30. Chapter 30
Kalli
I walk and walk until I stop thinking about anything except the road under my boots. Two-lane blacktop with pine on both sides and nothing else. No houses. Three vehicles all morning, and every one of them went past.
I check my pockets, because I already know what’s in them and I want to be sure anyway.
I have almost no money. I left with almost none, and there has been nowhere to spend it.
I have no ID. Nothing that says who I am, or who I was.
What I own is the coat I’m wearing, a bag with one change of clothes in it, and my grandmother’s ring under the sleeve.
I’m not going to stand on a road and feel sorry for myself about it. I’ve had less than this before, and worse company.
I could fly. Some stubborn part of me wants to, because my skin is asking for it.
You should have thought this through, you idiot.
I don’t know a lot about the world outside our clan territories aside from the bits I picked up on occasional trips into nearby towns, masquerading as human. Plus what I learned while I was in captivity, which isn’t much.
I don’t know where I’m going. I know Aurora sits in the mountains outside Seattle.
That’s a state and a guess. It isn’t somewhere to land.
And I’m not going up over towns and highways in daylight with people down there to see it.
Not while I’m tired. If I come down wrong, I come down where somebody sees it.
So I walk.
I walk through the last of the light and keep walking after it’s gone. Some time later, a truck slows behind me and taps its horn twice. Friendly. Not urgent.
The woman who leans across the seat to shove the door open has gray hair under a ball cap and a face that’s spent forty years outside. The truck bed behind her is stacked with feed sacks. The cab smells of grain dust and cold coffee.
“You look like you’ve had a night,” she says.
“Something like that.”
“Get in. I’m going as far as the co-op in Danby, but that’ll put you somewhere with a phone.” She waits until the door’s shut before she pulls back onto the road. “Boyfriend?”
“No.”
“You sure? Man trouble’s the only kind that gets a woman walking a county road at this hour in a dusty coat.” She glances over. “You eat?”
“Not since yesterday.”
She reaches behind her seat one-handed, eyes still on the road, and comes up with a paper sack. “Egg sandwich. My husband made two, and I only eat one. Don’t tell him I gave his away; he’ll sulk about it for a week.”
I take it, because I don’t know how to say no to her, and because my hands are shaking a little and I think it’s hunger.
The sandwich is cold and a bit dry, and it’s the best thing I’ve eaten in longer than I want to think about.
“This means a lot. Thank you,” I say, and my voice comes out rough.
“For a sandwich?” She laughs, one short bark of it. “Honey, it’s an egg sandwich, not a kidney.”
I don’t know what to do with her. Kindness is something I’m not used to. I look out the window at the dark until my throat lets go.
She drops me at a gas station on the edge of Danby with a pay phone bolted to the wall outside, tells me the number for a cab if I need one, and pulls back onto the road without waiting to see what I do next. She never asked my name. I never gave it.
I stand in front of that phone longer than I need to.
Serenity gave me her number the last time I saw her. She wrote it on a scrap of paper, closed my hand around it, and told me to use it if I ever needed anything. I said I wouldn’t. I’ve kept it ever since.
I lift the receiver and dial. It rings twice.
“This is Serenity.”
“It’s Kalli.”
There’s a pause, short, and then her voice drops the polite edge it opened with. “Kalli? Oh, my God! Where are you?”
“A gas station. A town called Danby. I left the Eyrie and the clan, and I don’t have—” I stop, because I don’t know how to say that without it sounding like begging. I’ve never been good at begging even when I meant it.
“You don’t have to finish it,” she says. “Danby, you said?”
“Yes.”
I hear her talking to someone in the background.
“Stay where you can be seen,” she says when she’s back on the line. “Somebody’s coming.” A pause, and when she speaks again there’s something warmer in it. “It’s good to hear from you.”
“You too,” I say. It isn’t enough, but it’s all I’ve got.
I sit on a bench outside the gas station because she told me to stay where I can be seen, and there’s nothing else to do with the hours.
The sun comes up. A few trucks pull in for gas and pull back out. Nobody looks at me twice, which, after the scrutiny at the Eyrie, is a relief.
I turn my grandmother’s ring once around my finger and put my hands back in my pockets. Just days ago, a woman was reading me the date of my own wedding. Today I’m a stranger on a bench outside a gas station, no title, no seat. And it bothers me less than it should.
This is better, my dragon says, quiet. We never wanted it anyway.
I don’t answer her. I don’t need to. She’s been right about nearly everything since the yard, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.
It’s hours before a car turns into the lot, dark and plain and going faster than the limit allows.
Serenity is out of the passenger side before it’s fully stopped, and she doesn’t slow down for the last ten feet.
She gets both arms around me, and I stand there a second too long before I remember how to do this back.
“Hello, little wolf,” I say into her shoulder, and it draws a sound out of her that’s almost a laugh.
“You look terrible.”
“You look like you’ve been eating.”
“I have. It’s one of the many good parts of being out of that shithole.” She pulls back and holds onto my arms, turning me toward the light, looking me over from my face to my hands and back. “You walked off a mountain and gave up a title to get here. Do you know how that sounds, said out loud?”
“Like the only thing I could have done.”
“Like exactly that.” She smiles, and something in my chest that’s been tight since the road lets go a little. “Get in the car, Kalli. It took us eight hours to get here, and Bastien is already losing his shit.”
We arrive at dusk, and Aurora looks the same as it did the last time I was here.
The room they take me to isn’t big. A table, a handful of chairs, and a window that looks out on trees and water instead of clouds.
Viktor is already there, standing instead of sitting.
Caleb Craven is against the wall with his arms crossed in a way that looks casual and isn’t.
Bastien comes in behind us and shuts the door.
Nobody asks me to sit and wait for a briefing. Nobody hands me anything to sign. Serenity pulls out a chair, and I take it, because I feel too shaky to stand.
“You have a lot to tell us,” says Viktor. “Start at the beginning.”
So I do. I lay it out the way I laid it out for my mother, except this time I don’t stop when somebody’s face changes.
“And my mother knows,” I say. “She’s known since the first week. She’s decided not to investigate, because uncovering anything means tearing the clan apart to find who did it, and she’d rather keep the peace.”
Nobody tells me I’m imagining a plot in my own grief. Nobody tells me it’s a private matter, best handled quietly, best handled by people who know the family.
Caleb doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and when he does, his voice is very even.
“Your clan isn’t known anywhere.”
I shake my head. “They keep to themselves. They always have.”
“Then as far as the rest of the world is concerned, there is no Heir of the Aldrake. You aren’t in any record.
Nobody official knows your clan exists, which means nobody official is ever going to ask what happened to you.
” He watches my face while he says it. “Somebody sold you. Somebody buried a stranger under your name. Your own mother has decided to leave it alone. There is nobody left in the world who can make anyone answer for any of it.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do. Not yet.” There’s nothing soft in the way he looks at me, and nothing unkind either.
“The Cravens are in. Whatever this needs. Resources, a name on it that carries weight outside your mountain, somebody in a room your mother’s council would never let a stranger into. You have it.”
I stare at him. I wasn’t ready for it to be this easy.
Strangers believed me in ten minutes. My own mother wouldn’t accept it in a month.
I don’t say that out loud. Instead, I ask the thing I’ve been wanting to ask since I walked in.
“Has anyone heard from Gideon Crowe?”
Bastien pushes off the door.
“Odile has. Twice.” He watches me while he says it. “About a week ago, and once since.”
“And?”
“He’s alive, he’s working, and he asked her to keep the rest to herself.” He grimaces. “Odile does what she says she’ll do. It’s the most irritating thing about her.”
“Working on what?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“He’s working on this.” I’m clear as I say it. “Whatever he’s doing out there, it’s this. He wouldn’t have stayed away for anything else.”
Nobody argues with me.
“Where is he?”
“She wouldn’t say that either,” Serenity says. “Only that he was speaking to a broker.”
I get up.
“Then I’ll find the broker.”
“With what?” Serenity doesn’t raise her voice. “You have no transport and no money, and you don’t know which direction anything is from here. You’d get as far as the front gate and stop.”
“Then help me find him.”
“Kalli.”
“I spent thirteen months in a room waiting for somebody to come and get me.” My voice is sharp. “He was the one who came. I’m not doing that again.”
“You’re not doing that again,” Serenity says.
“You’re doing something else, and I need you to hear the difference.
” She comes around the table and stands in front of me so I have to look at her.
“He called Odile from the road. He’ll call again.
And when he’s finished whatever he’s doing out there, he’ll come back here.
If you leave, you’re the one who’s lost. Not him. ”
I want to argue with that. I can’t, because she’s right.
I sit down.
Somebody brings food I don’t remember asking for. Somebody else takes my bag away. Caleb starts giving instructions to people who come in and go out again, and there’s work happening all around me. None of it is mine to do.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll wait.”
Serenity looks relieved.
I don’t tell her how long.