Page 15 of Last Flame
“Across the hall.”
“That’s the one.”
She nods like I’ve given her something new to think about, and walks past me into the lobby like the conversation’s settled.
I let out a breath. Because, fuck. How does that woman smell like night-blooming cereus?
She gives walking her full attention and still nearly loses. I follow. For safety reasons.
That’s it.
I press the elevator button. She watches me do it like it’s a card trick — actually leans in to watch my thumb, like the button’s the interesting part of the evening. The doors open. We get in.
It’s a small elevator and there’s nowhere to stand that isn’t close.
She turns and studies me. Openly. Head tilted, eyes moving over my face like she’s seeing it for the first time.
Her brows go down and I know whatever she says next won’t be anything I’m ready for.
“What’s with the jaw?”
I have answered a great many questions in four hundred years. I have nothing for this one.
“…The jaw?”
“Yeah.” She gestures at it. The whole thing. My entire face, implicated. “Do you practice that?”
“Practice what?”
“Looking like that. It can’t be an accident. Nobody’s face just does that.”
I decide not to help her with that. She takes the silence as encouragement. She usually does.
“Is the leather required?”
“For what?”
“Whatever this is.” She waves at all of me, head to boots, a slow gesture that loses confidence halfway down and has to start over. “The jacket. The boots. The whole — situation. Is there a meeting? Is it a club?”
“It’s a jacket.”
“That’s what a member would say.”
I hold still. Keep her talking. She’s closer than she was a second ago and doesn’t know it.
That’s when I hear it.
Under her voice. Low. She’s humming — not on purpose, the way some people sing quietly when their guard’s all the way down. She repeats a few notes. It’s not a song, just a piece of one.
And I know it.
It’s the sound from the clearing. The one I stood in the dark an hour ago straining to catch, and lost. Three years of nothing, and tonight it finally came — and now it’s six inches from me in a steel box that smells like cheap wine and those flowers, coming out of her like she’s known it her whole life.
It’s her.
The whole night reorganizes around that one fact and nothing else in the box matters. Not the jaw conversation. Not how close she’s standing. The thing I’ve driven across a city and waited three years for has been across the hall the entire time, humming in elevators, and she has no idea she’s carrying it.
“You’re not listening,” she says.
