Page 55 of Bought for Blood

A black cat crosses the corridor ahead of me with the air of an owner, which I suspect he is in some way. He stops at a door at the far end and sits down to wait. It’s heavier than the others. Sealed tight. I try the handle on my way past. It doesn’t give. By the time I’ve closed the distance, he’s gone, around a corner I didn’t see him take.

A cat. He has a cat?

“Here, Kitty,” I call after him. I can’t remember the last time I saw a cat.

Outside the library, I stop and reach for my magic, enveloping one hand with it. My fingers go vague against the paneling, hard to look at. I count. Nine breaths before it slips. Five in the compound, nine here.

Bit by bit, it’s coming back.

The clocks bother me most. They’re everywhere—mantel clocks, a grandfather clock on the main landing twice my height—and every one of them is stopped. Different times, all wrong, pendulums hanging dead. Nobody winds them.

Why not? Everything else in this place is polished to perfection.

In the drawing room there’s a small brass carriage clock, the key sitting in its back where somebody left it. I wind it without deciding to. It’s a small, ordinary sound, ticking into the silence. I leave it running and keep walking before I can decide whether that was allowed.

The shutters I test as I go. Ground floor: sealed, no latch on my side. First floor: the same. My rooms are the only ones where the sun gets in. I check eleven others to be sure.

The wolf walks with me, close under my skin, ears turning at staff sounds two floors away. She’s steady about it. Strong. Every stair I climb without my knees shaking says the same thing: I’m coming back. Here, of all places. Being kept well.

Being kept.

For my own safety.

But who’s more dangerous? Them or him?

The kitchen at noon smells of stock and fried onion, and it goes quiet when I walk in, four faces turning, a knife stopping mid-carrot. Then a broad woman in gray by the ovens wipes her hands on her apron and points me to a stool with a wooden spoon.

“Sit. You’re the reason I’ve an order in for lamb and white beans.” It’s the housekeeper from last night. Up close, she has flour to one elbow and a warm face, fifty or so. “Call me Marthe. You’ll get lunch now if you don’t mind eating here.”

“I’d rather eat here than in that dining room alone.”

“Sensible.” She sets soup in front of me, then bread, then stands across the table with her arms folded and looks me over, open about it. The others work around us, quiet, listening. “You’re too thin. We’ll see to it.”

I eat, and I dig.

“How long has he lived here?”

She pauses, considering. “Longer than anyone remembers. When he’s not somewhere else.”

“He has another place?”

“He has many places.” She turns back to her pots. “This one is the one he likes now. More bread?”

I nod, reaching for a slice. “The sheets on the furniture. The stopped clocks. How long has it been like that?”

“Since we got here. About twenty years back.”

“You’ve been here twenty years, and you’ve never taken the sheets off the furniture.”

She shrugs. “He likes it that way. Says he can move out whenever he wants to.”

“But he hasn’t wanted to move in twenty years?”

“Seems not. When he tires of it, I suppose he will.”

I look down into my soup. Twenty years and he isn’t tired of the place. I guess that’s something. Maybe it’ll take him twenty years to get tired of me.

“And you’ve worked for him all that time?” I carry on the line of questioning.