Page 109

I have thought about it every day since.

The reason is simple, and I will set it down in the plainest words I can.

I was afraid of Lex’s temper.

I was afraid, not of him, but of what lived under his skin and what it would do if it learned that Gideon Roake had come to Delacroix Street. I had seen it awaken in Tamsin’s booth over a plate of eggs, when a single sentence about his family was enough to turn him from a man into a weapon. I had put my hand on the back of his neck and breathed with him, and it had taken five breaths, and he had only been told of the danger.

If I told him that the pin was on his mother’s door, he would not wait. He would not trust me. He would not stay in a hotel and let a vampire and a private detective and a club of frightened humans handle it. He would go to Roake himself. He would walk into some warehouse with his fists and his black card, alone, furious, brave, and one of two things would happen. He would kill a grieving man. Or he would be killed.

I could not bear either.

So I chose a third thing. I thought I was clever.

I would go silent. I would give him a reason to be angry with me instead, something petty and human and plain, a rejection he could throw a punch at. I would go to Providence. I would find Roake’s people. I would put Sable guards on Delacroix Street: two of Marcus’s cousins, quiet humans with trucks, who would sit in the dark at the end of the lane and see who came. And I would end this without Lex ever having to know how close it had come.

It was a plan of enormous stupidity. It was a plan that could only have been made by a man who had lived alone for eleven hundred years and had forgotten what it is to have someone standing beside him.

Sabine told me so, on the fourth night, in a rented kitchen in Providence, with a bottle of my wine in her fist.

“You idiot, “ she said. “You absolute, glorious, thousand-year-old idiot.”

She was waiting on the curb when I landed.

Sabine Volkova is small. That is the first fact about her, and the one that misleads people. She stands five foot two in her boots, with a cloud of dark curls and a wide fierce mouth and enormous gray eyes that are the twin of my own. She wears vintage coats and film-school scarves and carries a canvas tote bag that says Bergman Did It First. She has been known to disarm a man with a tire iron using nothing but a raised eyebrow.

She saw me come through the arrivals gate, and her face crumpled.

“Oh, Maksim.”

“Do not.”

“You look like a corpse.”

“I am a corpse.”

“You look like a sad corpse.” She threw both arms round my neck and I held her, for a long time, in the middle of a crowd of people with luggage, breathing in the smell of her hair. She smelled of cigarettes and vanilla and winter and every year I had ever known.

“I hurt him,” I said, into her curls.

“Yes.”

“I hurt him and I sent it in a text.”

“I know. I read it.” She drew back. “It was terrible. It was fifty words of unrelieved cowardice.”

“I know.”

“You said time apart. No one has ever said time apart and meant anything but goodbye. “

“I know.”

“He is going to hate you.”

“I know. “

“Good,” said Sabine, and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. “Then we know where we are. Come. I’ve got a car. You are going to eat something, and then I am going to show you the map.”

Roake’s house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in the old part of Providence, a tall narrow Victorian with peeling paint and shutters drawn tight. Sabine had left the back door on the latch. We went in through the kitchen, in the dark, moving like cats.