Chapter4
1349 Words
She did not move for a long time after.
The room had gone fully dark, the last of the winter light swallowed by the forest outside, and Nina sat in the blackness with her hand still close to his and her heartbeat doing something irregular that she could not calm down.
Nina.
She kept turning it over. The shape of it. The distance it had traveled to reach her. It had not sounded like a dream or a hallucination or the kind of thing tired minds manufacture in strange places. It had sounded like a man who had been saying her name into the dark for so long he had almost stopped believing it would ever reach anyone.
She looked at his face.
Same as always. Still. Closed. Giving nothing away.
But his hand, she noticed, had shifted again in the sheets. That small deliberate movement she was beginning to recognize. Not the random drift of a body in unconscious rest. Something with intention behind it. Something reaching.
She put her hand over his and sat with him until the manor's old bones settled into their nighttime quiet around her.
"I don't know what is happening to you," she said. "But I'm going to find out."
She went to bed at midnight and did not sleep well.
By the third morning she had developed a routine without meaning to.
Breakfast with Cora, who fed her too much and said too little but whose silences had started to feel like a language Nina was slowly learning to read. Then an hour in the east wing library, which had tall windows and good light and shelves full of books about pack history that she was working through with the focused determination of someone looking for a specific answer without knowing exactly what the question was yet.
Then Eli.
Always Eli, in the afternoon, when the winter light came through his windows at the low flat angle that made everything in the room look amber and underwater. She would sit in the chair and talk or not talk and watch his face and wait for that small movement of his hand, which came every day now, always at the same point in the visit, always after she had been there long enough that the room had settled around her.
Like he was waiting for the house to confirm she was real before he reached.
On the fourth day she asked Cora about the north corridor.
Not directly. She had learned by then that direct questions in this house were like hands grabbed too fast toward something small and frightened. They made things disappear.
"The older parts of the manor," she said instead, watching Cora's hands on the bread dough. "The stone ones. How old are they?"
"The east foundation is about four hundred years," Cora said. "The north section is older. Nobody's sure how old."
"Has anyone ever found anything in the north section? Old things. Symbols. That sort of thing."
Cora's hands slowed.
Just slightly. Just enough.
"There's a corridor," Nina said quietly. "With a door at the end. There's a symbol carved into it."
Cora set down the dough and wiped her hands on her apron and turned around with an expression that had moved past careful and into something Nina could only describe as reluctant.
"You went in there."
"Yes."
"And you touched the door."
"Yes."
Cora looked at her for a long moment. Then she pulled out the stool across from Nina and sat down, which meant something serious was coming because Cora never sat during the day.
"That symbol," she said. "It hasn't reacted to anyone in twenty three years."
Nina kept her voice even. "What does it mean when it reacts?"
"It means the person touching it carries something old in their blood." Cora folded her hands on the counter. "Something the house recognizes. Something that was supposed to be gone from the world a long time ago."
"What kind of something?"
Cora opened her mouth.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside, sharp and deliberate, and something in the rhythm of them made Cora's expression close like a window being latched from the inside. She picked up her cloth and turned back to the counter and the moment was gone as completely as if it had never existed.
Victor walked past the kitchen doorway without stopping or looking in.
But he slowed, just fractionally, just enough, and Nina understood that slowing the same way she understood the symbol on the door and the file with her name on it. It was the slowing of a man who already knew what had just been said in the room he was passing.
Nina drank her coffee and said nothing and added it to the list of things she was keeping.
She went to Eli's room earlier than usual that afternoon.
She needed to think and she had discovered, somewhat to her own surprise, that she thought most clearly in his room. Something about the quality of the silence there. It asked nothing of her, required nothing, and so her mind moved more freely inside it than it did anywhere else in the manor.
She sat in the chair and she thought about extinct bloodlines and symbols that recognized certain hands and a cook who had been about to tell her something important before powerful footsteps in a hallway had reminded her of the cost of telling it.
She thought about a file labeled CARLOS. NINA. ORIGIN ASSESSMENT.
"What am I?" she asked the room.
The room did not answer.
She put her hand over Eli's hand.
That warmth came immediately, the way it always did, that dense grounded heat that had nothing to do with body temperature and everything to do with something she could not name yet.
"I keep thinking about what you said," she told him. "That I came back. As if you were waiting for something specific. Not just anyone. Me." She paused. "That means you knew me before this. And I keep looking at your face trying to remember and I can't. But there is something. Not a memory exactly. More like a shape where a memory should be."
His fingers shifted.
That small rotation she had been waiting for. His hand turning under hers.
"I'm here," she said.
His fingers closed around hers and this time the grip was stronger than before. Not the tentative exhausted grip of the first time. Stronger, and steadier, and underneath it she felt that tremor again, that straining enormous effort, but with something new inside it.
Urgency.
Like something trying very hard to break through a surface from underneath.
She leaned forward without meaning to.
"Eli," she said.
His jaw tightened. A muscle moved in his throat. His grip on her hand went tighter still and she could feel the effort radiating off him like heat, the way you feel heat from something burning behind a closed door, and she thought, with sudden absolute clarity, that what she was feeling was not the random firing of a damaged nervous system.
It was well.
It was a man pushing against something from the inside with everything he had.
She looked up at the monitor in the corner. That small black lens watching them both.
And she understood then, sitting in that amber underwater light with his hand straining around hers, the thing that had been in front of her since the first night and that everyone in this house had been arranging, carefully and deliberately, for her never to see.
Eli Draven was not in a coma.
He was not unconscious. He was not lost or absent or diminished or any of the careful words Victor had used to describe him.
He was awake.
He had always been awake.
Trapped inside his own body like a man sealed behind glass, able to see everything, feel everything, reach and strain and call her name from the bottom of a well, and never once be able to break through.
And someone in this house knew.
Someone had put him there.
- Writer
