a while before she answers.
“That’s a serious offer,” she says.
“It is.”
“Thank you.” She underlines something. “My second question. Where is the woman you bought?”
“Sold on. A man in Lisbon. I didn’t ask his name.”
“You paid a very large sum for her.”
“I pay large sums for lots of things. Look at my account. I buy what interests me, and very little interests me for long.”
She writes it down. I watch the pen and keep my expression fixed. The arm helps with that.
“Who brokered the Lisbon sale?”
“A dealer. He approached me saying he’d heard what I had. Collectors talk to each other.”
“Which collectors introduced you?”
“None. He wrote to me. Rare blood gets discussed in certain circles, and I’d stopped being discreet.”
“When did she leave your house?”
“I don’t keep a diary of my purchases going out the door. Ask your own people; somebody logged an inquiry about her five nights before you took me. Perhaps they know something I don’t.”
That’s a risk, and I take it deliberately. Her pen slows for half a line, and then keeps going.
Then, without any change in her voice:
“The purchase. Did the Court tell you to buy her, or was that your own money?”
There it is. Either answer puts Serenity in danger. If the Court told me to buy her, then she matters to the Court, and this woman’s superiors will want to know why. If I bought her with my own money, then she matters to me, and she becomes the lever they use on me.
So I answer with neither.
“The Court doesn’t buy blood,” I say. “It polices the people who do. And I buy whatever interests me at the time. She interested me, the novelty wore off, and the Lisbon offer made it worthwhile to sell her. If you’re looking for meaning in my account, you’ll be looking a long time.”
Ecaterina studies me. Then she writes one line. I can’t read her face while she does it, and I can’t read the line.
“All right,” she says, and closes the notebook over her thumb.
“Do you know what I think? I think you’ve been fed, rested, and sure of yourself for three hundred years, and tonight you have enough left in you to keep this act up.
That will change. The stuff you’ve been drinking does more than take your strength.
It’s brewed to sharpen the thirst.” She stands and picks up her chair.
“By tomorrow night you’ll be ravenous. You’ll stop being a Seigneur and start being an animal, and animals answer questions.
We’ll talk again after sunset. Think about Lisbon. ”
The door shuts behind her. I’m locked in the dark cell.
The day between is long. Water drips somewhere outside the door, and that’s the only thing that happens.
I trace time by how many visits the smoking man makes with the poison—four—and between his visits, the thirst becomes all I can think about.
She told the truth about that. By afternoon I can hear the blood moving in the guard outside the door.
By evening I can hear every heartbeat in the building, and I know exactly where each one is. My gums ache down to the jawbone.
Somewhere in the second afternoon I try to call up her taste, because it is the only thing I want and the only thing that might get me through to dark.
I don’t get it. I have her voice through a door, the weight of her asleep on my arm, the exact sound she makes when she is trying not to laugh.
But the one thing I took from her has never stayed in my memory.
And that’s the value of her line. The blood that keeps pulling you back.
And now, any blood would do. I’m being sucked dry from the inside. Ecaterina was right about what the drug does. She’s wrong if she thinks it will make me talk.
Her footsteps come back down the corridor a while after sundown. This time she doesn’t bring the chair. One of her men carries in a small table, sets a glass on it, and goes out.
Blood. Fresh, human, clean. I’d smell the drug in it, and there’s no drug. She’s placed it exactly at the edge of my reach.
“That one’s clean,” Ecaterina says. “A full feed’s worth. It will save you. Answer my questions, and it’s yours.”
The glass sits there. I want it so badly that I don’t trust myself to move.
“Take it away,” I say, “or I’ll stop being civil.”
“You’re welcome to stop being civil. The offer stands either way.” She folds her hands. “Your arm as well. We have a man who could set it, and fed, you’d heal in a night. The other houses.”
“I’ve told you. I never saw anything past the building you emptied.”
“Lisbon, then. A name. A street. The color of his door.”
Third time.
They still want her. Two nights, two questions, and this is the one she can’t leave alone. Whatever I sold her as, somebody above this woman is asking, and they’ll go on asking after I’m ash.
“I bought, I got bored, I sold. That’s all there is to it, however long you keep that glass filled.”