Page 130 of Bought for Blood

The air smells like rock. I lie there with my eyes shut and go through it. Cold stone. Old coffee. A heater somewhere close that has burned the dust off its own element. People. Too many people.

I’m looking for beeswax. For cut flowers and woodsmoke from the fireplace.

I’m not there.

I sit up too fast.

No!

The ceiling is bare with a strip light bolted into it and a run of gray conduit going off toward the door. It’s the room they put me in the first night. Paneling halfway up the walls, painted the color of old teeth. A chair beside the cot I’m in, and Grace’s coat folded over the end.

My boots are underneath the chair with the laces tucked inside them. Somebody did that.

On the table by the door, there’s the silver cage with the bird in it. I left it in this room the night I went to find Crowe. Nobody’s moved it.

I swing my legs off the cot. The room tips once and settles. There’s no pain anywhere in my shoulder, and I put two fingers under my collarbone and press hard enough to hurt. I don’t feel anything.

I’m wearing one of his shirts. It’s been washed.

The pull is still there.

Low on my left, under the bone. It was unbearable for days, and now it’s a dull throb, and it’s pulling south.

He’s alive. He’s alive, and he’s six hours away. And he put that distance between us.

There’s a folded sheet of paper under the cage.

I know it before I open it. Two pages, heavy stock, the second one behind the first. A designation typed at the head where a name should be. Careful notes going down the left margin, every entry lined up under the one above it.

At the foot of the second page, in the space marked for the purchaser, somebody has drawn one straight line through S.-L. de Val-Serein.

Above it, in fresh ink:

Serenity Sangrey.

Under that, his signature. Under that, a second signature in small upright letters, and beside it the word witness.

Nothing else. Nothing on the back of either page.

I sit on the edge of that bed with a bill of sale in my hands and my own name written into the line where the buyer goes.

You gave me to myself.

The door opens, and Grace comes in with two mugs.

She stops. Then she puts both mugs down on the table hard enough that one slops over the side. She stands there with her hands closed at her sides.

“You,” she says.

“Grace.”

“You left in the night.” She stops and gathers herself. “I woke up, and your bed was cold. I stood in that corridor at four in the morning shouting at people.”

“I know.”

“You don’t.” She hasn’t moved off the door. Her eyes are swollen, and her hair is flat on one side. “All that time I did what those people told me so they’d keep you breathing. Then I had you back for a day, and you walked out of here without a word.”

“He was going to burn. He would have died.”