13. Chapter 13
Kalli
I wake up a little at a time. My hearing comes back first, and it’s slow.
A log settles in the fire. The light of it changes on the ceiling, and I hear the sound a second afterward.
Then I see the room. Carved wood, candles, a high white ceiling I’ve seen once before.
The suite. They’ve brought me back to the suite.
Shit!
My head is awake before the rest of me. I decide to move, and then I wait, and my body barely responds.
They’ve kept me drugged since the night Vex left bleeding. I know it from the taste in my mouth. The sweet drink, over and over, making me gag.
I run the check I always run. Where am I? What’s on me? What can I move? The answers come slowly, one at a time, and none of them is good. I’m on the wide bed in the middle of the room. My wrists are bare. They don’t need cuffs anymore; the drug does it for them. And I can move almost nothing.
I tell my hand to close. It closes, eventually, after I’ve asked it twice.
Mrs. Nell is here. She’s peeled me out of the nightdress I was wearing, and she’s arranging me on the bed, moving my bare limbs where she wants them, gentle the whole time.
“There’s a good fire tonight,” she says. “It got cold after dark. You’ll be warm enough.”
I get my head to turn. That’s all I can do.
“You’ll be all right,” she says. “It’s quicker than you think, and then it’s done, and tomorrow’s an ordinary day.”
She arranges a pitcher and a water bowl on a table nearby. “I’ve left clean cloths. For after. You won’t have to ask anyone for anything.”
She says it kindly. She means it kindly. I think I hate that most about her.
“You’ve…said this to someone. Before,” I manage to say. “In this…room.”
Her hands stop for a second. Then they go on, smoothing the sheets under me, tucking it at my shoulder.
“Rest now, Kalli,” she says.
I can’t fight. My dragon is awake, and she’s furious, but she can’t get up. That stuff they keep pouring down my throat suppresses her, and every time she pushes up, it presses her flat again.
Think, Kalli. There’s always something you can do.
I can see. I decide I’m not closing my eyes. Whatever happens in this room, it happens while I’m looking at the men who do it. Let’s see how that sits on their consciences.
Probably won’t do anything. Bastards.
I can remember, though. I start on the names while they’re still in my mind. Renwick. Mrs. Nell. Hollis. The four men from the yard, and the one with fresh nail marks down his cheek. The doctor with the tape, back at the last place. Vex, now that I have his name.
I put them in order and repeat it to be sure I remember each one.
You’ll be sorry. All of you. That’s a promise.
The door opens, and the dry, stone smell of them comes in before they do. Two dragons. The room fills with their heat.
Renwick brings the old one in.
“She’s had the full evening dose, and another, to be sure,” Renwick says. “She won’t shift, and she won’t struggle. Her body will be receptive. You’ve got until morning before the sedative thins.”
“I don’t need until morning.” Ilmar Vex stands over the bed and looks down at me. Pale yellow eyes, dry skin, a thin healing line on his cheek where I opened it.
“Of course you don’t,” Renwick agrees.
“This is what we’ve been waiting for.” Vex doesn’t look away from me while he says it.
“Second-last of my blood, Renwick. The last one is my brother’s boy, and he’s been held in detention for who knows how long.
It comes down to me. It comes down to tonight, in this room, or the Vex line ends with two old males who never bred. ”
“Then I’ll leave you to it. You have until the dose wears off. Don’t waste the hours arguing with her—she can hear you, but she can’t do anything about any of it.”
“I know how the drug works. Go.”
“Mind the fire. It’s high.” He says it the same flat way he’d warn a man about a step.
Renwick goes. Mrs. Nell folds a towel over the chair, touches my hair once, and follows him. The door closes behind them both.
Vex begins to undress. He does it slowly, and he isn’t rough, and he isn’t cruel. He’s an old man getting ready for a piece of work he’d rather have finished already. He sets his coat over the chair. He works at a cuff.
“This is a great honor for you, girl,” he says. “Keeping the clan line alive. Your name will be remembered.”
I keep my eyes open. I keep them on his face. “Fuck you,” I hiss.
“Unbecoming.” He shakes his head. “It will be a good thing that my child will be raised by those with respect for the true ways.” He unbuttons his shirt to reveal a pale, bony chest. He has to be millennia old. Dragons age so slowly that I don’t think I’ve ever met one who looks like him.
He stands at the foot of the bed and runs his eyes over my naked body. His nostrils flare and my skin prickles. But it doesn’t matter what that drug has done to my body. I’m sick to my stomach.
Get up. Get up, dammit!
He reaches for the front of his pants, and my flesh crawls. It takes everything in me not to squeeze my eyes shut and try to wish him away. But I won’t give him the satisfaction. I growl low in my throat and glare at him with every bit of disgust I can muster. Which is a lot of disgust.
And then my dragon comes up.
Not at him. At the door. She surges against the drug all at once, hard, her focus aimed at the wood. I don’t understand it, because I’ve felt this on the road and I’ve never once known what it means.
Something hits the wall outside. Heavy. Then shouting, close, and running.
Vex turns toward the door with his fly undone.
The door comes apart.
He’s in the room before the pieces of it hit the floor, and the smell of him comes with him. Blood, a lot of it; human, I’m sure of it. Cold night air comes off his coat. And under both, nothing; no sweat, no heat, no living smell at all.
He’s bigger in a doorway than I remembered. His mouth is red. There’s blood on both his hands and more of it down one sleeve, and his teeth are down, white and long. I have never seen anything move as fast as he moves across this room.
I should be afraid of a thing that looks like that with the blood still on it.
I’m not. My dragon comes straight up at the sight of him, all of her, harder than she’s come up for anyone. Heat floods my chest, and my mouth waters and my whole drugged body tries to turn toward him at once.
Gideon Crowe.
Vex shifts. Not all the way—his back bows and dark scales break up his arms, and his hands go to claws—half a dragon in a bedroom. He’s bigger than Gideon now. He’s older than anything else in this valley.
It doesn’t help him.
“What is the meaning of this?” he roars, voice roughened by the beast sharing his body.
The vampire doesn’t respond. Not with words. And I can already see that this is not a fair fight.
Vex has been valuable for his bloodline his whole long life…but nothing more than that. It’s clear that he has never had to fight anybody. Gideon crosses the space and takes him off his feet before the shift is even finished.
Even drugged, I flinch as he crashes to the floor. Something cracks, and he screams, but it doesn’t deter his attacker.
After that it’s fast, and it’s ugly, and I watch all of it because I said I would. A claw opens the vampire’s shoulder to the bone.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” the half-dragon snarls, sweeping a huge arm in a wide arc.
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Gideon doesn’t slow down. He gets a hand around the old dragon’s jaw and an arm across him and drives him down. There’s a wet sound, and a scream. Vex goes down against the foot of the bed and stays there.
He doesn’t die quickly. He works at the carpet with one clawed hand for a while, slow, and then the scales sink back under his skin as he goes, until it’s just an old man on the floor. The rasping sounds grow quieter. Then they stop.
Crowe stands over him with blood running down his own arm and doesn’t wait for him to die. He turns to the bed. To me.
Then the door fills up again.
Renwick comes through the broken frame with two men behind him. He sees the floor, and he stops.
He isn’t openly angry. His face has gone gray.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” he says. He’s quiet. He doesn’t raise his voice once. “That was the last strong male of the Vex line. There’s only one more alive, and he can’t breed where he is. Fourteen hundred years, and you’ve ended it in a bedroom. Over a woman.”
“Then it should have ended sooner,” Crowe says.
“You have no idea what you’ve cost. Not his people. All of us.” Renwick’s eyes go to me on the bed and back. “There are fewer of us every year. Men like you are why.”
“Men like me are why she’s leaving.”
Two more men come through the door behind Renwick. Not his team. They’re here with the vampire. I recognize one from the night in the van. The other is older. Both of them are as cold as Gideon, and both look lethal.
“Get them!” Renwick barks at the men he brought with him.
The newcomers exchange glances, and the room turns into a fight.
I see about a third of it. I’m flat on a bed in the middle of it, and I can’t lift my head more than a hand’s width, so I catch parts of it. The older one drives one of the guards into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. The man slides down it and crumples.
“Door’s clear,” he says. “Get the rest.”
The younger one is somewhere to my left, low and fast. A gun goes off twice. He takes it out of the man’s hands; there’s another sickening crunch, and it doesn’t go off again. Renwick shouts a name. A man answers it once. He doesn’t answer the second shout.
A body comes down across the end of the bed and rolls onto the mattress by my feet before sliding off.
A chair breaks somewhere to my right. The candles go over, and I smell the smoke off the carpet before I see it, acrid wool smoke curling up past the foot of the bed, and nobody stops to deal with it.
I can’t help any of it, and I can’t get away from it. I lie there, and I keep my eyes moving, and pray for my dragon to do something.
Then a hand slides under my back and another under my knees, and I know it’s him before I see him, because he’s cold and everything else in this room is hot.
He pulls a blanket off the bed, gets it around me one-handed, and lifts me off the mattress against his chest. My head rolls against his arm, and he moves it back without being asked and without slowing down.
There’s blood on the arm under my cheek.
His shoulder is open where the claw got him, but he holds me on that side anyway.
“You came,” I tell him. My voice comes out slow and far away, and I don’t sound like myself. “My dragon said you would. She never shut up about it.”
“I said I would.”
“I said she was wrong. I said nobody was coming.” My tongue is thick, but the words come out anyway.
“You should have believed her. Hold still.”
I turn my face into his neck because it’s the only part of me that moves.
His skin is cold against my face, and I’m burning up against his.
I can’t work out why I don’t want him to set me down.
I don’t try to work it out. I cling to the front of his coat with the fingers that cooperate with me, and I don’t let go.
“There’s a wall,” I tell him. “Around the whole valley.”
“I know.”
“You can’t get out.”
“I know that too. Quiet now. Save it.”
He carries me out through the broken door. The hallway is worse than the room. I hear it more than see it—running feet, shouting from two directions at once, a door slamming somewhere ahead, and one long sound off to the side that I don’t turn toward.
One of his men goes in front, and guards get out of his way, or they go down and don’t get up.
The other vampire comes behind us, walking backward half the time, watching the way we came.
Gideon holds me against his chest and moves fast down the middle of it and doesn’t jolt me once.
I keep my eyes open over his shoulder, and I watch the doors go past and the horrified faces in them.
A man steps out ahead of us with something in his hands. The man clearing our path takes him off his feet without breaking stride. We go over him and keep going.
“Left at the bottom,” the one behind us says. “The kitchen door. Same way we came in.”
“I know the way,” Gideon says.
“Just saying it.”
Down a back stair, narrow and dark. Through a kitchen with a bubbling pot still on the stove.
Then a heavy door, and Gideon turns his shoulder into it.
It bursts open, and we’re outside. The lawn I took off from is hard and white under his boots.
The sky is full of stars. Away to the right, past the raked drive and the lamps, the gate stands shut across the only road down the mountain.
The wall is still there. I can feel it, a long way off, all the way around us, closed.
“Now what?” one of the others says, and nobody answers him, because there isn’t an answer.
We’re out of the house.
We’re nowhere near out of danger.