16. Chapter 16
Crowe
She’s asleep across the room, and I’m still in the chair. I haven’t moved much since she went under. My legs have gone stiff from sitting still this long, but I don’t get up. Getting up means walking past the bed, and I’ve had enough tests of willpower for one night.
I had her hands in my hair. I had her mouth open under mine and her back arching into my hand, and I pulled away.
I still want her. That hasn’t stopped. I’ve been sitting in this chair all night, watching her breathe, and it hasn’t got easier by one degree.
There’s enough lamp left to see her by. She’s on her side with one hand under her cheek.
Her hair has come loose and gone everywhere across the pillow in red waves.
Her face is thinner than it ought to be.
There’s a hollow under each cheekbone, and a fading mark along her jaw.
Even asleep, her mouth is set like a woman holding a position.
I only notice I’ve been looking at her for an hour when the lamp gutters. I don’t regret it. I’d do the same thing again.
And another flash takes hold of me.
Her teeth against my throat, heat coming off her skin, and this time it comes with her scent on it; soap and flowers, and beneath it, her, exactly as she smells three feet away right now.
It isn’t a stranger’s face anymore. It’s hers now, and that makes it worse.
I sit through it with my jaw locked until it passes.
I get up before it can start again.
I go out and shut the door quietly behind me.
Kent’s in the kitchen with his bag already packed, sitting on the counter with his boots off.
“Faine called,” he says. “We’re expected. Properly this time.”
“When?”
“An hour ago. You were busy.” He doesn’t ask what with, and I don’t offer. “She wants us back. Court business, whatever that means this week. She said it in the voice.”
“The voice.”
“You know the voice.”
I know the voice.
“You did good work,” I tell him. “Both of you.”
“I got to meet a dragon.” He grins, and I can see there are going to be stories he tells about this month that will get bigger with every telling. He hops off the counter and shoulders the bag. “Take care of her, Crowe.”
“I intend to.”
“I know you do. Take care of yourself while you’re at it.”
Meyer’s at the door already, bag over one shoulder, watching the road.
“Faine’s men will be shortly,” he says. “We’ll meet them at the crossroads.”
“Understood.”
He doesn’t move to go yet.
“Your hands,” he says.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing. Just make sure they don’t shake when she’s around.”
“Noted.”
“Good.”
He goes. The truck starts outside, and then it’s driving away, and the house is silent. Two fewer people in it. Somehow, that makes it feel smaller.
I sit out the daylight in the kitchen with the shutters shut, and it’s late in the afternoon before I go back in to her.
She’s awake when I open the door, sitting up against the headboard with the blanket around her shoulders, watching me steadily.
“They gone?”
“Yes.”
She pulls the blanket tighter. “What now?”
“Aurora.”
“Who’s Aurora?”
“It’s an organization. People who’ll know how to help you better than I can. There are dragons there. And security. And a name that means something to the people who did this to you.” I sit down in the same chair I never left last night. “It’s the only place I know that can actually help properly.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Not thinking it over; I’ve watched her think things over, and this isn’t that. This is a woman checking whether she has any objection and finding none.
“All right,” she says. “Aurora.”
“That’s it? No argument?”
“You want one?”
“No.”
“Then don’t sound disappointed that you’re not getting one.” She swings her legs off the bed, and then she stops and looks down at herself, at the shirt hanging to her knees and the cuffs over her hands. “Is there anything else to wear in this house?”
“No.”
“So I arrive at Aurora in your clothes?”
“You do.”
She takes that in. Then she rolls one cuff back twice, and then the other.
“Ten minutes,” she says.
We’re on the road minutes before full dark, in a different truck, heading south on a highway with no name I care about. She sits with her knees up and her arms around them, watching the dark go by, and neither of us says one word about last night.
She’s careful not to. I can feel her being careful.
“You’re very quiet,” she says, an hour in.
“I’m always quiet.”
“You talked more when I was chained to a floor.”
“You asked better questions when you were chained to a floor.”
“Fine.” She turns in the seat to look at me properly. “Then I’ll ask one now. You’re a vampire, right? I mean, it’s pretty obvious, but I thought I should get it from you.”
“Yes.”
“How were you made?”
“Made?”
“Created. Whatever the word is for becoming a vampire. You weren’t born like this.”
“No.” I watch the road.
“Is it a rude question?” She tilts her head. “I don’t know much about your customs. But I’m curious. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I’ll tell you.” I keep my eyes on the road, but my thoughts are somewhere else.
“It was back in the mid-1960s. I was thirty-five. A vampire wanted a man who could move through a city without being noticed and who already knew how to find things and people. He found me first, drained me in an alley behind a warehouse, and gave me enough of his own blood back to make me what I am. Then he told me what I was for.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole story?”
“That’s the whole story. It’s not romantic. Nobody sat me down and asked if I wanted this. I was a good tool, and he needed one.”
“Are you still his?”
“He’s dead. Has been for forty years. I work for whoever I choose now. The vampires’ Nocturne Court, and others with special requirements, because the alternative is not working for anyone, and a man who doesn’t work for anyone gets noticed eventually.” I glance at her.
“So you just work for them? You don’t have a…family seat, or something?”
“I’m a Turned.” I shrug. “Not born, not ancient, not one of the old bloodlines that get invited to the good tables. I’m a few decades old, which is nothing to the ones who’ve been walking around since before your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother hatched.”
“That’s oddly specific.”
“I’ve met a few of the ancients. They like reminding you how unworthy you are.”
“Huh.” She looks at me for a while, working something out behind her eyes. “You say all of that like it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s just a fact. I didn’t choose the century I was born in either.”
“Okay,” she says, and doesn’t push further.
“Your turn,” I say. “Tell me something. Not about what they did to you back there. Something else.”
She’s quiet long enough that I think she’ll refuse it.
“I’m the Heir of the Aldrake,” she says. “Of the Eyrie Seat. Which sounds like a title out of a bad story and is actually mostly paperwork and a lot of standing very still while old men decide things for you.”
“What does an heir do?”
“Learn the clan’s holdings. Learn the treaties, the borders, who owes who a favor going back three generations.
Fly the boundary lines so the neighboring clans see you doing it and know somebody’s watching.
Sit at councils I wasn’t allowed to speak at until I was past thirty, listening to men argue about land rights.
” She shrugs, and the shirt slips off one shoulder, and she pulls it back up without noticing she’s done it.
“My grandmother ran the seat before my mother. She used to say the crown weighs more than the woman wearing it thinks it does, and less than the woman inheriting it fears. I didn’t understand that until I’d tried wearing it. ”
“Did you like it? Before.”
“I don’t know yet. I liked flying the lines. I liked my grandmother. I did not like the councils, or the paperwork, or being told my whole life was owed to people I’d never met.” She looks at me sideways. “What did you like? Before you were what you are now.”
I have to think about that. I’d forgotten how long ago it was.
“I liked being underestimated,” I say. “I was good at looking like nothing. Doors opened because nobody thought to check who was walking through them. I still like that part. It’s the one thing that survived the alley.”
“You’re not nothing now.”
“No. Now I look like exactly what I am, and people check twice. I miss the version of the job where they didn’t.”
“I like this version of you fine,” she says, and then pinches her lips together, frowning.
“Careful,” I say. “That’s twice tonight you’ve said something honest by accident.”
“I’m tired. It lowers my defenses.” She yawns, wide, and doesn’t bother hiding it. “Ask me something else. Something easier.”
“What’s your grandmother’s name?”
“Ilaria. She’d have liked you. She liked anyone who could tell her something true without dressing it up first.” Her head tips back against the seat.
“She used to say a lot of things that took me a long time to understand. I realize that there was wisdom in almost everything she said. I just needed to work it out.”
“Did you work it out?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it took years.” She sighs. Yawns again. “Sometimes I figured I’d get it eventually if I was patient.” Another yawn. “I miss her. And I—”
She stops.
Her head’s tipped all the way to one side, against the window. I hear her breathing change before I look. It slows, catches once, and goes even.
She’s out, mid-sentence. One day upright, after everything, with the drug still going out of her. Her body has stopped taking instructions.
I don’t wake her.
I drive.
The road runs straight and empty in the headlights, wet at the edges, nothing else moving on it this time of night. The heater ticks. The tires make one long sound that doesn’t change.
And the cab is full of her. Soap, and warm skin, and dragonfire. She’s put out warmth since the moment she got in, and I’ve had the window cracked for hours to make it easier for myself.
I watch the odometer. Aurora is four hours out at this speed. Three and a half if I push it.
I don’t push it.
In all the years of this work, I have never once wanted a drive to take longer than it needed to. Every job I’ve ever run, I wanted done as soon as possible. Tonight I could drive in circles for a week and call it diligence.
I don’t examine that.
I drive.
Somewhere past the third hour, the land opens up and lights show along the horizon, low and scattered, and then a gate, lit white, with two guards on it who are already watching my headlights come up the road.
Aurora.
Kalli’s still asleep. In a few minutes I’m going to have to wake her, walk her through that gate, and hand her to people who are going to look at who she is and start making plans about what she’s for. Her own kind. Councils. Men who’ll decide things for her the way they always have.
I haven’t thought once, until this exact second, about what handing her over is going to feel like.
I slow the truck at the gate and tell myself it’s for the best.