Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
The car is silent on the way to the lift.
I say nothing. What is there to say?
I fidget.
He notices.
He notices everything.
A guard waves us to a stop. Cáel lowers his window and hands over documents that seem to include me. The guard scans them, nods and says Cáel’s name, then looks across at me. “Hunter,” he says.
I nod politely, feeling entirely out of place, and he waves us through.
My bounty-hunter licence covers one registered working animal. From the looks of it, Cáel has included Mina as well as me.
The car enters the lift, and we begin to rise into the clouds.
In daylight, the Zone feels different. Less like a dream and more like somewhere people actually live, which is almost stranger.
What I do not expect is Cáel driving towards his house.
I am glad Mina is with me. This is already too strange. I need to be somewhere public with this man, not alone in his home.
The last thing I want is to end up murdered, with Mina conscripted as an Overseer’s guard dog.
“Where are we going?” I keep my voice level. “I thought we were getting something to eat.”
“We are. You also have someone to talk to.”
At least we will not be alone.
A meeting, perhaps, with someone from a magical institution who wants to hear what I know about the runes and the Fade.
The Zone is quiet in a way the Districts never are. Below, grey-faced crowds move with the urgency of necessity. Up here, hardly anyone walks. Everyone is inside a car or behind a closed door.
There is stillness. Room to breathe.
Yet, though I grew up here, it does not feel like coming home.
We pull up outside his house. Cáel gets out and opens my door.
A proper gentleman.
I climb out with a mumbled thank you, unclip Mina’s harness, and we file through the side entrance into the utility room. Cáel leads us into the hall.
The house is clean and elegant, with pale oak flooring and wall panelling painted a soft, neutral blue. Light pours through the glass front door and turns the paint silver wherever it touches.
Then the smell reaches me.
Real food. Hot and close, rich with butter and meat. My stomach voices its approval without asking permission.
“Cáel, is Mina all right to come through?”
He glances back, his navy eyes catching the light. “Of course. Come on.”
I follow him down the hall towards what must be the kitchen. Pans clatter softly. Something sizzles, and the warm scent grows stronger.
Mina and I halt in the doorway.
The kitchen is blindingly white—hand-painted in-frame cabinets, off-white stone worktops and a table made from the same pale oak as the hallway floor. French doors open onto flagstones and an immaculate back garden, its far boundary wall pressed against the Overseer’s estate.
My sister stands at the hob.
Her dark hair is scraped into a topknot, and she holds a spatula in one hand as she flips a pancake. A yellow cashmere cardigan. Slim grey trousers. Bare feet with shell-pink toenails. Her skin carries the soft luminosity of an Immortal.
She is unmistakably Vivian.
She turns, sees me and nearly drops the pancake. Her gaze skims over my swollen jaw, split lip and the fading palm print across my cheek. Horror flashes through her expression before she swallows it.
She lifts the pan from the heat, crosses the kitchen and stops one pace away, as though suddenly uncertain whether she is allowed to come closer.
I do not move.
Then she closes the final distance and sweeps me into a hug before I can get out of the way.
I stand rigid in her arms, braced for something that does not come.
I am much shorter than she is and painfully aware that I have not washed my hair in a while, yet she kisses the top of my head regardless.
“I’ve missed you.” Her arms tighten around me. “You’re so thin. Look how small you are.” She steers me towards a chair.
Numb, I sit and stare at the table, unsure what to say.
I came through that door with my hand near a knife. I notice, distantly, that I have stopped thinking about the knife.
My sister is here.
With her fiancé.
I wish I had removed my boots. Scuff marks stand out against the white tiles. In this bright, beautiful kitchen, I am acutely aware of my clothes, my bruises and the loose strands escaping my plait.
I tuck my hair behind my ear.
“A dog!”
“She’s called Mina,” I say. “She doesn’t bite.”
Vivian crouches and extends one hand towards Mina’s nose.
Mina considers her, then gives her palm a confident lick.
“She’s beautiful. Hello, Mina. I’m your Auntie Viv.” Vivian scratches behind her ears, and Mina’s tail thumps against the floor in delighted approval.
While Vivian befriends my dog, Cáel moves to the stove and finishes cooking pancakes, sausages, bacon, tomatoes, beans and eggs.
A feast.
I have not seen so much food gathered in one place since childhood.
Dishes pile across the worktop, and the table is laid for four.
I watch Cáel and Vivian move around each other, then force myself to look away.
He is with Vivian.
Whatever pull I have felt towards him must stop. I will set it down, leave it there and never pick it up again.
“Can I give my dog-niece something to eat?” Vivian asks. Before I can answer, she takes a china bowl from the cupboard and fills it with egg and several pieces of plain sausage. “It won’t hurt her, will it?”
Mina sits perfectly still, her tail sweeping the floor. A thin strand of drool escapes from one corner of her mouth.
“She doesn’t really eat our food,” I begin.
Vivian has already placed the bowl on the floor and stepped back. Her brow furrows when Mina continues to sit, motionless.
“Eat,” I tell her.
Mina descends on the bowl.
Vivian grins as she watches her devour the food.
Oh.
Right.
I forget that the food up here is different.
They are not trying to kill everyone.
The door opens.
A woman with dark curls and bright-blue eyes enters. She reminds me of the porcelain dolls Vivian collected as a girl—gifts from our grandmother that I found deeply unsettling but Vivian adored.
“This is Thea,” Vivian says. She draws the woman close with practised ease.
“Hi, Thea.” I give her a small wave.
“Hi. Lovely to meet you, Elmo.”
She uses the nickname without hesitation.
Vivian has spoken about me.
After all these years, she has spoken about me.
“Thea is my wife of nearly sixteen years,” Vivian adds, nudging her towards the table. “Sweetie, Mina is our dog-niece.”
“Oh, she’s beautiful.”
“Sixteen years,” I say.
It comes out flat, because everything is coming out flat.
Vivian’s chin lifts a fraction. “Yes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“No.” Something older and more tired arrives behind her eyes. “I like women. I love Thea. If that is going to be a problem—”
“It isn’t.” I look at my hands. “I meant I didn’t know any of it. Any of you.”
Her face changes. She sits down beside me.
Her gaze holds mine a heartbeat too long. Relief, love—and beneath both, a question she is not ready to ask.
Not yet.
Sixteen years married, and I did not know there had been a wedding. Whether anyone stood up for her. What she wore.
Where were you?
The question arrives fully formed, and I swallow it. Not here. Not in front of her wife and a man I met the night before last.
Then the rest of it catches up with me.
“There’s a betrothal notice,” I say. “Lodged in the family drawer. A marriage negotiation between the Valeras and you.”
“Oh, that.” Vivian laughs and begins passing plates around the table with the ease of countless shared meals. “It’s a cover. We can’t register our marriage with this government. You know how it is. This way is simpler.”
So he is not hers.
I know exactly how unworthy that thought is. I have it anyway, and it goes through me like the first mouthful of something hot.
And underneath it, steadier: she is happy. Properly, ordinarily happy, with a wife who calls my dog her niece.
“Then why is he here?” I ask.
Vivian looks at Cáel.
He sets down the last pan and turns around, and for the first time since the checkpoint, he does not look like a man guarding anything.
“A formal negotiation gave me access to your family records,” he says. “And a legal reason to ask about you without anybody wondering why I was asking.” He pauses. “I came to get you out.”
The kitchen is very warm.
I am aware of the plate in front of me, and the fork beside it, and Thea saying something kind that I do not catch. None of it arrives in order. Heat climbs my neck and settles behind my ears. Somebody laughs. The words go past me like traffic.
Nobody has ever come for me.
“Oh,” I say.
Then, more softly, “Oh.”
Cáel is watching my plate.
“You haven’t eaten.”
“I’m fine.” I hear how that lands and try again, more gently. “I’m not hungry any more. It isn’t the food. The food is—” I gesture at all of it, the pancakes and the butter and the sheer obscene quantity of it. “It isn’t the food.”
He does not push. He sets a slice of toast on the edge of my plate anyway, where I can reach it if I decide to, and returns to his own.
Under the table, Mina rests her chin on my boot.
I put my hand down and take hold of her ear.