She looks at it the way I looked at the building next door from the upstairs window, straight on, holding it, the way you look at a thing that thinks it's getting away with something. The fox holds its pose. Committed to the role.
"There's a chimera somewhere in this building," Helena says. Her voice is thin from a century of disuse and entirely, terribly present. "It eats what the animals collect."
Nobody moves.
"Did you know that?" she asks, and turns her not-blinking eyes on me. "All these years they've been watching you. Somebody has to clean the plate."
17
EVERLY
There's a hand at the small of my back that didn't come from inside my own body, and it's six in the morning, and I have exactly one hour.
That's the part I keep circling. Not the warmth of him along my spine, not the way the gray light comes through my window the color of weak tea—the hour. Ren fed the mark false blood sometime in the dark, Sanguis lying to the thing on his hand, telling it he's still asleep in Vitae Hall, that he never left, that the second heartbeat it keeps for him is ticking along under a blanket across campus. The lie holds for one hour.
He told me that last night with his mouth against my temple like it was nothing, like a man mentioning the weather, and I heard the thing he didn't say underneath it, which is that the boundary is burning his hand the whole time he's in this house anyway. Fed or fooled, the leash still pulls. He pays it and doesn't mention the bill.
So. One hour. Forty minutes of it left.
I roll over to face him and the bond rolls with me—warmth arriving from the wrong direction, from outside my skin insteadof under it, his blood answering mine before either of us has decided anything. I've stopped being startled by it. Mostly.
"You're counting minutes," he says. His eyes are still closed. "I can feel you counting."
"I'm rationing." I put my hand flat on his chest, over the real heartbeat, the one the mark isn't keeping track of. "Forty minutes. I'm deciding how to spend it."
He opens his eyes at that. Brown, steady, that wariness he wears like a second skin already gathering at the edges of them, because Ren's first instinct, always, is to weigh what it might take from him and pull back before it takes more. I've watched him do it a hundred times. The library. Every session. Every time he set himself near a door so he'd have somewhere to retreat to.
I don't let him retreat this time. I push him onto his back and follow the push down.
"Everly." Low. Not a no. A man bracing.
"You went down on me in the stacks," I say, "and then you left before I could even say thank you. That was rude." I'm already moving, the sheet sliding off both of us, the cold of the room raising the hair on my arms. "I have manners. My mother raised me with manners."
I take him in my hand first and warm at how he answers it: the full-body breath that goes through him, the way his abdomen pulls tight under my other palm. He's hard already, has been since I rolled over, and I drag my thumb up the underside of his cock and watch his jaw work. Then I lower my mouth and put the flat of my tongue against him, root to tip, slow, the way you'd taste something you wanted to remember.
His hand finds my hair. Doesn't push. Just rests there, fingers spreading, like he needs to know where I am.
"That's—" He stops. Tries again. "I can feel what you're?—"
I know. That's the thing about Ren that the others don't have. His blood sense reads me from the inside, every flicker, half asecond before I'd show it on my own face, so when I take him deeper and like it, he feels that I like it the instant before my own body tells me, and it loops back into him, his pleasure and the echo of mine braided so tight he can't find the seam. I feel it land in him as warmth, pouring back across the bond, and I do it again because of the sound he makes—not a word, just air leaving him like something gave way.
This is what he likes. Now that I know, I do it more.
He's careful even now, even like this. He keeps the grip in my hair gentle. He says my name twice more and both times it costs him something to keep it that quiet, this man who never loses control, who held the noise of other people's blood off since he was fifteen and never once asked for anything—and I have his cock in my mouth and my hand at the base of him and I am unmaking that control on purpose, watching it go, and God help me, I like that too.
His breath is climbing. The warmth in my chest that isn't mine is climbing with it. He's close, I can feel it, the bond practically singing it at me?—
The stair creaks.
Not the wind-creak the house makes settling. The other one. Weight. Something coming up.
We both go still.
I am off him and across the room with the sheet clutched to my chest before I've decided to move—the body's faster than the brain, always—and Ren is upright with his shirt already half on, blood-quiet, the wariness snapped back into place so fast it's like the last ten minutes happened to two other people.
The thing on the landing stops outside my door.
I know the gait by now. I've lived under these watchers for weeks. The cat works the ground floor and the raven keeps the upper hall, but the fox—the fox keeps the parlor, and the fox has no business on this stair, and I can hear it: the small dry clickingof taxidermied claws on old wood, patient, deliberate, the sound of a thing that reports what it sees back to Wheeler and then to Catalina.
