Chapter 35
Bastien
There’s a woman with her forehead on my chest and blood coming out of her nose. Her hair is stuck across her cheek. Her breathing sounds wrong, and every part of her that’s touching me is wet. I know blood well enough to tell it’s not all hers.
She came for me.
I had stopped expecting anything. I sat in that corner and watched the glass turn gray, and I was ready for it. Then the door swung open, and it was her.
“Get her off him.” Odile has one knee down on the concrete. “Careful. That’s a gunshot.”
“Don’t move her.”
“Bastien, you both need attention—”
“Then move us both.”
They move us both.
There’s a room under that building with no window in it. A boiler runs along one wall, and they put me on the floor against the warm side of it. Somebody unfolds two coats and tucks them around us. Odile lays Serenity down close enough that I can get my right hand onto her arm.
My right hand is all I have. The left one won’t do anything I ask.
Faine crouches on the other side of her. She turns Serenity an inch and looks under her collarbone. Then she puts two fingers behind the shoulder and finds the exit wound, and she stays there much longer than the wound needs.
“That went through the top of the lung,” she says.
“Then she should be dead.”
“Yes.” Faine settles back. She doesn’t look at me. “She should.”
One of her people brings a field kit, and Faine dresses the wound herself, front and back, without asking anyone. The entry wound has already stopped bleeding on its own. Nobody says anything about that either.
Every person in this room carries the medicine that would close that hole in an hour. Nobody offers it. The law I broke is the reason she’s breathing, and the same law is why no one here will mention it.
I don’t say anything. Faine has been alive long enough to know the signs, and I can’t tell her anything that would improve my position.
When she’s done, Faine leans back and meets my eye.
“Not today,” she says, and stands up.
One of her people crouches over me with a blood bag in his fist and holds the corner of it against my mouth. It’s cold. It’s been in a cool box, and it tastes like it.
I drink it fast, with no dignity about it at all. It does the work. My arm starts knitting inside the hour. The iron burns start closing at both wrists.
My foot doesn’t. Nothing the sun does ever does.
We’re in that room all day.
The captives they saved are upstairs in the loading bay. Every half hour or so, Faine comes down the stairs and tells me where things stand.
“Still no update on the trucks that got out.”
“How long until Aurora’s here?”
“They’re not coming.” She stops in the doorway.
“Parlance won’t be impressed that you did this without him.”
“I don’t answer to Parlance.”
Serenity sleeps through most of it. Around two, she wakes and turns her head until she can see me.
“The sun. You…” she says.
“I’m fine.”
She lifts a hand, and it drops before it goes anywhere. “You were dying. I saw you…”
“They gave me something. It’ll wear off.” I get my hand onto her hair. “Go back to sleep.”
“Is Crowe here?”
“Against the wall behind you.”
She turns her head enough to find him, then lets it drop back.
“Kalli,” she says. “Did anyone go after the truck?”
Crowe’s head comes up.
Nobody answers.
“No,” I tell her. “There was nobody to spare.”
Serenity’s eyes stay open for a few seconds, fixed on blank space.
“Oh,” she says, and she’s gone again before I can tell whether she understood any of it.
Crowe sits against the opposite wall all afternoon and doesn’t take his coat off. There’s blood dried to both his hands and up his forearms. He hasn’t washed any of it.
He’s watching the door. Every time somebody comes through it, his head comes up. Every time it isn’t what he wants.
“How many trucks got out?” I ask him.
“Two.”
“And the second one?”
“Forty minutes ahead of us on a road with three junctions.” He doesn’t move.
“Which one was Kalli?”
“Red-haired woman. Dragon.”
“Dragon. Who told you what she is?”
He doesn’t answer that.
“I couldn’t go after her. Faine stopped me, but she was right.
I’d have got twelve feet up that ramp.” His hands are open on his knees.
“Then nobody would have held the bay. They would have finished loading the trucks before Odile’s people could stop them.
We’d have walked out of there with far fewer than we did. ”
“You did the right thing.”
“I said I would get her out.”
“You got the others out.”
He turns and eyes me until I stop talking.
After a moment, he takes an envelope out of his coat and holds it across to me. My deed. My letter. My signature on both.
“Take it back,” he says.
“Keep it.”
“You’re not dead.”
“Keep it anyway.”
Crowe looks at the envelope. Then he puts it back inside his coat. He doesn’t ask me why.
We go at dusk.
It takes two of them to get me up the stairs. Odile walks backward in front of me the whole way with both hands out.
“Stop hovering,” I tell her.
“I’m not hovering. I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to go over, so I can enjoy it.”
“You could carry me.”
“I could.” She takes another step back. “You’d never speak of it again. Neither would I.”
The vehicles are on the quarry floor with their lights off. Serenity is already in the back of the second one. They put me in beside her, and she gets her head onto my thigh without opening her eyes.
We go south. She wakes an hour in and lies there looking up at me in the dark.
“How far?”
“All night. We’ll be home before it’s light.”
“Home.” She turns that over. “How far is Aurora from your house?”
“Six hours.”
“That’s not long. It felt like the other side of the world.”
“You were unconscious for most of it.”
“That would do it.” Her hand comes up and finds my wrist. “Bastien. On the stairs. Somebody shot me.”
“I know.”
“It went straight through. I felt it go through.” Her eyes are on the roof of the car. “Then I got up. I was on the next flight before I worked out I shouldn’t have been standing.”
“No.”
“Is that you?”
I don’t answer her.
“That’s what I thought,” she says.
She turns her face into my leg, and she’s gone again inside a minute. I sit in the back of a car in the dark with my hand on her head.
She should be dead. Faine knows exactly why she isn’t.
Yves has the doors open before the car has stopped.
His face stays blank while they lift me out. Then he sees the state of Serenity past Odile’s shoulder, and he has to turn his head away before he comes down the steps.
“Her rooms, my lord?”
“Mine.”
“Yes, my lord.” He gets under my arm without being asked. “The doctor’s coming out from the village. Marthe has had him telephoned twice.”
Marthe is in the hall in her dressing gown with her hair down her back.
“Right,” she says. “Her first. Broth, then the doctor.”
“Marthe—”
“And you’re going too.”
“I’ve lived through worse.” I’m not certain that’s true.
“I’ve buried a husband and raised four boys.” She points at the staircase without looking at me. “Don’t argue with me at four in the morning, my lord. You’ll lose.”
They get us both up. Serenity doesn’t wake for any of it.
The doctor comes at six. He’s mortal. He’s been coming to this house since he was a young man, and he has never asked a question about anyone in it.
He cleans the shoulder front and back. He can’t stitch anything, because the wound isn’t open enough to stitch. Then he stands over his own work with the swab in his hand.
“How old is this?”
“A day.”
“Mr. Val-Serein.” He looks up at me. “I’ve seen a lot of things in this house, and I’ve never asked about any of them.”
“No.”
“Then I won’t start.” He shuts the case. “Feed her. Let her sleep. And get some rest too. You look worse than she does.”
Crowe is in the front hall when I come down. He’s got his coat on and his keys in his hand.
“You’re going back,” I say.
“Faine’s people are moving the captives.” He turns the keys over once. “And somebody has to stand before Viktor Parlance and say what we did.”
“That will be an interesting conversation.”
“It’ll be short.” He stops. “There’s something you need to hear first.”
“Say it.”
“Her sister is demanding to know where Serenity is.” He watches my face.
“They took that mountain apart. There’s an angry bear involved.
Viktor’s had people on the road since. He’s been telephoning Faine every two hours, and Faine hasn’t said anything, which he’s worked out means she knows something. ”
Grace.
“What am I telling them?” Crowe says.
She’s asleep two floors above us with a hole in her that closed overnight.
“That she’s safe.”
“He’ll ask where.”
“Then he’s getting the same answer you got.”
He rubs his face with one hand. “For how long?”
“A few days.”
“Bastien.”
“A few days, Crowe.”
I know exactly what those days cost the woman on that mountain. I’m asking for them anyway.
He puts the keys in his pocket and goes out to the car. He doesn’t say goodbye. He doesn’t say he’ll do it either.
I stand in my own hall until the sound of the car is gone off the drive. Then I go up the stairs to my own room, where she’s asleep in my bed, and I sit down to work out how I’m going to tell her what I’ve just done.