38. Chapter 38
Bastien
The door of this house faces east, and I have not closed it once since I came up here. There is no glass in two of the windows. There are no shutters anywhere. Nobody has lived on this ridge for decades, and what is left of it is four rooms, a table, two chairs, and a grate I have not lit.
I don’t tell myself I’ll shut that door before morning. I stopped telling myself that on the second day. Every night I sit in this chair and watch the dark over the valley go thin, and every morning the light comes right up to the step, and I don’t move. I know exactly what that means.
I have not fed since the quarry. My gums ache. My foot throbs where the sun burned it, and there is a tremor in both hands that has been there for days. I have made no arrangement about any of it. I wasn’t planning to need one.
At the start of this year I sat in my own study with a fire I couldn’t feel and decided that was the worst condition available to a creature like me.
I was wrong.
The tilt of her chin. The way my shirts fit her. The sound of her voice from the kitchen downstairs. I caught it and kept it, and none of it is here, and I can’t get used to that. I can’t remember what my life felt like before her.
Dismal. You were rich, spoiled, and dismal, Val-Serein.
Crowe arrives on the fourth evening.
I hear the car at the bottom of the north track, and I know it before it stops. He walks the last stretch. He looks at the open door for a moment before he uses it.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“I wasn’t going to.” He pulls the other chair out and sits in his coat. “Yves told me where you were. He’s frightened, and there’s nobody else he can say it to.”
“How are the survivors?”
“Some have family. Aurora’s started finding them.” He puts both hands on his knees. “The trucks are why I’m here. Jericho traced the first one to a warehouse outside Coeur d’Alene. It was empty. Whatever was in it went out a loading door six hours ahead of us.”
“The second.”
“Changed plates twice inside four hours. Then they split the load into two vans past the Montana line.” He stops. “There’s a weighbridge on that road. One of those vans is carrying something that weighs more than a person is supposed to.”
“The dragon.”
“That’s my reading.”
“You’re certain?”
“No. I’m going anyway.” He turns his hands over. “Faine’s given me four people and a month. I’ll take longer if I need it. If she pulls me off it I’ll do it without her.”
“Then take a fifth.”
Crowe doesn’t answer.
“I’ve been inside two of their buildings,” I say. “I know their paperwork. How they operate. I’ll be useful.”
“No.”
“You haven’t considered it.”
“I considered it on the drive up.” He rubs his eyes. “There’s a price on your head. It came down through the trade a week after the quarry. Every dealer between here and the coast knows the number.”
“I’ll manage.”
“You won’t.”
“I’ve managed before.”
“You managed because you wanted to come home afterward.” He says it bluntly. “I’ve had thirty years of men sitting across a desk volunteering for work. I know what it sounds like when one of them doesn’t care how it ends.”
“That’s a confident reading.”
“I watched you walk into that compound after I told you four times not to.” He sits back. “You did that with something to lose. I’m not standing next to you while you do it with nothing.”
I don’t deny it.
“Say I’m wrong,” Crowe says.
I can’t.
He waits. He is better at it than anyone I have ever known. The answer I don’t give him tells him everything he needs to know.
Then I notice he hasn’t stood up to go.
“What are you not saying?”
A car door shuts at the bottom of the track.
I’m on my feet. “Crowe.”
“I know.”
“Tell me you didn’t.”
“I’ve been up here twenty minutes trying to work out how to say it.” He stands.
Her heartbeat comes up the path ahead of her, faster than a walk accounts for.
Then she’s in the doorway. She’s in an oversized coat and boots that aren’t hers. Her hair is pushed back off her face, and there’s a crease down one cheek from hours against a car window. She stops on the step with her hands at her sides and doesn’t come in.
She looks at Crowe first.
“You’ve had long enough.”
“I have.”
“I gave you twenty minutes. I counted them.”
“You did.” Crowe turns to me. “For the record, I told her not to come. Before we left, and in the car. She listened to all of it.”
Of course she did. And she ignored it.
“You brought her here.”
“She’d have found another way, and it would have been worse.” He picks his hat up off the table. “Faine’s people are on the road below. Nobody followed us, and she hasn’t been out of my sight since that mountain.”
“That is not the point.”
“It’s the part I can do something about.”
Serenity comes in as far as the middle of the room. Under the frost on her coat and the smell of gas on her hands, there is warm skin and clean hair. My whole mouth floods, and I turn my face away before either of them sees it.
“You told him about the trucks?” she says.
“All that we know so far,” Crowe says.
She turns to me. “He’s going to find her. Kalli. He promised.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Say it properly with him here to witness it.”
“I promise I’ll find her.” He looks straight at her. “It might take a year. It might take longer. I don’t know what I’ll find. I’m going anyway.”
“If anyone reaches her, it’s him,” I say.
“I really hope he can.” Serenity pinches her lips together.
“Right.” Crowe puts the hat on. “I’ll be at the bottom of the track for an hour. After that I’m on the road.”
He goes. I listen for his engine, and it doesn’t come, which means he’s going to sit down there in the dark until she tells him one way or the other.
Then it’s the two of us in an empty house.
“Go with him,” I say.
“No.”
“You were safe. You were inside a mountain full of armed people, with your sister and a doctor.” I put both hands on the back of the chair because they need somewhere to be.
“There is a price on my head. There are men being paid to find out what I care about. You have driven six hours to stand here where anybody can see you.”
“We’ll get to safe,” she says. “First we’re doing the other thing. You put me in a car while I was unconscious and you gave me away. You didn’t ask me.”
“There wasn’t anything to ask.”
“There was one thing to ask.” It comes out of her hard enough to fill the room. Her eyes have filled, and she’s furious about that too.
I don’t respond.
“You didn’t want the answer,” she says. “If I’d said stay, you’d have had to be the one who decided. So you did it while I was asleep. That’s cowardice.”
“Yes.”
She stops.
“Don’t do that.”
“It’s true. Now go back to the mountain. It’s the safest place you can be.”
“No, it isn’t. There is no safest place.
” She takes a step toward me. “Listen to me. The danger isn’t standing next to you.
The danger is my blood, and my blood goes where I go.
Aurora had me for three days, and I walked out of it past sixty armed people, because I can do that, because of what I am.
If I can walk out, someone else can walk in. ”
“Aurora is still a fortress.”
“Aurora is a truly bizarre collection of people in a hole in a mountain.” She keeps coming. “And you have more money than the Court. Walls can be bought. Guards can be bought. If safe is what you want for me, build it. Build it around both of us. That problem has a price on it, and you can pay it.”
She’s right, and she can see on my face that she’s right, so I give her the next one.
“Then hear all of it. I’m not a good man, Serenity.
I bought you. I put a price on a woman and paid it and had you delivered to my house.
I sat at a table with your sister and let her believe you were dead.
I nearly killed you because I didn’t know when to stop feeding.
You deserve better than the man who did those things. ”
“Do you think I don’t know what you are?
” She wipes her cheek roughly with the back of her wrist. She’s crying, and she doesn’t look away.
“You handed yourself over for people you’d never met.
I found you in that room, burned and dying, and you’d given them nothing.
Only a good man does that. Everybody knows it except you. ”
“Serenity—”
“You do the right thing, and then you go and stand in a room alone so nobody can catch you at it. You’ve done it every single time. I’m tired of it.” Her chin comes up. “And I’d like you to stop telling me who I’m allowed to love.”
Love.
She said it first.
“There’s a wolf in me,” she goes on without stopping.
“You’ve never asked about her. She chose you at that compound, before I’d decided anything, and she was right.
And wolves choose once, Bastien. Nobody tells you that part.
There is no second one. So there’s no better man waiting for me somewhere.
There’s you, or there’s nobody, for the rest of my life. ”
I didn’t know that. She’s telling the truth, and I can’t argue that.
So I retreat again, and this time I hear myself doing it.
“Then it’s worse than I thought,” I say.
“Because there’s a whole life I can’t give you.
A family. Children. Vampires don’t make them.
There is no amount of money that changes it.
You could have had a man who grows old beside you, and children on the stairs, and I took the choice away the day I paid for you. I gave you back so you could have it.”
“What life is that, exactly?” She doesn’t raise her voice this time.
“My mother died running. I grew up learning to be invisible. Then a cell, for a year, while men priced my blood. Show me the part where the husband and the children were on the table. That life was never mine. You keep trying to hand me back something I never had. And my wolf doesn’t want it either.
She chose you, and she knew exactly what you were when she did it. ”
I have no reasons left to hand her, and she knows it before I do.