Balthazar had disappeared at some point during all of this, and if she was being honest, it felt like a small form of betrayal. Which was ridiculous, because he could not help with anything in the kitchen. It was more that his presence was a kind of … ballast. A warm, opinionated weight in the room that kept the rest of it from tipping. And now he was somewhere out in the rain, which was rather strange because Balthazar hated the rain with a rather intense passion.
She collected the ingredients for the chocolate bees themselves, and the molds?—
The molds.
She checked the shelf where they lived. She checked the shelf beside it. She checked the lower shelves, and the drawers, and everywhere else they might possibly be. But they were nowhere in the kitchen.
She took a moment to stand with her hands pressed to the edge of the worktable and felt the memory surface: the molds had been part of a stack of things she had carried upstairs several days ago, when she had run out of space in the kitchen and the pantry.
The bedroom. They are in the bedroom. You put them in the bedroom.
She untied and retied her apron as she hurried for the stairs.
The bedroom, please, she told herself as she climbed.Not the storeroom. Not the storeroom.Though the storeroom had been behaving recently, had it not?Kazrian had sorted it. It had been perfectly cooperative for over a week now. So it would be fine if they happened to be in the storeroom, because the storeroom was being sensible, and it would simply open, and she would simply retrieve what she needed, and it would all be?—
She reached the top of the stairs and stopped.
The crates were sitting against the wall. Three of them, heavy things, far too heavy for Lucie to move on her own, sitting where they decidedly had not been sitting before. And across the passage from them, the storeroom door was closed.
She tried the handle.
Locked. Of course.
She turned and went into the bedroom, because that was where the molds were. She was almost certain of it. She would never have put them in the storeroom, not when the storeroom had a documented history of doing precisely this.
She searched with the kind of thoroughness that left no surface unexamined, her breathing sitting high in her chest in that same shallow, too-fast pattern she had been living with for days.
But she already knew.
The molds were in the storeroom. And the storeroom door was locked.
She went back to it. She knocked—firmly, with the heel of her hand, the kind of knock that would have been considered quite rude if directed at a person rather than an inanimate door. When nothing happened, she knocked again, harder.
“Open,” she said. Her voice came out thin and high and not at all commanding. She tried again, more sternly. “Open this door. Right now. I am not in the mood for this, I do not have time for this, and you will open this door immediately.”
The door remained exactly as it was.
She banged on it once more, with her fist this time, and told it several things in a voice that could certainly be classified as shouting, none of which made the slightest difference.
And that was when she sat down against it and started to cry. Palms pressed hard against her eyes, her breath catching in shallow, useless gulps that did nothing to fill her lungs and everything to make the sobbing worse.
Which was how Kazrian found her.
She heard his footsteps on the stairs before she saw him—taking them two at a time, by the sound of it—and she knew, purely from having heard him move up and down this staircase countless times throughout the past weeks, that it was him.
Relief.
He was here. He would fix this.
She lowered her hands from her face, blinking through the blur, and the first thing she saw was Balthazar. He came up ahead of Kazrian at a brisk, proprietary trot, tail aloft. Then Kazrian himself, still in his coat, the shoulders of it dark with rain, rounding the top of the stairs at speed and crossing to her in several quick strides.
He crouched beside her. “What has happened?” His eyes moved over her, swift and searching. “What’s wrong? Balthazar came to find me. I have no notion how he even knew the way to Rowanwood House.”
She looked at Balthazar, who had seated himself a polite distance away and was regarding her with an expression of faint, weary vindication.
Oh.
The guilt arrived swiftly. She had thought he had abandoned her, when the clever, magnificent creature had in fact been a full step ahead of her the entire time. He had known she would want the molds. He had known where the molds were. He had likely come up here to check, found the door doing precisely what the door always did, and then gone out into the weather he loathed above all things to fetch the one person in Bloomhaven who might open it.
