THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE

The town car took the last curve of the drive too fast, and Zale slid sideways across the leather with the brass watch pinned between his palm and his ribs. He had held it the whole way from the city. Marcus Vance had pressed it into his hand that afternoon on the museum steps, folded Zale's fingers closed over it, and said, "Keep it wound. A man who knows the time is never late for what matters." Zale hadn't understood that. He was twelve. What he understood was the weight of it, and the cold of the case warming slowly against his skin, and the tick going on and on in his fist like something small that had gotten trapped there. The driver hadn't spoken since the highway. Zale had counted the glances in the rearview mirror, eleven of them, and none had landed on him. They went past him to the road behind. The man's hands sat locked at ten and two. A vein jumped in his neck, steady as a pulse. "Your father usually has someone posted at the gatehouse," the driver said. His voice broke on the last word. "Maybe they're inside. It's late." The man said nothing. The car shuddered to a stop at the foot of the front steps, and he kept his foot on the brake. Zale pulled the handle. Night air poured in, sharp with pine and cold enough to sting the inside of his nose. He climbed out, dragging his school bag by one strap. The door was still hanging open when the engine growled and the tires threw gravel against his shins. Then the car was moving, taillights shrinking down the long drive until the trees took them. No goodbye. No waiting to see him inside. He stood very still and listened to it go. Something was wrong with the dark behind him. He turned. The wrought-iron gates at the end of the drive, ten feet of black iron that had been shut every night of his life, stood spread wide. And the floodlights were off. All eight of them, mounted on their stone posts around the grounds, burning from dusk to dawn because his father liked to say a house should never be able to hide. Now they were dark glass on dark posts, and the lawn ran away from him into nothing. The house rose ahead, three stories of gray limestone under a slate roof, chimneys cut sharp against a sky with no moon. Some long-dead ancestor had built it to be remembered, and every window looked down on the drive like a lidless eye. Not one was lit. Not the kitchen, where Mrs. Pell left a lamp burning for his father's late dinners. Not the library. Not even the small yellow glow in the east hall that nobody had ever bothered to switch off. Zale thumbed the watch case open and shut. Click. Click. Nine forty-one. "Hello?" he said, and the word went nowhere. He climbed the marble steps. There were fourteen. He had counted them out loud every day since he was four, until Dorian told him only babies counted stairs, and he'd gone on counting silently ever since. Tonight he lost the number at nine. His legs felt like they belonged to someone taller. The marble sent cold straight through the soles of his school shoes. At the top, the front door stood a hand's width open. Oak banded in iron, twice his father's height, and a thin black line ran down the seam where it should have been sealed. He had never once seen it open without someone holding it. Mrs. Pell, his father, one of the quiet men in dark suits. He laid his palm flat against the wood and pushed. The hinges let out a long groan that rolled away down the hall and did not come back. The cold met him in the doorway. This wasn't the cold of a house with the heat turned down. It was the damp cold of a cellar, a house that had stopped trying to hold anything in. His breath fogged in front of his face. He stepped over the threshold and the door swung shut behind him under its own weight, and the latch did not catch. Then the smell. Every day of his life the foyer had smelled of lavender polish and old paper, with his father's cologne drifting down from the staircase, bergamot and cedar. The lavender was gone. Something heavier sat in its place, thick enough to coat the back of his tongue. Metallic. Sweet underneath, and wrong. Once, on a dare from Dorian, he had held a fistful of pennies in his mouth for a full minute. This was that taste, wet copper, except now it was in his nose and his throat and pressing down on his chest. He tried breathing through his mouth. That was worse. He could taste it. The foyer climbed three stories into blackness. Overhead the chandelier was a pale cluster of crystal he could only guess at, and ahead the grand staircase curved away into the dark. The portraits of the dead Aldens lined the wall, their eyes catching a little gray from the high windows. He did not look at them. Beneath everything the grandfather clock by the stairs went on ticking, slow and heavy, each swing of the pendulum louder than it had any right to be. In his pocket his own watch ticked a half beat off from it. The two sounds fought each other. His heart slammed against his ribs so hard it hurt. He pressed his free hand flat over it as if he could hold it in. "Mom?" Nothing. The clock. His own ragged breath. "Dorian?" At the far end of the hall, light bled out from under the double doors of the living room. Not electric. A dull, flickering orange. The fireplace, still burning, with no one there to feed it. He went toward it. His shoe squeaked once on the marble and he froze, and the sound kept echoing after he'd stopped. After that he walked on the outer edges of his feet, the way he did when he was sneaking down for water at midnight. One of the doors stood open a foot. He pushed it with two fingers. The living room was the biggest room in the house. The ceiling rose twenty feet to the plaster mouldings his mother loved, and windows ran floor to ceiling along the south wall, black glass with the garden somewhere beyond it. The fire in the stone hearth had burned down to a bed of orange. It gave just enough light. His father sat on the floor with his back against the side of the sofa, legs stretched out in front of him like a man who had decided to rest for a minute. His good charcoal suit. One loafer had come off and lay on its side on the rug. His chin was tipped down onto his chest, and the front of the white shirt was not white anymore. Zale looked at the loafer. Brown leather, a little scuffed at the toe. He kept looking at it. The rug was Persian, red and navy, older than the house, and his mother wouldn't let anyone cross it in outdoor shoes. Now the dark was spreading through its pattern, seeping out from beneath his father in a slow, glossy edge. It found the lines of the weave and followed them. It reached the fringe and stopped there, the way water stops at the rim of a glass. Dorian lay by the piano. Seventeen. Taller than their father since March. He was on his side with one arm flung toward the bench, his varsity jacket dragged halfway off one shoulder. His eyes were open. They gazed at the carved leg of the piano with a calm, mild interest. His fingers were curled around nothing. His mother was closest. She lay a few paces inside the doorway, on her back, and her hair, pinned up every single day of Zale's life, had come loose across the parquet in dark ropes. She still wore the pearls. Her left hand rested beside the edge of the rug, palm up, fingers slightly curled, and it was perfectly, absolutely still. He had never seen her hand still. It was always doing something. Smoothing his hair, straightening a collar, tapping out the rhythm of a song against the edge of a table. Her cologne hung in the air too, jasmine, and under his father's cedar it mixed with the copper until his stomach turned over. On the glass coffee table a newspaper lay open to a half-page photograph. His father and Marcus Vance shaking hands beneath a banner. EXPANSION, the headline said. Three days old. Next to it a tumbler of whiskey sat untouched, a small perfect ring of firelight floating in the amber. His throat closed. It didn't happen slowly. It shut like a fist, and the air he'd pulled in stayed trapped under his collarbones, cold and unmoving. The edges of the room tilted and ran together, the fire smearing into one long orange streak. He looked down at his hands and could not feel them. They hung at the ends of his arms, white and strange. The watch was still in the right one, and he could see the chain shaking but not feel the metal against his palm. Mom. He tried to say it. His mouth shaped the word. Nothing came out. No scream, none of the noise he would have sworn was waiting inside him. His eyes stayed wide open and dry and stinging. Somewhere deep in his chest something pushed upward and found no way out. In the hall, the clock. Tock. Tock. He took a step. His knee buckled and caught itself. He took another. A sound. Small and wet, a catch, like a hiccup, like a breath pulled through a straw. Zale didn't move. The fire popped. The clock swung. Then it came again, so faint he almost lost it under the ticking. Low to the ground. Close. "Lyra?" It scraped out of him, hardly a word at all. He spun. Under the sofa. His hands had started working again, clumsy and thick, and he dropped to his knees and swept them through the dark beneath the cushions and found dust and a dead pen. The drapes. He tore them aside and found the window seat empty. The piano. He made himself go around Dorian, giving him a wide berth, and checked behind the bench, behind the stand. Nothing. "Lyra, it's Zale." The gasp came again. From the east windows, under the edge of the rug. The board. Of course the board. Their grandfather had left it behind in the floor, a square of oak that sounded hollow when you knocked, and Lyra had hidden in it so well during hide-and-seek that Dorian had banned her from using it. She was six. She fit. He dragged the corner of the rug back, keeping away from the dark soaking in from the far side, and ran his fingers along the seam in the wood. Rough grain. A splintered edge. He dug his nails in and heaved. It came up with a dry tearing sound. She was curled in the hollow with her knees pulled to her chest, in the yellow nightgown with the faded ducks. Her hair was plastered to one cheek. Her eyes were wide open and fixed on nothing, her mouth a little open, and her whole body shook so hard her teeth clicked together without any sound coming out. A smear of something dark crossed the back of one small hand. "It's me." He reached in. "I've got you." She didn't look at him. He slid his arms under hers and lifted, and she came up out of the floor stiff and light, her limbs locked in the shape they'd held. He sat down hard with his back against the window seat, dragged her into his lap, and wrapped both arms around her. He pressed her face into his chest so she couldn't see the room. Strawberry shampoo, faint, under the copper. Her heart ran against his forearm, fast and light as a bird's. "I've got you," he whispered. "I've got you. I've got you." Her fingers knotted in his sweater and held. She still hadn't blinked. Light. White and sudden, it swept across the ceiling from left to right, slid down the plaster mouldings, and fixed itself on the tall black windows. Headlights. Two sets, then a third, laying long bars across the floor. They crossed his mother's hand. They lit the rug. For one second they lit all of it. Under the ticking, gravel crunched. Heavy, even steps. Boots. Several pairs, not hurrying. A car door shut with a careful, quiet click. Then a low voice, clipped, and the thin hiss of a radio. Zale's whole body went cold. He couldn't carry her and run. He couldn't hide her in the board, she wouldn't let go. He got to his feet with Lyra locked against his neck and stumbled, bent low, across the room, past the fire, to the alcove where his father's desk stood behind its carved wooden screen. Boots on the drive. Closer. He knocked a lamp over and it did not break. Bottom drawer. His father had shown him once, late, on a night he'd smelled of whiskey and not looked Zale in the eye. If something ever happens and I can't, he'd said, and then stopped, and said nothing else. Zale shoved his fingers into the back of the drawer, found the catch, and the false panel dropped open. The phone was black and thick, with a stubby rubber antenna. A red button sat beneath a plastic flap. He thumbed it and the screen flared green, far too bright, and he crushed it against his chest to smother the light. One entry in the speed dial. He pressed it. It rang. Boots on the steps. Marble. Fourteen of them. He counted without meaning to. One. Two. It rang again. Five. Six. Lyra's nails dug into the back of his neck. The line clicked open. "Zale?" "They're here." His voice came out as a thread. "Marcus, please. They're in the house. They killed everybody, Lyra's with me, please come, please, please." Eleven. Twelve. Fourteen. The front doors exploded inward, oak shrieking off its hinges, and the whole house split with the sound of it.