Page 87 of Bought for Blood

“You’re being strange,” I say.

“Am I?”

“You’ve been in here five minutes, and you haven’t once looked at my throat.”

“I’ve looked at your throat.”

“Not the way you look at it.”

He hasn’t fed from me since the night he took too much. At first that was me. I was angry, and I kept my distance, and he let me. Then I stopped being angry, and he still didn’t come near my neck. Last week I wore my hair up at dinner, pinned off my shoulders where he couldn’t miss it. He spent the whole meal looking at his glass. And then he gave me a watch with so many diamonds on it that I can’t read the time.

I keep landing on the same explanation, and I hate it. Something about that night finished it for him.

He turns his head. The lamp is behind him, and I can’t see much of his face.

“Do you want me to?”

“Ask me that again when you’re not using it to dodge something else.”

“It was a reasonable question.”

“It was a distraction, and you’re good at those.” I pull my feet back and sit up. “Who came up the drive this morning?”

“I brought you something.”

Oh, that’s low. That’s very low.

He takes it off the side table. It’s wrapped in cloth, bigger than both his hands, and heavier than I expect when he sets it in my lap.

I know what it is before the cloth comes off. The silver bird in its silver cage. The keyhole in the base with no key in it.

“You’re giving me your bird.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t work.”

“Wind it.”

There’s a key in the lock now. New metal, bright against the old base, cut for this keyhole.

I look at him. He doesn’t say anything. So I turn it.

Seven turns, and it stops.

The bird lifts its head. It opens its beak, and it sings.

It isn’t much. Eleven notes, maybe twelve, thin and high, cracked at the top of the run. The little silver head turns twice on the way through. Then it stops with its beak open, exactly the way it has sat on his table since the day I got here.

I frown. “You told me nobody alive could fix it.”

“I thought that was true when I said it.” He’s watching the bird, not me. “It turned out to be a difficult thing to be certain of.”

“So how—?”

“I found a man outside Geneva. He’s eighty-one. His grandfather worked on the original and left him the drawings, and nobody had asked him for them in sixty years.”

“What did it cost you?”