7. Erik
Erik
Her sentences are losing words off the ends.
She’d deny it. Ten minutes ago she declared this arrangement medical and appointed herself its supervisor, and now her head is doing a slow dip and recover, dip and recover, and her heartbeat has gone soft and slow under the quiet of the room, and nobody has to say anything.
“Bed,” I say.
“I have questions.”
“You can have them in the morning.”
“They’re time-sensitive.”
“They’re four hundred years old. They’ll keep.”
She wants to argue. I watch her look for the argument and come back empty-handed, which tells me more about how done she is than anything else tonight.
She lets me pull her up out of the chair, and she lets my arm stay around her on the stairs, and she complains the entire way, which is how I know she’s all right.
“I’m still mad at you.”
“I know.”
“You had no business going in my apartment.”
“I know.”
“You were spying.”
“I was.”
“That’s creepy.”
“…A little.”
“A lot.”
“…A lot.”
I’m not defending myself. I lost that argument at dinner and I deserved to lose it, and there is something that feels right about being told exactly what I did wrong by a woman who is leaning on me while she does it.
The bedroom at the end of the hall has always been hers. No one has ever used it. Nobody discussed it. It’s the warm one, over the kitchen, with the window that catches all four moons. I steer her in and she sits down on the edge of the bed all at once.
“You poked around about Kyle.”
“I’m sorry.”
“…But then you saved me from Kyle. At the coffee shop.”
“I did.”
She lies down. I pull the blanket over her, and she lets me, watching my face the whole time with eyes that are three-quarters closed and entirely too sharp.
“And then you weren’t there when he came back.”
My hands stop on the blanket.
“I know.” It comes out in a whisper. It’s all I have.
“But Muffin was.”
“Yeah.”
“And Muffin is Leif.”
“Apparently.”
“So Leif was there.”
“He was.”
She’s quiet long enough that I think she’s gone under.
“I’m glad he was,” she says.
She has no idea what she just gave him. She’d deny it in the morning. I’ll deliver it to Leif anyway — word for word, at some hour she can’t hear me do it. She’s been handing things out all night without knowing, and I’ve decided none of them are getting handed back.
“Stay with me?”
My heart does something I’ve only ever heard hers do.
“Elara…”
“Just until I fall asleep.” A yawn takes her whole face. “I don’t think it’ll take long.”
Three years of hallways. Three years of the right distance — twelve feet, a wall, a closed door, every night. And she asks like it’s a small thing, half-asleep, already sliding under. It is a small thing. To her. Tonight.
I take my boots off. I lie down on top of the blanket, careful, along the far edge of a bed with plenty of room in it.
She closes the distance without opening her eyes.
She rolls into me, and her head lands on my chest, and her hand comes up and takes a fistful of my shirt, and she settles with a low, content sound I have never once heard her make through that wall.
I hold very still, because the woman is asleep on the surface and the thing underneath her is not, and I know exactly which one of them just moved.
Her breathing goes long and slow.
With nothing left to guard, my mind wanders two realms over to her refrigerator.
The milk I bought her Saturday, standing in the dark of an empty apartment, going bad on a schedule nobody is left to care about.
Her deadline. Her mother, who answers on the second ring, calling a phone that’s on a counter in another world.
The list of things I am going to have to solve has gotten strange, and I add to it in the dark until her fingers twitch against my chest and pull my attention home.
Then, from the very edge of sleep, quiet and clear.
“You left me alone, Erik.”
In the clearing it was an accusation. This is worse. This is just true, said in the dark by someone too tired to aim it, and it covers all three years at once — every night I stood close enough to hear her and let her believe she was alone in the world.
“I’m so sorry.” My fingers are in her hair. I don’t remember deciding that. “It will never happen again.”
“Mm. You owe me.”
“I know.”
“Forever.”
“Gladly.”
“Until the day you die.”
“…Longer.”
She’s asleep before I finish. Gone, mid-grievance, her breath spreading warm through my shirt. I lie there in the dark of a realm she didn’t know existed this morning, smiling at the ceiling, because she’s sounding like herself again and the price is more than fair.
I stay until her grip on my shirt lets go on its own.
Then I slide out slow and tuck the blanket up over her shoulder.
One foot has escaped it, sole printed with the whole three-hour walk — the strap-line of those ridiculous sandals crossed over the arch like a brand.
Salve, tomorrow, before she’s up. I cover the foot, and press my lips to her forehead, once, light enough not to register.
I turn around.
Gunnar is in the doorway.
Shoulder against the frame, arms crossed, and his eyes go straight past me to her — the shape of her under the blanket, the slow rise and fall. He came upstairs to confirm it with his own eyes.
We look at each other. There’s nothing to say and neither of us says it.
He pushes off the frame and walks downstairs. I follow.
The living room has pulled itself in around the fire.
Brock is on the floor with his back against one end of the couch, and when Gunnar drops onto the cushion above him it doesn’t look planned.
It never does. I take the hearth, boots on the patch of stone worn pale by centuries of exactly this. On the windowsill, Gerald.
For a while nobody says anything. The fire works through a log. Upstairs, her breathing stays slow and even — all five of us can hear it, and all five of us are listening, and nobody pretends otherwise anymore.
“Well,” Gunnar says finally. “That was almost catastrophic.”
Nobody asks what he means.
“If she had shifted,” Leif says, “there would have been no controlling it. Not a first shift. Not out of panic.”
“There wouldn’t be a house left,” Rayner says. Calm. Factual.
Nods around the fire.
“But you all felt it,” Brock says. He’s been quiet, and when Brock has been quiet, what comes next has been checked twice. “What it did. When it couldn’t shift.”
Silence.
“It reached for us,” Leif says.
“She’s ours,” Gunnar says. Flat.
“Yes.” Leif looks at the fire. “But that’s not what tonight was.”
Everyone waits.
“Tonight went the other direction. Her dragon didn’t reach for comfort. It didn’t reach for one of us. It reached for all five, in the dark, in a body that has never done this before — and it settled when it had us.”
He looks up.
“Her dragon knows we’re hers.”
The fire pops. Nobody moves.
Rayner’s whole face eases, like a man hearing confirmation of something his heart decided years ago. And Gunnar is looking at the fire like it insulted him. His jaw works. The joke assembles behind his teeth, and I watch him load it, and aim it, and — put it down.
“All five of us,” he says instead. Quiet.
“All five,” Leif says. He looks back at the fire. “The Vestry isn’t going to like that.”
I take a breath as they all nod.
No one wants to hear it, but it’s the truth.
Nobody asks what we do about it. There’s nothing to discuss.
Upstairs, a woman is asleep over the kitchen with her fist still curled where my shirt used to be, her breath riding slow and even through the floorboards, and on the windowsill Gerald’s leaves have turned, all of them, toward the ceiling above the stairs, and the five of us sit with the fire burning down and listen to her sleep — which is a thing I did alone for three years, through a wall, in the dark, and will apparently never do alone again.
If they want her, they’re going to have to go through all five of us first.