A TASTE OF HEAVEN

HER ROOM

The woman in gray led her down a corridor Elaine hadn’t seen from the party floor past portraits of strangers who had been dead long enough that no one remembered their names. She counted turns out of habit. Four. She counted doors. Nine before her own.

The room they left her in was beautiful, in the same way the rest of the house was beautiful: dark wood and heavy fabric and a bed much too large for one person to need. The woman in gray said nothing. She simply stepped back into the hall and pulled the door shut. A moment later Elaine heard the lock turn from the other side.

One exit gone. She noted it in the way she noted everything, without feeling; she filed it away with the rest.

She was alone. It was the first time all night that no one was watching her.

Her trembling had finally stopped. The shallow, frightened breathing she'd worn downstairs like a second gown settled into something slower. Deliberate. The woman who had shaken in his study was a costume. Elaine slipped out of her as easily as she would the gown, folded her neatly away, and left her where she could be found again.

She pressed her palm flat against the old pane. Out of a habit she couldn't seem to kill, she reached for the feel of the house, for the shape of the living and the dead inside it. But nothing came back. It never did anymore. She was reading the world the way the humans did now.

She let her hand drop.

The dagger was where she'd left it, sheathed against her thigh beneath the fall of her gown, exactly where his people had searched and found nothing.

That had been the first thing she'd confirmed tonight, before the mirror, before the line of women. They couldn't find it, and they couldn’t sense it.

Whatever else was true about him, his senses had an edge. She existed just beyond it.

She drew it in the quiet and held it up to the low light.

It was not steel. It had never been steel. The blade was pale, almost white. It drank the firelight instead of casting it back, and along its length ran marks she did not need to read. She had known them longer than the house had stood. It had been made for one purpose. It had only ever done that one thing well.

Once, it would have warmed in her hand. Once, it had answered something within her the way iron answers a lodestone, a low, familiar heat that told her she was holding a piece of herself. She waited for it now, and it did not come. The blade stayed cold. So did the place inside her it had once reached.

She turned it over, turned it back, and put it away.

That was the trade. That was what it had cost to be sent down into a body that could bleed, close enough to touch him, close enough to end him. She had agreed to it with her eyes open. She was only now learning what open eyes were worth.

Elaine sat on the edge of the too-large bed and looked at the locked door.

He thought she couldn’t escape. He thought she was his, and she would let him keep thinking it for as long as it took him to slip.