Page 135 of Bought for Blood

“I’m tired,” I say softly.

Grace nods. “Of course you are.” Her hand is on my shoulder. “Just…just remember that we want you here too.”

I smile. Then I turn around and go back to the room they gave me. The silver cage is on the table where I left it. The key turns under my fingers. Seven turns, and it stops.

The bird lifts its head and sings.

Chapter 38

Bastien

The door of this house faces east, and I have not closed it once since I came up here. There is no glass in two of the windows. There are no shutters anywhere. Nobody has lived on this ridge for decades, and what is left of it is four rooms, a table, two chairs, and a grate I have not lit.

I don’t tell myself I’ll shut that door before morning. I stopped telling myself that on the second day. Every night I sit in this chair and watch the dark over the valley go thin, and every morning the light comes right up to the step, and I don’t move. I know exactly what that means.

I have not fed since the quarry. My gums ache. My foot throbs where the sun burned it, and there is a tremor in both hands that has been there for days. I have made no arrangement about any of it. I wasn’t planning to need one.

At the start of this year I sat in my own study with a fire I couldn’t feel and decided that was the worst condition available to a creature like me.

I was wrong.

The tilt of her chin. The way my shirts fit her. The sound of her voice from the kitchen downstairs. I caught it and kept it, and none of it is here, and I can’t get used to that. I can’t remember what my life felt like before her.

Dismal. You were rich, spoiled, and dismal, Val-Serein.

Crowe arrives on the fourth evening.

I hear the car at the bottom of the north track, and I know it before it stops. He walks the last stretch. He looks at the open door for a moment before he uses it.

“Don’t,” I tell him.

“I wasn’t going to.” He pulls the other chair out and sits in his coat. “Yves told me where you were. He’s frightened, and there’s nobody else he can say it to.”

“How are the survivors?”

“Some have family. Aurora’s started finding them.” He puts both hands on his knees. “The trucks are why I’m here. Jericho traced the first one to a warehouse outside Coeur d’Alene. It was empty. Whatever was in it went out a loading door six hours ahead of us.”

“The second.”

“Changed plates twice inside four hours. Then they split the load into two vans past the Montana line.” He stops. “There’s a weighbridge on that road. One of those vans is carrying something that weighs more than a person is supposed to.”

“The dragon.”

“That’s my reading.”

“You’re certain?”

“No. I’m going anyway.” He turns his hands over. “Faine’s given me four people and a month. I’ll take longer if I need it. If she pulls me off it I’ll do it without her.”

“Then take a fifth.”

Crowe doesn’t answer.

“I’ve been inside two of their buildings,” I say. “I know their paperwork. How they operate. I’ll be useful.”

“No.”

“You haven’t considered it.”