by Shana Abe
With the chill, Hayden’s ring was looser upon her finger. She fiddled with it absently with her thumb, sliding the band around and around.
The tea was tepid; most Parisians seemed to prefer coffee, and finding a decent pot of tea was difficult even amid the most fashionable of neighborhoods. She found herself gazing down at the round moon of its surface in her cup, searching for a reflection that was not there.
She remembered his kisses. Hayden’s kisses. How welcome they had been at first, and then … how peculiar. Even as she’d embraced him, she’d felt the change in his body. At first she’d refused to acknowledge it, even to herself, because she told herself in that darkened bedroom, upon that narrow child’s bed, it was what she wanted. What she’d wanted for so long: to be accepted, to be desired. And there he was, unexpectedly all that she wished. She’d known in her heart it was too good to be true.
Rhys. Wicked, wily, unconscionable Rhys, with his smoking halo and sharp green eyes, who told her openly how much he wanted her and damn the consequences. Who told her bluntly how he liked her, how their dragon nature and their animal passion bonded hearts. Who was so determined to prove their connection he’d invaded the body of a fellow clansman, and pressed his lips—Hayden’s lips—to her skin, tasted her with his tongue.
Zoe brought her hands up to her cheeks. Hot color flooded them, made even the centers of her palms seem cold, but the café was nearly empty, and no one paid her any mind.
It had been so dreadful and so acutely wonderful. To be held like that, half-naked like that, stretched out upon the bed. To be stroked. To feel passion without the winter sting of his touch—
She removed her hands from her face. She brought the tea to her lips, attempting to relish the relative coolness of the liquid: inoffensive and flavorless. Everything opposite of the confusion that boiled inside her.
She would not be so idiotic as to fall in love with a memory. That he had a sort of substance, a manner of opacity and a great deal of sweet persuasion that went with his nefarious behavior did not make him alive, or real, or worth the risk of giving him her heart.
She was drákon, a child of the tribe. Zoe knew her duty. She would return to Darkfrith and accept her punishment and her place in the order of things. She would not hunt the sanf inimicus. She would not wish for more than what she had been given. She would wed a living dragon, and live her life in her cottage by the woods, not pine for an impossible ghost, no matter how jaunty his grin.
The clouds were swelling closer. She smelled the rain in them, the thunder that ached for release. The bell over the café door gave a merry tinkle; a group of pastel-clad ladies rushed in with a bluster of wind, laughing in happy tones, exclaiming over the coming storm. Their maids waited outside, huddled in bonnets and coats.
Instinctively, more out of habit than anything else, Zoe pulled the deep blue cloak about her, then flung it out in a circle with herself in its eye.
It returned to her with Rhys caught in its folds, his light brighter and brighter, and then he was there with her. There in the chair opposite hers, just like a living man, one arm draped over the back and his booted feet crossed.
She sighed. She set down the teacup, placed a few sous upon the table, and rose to go.
He followed her, naturally. He kept near to her shoulder, glancing about at the brightly polished shops of imported lace and Indian silk like a tourist, then back down at her.
“Nice ring.”
She gave a nod of acknowledgment, stuffing her hands into her gloves.
“From him, I must suppose.”
She only sent him a look.
“What,” he said, “he couldn’t bother to find a black diamond?”
She paused with her back and skirts flattened to a building to allow a sedan chair past; a little brown dog staring bug-eyed out the window at her began to howl most piercingly, hushed by a woman’s voice. Rhys drifted ahead, turning to walk backward when she started off again.
“Are you still angry with me?”
She rolled her eyes, kept walking. The hues of the day were browning, changing shades with the coming of the storm, and there was a mercer’s in particular she wished to find before the rain began. She’d seen it once after she’d first arrived, cramped and dusty and crammed with reels and reels of intricate lace. A measure of it would do very well for her wedding gown.
To Hayden. For the wedding gown she would wear for her wedding to Hayden.
Rhys was still directly ahead of her. “Because, listen, I …”
She waited with her gaze on the hem of her dress, expecting any sort of new excuse or cajoling, prepared to ignore him all the way back to England if she must. But when she peeked up at him he seemed truly without words; he’d gone still, stock-still—she almost walked through him—and then moved swiftly to take her hand.
She yanked free, she couldn’t help it. His slightest touch made her skin crawl with cold.
“The ring,” he said. “Zee. The ring.”
She pursed her lips and arched a brow, once again moving out of the way as more people brushed past, her back against the glass front of a shop.
“Did you notice James’s hand?”
She shook her head, puzzled.
“The ring on his hand,” the shadow persisted. “The signet.”
Yes. Yes. Hayden was still wearing his gold tribal ring. He was! She’d seen it for days, and it’d never registered, because he’d always worn it, ever since she’d known him. Hayden had his ring. That meant—
“It was mine.” Rhys combed his fingers through his hair, sending smoke up in broken puffs. “The one from the wallet. I’m sure it was. Who else’s could it be?”
She shot a dubious glance at his hand, where the ghost ring still shone. He twisted it free of his finger and held it up between them, turning it back and forth in the clouding caramel light.
“But this isn’t truth, is it? What you see before you is what I think I look like, what I want to look like. This is my favorite waistcoat, you know. These are my best boots. But I wasn’t wearing them when I was killed. Taken. I recall that much. They’re all still back in my quarters at Chasen, no doubt. I was, however, wearing this.”
The wind gave a sudden push; the first of the rain clouds began to release, miles away. Movement flickered at the corner of her eye; a shopkeeper inside the store at her back was lighting the sconces on the wall with a taper, throwing her long, curious looks as he moved from flame to flame.
Zoe found herself walking. There was an alley coming up, an alley of muggy foul smells and cats leaping down and away from their perch upon a broken stool smashed against a wall. Rhys went first, and the cats bolted out into the street on the other side. When she stopped by the stool he lifted his hand again, focused on the ring flat on his palm; it faded to nothing. Just like a wizard’s trick. Gone.
She lifted her eyes to his.
“Who knows what the truth of me is now? I had hoped—” He drew a deep breath of air and let it hiss out between his teeth. “I had hoped,” he finished, curt. “All kinds of ridiculous hopes. That all this is a mistake, that I’m actually alive somewhere. Dreaming in my bed at home, and you’re still back there too. That I might even be that wretched prisoner, tool of the sanf. But if I’ve been gone so long—if they destroyed my ring, kept it as a prize …”
For the first time ever, she reached for him in compassion, took his hand in hers despite the painful cold. He gave a taut smile, turned her gloved fingers over in his, and raised them to his lips. She felt his kiss, so brief and awful, even through the kid. The needles of ice gouging her bones.
“Do me a favor. Take the signet back to the shire. Give it to my brother. Let him know.”
“Know what?”
“That I died well, that I didn’t suffer. I don’t know. Lie to him. Pin him with those tremendous dark eyes and he’ll puddle like snow in July. He’s only a red-blooded dragon, after all. He’ll believe whatever you say.”
“I will.”
“Thank you.” He seemed about to add something more, still holding her hand; she wanted to take it back and she didn’t, but his gaze had gone fixed and distant, a flare of green against the blowing shadows.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw only the street, the shops, the rainstorm churning above rooftops.
He vanished, all of him, all at once. She was left with her arm lifted halfway to nothing, and the sensation of hoarfrost that had been creeping up to her shoulder.
The gray street had plunged to shadow just as Zoe’s street had. A storm simmered here as well, but the raindrops were already falling, big fat plops of water spattering the walkways and buildings. People began to scatter, heels clicking, yanking coats over their heads, hats, newspapers, whatever they had. Rhys stood on his sidewalk and the rain fell straight through him, broke into beads through the soles of his feet. He didn’t even feel it.
And yet this wasn’t what had wrenched him back.
He turned a wide circle, searching. Perhaps he’d been mistaken. Perhaps he’d imagined it, that urgent pull that had got him here. That familiar, electric prickle along his senses that all his life had always meant only one thing. Yet nothing but the rain appeared any different: the damp buildings and the gabled roof and the shrub—hardly any leaves left—and the rat, all like before.
The rat, staring at him and then quickly to the right. The rat, running away with its tail a pink whip along the ground, into the house across the street.
Rhys looked to the right. And yes, goddamn it, there they were. James and the Zaharen boy, walking gradually toward him, cloaked, hooded, far slower and more deliberate than any of the Others dashing around them. James turned his head and murmured something; the other dragon nodded.
Rhys tried to go to them. He tried to at least get close enough to hear them speak, but he was stuck as he always was, unable to venture beyond his tiny realm. Yet it didn’t matter: They were still coming to him. Right to him. James was tall and broad and the dragon-boy more slight, but there was no question that they both emanated identical crackling auras of watchful, sinuous menace.
They were hunting. Right here, on his street.
Rhys realized abruptly what it meant. He was in Paris, just as they were. He was in Paris, just like Zee! This was the same storm that brewed near her. The same time, the same place.
And they were hunting near him.
The hoods of their cloaks revealed only grim, pale jaws; their eyes were covered, their hands hidden. Raindrops shattered along their hoods and shoulders, slithered in rivulets to the sidewalk. He could practically mark their footsteps in the water, they moved so slowly.
Right as they reached him Rhys held up both hands, palms flat. They stopped. They stopped, just for an instant, both of them, and then as one continued through him. He broke apart, re-formed. They walked on down the sidewalk, but not before throwing quick, subtle looks at the building behind Rhys, the one with the gabled roof that he knew so well.
Rhys looked too. He saw a door, shuttered windows. He saw a pair of chimneys that let seep no smoke.
There were dots of recent solder around the lock of the door. He squinted at it through the downpour, trying to see better. Yes, the keyhole had been filled with lead. No sign or light or movement escaped the seams of the door; those were blocked too.
All ways to keep out smoke.
Great God. The sanf inimicus were here. He’d wager his fortune there was fresh solder sealing the windows as well. That the chimneys would be blocked.
James and the boy would have smelled the melted lead like an alarm; Rhys remembered it from life, acrid and then heady, metallic sludge with music that hardened into flat, strange notes.
He spun about in time to see them make an unhurried turn at the next corner. They were the last figures visible through the storm. After they were gone, Rhys stood alone. There weren’t even any carriages going by.
And so he was the only one who heard the voices rise and cut short from the interior of the solder-sealed house. The only one who saw the door give a little shake, as if someone on the other side tested the lock.
He leaned a step toward the house. The music surrounding him reached a painful new pitch, hurting his ears, but to his very great astonishment, he managed it. Another step. Music rising. Another, like dragging his feet through quicksand. The weedy walkway to the front porch, up the steps to the bleak gray door. He stopped to rest a moment, his head spinning—was it too bloody much to ask for a little potency in death?—then pressed his palm flat to the wood. He felt the resonance of its substance, not real wood but an echo of it, almost as stiff as life.
The voices inside had lowered to hushed babbles; he could make out no words over the song in his head. He thought he heard a woman, more than one man. He thought he smelled—heavens, he smelled—drenched wood and humans and the tin from the solder, something dry and spicy like herbs. And beneath all that … the weak, dim perfume of drákon.
Rhys glanced around him, curled his fingers around the bronze-plated latch, and gave it a heave.
She was in the lace shop, desultorily surveying layers of fragile webbing, listening to the rain pattering the roof, sweeping strong, then faint, then strong again, soporific. A horde of people had ducked inside with the first pelting drops; the men clumped together at the windows, water from the hems of their coats dripping into puddles, staring out and speculating about the duration of the storm. The women had dispersed throughout the tall wooden racks of goods, doing precisely the same as Zoe. Fingering the delicate threads and knots of the reams, pretending they would make a purchase.
There were only a merchant and his young daughter to assist. A stout lady in a beaded aubergine hat had cornered them both, demanding to be shown a length of bobbinwork from Portofino her cousins sister-in-law had described to her. The merchant kept lapsing into Portuguese; the woman spoke only emphatic French. He was having scarce luck convincing her she was in the wrong shop.
The daughter stood to one side with her head bowed, a silver chain around her neck the sole splendid gleam in the store.
Zoe’d not been out in rain since she’d left England. She’d not even attempted it, especially after what had happened at the coffee shop in Palais Royal. She stood as far back from the windows—the dripping men, the front door that opened and closed each time with a spray of wet wind—as she could. Like everything else right now, the lace shop was plunged into that caramel gloom. She had no umbrella or parasol. If she was quiet and still, she could likely linger in the rear of the shop for a good while, hopefully at least until the worst of it passed.
“Zoe.”
He appeared to her in the midst of a waterfall of long pale lace, a dozen dangling ribbons unspooled from a wire rod above them, draping down into his head and chest and shoulders.
She inhaled a swift breath with a hand pressed to her heart, but that was all. The shadow glanced about them quickly, then looked back to her.
“You need to return to the maison right now. Pack your things, and leave. I’ll come to you when I can.”
Her lips formed, What?
“Just do it. Wait—don’t even go back to the house. Go to—go to a hotel. Do you have the funds for that? Someplace common. An inn. Anywhere but where James and the boy know you’ve been, or imagine you might go.”
The door to the shop opened again; the ribbons of lace inside Rhys twirled languidly in the rush of new air.
“What’s happened?” Zoe whispered. “Did they find the sanf? Is Hayden in danger?”
“I’ll tell you later. Honest to God, Zee, you’ve got to do as I say.”
“No, Rhys, you’ve got to tell me—”
He left. Just like before in the alley: an instant, complete vanishing. If she’d blinked, she’d have seen none of it.
Several of the patrons were glancing back at her, muttering to each other behind their hands. She realized she’d spoken her last sentence in her normal voice, straight to a line of crisp ironed ribbons,
some of them still swaying an inch from her nose.
She did not wait to leave the shop. She closed her eyes and summoned the cloak with all the power her fear and anxiety lent her, and it came, indigo and deep and shimmering with the force of her will. She heard the voices from inside it. She felt the touch of countless hands, plucking, pulling, all along her body.
Find them. Hayden and Sandu.
Folds of heavy blue ballooned in waves across the shop. They devoured everything: the people and the ribbons and the woman in the hat, the rainfall and sodden scents and shying horses outside, everything physical, everything of carbon and mineral earth, smothered into silence.
From the infinity of blue before her came a pinprick of new light. It rotated in lazy, radiant spokes; it dazzled and expanded, blinding. Zoe lifted her arms to it, thinking, hurry! and the pinprick became a window, and the window became a door. Beyond the door was the light that was Hayden, the colors of his body flaring around him in orange and red and azure. They were the colors of his dragon self, but he and the prince were still in human form—naked, both of them naked—creeping along the hallway of an unlit corridor—two men and a woman in a mobcap with a palm over her mouth waiting around the bend in the corridor. The woman clutched a bowl of pale powdery something but the men were armed with guns. Rhys stood before the turn, frantically attempting to speak to the drákon, shoving uselessly at them both.
She did not bother to wonder why Hayden and the prince didn’t sense the Others, or what Rhys was trying to do. She only ran from the lace shop, following the streaming arrow of the cloak, the bending, luminous colors of drákon that rose from a point east into the sky bright as a rainbow as the rain slapped down.
