The Vows We Broke

Chapter One DAYLE Eleven passengers ride the last train into Itápolis. Ten of them are asleep. The eleventh is me, and I haven't slept since Montreal. The photograph sits on my knee. I keep my palm over it, as if someone might steal it, or as if it might vanish if I stop touching it. My brother is alive in it. Gabe stands beside a doorway cut into dark rock, one hand braced on the frame. His hair is too long. His left shoulder sits lower than it should. The image is grainy, shot from a distance, but I know how my brother stands when he's tired and refusing to admit it. The date stamped along the bottom edge is three years ago. Four years later, the council declared him dead and buried an empty coffin under his name. No return address came with it. No note. Just the picture, in my mailbox, waiting for me like a dare. I accepted. The plan was simple: slip in, find whatever else the sender left for me, learn where that doorway is, and get out before Malachi, Kai, Dante, Rohan or Campbell learns I'm back. Forty-eight hours. I've survived worse odds. Not many, but some. Itápolis Central smells the same. Machine oil, cold stone, burnt coffee, the iron clock still hangs over the arrivals' hall. I don't look at it. Six boys once stood under that clock arguing over lost tickets, and one of them laughed louder than the rest. I shove the memory away before it can finish. I've had seven years of practice. Past the ticket barriers, a thin silver line crosses the floor. The ward boundary. Outsiders step over it and suddenly remember urgent business elsewhere. When I was eight, Gabe told me it could never hurt a Prescott. "Our blood's in it, Daylight. It's family." I step over the line. Pain clamps around my left wrist like a wire snare. I catch myself against the tiles and bite back a yelp. A woman walking past decides I'm drunk and gives me a wide berth. So much for family. I count my breaths until the floor stops tilting, then push up my sleeve. A mark has appeared on the inside of my wrist. Five thin dark lines spread from a small knot, like the strands of a cut rope. Not a burn. Not a tattoo. It sits under my skin, as if someone wrote it on the inside of me. Then my heart stumbles. No. Not mine. Mine is racing, but steady. These are others. Five of them, beating under my own pulse. One slow and heavy. One quick and restless. One so quiet it's barely there. One warm. One tight and controlled, like a man holding in words. Five heartbeats. I know exactly how many people in this city once knew me well enough for my body to remember them. I press my thumb hard on the knot. The rhythms vanish. For three blessed seconds, I'm alone in my own chest, then they creep back. Fine. I'll panic later, in private, with a drink. I yank down my sleeve and walk. I'm halfway down the station steps when a woman says my name like she's reading it off a file. "Dayle Prescott." I consider running. The suitcase makes that undignified. She's in her late forties, in a rumpled gray suit and a dark coat, a police badge on a chain around her neck. Reading glasses perch on her head. She's forgotten they're there. "Inspector Billie Mulligan." "Congratulations," I say. "You're the first to spot me. I'd hoped for at least an hour." She doesn't smile, just holds out her hand for my credentials and reads them under the streetlight. "Supernatural forensic investigator." "People keep dying in creative ways. Someone has to write it down." "And some don't stay dead," she says. My fingers tighten on the card when she hands it back. She notices. Of course she does. "Is this official?" I ask. "No. It's a warning." She tucks her hands into her pockets. "Ashgrove runs the dead now. Every supernatural death goes through the academy. Scene access, evidence, autopsies. My department asks permission. Usually, we don't get it." "Itákratos is a school." "Itákratos is a lot of things. The council voted it through." Of course it did. The same council that sat on a stone dais and listened to Campbell Ross say I'd been inside the ritual circle when my brother vanished. That my blood had opened it. The same council that never asked why the other four witnesses, the men who'd loved Gabe since they were twelve, stayed silent. "If you find something," Billie says, "Itákratos can bury it. Legally." "I've been buried before." "Not here." No threat in her voice. Just tired fact. "Your brother's file is still sealed, by the way." "Sealed isn't closed." "No," she agrees. "It isn't." "How did you know I'd be on this train?" "You weren't hard to notice." Which isn't an answer. I file that away. She offers me a card. "If you get into trouble, call me before you make it worse." "Define worse." "Most people don't need me to." "Most people aren't Prescotts." Her mouth softens for half a second. That worries me more than anything else she's said. I take the card and climb into a taxi. The old city slides past, gray stone and carved arches and camera domes. A bakery sells pastries in one window and protective charms in the other. Two bouncers outside a converted chapel watch us pass, their eyes reflecting the headlights in colors no human eye could manage. We skirt a high stone wall. Saint House. I stare at my hands instead of the windows. My wrist warms. Then comes a strange pressure on the edge of my awareness. Not pain, but attention. I twist around. The street behind us is empty. "Everything all right?" the driver asks. "Fine." It isn't. A mark that wasn't there an hour ago. Five borrowed heartbeats. And the feeling of being watched from a car no one is following. If this were someone else's case, I'd find it fascinating. The town house waits at the end of Prescott Lane. Three stories of pale stone, a green door, every window dark. A brass plate on the gate declares it sealed by the council. The driver leaves before I reach the gate. Smart man. The black wax seal over the lock has been cut along one edge with a thin blade, then pressed back together with a slightly different black. Good work. Most people wouldn't notice. Most people don't spend their days looking for the places where things have been put back. The keyhole has no dust. Someone uses this gate. Often. When I touch the iron, it hums against my palm, cold and familiar, and swings open on oiled hinges. The courtyard is swept. The roses are pruned at the correct angle. The brass knocker has been polished until it reflects my face. Not a council caretaker. Caretakers do the minimum and file a form. Whoever did this did it for a person. My old key still fits. Inside, the hall smells of polish and, faintly, of lilies. I don't look at the photographs climbing the stairs. I know which frame near the top holds six young men laughing with their arms slung around each other's necks. I keep my eyes on the steps. Gabe's door is closed. I stand there long enough to hear the hall clock tick through a full minute. Nothing changes if you wait. I open it. The bed is made with his too-short blue quilt. Gabe never made his bed in his life. Someone has turned his room into a careful picture of itself. White lilies stand in a vase on the nightstand. Fresh. The stems are cut at a slant and still green. Two buds haven't opened. Three days old, four at most. His leather jacket hangs on the back of the door. The brown one with the torn cuff. He wore them on the night of his birthday, the last time I saw him in this house. I told him he looked like he'd lost a fight with a motorcycle. He kissed the top of my head and said he'd see me at the party. My hand closes on the leather before I can stop it. It's been oiled. What if he came back? What if he's been here, all this time? I force myself to look at it like evidence. Old creases, no new ones. The zipper is stuck exactly where it always stuck. The shoulders hold the hanger's shape, not a body's. Maintained. Not worn. Someone hasn't been living in Gabe's room. Someone has been keeping it. The guitar leans in the corner. He never learned more than four chords, and he used every one to embarrass me. I lift it by the neck. Underneath lies a folded sheet of cream paper. My pulse jumps. Five others jump with it. I glove up before I unfold it. Seven words, in a narrow hand I don't recognize. Ask them what happened on the roof. The roof. Itákratos Academy, Gabe's twenty-sixth birthday. Strings of lights. Dante, twenty-five and laughing at me. Me, twenty-one and furious, until his mouth was on mine. Then a distant alarm. A stairwell. A corridor. Cold. Then nothing, until the tribunal chamber and Campbell's voice. The gap in between has always felt like a page torn out of a book. I can see the ragged edge. Never the words. I know what I did that night. I kissed Dante while my brother was being taken. Ask them, the note says. Not him. Them. All five. I slip it into an evidence sleeve beside the photograph. The mark burns. Not warm. Hot. And with it comes that pressure again, closer and sharper. Aimed. I edge the curtain aside an inch. At the end of the lane, just past the streetlamp's glow, a figure stands motionless on the opposite pavement. Too far to see a face. Not smoking. Not waiting for anyone. Just facing this house. Facing this window. I flatten against the wall. The heat follows, wrapping around the bone, and beneath it is something worse than pain. A slow, deliberate pull. The feeling of being wanted, thoroughly, by someone who has had a long time to think about it. My body doesn't care that this is ridiculous. I look again. The figure has crossed out of the light, a few steps closer. The mark flares. Heat races up my arm. The skin along my neck prickles, as if someone is breathing against it. One of the five heartbeats rises until I can't tell it from mine. I press the knot. This time the heartbeat doesn't disappear. It goes quiet and waits. This isn't a spell cast at me. It's something inside me, answering someone out there. When I look again, the figure has melted back into the dark. The pull remains. Patient. As if they've been doing this a very long time. So much for slipping in unnoticed. Someone has been tending my brother's room. Someone left me a message about the one night I can't remember. Someone is watching my window. And I want to know how long. Seven days? Seven years? All that time in Lisbon and Prague and Montreal, did one of them always know exactly where I was? Engines growl outside. One. Two. Three. Five black cars turn into Prescott Lane in a slow, single line. Their headlights sweep across the courtyard and up the house, and for an instant the whole room flashes white. They stop at the gate. Every one of the five heartbeats under mine quickens at once. The driver's door of the first car opens. A tall man steps onto the wet cobbles. Broad shoulders. A dark coat. The stillness of someone who expects the street to rearrange itself around him. I don't need to see his face. Malachi Saint. My brother's best friend. The man who stood at the end of that row in the tribunal chamber, stared at the floor, and let them take me apart. He doesn't look at the door. He looks straight up at Gabe's window. At the gap beside the curtain where I'm hiding. As if he's always known exactly where to find me. And the mark on my wrist catches fire.