37. Chapter 37
Kalli
It’s finally snowing properly, fat flakes instead of thin ones, and I stand in the yard rubbing my arm, which is protesting against the cold weather.
Gideon is across the yard arguing with one of the youngsters about whether a vampire can be cold, which he clearly can, going by how close he’s standing to the fire barrel while he insists otherwise.
Two of the boys who used to go quiet around him are teaching him a game with a ball and a wall.
He’s terrible at it. Nobody is being polite about how terrible he is.
Then the sound comes up out of the valley, and every head in that yard turns at once.
I know what it is before I see it. I’ve just never heard one from up here.
“That’s for us,” Gideon says when he reaches me.
“A helicopter.”
“Bastien sent it. He’d rather we came to him than sat in a truck for two days, and he isn’t a man who enjoys being told no.”
It clears the rock and comes down onto the flat ground beyond the gate, and the snow goes up in a ring around it, and half the mountain comes out to look.
“Why have we never done this before?” I say. “Any of it. There were people in that compound, and you drove.”
“Because a machine like that tells everybody within fifty miles exactly where it’s going.” He watches it settle. “Your people have been hidden two hundred years. Nobody was going to land one here while you were keeping your clan private.”
“And now?”
“Now the Cravens have flown onto this rock, and Aurora has your clan on its books, and your mother has taken a call from a vampire lord.” He shrugs. “You’re not hidden anymore, Kalli. That happened three weeks ago. This is just the first time anyone’s said it out loud.”
My mother comes out through the arch while I’m still looking at it.
She’s dressed for the yard, not for a council, and Hesper is behind her with a coat she has plainly refused to put on. She stops beside me and looks at the helicopter the way she’d look at a badly parked truck.
“I don’t like it,” she says.
“Nobody asked you to.”
“No.” She gives a delicate sniff, then takes in a breath. “Before you go. There’s something I want to discuss with you.”
Aldis is at the gate. Hesper is two steps back with the coat. Half a dozen others have stopped what they were doing.
“I’ve been thinking about the seat,” my mother says. “I’ve come to know your vampire, and I can see why you chose him. I’ve had time since to sort out which of my original reservations were principle and which were pride.” She looks at me. “So I’m asking, once. Come back to the line.”
“No.”
Nobody in the yard moves.
“Not forever,” I tell her. “But not now. I’m not taking it back as a prize for having survived something, and there’s work I have to do first.”
“Then who holds it while you’re off doing whatever you’re about to tell me you’re doing?”
“You do. The way you have been.”
“I’m not young, Kalli.”
“You’re not old either. Stop fishing for sympathy you don’t need.”
One corner of her mouth lifts and settles. I don’t often tease my mother, and I let myself laugh at it, and then she puts her hand on the side of my face for a second in front of everybody, which is worse.
Before I turn to leave, she presses a folded note into my palm. “Kaevor came to me. He found a source. South. A man who knows the country Renwick works in.”
“Thank you.”
“I should have been working on this with you from the start.” She says it plainly. “I wanted that said before you got in that infernal machine.”
Aldis opens the gate for us and doesn’t say anything at all, and doesn’t need to.
Bastien’s estate takes two hours and looks like nothing I expected. Old stone, deep windows, shutters on every one of them, and a man in a dark coat waiting on the steps who has been alive for four hundred years and looks faintly annoyed about the weather.
“You’re late, Crowe,” he says to Gideon.
“You sent the helicopter.”
“I sent it early. That was the point of sending it.”
We end up in a long room with a lit hearth and far too much food for the number of people, which I understand within ten minutes is Serenity’s doing and not his.
Odile is already there, lounging elegantly in an overstuffed armchair with a young man rubbing her shoulders.
Caleb Craven is at the far end with Dorian.
Torbjorn is by the fire, taking up most of it.
Odile doesn’t bother with hello.
“Negotiations are underway for Roland Vex’s release.”
“When?”
“Terms are being drawn up now. Creed’s negotiating it.” She turns her glass. “I think that man interferes altogether too much in Aurora business.”
“You’ve thought about him a good deal,” Bastien says, from the window.
“I’ve thought about the terms.”
“Of course.”
Odile looks at him with an expression I’d pay money for and then turns back to me like the exchange didn’t happen.
“Torbjorn’s people have had eyes on the crossing for two weeks.”
“Three,” Torbjorn says.
“Two weeks that were any use.” She doesn’t miss a beat. “His ground borders the country Renwick’s trucks move through. He’s usually right about what happens up there after the melt.”
“Usually,” Torbjorn says.
“Don’t doubt yourself, Torbjorn.”
It’s the second time she’s said his name warmly in five minutes, and she still hasn’t heard herself do it. Serenity catches my eye and very deliberately says nothing.
“There’s still Renwick,” I say, once the Vex business is finished with. “The house. The women they’re planning to take there.”
The room goes quiet in a different way.
“Still running,” Caleb says. “But not for long. We want it built slow and airtight. The clans are unforgiving, but there will be resistance to interfering with ancients if we don’t have our facts right.”
“Then we get them right,” I say. “I’ll see to it personally.”
Nobody argues with me. Gideon, beside me, doesn’t either. He goes very still, which is what he does instead of arguing, and I know he’s already decided something and will tell me when he’s ready.
“There’s a woman in that house called Mrs. Nell,” I tell the room. “Human. She’s the one who takes care of the women.”
“Then she’s the one who talks,” Odile says. “Good. That’s a name I can work with.”
“One thing’s still open,” Gideon says. He hasn’t spoken since we sat down. “Somebody walked out of the Ondrathe hall the night Sereth died. Nobody has seen them since.”
“The gate log’s been checked twice,” Caleb says. “Aldis did it himself.”
“They’re not in it.”
Odile sets her glass down. “Then they didn’t have to sign it.”
Nobody answers that. I think about the four hundred people who watched them bury me, and the one of them who is still sleeping under the same rock I do.
Serenity gets me out of that room before the food is finished, on the excuse of showing me the gallery, which is a lie we both accept.
“We haven’t had enough time together,” she says.
“There’s been a lot going on,” I say.
“I know! Who would have thought we’d go from whispering through a cell wall to finding our mates and becoming part of an international trafficking task force in a couple of months?”
“Sometimes things turn out the way they’re supposed to,” I say.
“You mean like Fate?”
“Yes, like Fate.” I smile at her, then realize my fingertips are tracing the faint puncture marks on my throat when her eyes linger there.
“You’ve been rubbing your thumb over your throat all evening,” she says once the door’s shut.
“That obvious, huh?”
“Don’t worry, I do it too, though mine are gone as soon as he makes them.”
“Really? It takes a day or two for mine to close, and even then, my dragon likes to keep the mark there.”
“Bastien can heal them. Something to do with being an ancient.”
“Gideon’s a Turned. He says the younger lines don’t have the same powers. He thinks of himself as a lesser line.”
“Does that bother you?” she asks.
“Are you kidding? I’ve spent my life fighting against the expectations of royalty. I love being with someone who just wants me as me…does that make sense?”
“Well, I can’t speak from experience, but I’ll admit that there’s something appealing about being with a man who’s addicted to you.” She grins. “Is it the same for you?”
I feel my ears burn. “A bit. My blood makes him go warm. Like he’s human again. He’d probably drain me dry if he wasn’t such a gentleman about it.”
“Wouldn’t bother me,” she laughs. “The rush when they feed is—”
I hold up a hand. “Stop right there!”
“Okay, okay, too much information!”
“There’s one thing that bothers me though,” I admit.
“That you can’t get a mate mark on him?”
My eyes widen. “You too? It’s gone by morning. Every time.”
“Mine close over in under a minute,” she says.
I stop walking.
“Under a minute. I’ve had my teeth in that man’s shoulder, and by the time I’ve sat back there’s nothing there at all.” Her voice is dry. “You get till morning. I’ve been jealous of you for about four seconds.”
“Serenity—”
“I know.” She leans back against the paneling. “It isn’t funny. My wolf wants the entire world to know that he’s ours and we can’t make it stick.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I’d already marked him.” She turns her hand over, palm down. “He has a scar, knuckle to wrist bone, that I put there. The only scar on him in four hundred years. I opened a shutter while he was asleep, and the sun got across his hand before I could shut it.”
“You opened a shutter with a vampire in the room? What were you thinking?”
“I said I wanted to see what was outside, but if I’m honest with myself it was more. He’d paid for me, and I thought I was his prisoner. I think there was a very tiny part of myself that knew I could have escaped then.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t. I think that’s when I knew. At least my human part knew, because my wolf had known all along.”
“You nearly killed him.”
“I nearly killed him. And that’s the mark that stayed.” She gives a wry smile. “He says that’s the day I marked him, and as far as he’s concerned, he’s officially claimed. Have you considered that there might be something similar between the two of you?”
I don’t answer right off, because I’m going back through weeks, and I’m arriving somewhere.
“He said he had visions of me,” I tell her. “Of my dragon claiming him.”
“Really?” She frowns. “When?”
“He mentioned a quarry rescue. I don’t know what that means.”
Her eyes go wide. “Ohhh! Oh, my God, that explains it! We had to get Bastien out of a facility in a quarry. We caught sight of you just as you were being driven away. I’ve never seen Crowe so freaked out.”
“He was?”
“We thought it was just because the mission hadn’t gone as planned. We’d hoped to get everyone out, but we lost some. And I knew you were among them, and I was really upset. He promised he’d find you.”
“You mean like a job?”
She shakes her head. “No, this was different. He was adamant that he was going to be the one to do it, no matter how long it took. He swore he’d get you out of there. It’s like he was fixated. Weird because he’d literally seen you once in the back of a truck.”
And my dragon saw him. And seared a picture of herself in his mind. So much makes sense now.
“We should get back,” Serenity says. “They’ll probably be done with all the logistics talk by now—and I should warn you, Aurora is all about organization and planning. Viktor’s a good man, though. He and the Collective are doing so much for those of us who don’t fit into human society.”
Everyone is dispersing as we return, and a stiff-backed older man with a heavy French accent shows us to the guest suites.
Our room has shutters on the inside of the windows, which is the first room either of us has been in that was built with Gideon in mind.
His coat is off, and his back is to me. He’s testing the catch on the shutter out of habit, the way he checks every room he’s ever walked into, and I watch him do it and decide I’m not waiting any longer.
“I worked something out tonight.”
“When you were speaking to Serenity?”
“Yes.” I lower myself onto the foot of the bed. “She asked me whether I was sure I hadn’t already marked you.”
He turns around.
“The picture you used to get,” I say. “Before you found me.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“That was her, my dragon. She burned us into your mind.” My voice isn’t behaving properly. “I marked you before I knew who you were. And it’s never left you.”
“No,” he says, his thumb moving over the smooth skin of his throat. “It hasn’t.”
“Did the visions fade?”
“Not once.”
“Then I did mark you.” I have to stop for a second and start again. “I marked you before I ever laid a hand on you, and there is nothing that can take that off, no matter how much vampire healing you have.”
He comes across the room and stands over me.
“Kalli—”
“I’m not finished.” I get hold of the front of his shirt, because I need something in my hands for the next part. “I told my mother I love you. I said it to her the night I came back, standing in her rooms. I’ve been carrying it around ever since, because I said it to the wrong person first.”
He goes completely still.
“I love you, Gideon Crowe.”
He doesn’t answer.
I make myself stay still and wait him out.
Then he goes down onto his knees, so that we’re eye to eye, and puts a hand either side of my jaw.
“Nobody ever gave me a reason to learn how to say that,” he says.
“You don’t have to—”
“I love you too, princess.”
“I’m not a princess anymore.”
“You’ll always be one to me. And I love you.
I loved you in a loading bay before I knew what your voice sounded like.
I loved you on every road between there and that mountain, and I’ve tried to find another word for it, and there isn’t one.
” His thumbs move once under my eyes. “I’ll still be saying it when there’s nobody left who remembers either of us. ”
I get hold of him with both arms and put my face in his shoulder, and nothing I do for the next while is graceful.
When I can talk again, he’s still on his knees and hasn’t moved an inch.
“I’m yours, Kalli,” he says, into my hair. “Every night I’ve got left, for as long as I’ve got them. Forever.”
“Good,” I say. “Because forever is exactly how long I plan to keep you.”