CHAPTER TWO: THE MAN BY THE WINDOW
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He had not expected her to be so calm.
Caelum stood at the window of the east sitting room — the one he'd had her moved to after the first room proved too cold, a fact he had not examined too closely, this impulse toward her comfort — and watched the fog move through the streets below.
She was in the adjoining room. He could hear her moving. Quiet footsteps, the sound of drawers being carefully opened and closed, the specific silence of someone thinking very hard while doing something with their hands.
She was cataloguing her situation. He recognized it because it was what he did.
He had been briefed, such as it was, by Solene — who had found the girl at the estate's front door at 3 a.m., standing in bare feet on the stone steps, eyes open but seeing nothing, her hand raised as if she'd been mid-knock for some time. Solene had said three words to him: She has the marks.
He hadn't slept since.
The marks were faint — he'd seen them when her sleeve had shifted as she'd pulled back the curtain. The inside of her left wrist. A pattern that looked, to anyone who didn't know, like an unusual birthmark or an old scar. He knew better. He had grown up with drawings of those marks in the books his his mother kept, the ones she made him memorize before she disappeared. He knew what they meant.
He knew what she was.
He did not yet know what to do about it.
The door between the rooms was ajar. He'd left it that way deliberately — not to watch her, but because the alternative, leaving her sealed away in a room in a strange house in a city she didn't know, felt like something he wasn't willing to do. Which was itself unusual. He was willing to do most things.
"You can come in," she said from the other room.
He was across the threshold before he'd decided to move.
She was sitting on the window seat, her knees drawn up, her dark curls escaping whatever she'd used to pin them, watching the street below with the expression of someone working through a complex problem in real time. She didn't look at him when he entered.
"Nothing moves out there," she said.
"Not at this hour."
"What hour is it?"
"Nearly four."
"Morning or—" She looked at the sky. "You know what, never mind." A pause. "Is it always like this? The dark?"
"The sun rises at ten. Sets at two."
She absorbed this. "That's only four hours of daylight."
"The city manages."
"Does the city have a choice?"
He looked at her. She was still watching the street, and he had the strange sensation — one that he was unaccustomed to, that he did not have a ready category for — of being seen, somehow, without being looked at.
"No," he said. "It doesn't."
She turned then, finally, and looked at him directly. Up close her eyes were darker than he'd realized — deep brown, warm, the kind of eyes that made people feel examined without feeling judged. "Are you going to tell me what's going on?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"When I've decided how."
She considered this for a moment. Then she said, with a composure that he found genuinely remarkable: "Okay. That's fair." She turned back to the window. "Can I ask questions while you're deciding?"
"You can ask."
"The marks on my wrist." She said it simply. Not a question, exactly. More like placing a piece on a table.
He was still.
"You looked at them earlier," she said. "When I pulled back the curtain. I saw your face change." She glanced at him sideways. "You have a very controlled face, but things still move through it if you watch carefully enough. I'm good at watching carefully."
He didn't speak.
"So," she said. "The marks mean something. To you, specifically. You know what they are." She paused. "And whatever brought me here knew about them."
"Yes," he said. All three.
"Is it dangerous? What brought me here?"
He looked at her steadily. "Everything in Noirheim is dangerous."
"Is it more dangerous than you?"
He said nothing.
She smiled — small, wry, a smile that had seen things it hadn't expected but was still, somehow, intact. "Right," she said quietly. "Okay then."
Outside, the fog shifted.
Something moved beneath it — not a person, not an animal, not anything with a name he'd give to an outsider. It moved in the way that things moved in Noirheim after 3 a.m., with a patience that was almost contemplative, heading in no particular direction with a terrible sense of purpose.
He watched it pass.
When he looked back at Mara Cole, she was watching it too. Her face was white. But her jaw was set and her eyes were steady and her hands, resting on her knees, were perfectly still.
"I've never seen anything like that," she said quietly.
"No," he said. "You haven't."
"What is it?"
He considered, for a moment, a softer answer. "Something old," he said finally. "Something that lives beneath the city. It won't come near the estate."
"Why not?"
He held her gaze. "Because I won't allow it."
She looked at him for a long moment. Like she was deciding whether to believe him. Like she was weighing what she'd seen against what she felt, the instincts pulling in different directions — run and stay fighting for the same ground.
She stayed.
"Okay," she said for the second time that night. Smaller this time. More to herself than to him.
He moved to leave.
"Caelum." His name in her mouth was strange — she said it like she'd been saying it for years, without ceremony, without the flinch most people couldn't suppress. He stopped. Turned.
"Thank you," she said. "For not lying to me."
He looked at her for one moment too long.
"Don't thank me yet," he said.
- Writer
