Page 104 of Flames and Blood

“Sleep,” I tell him.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Try.”

The hallway is cold after that room. I go up through the sleeping mountain the way I came, barefoot, past the grain stores, up the stairs with my palm on the warm stone. My legs don’t work properly. My mouth tastes of him. My family name is cut over these doorways, and I’ve just come from a vampire’s bed though I know my mother sees him as staff. I don’t yet know how to be both of those women at once.

On the third level, the lamp in the alcove has been put out.

It was burning on my way down. Somebody has come along this passage between then and now and put it out, quiet enough that Gideon and I never heard a footfall. Then again, we had other things on our minds.

I stand in the dark beside the dead lamp and listen.

Nothing moves. Nobody breathes. If someone is standing back in one of the side passages, they are better at being still than I am.

I climb the rest of the way to my suite, and I don’t run, because the Heir of the Aldrake does not run in her own halls.

My boots are where I left them by the bed. I shut my door and stand against it in the dark with my hand still on the wood.

I hold my breath.

Minutes tick by.

Just as I’m about to tell myself to stop being paranoid and lie down, footsteps move off down the stone hallway.

Chapter 24

Crowe

The sun comes up somewhere above four levels of rock, and I sit in a room where it makes no difference at all.

I’ve waited out daylight in places worse than this. Cellars. A grain pit outside Tulsa. Eleven hours in a chest freezer with the power off. This room has a bed and a chair and a lamp, and not much else. And I’m perfectly happy.

What’s different is that I don’t want to be anywhere else, even though there’s no work here for me to do.

Maybe there is, Crowe.

I sit in the chair with my back to the wall and go over what I heard in the hallway.

Somebody came along it last night, about twenty minutes after she left. Not toward my door. They stopped short of the last turn and stood there, then they went back up. Whoever it was walked carefully. A person who wants to be quiet in this mountain and knows how.

It could be a household matter. Somebody trimming a wick, somebody checking the stores. That’s the sensible explanation.

I also don’t stop turning it over.

It was quiet down here before. It isn’t now. The mountain is awake above me in a way it wasn’t yesterday—boots crossing the same three floors again and again, something heavy dragged and set down, a door propped open that was shut before, so I can hear more than I did yesterday. Somewhere over my head a woman is counting out loud, getting to forty, and starting again.

Something is being organized up there.

Deliveries. Three times before noon, a party comes up the outer stairs and unloads. I hear the crates. I hear the arguing about where they go. I hear a man laugh about something and get told off for it.

Nobody comes down to tell me what any of it is for.

Just after the middle of the day, somebody does come down.

He knocks.

“It’s Sereth,” he says through the door. “I’m a cousin of Kallista’s. I’ve brought you nothing at all, so you can open it or not.”