The Treasure Keeper

by Shana Abe

  He yanked the bodice from her. The sleeves were tight and they caught on her arms, but he pulled them down and down until her arms were free again, and she wore only her torn shift and the skirts. He shoved them both to the left, away from the mirror, and when she tried to step away he pushed her back against the wall, gold barbs stabbed through petticoats and pink satin, hauling them up to her thighs.

  She raised a leg to his hip, her stockinged thigh to his hip. She found the knot in his breeches and yanked at it, cinching it tighter, so she pulled and pulled until the fabric split down the seam on the other side, and she could grasp his shaft.

  He made a strangled sound in his throat. He held motionless, trembling, as she wrapped her fingers around him and began to stroke, using first her fist, then her fingers, and finally her nails—deliciously, delicately, scraping his skin, then soothing it, tracing the crown of his head and the tender underneath as if she’d always known how to do it. Always known his body and his wants, and how to make him thrust into her hand with his eyes closed and his mouth drawn tight. His claws scoring furrows into the wall, ravaging her skirts.

  She guided him between her legs. She urged him there, remembering the way of it, her hands around the hard muscles of his buttocks, and he slid back and forth in her slickness, that small strangled sound turning into a rasp with every breath.

  He bent his knees, brought his palms to her shoulders and thrust up deep into her, lifting her to her toes. The hurt came again, quick and hot and wet … and then easing into something better, a dark licking flame eager for more of him.

  He put his forehead to hers. They moved in silence, neither speaking, only the smack of their skin filling the air, perspiration beading down his face, onto hers. Strands of dark and gold hair clinging to her neck. Moisture between her breasts. One twisted clawed hand shifted from the wall to scoop behind her waist; he bent her there, bowed her toward him, and she nearly lost her balance until he grunted and shoved even deeper inside, lifting his face to the ceiling with his eyes now closed, something that looked like anguish hardening his features.

  She stood on the balls of her feet. She kept her fingers clenched into his shoulders. She could not move otherwise without tilting them both off-balance, and Rhys knew it. He had mastery of the moment and used it, pumping in and out of her, using his body to rub against hers, the crisp curls of his groin, the center of her caught in some terrible tight torment that wasn’t letting go—

  She tried to turn her face away but he wouldn’t let her, bending close to suck at her lips, her breasts bouncing, then crushed against him. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t fight him. He had control of every aspect of her body, shifting from hard and fast to slow and deep, deeper, and without warning she felt that rising within her once again, spiraling white flame.

  Zoe tore her mouth from his; she could not breathe, and she needed to breathe because she was about to incinerate; she was the one made of paper—

  Rhys paused, only long enough to hear her low, desperate moan, then pushed so far into her the wall surely buckled, and she no longer touched the floor at all, and someone’s voice had risen to a gasping, wordless plea.

  “Yes,” he growled. “Yes, yes, Zee.”

  She climaxed, her body clenching around his, shuddering, and he pumped and pumped and came inside her with a sudden stiff push, flooding her without sound, only his breath harsh and frantic in her ear.

  Her toes gradually sank back to the floor. He waited until he could speak again, until they could both speak, and then ran his tongue up the line of her neck.

  She shivered. His teeth closed over her earlobe.

  “You will love me,” he whispered.

  “Unlikely.” She closed her eyes, opened them, and struggled to find her sense in the sex-scented gloom of the crimson chamber. “That was my last decent gown.”

  * * *

  He convinced her to delay their leaving. He convinced her with words and his hands, and finally with the remnants of the food he’d stolen for her, slivers of roast beef and apples that he fed to her in bed. He knew if he delayed her long enough, she’d give it up for the night. Her plan required daylight and respectable people surrounding her in the fashionable quarter of the Palais Royal.

  Let it grow dark. Let the sun set. Let him have one more day with her in the flesh, one more night, before their lives were tossed back to the fates.

  Rhys lay with his head pillowed upon her stomach, enjoying the unhurried rise and fall that shifted his view: the bed and window, the ceiling and window. Bed and window. Ceiling and window.

  The apartment had grown dim. It had been some while since either of them had spoken, and he wondered if she’d fallen asleep.

  “I should go,” she said just then, as if she’d read his mind and was determined to dash all his hopes. He realized, oddly, that perhaps she had.

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s no reason not to.”

  “There are a thousand reasons.”

  “Name one.”

  “Me. I don’t want to go tonight.”

  The rhythm of her breathing never changed. “We could do this every night, I suppose,” she murmured. “Laze here. Eat and sleep like a pair of satisfied house cats.”

  “Make love,” he said, hopeful.

  “Cats,” she said again, determined. “And naught would change. Our world would slip by us. Our people would fight without us.”

  He said nothing.

  “But they would not win. They need us. We hold a key now. We know the sanf inimicus now, their weapons against us, a portion of their plans. We may be the ones who turn the tide. But to do that, we must leave this place.”

  Rhys allowed his lashes to drift closed, his fingers exploring a rent in the sheets he’d made before, gradually widening the tear.

  “You know I’m right,” Zoe said.

  “Aye. But not tonight.”

  She sucked in an impatient breath and his head rose sharply with it. He rolled over, snagged the sheets again, plucked free his claws, and rested on his elbow as he gazed down at her.

  In her bare shift she was girlish and lovely, her skin fresh as cream, her lips dark rose. All that glinting silvery hair, surrounding her like winter wind spun to silk.

  “Why do we even need to leave this room?” he asked.

  “I told you—”

  “No. You read minds, Zoe. You gather thoughts. You told me that. I’ve watched you growing these last days. I’ve watched your Gifts expand. Why do we need to go anywhere but here? Can’t you find them from right here?”

  She gazed at him, arrested. Opened her mouth, closed it. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “It’s only worked in close proximity before.”

  “I wasn’t close,” he pointed out. “And you found me.”

  He saw her comprehend it, saw it and felt it too, a sudden profound chill to the air, the unexpected awakening of her potential. She lay there as fetching as any maiden, and above and all around her he felt the soundless, bottomless depths of her power gather, invisible wings that brushed the air and stirred the molecules.

  Her eyes went black. All black, pure liquid, just like that time at the dance hall. It was scary as hell and even more beautiful; he could not look away from her.

  She didn’t seem to notice. Those shining jet eyes seemed focused on a point beyond his comprehension. She was seeing things he could not, he realized. She was knowing things he did not know.

  The velvet curtains rustled. The sheet across the broken mirror rippled and shimmied, trying to pull free. He felt the brush of those wings glance his face—

  —malevolent dark, stinking water and dripping tunnels and—

  Zoe blinked; her eyes went back to normal. She turned to him in the bed where he lay frozen, trying not to smell the decayed scent of earth and rot that had rushed over him with the touch of her Gift, no, not ever again …

  “I know where they are now,” she said, her voice hushed and low and still luscious with power. �
�You were right. It was easy. I know where to find the heart of the sanf.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Kimber,

  I’m alive. Hayden James was killed by the Others. All three emissaries are dead. Zoe Lane Langford is with me. I’ll explain all when I get back. I hope.

  —R.S.V.L.

  Paris was one ravenous city built upon the back of another. Above the earth it bedazzled: marble façades, slate roofs, breathtaking palaces and cathedrals and ancient walled cemeteries brimming with statues and bodies. Hospitals and monasteries, faubourgs that housed the deprived and the prosperous and everyone in between. People flocked to its opulence, lamented the state of its water and its roads, were overwhelmed by the abundance of theatre and science and public restaurants. There seemed little to rival it in all the civilized world. And tourist or native-born, most people who traveled its streets gave no thought to that other place. That world that still existed, crouched and hunched, beneath them.

  The other city had no official name. It was a running sore below the paving stones and filthy wide river, miles and miles of underground tunnels and rooms carved first by Roman hands, then Frankish, Carolingian, French: the bedrock chipped and sliced and hauled away to the surface to supply all those generations of buildings and bridges.

  Les carrières. The quarries.

  They had been abandoned for centuries. Water pooled in milky puddles, made lakes and grottoes of entire portions of the hidden city. Where it didn’t pool it merely leaked, or dribbled, seeping and plopping from above to below. Always seeking below.

  Some of the tunnels had collapsed beneath the weight of the behemoth above them; great sections of Paris were progressively sinking, and all the timber joists to be found would not prevent it.

  Most of the entrances to the quarries had been forgotten over time. There existed still a few more obvious apertures, usually by way of Gothic crypts, especially in Montparnasse, but by and large the populace of the upper city had overlooked its origins, and the warren of tunnels lay dead and dark.

  But for those that formed the easternmost edge.

  The passageways there spoked from a hub in eerie resemblance to the pattern of the streets above. The hub itself had once been a massive field of tightly grained limestone, but that was before Charlemagne. Its excavation had left a chamber the size of a granary and roughly the shape of a rectangle, with side tunnels leading away, both up and down, all across the city, toward walls of yet-untouched stone.

  It was cold in the tunnels, but on this particular night it was colder above the ground. Fat gray clouds had enclosed the city, and the first snow of the season had started to fall.

  The flakes drifted nearly directly through the twist of smoke that slithered above the sidewalks of la Vallée. They continued their path downward to catch along the shoulders and hair of the woman who walked just below the smoke. A servant out very late, or a tavern girl, with a woolen coat but no hat or muff, no hint of cosmetics or jewelry, not even a simple ribbon about her neck. She was scurrying along the lanes with her chin tucked to her chest, clearly in a hurry.

  It was nearing midnight. The stalls of the poultry market she passed were empty. Feathers of all sizes and colors littered the ground, cupped the snow to create walkways of bumpy white. The flakes helped mute the stench as well; they muffled all the worst aspects of the city, hid the piles of garbage and stained roofs, dropped in quiet, drifting beauty along the wealthy and the poor in equal measure.

  The woman slowed, then stopped. She hesitated, looking around her, then retraced her steps back to the poultry stalls, began to forge a new path through the virgin white.

  The odd twist of smoke followed her, a smudge of gray above her head.

  Zoe moved guardedly through the wooden stalls of the market, switching her gaze from the indigo cloak that writhed in its funnel ahead to the sticky mess at her feet, damp feathers clinging in lumps to her shoes and hem. She shook her skirts every few feet, glanced back behind her, and was pleased to see the snow falling quickly enough to muddle her tracks.

  The cloak beckoned her forward. It had chosen a point upon the ground, the tapered end of it skipping and hopping, whipping back and forth in a random small circle without disturbing a single chicken feather.

  She walked up to it, crouched, and touched a hand to the earth. The smoke that had been a twist rushed down beside her and took a new shape: a man, a dragon-man, with a curved back and bent legs, and talons that scratched the dirt.

  “Here?” he asked, frowning at the scratches.

  Zoe nodded. She knew they both heard it, the subdued song of limestone made hollow by the open space behind it, about as big as a trapdoor. Everything else around was solid stone beneath packed mud.

  She stood, kicked her heel against the earth. The song wavered, then resumed.

  “Allow me,” said Rhys.

  She stepped back, and he curled his hands into fists and pounded them both against the ground.

  The song broke. Rhys hit the earth again, and again, and when the stones crumbled apart they both heard that as well, and then they saw it: a hole opening up, snowflakes and feathers tumbling down into the sudden darkness, disappearing.

  “You know what I miss?” sighed Rhys, peering down into the opening.

  “What?”

  “The smell of peaches. Ripe peaches. There’s nothing that evokes warm days and starry nights, leisure and happy times more than the aroma of freshly picked summer peaches. And plums. Plums are good too.”

  She glanced up at him.

  “This”—he aimed a talon at the gaping hole—“is about as far from that smell as I can imagine.”

  “Agreed,” she said. She stood to dust the snow off her lap. “Shall we go?”

  “In a moment. One last thing.” He faced her, flakes gathering on his bare skin, speckling his hair, white fluff across his eyelashes. It was coming down harder now, much harder, and she had to blink a few times to clear her own vision. “I know I’ve told you how much I don’t want you to do this.”

  “Rhys—”

  “And I know you’re dead set on it anyway,” he continued, speaking over her. “It’s one of the things I love about you, Zee. Normally. That you think for yourself. That you don’t adhere to any sort of conventional behavior for a female, even a female dragon. So now I’m going to tell you for what may be the last time the one thing I hope you’ll remember of me: I would give up all the summers of eternity for you. I love you. Forever and my summer days, I’ll love you.”

  She cupped her cold fingers to his cheek. “This won’t be the last time.”

  “Well.” His lashes lowered and his mouth curved; he turned his face to kiss her fingertips. “Just the same.”

  Her hand dropped. “I didn’t love him.”

  His eyes flashed back to hers, and she swallowed.

  “You said that I did. But I … I want you to know that’s not true. I wanted to love him. I tried and tried. He was a good man. He was kind.”

  “Yes,” Rhys said, and nothing more.

  “But no matter how hard I tried, it just … didn’t happen. Maybe, had we been given more time …” She wiped the snow from her eyes. “So no, I didn’t love him. But he was still mine. That’s why I’m here. That’s what this”—she pointed at the hole—“means to me. He was good, and valiant, and he was mine.”

  Snow fell in dots between them, a curtain of endless dots. “Then that makes him mine as well,” said Lord Rhys, and shook the flakes from his hair. “Let’s go.”

  Had any of the sanf inimicus inhabiting the quarry tunnels come upon them, no doubt they would have been startled to see a single candle in a lantern bobbing along by itself in the air, an excess of smoke drifting behind it to crease along the bumps and knots of the ceiling.

  But they encountered no one. Not the first mile. Nor the next.

  She followed the cloak, swishing and flicking ahead of her, a living thing now, deep blue and yellow stars, voices murmuring in chorus, whisp
ering to her, hurry; no, don’t; yes, hurry, it’s time.

  The limestone had been chiseled in great sheets from its base, but the floors of the tunnels were littered with splinters and flakes, and she was afraid she was beginning to leave a trail of blood behind her, for all her invisibility. She looked back and saw nothing but water puddles and sharp changing shadows. If she rinsed her feet, she’d leave prints for certain. So she tried to step lightly and went on.

  Her strategy had evolved from simple vengeance into more complicated duplicity. She had instructed the cloak to take her to the leader of the sanf inimicus. Zoe would identify him, wait for him to be alone—and he would be alone at some small moment, she was certain of it—and then she and Rhys would abduct him. Smuggle him out together, out of the quarries, out of Paris, all the way back to Darkfrith.

  Let the council have him. Let the Alpha work his tender mercies upon the human who had caused them all so much grief. She wouldn’t shed a tear.

  And if perchance the man proved to be … disagreeable, or impossible to transport, Zoe would kill him. She would picture in her mind the face of the dragon who had pledged twice to wed her. She would remember Cerise, and the shire, and she would snap his neck.

  That seemed an excellent plan too.

  Up ahead, the cloak loosened its arrow shape, widened and thinned until it blocked the entire passage as a diaphanous veil. Through the spirits she caught a glimpse of a different sort of light, less mobile. It was a rushlight, fixed to the wall.

  She paused and glanced at the smoke beside her. Rhys Turned to man, winked at her, and went back to smoke.

  She blew out the flame of her lantern and set it against a wall. She crept onward, up to the veil, straight through it, and for the slightest second—as the world plunged deep blue and she tripped forward into infinity—she heard the voices again, clearer than ever before: yes!go! Then she was through it, back upon solid stone. She stopped to lift her hands to the rushlight to get warm, then wrung them down her hair to ensure no stray droplets of water would betray her.