Page 95 of Bought for Blood

I count the turns for as long as the drug lets me count anything. Somewhere past the tenth, I stop counting.

Crowe is at a fence behind me with an envelope in his coat and instructions that begin at dawn. By tomorrow dark, he’ll have her behind Aurora’s wards. He keeps his word. It’s the only thing tonight I’d put money on.

And Ecaterina asked me where the woman is being kept. Which means she doesn’t know.

The heat comes up my arms again, heavier this time, the bone grinding where it’s broken, and I hold on to that one fact while the road carries me north.

She doesn’t know, and I’ll never tell her.

Chapter 30

Serenity

The word I caught through the door last night was “dawn.” Dawn comes. The sky over the trees goes from black to gray, and by seven it’s blue and hard, with frost on the glass. The gravel at the top of the drive stays empty.

I’m in the study. I’ve been in the study all night. The fire went out somewhere in the small hours, and I didn’t get up to fix it. The cage sits on the floor by my foot, where I put it down.

He can’t travel in daylight.

That’s what I have, and I hold on to it. Whatever kept him, he’s stopped somewhere with the shutters closed, because no vampire moves in the sun. He’ll come up that drive after dark, and I’ll have spent a whole day making a fool of myself.

It doesn’t work. Because of the thing under my ribs.

It came a little after one. I know, because the drawing room clock—the one I wound my first week here—had just struck one, two floors down, and I was counting the strikes for something todo. A few minutes later, this feeling arrived. Low on my left side, under the bone. It’s heavy. When I stand up, it stays where it is. It pulls.

It pulls in one direction, and the direction doesn’t change when I move.

It isn’t fear. I know my own fear. Fear goes to my hands and the backs of my knees and dries my mouth. I lived with it for a year, and I know everything it does to me. It has never done this.

And it didn’t come from me. One moment it wasn’t there. The next it was.

I’ve known where he is in this house since the night he opened his wrist over my mouth. I never said it out loud. I told myself it was my nose coming back, or my ears, or the floorboards. Two rooms away, three, the far end of the gallery. I always knew, and I never had to check.

Now it’s pulling, and he isn’t in the house.

My wolf has been on her feet since it started. She isn’t pacing. She’s standing with her head down, facing the window, and every so often she leans on my ribs from the inside.

Lie down.

She doesn’t lie down.

Marthe brings a tray at eight and takes it away untouched at eleven.

“You’ll eat before I go home.” She stacks the plates against her hip. “I’m not asking.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Nobody’s hungry.” She stops with the tray. “He’s stayed out before, love. He’s stayed out a week.”

“Has he?”

Marthe looks down at the plates, then goes off down the passage, and a moment later I hear the whole tray go down hard on the kitchen table.

Yves walks past the study door at noon. Then at one. Then at two.

By the fourth time, I’m standing waiting for him.

“That’s four times since noon,” I say.