A barrage, like Elsie. Sweeping clean the muddy path.
And in them, he was happy to drown.
She was crawling into his bed at the lodge, her black hair in loose waves, her chilled body covered in goosebumps.
The first night.
“You don’t mind if I stay?”
His smile was irrepressible as he shook his head. “Of course, I don’t mind.”
She grinned, pulling the covers closer above her crossed legs, and set to work on braiding her hair into that thick, mussed braid that eventually he learned meant she was getting tired, and he’d listened to her fingers brushing the groaning tangles out as he’d torn through his wardrobe, praying for pajamas he knew he hadn’t even bothered to bring.
Panic was starting to rise, and he’d glanced over at her, humming quietly to herself. She’d met his gaze, cocking her head to the side. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, I…I’ll be right back,” he muttered, snatching a crumpled dressing robe from the wardrobe floor, pulling the bundle to his chest as he turned for the bathing room.
No sooner had the lock clicked shut, then he’d dropped the robe to the floor, the bathing room of the lodge vanishing in a whirl.
Caelaymnis had been chilly that night, he remembered, and there’d been snow starting to drift down in great, white clumps. It’d taken two minutes, running upstairs, to find the soft mossy pants he neglected in his solitude.
Of course, he’d come back with snow in his hair.
He’d brushed it off over the sink, but she’d still noticed when he climbed in beside her.
“Your hair’s wet,” she snickered, running her fingers through it, curled close beside him, their legs already tangled together.
“Your hair’s wet,” was the only retort he’d been able to think of, and she’d lost it, face crinkled with laughter.
It was a beautiful sound, her laughter.
Not like bells or chimes or any of the other pretty things people said laughter was like.
It was sort of breathy, through her nose, unless something was particularly amusing, then she’d fall completely silent, ribs shaking, eyes streaming with tears. There was this cascade of vocalizations, too, harmonics hit with diaphragmatic jolts, almost half-cut hiccups beyond what she could herself hear, and those—he lived for those.
Her kisses had been damp, after that, soaked with joy and salted to perfection.
But there was a silent agreement on those lips.
This, but no more.
Other nights, later nights, nights from their future, those nights bore witness to wandering hands across flushed skin, and still, murmured with the soft sounds of lovers, the agreement.
This, but no more.
And thank the gods.
He’d become adept, in those moments, at writing off his own hesitation as belonging to her, and her alone.
There were moments, though, breathless moments, quiet moments, moments where her hesitation wavered. They left him stranded, fumbling. What he wanted…what he wanted was to lose himself with her. He wanted to hold her, to press his eyes closed and listen as her heart raced, to surrender, he realized now. He wanted to surrender. To hold his hands in the air and beg forgiveness.
He’d had so many reasons of his own, private and shared. In his heart, he told himself the facade was not strong enough to withstand passion, not yet, not without practice. That, in surrender, the illusion would shatter. A lie. He told himself that if it withstood, they did not have the Dradan tea leaves to complete the rite, and in those moments, he was oddly devout, needing them both to down the tea, kneeled in prayer before an icon. To his would-be lover, he told other lies. That he wanted to, really, he did, and that part wasn’t a lie, but that he hadn’t known she would want to, and so, hadn’t thought to buy the rubber sleeve the humans so cleverly manufactured in the absence of Dradan tea. They were expensive, hardly an impulse purchase from behind the physician’s counter, and she would feign relief, forgiving his forgetfulness.
And more than that, he’d spun himself a most romantic tale. He’d spun a tale where their joining would’ve meant the end of the investigation, the end of his life before, the making of a vow, that he would live and breathe and love and die as nothing more than a human.
That night, the first night they’d shared a bed, he had shifted.
He awoke to a darkened room and a cold hearth, heart pounding, unsure at first what had roused him. Elsie seemed dead to the world, her arm around his waist, her head nestled into his shoulder, one leg thrown haphazardly across his hips. But it was not a human she’d snuggled up against.
How to shift without waking her.
He couldn’t.
He’d felt his skin tingling with familiar warmth, his magic tired and sluggish, his body reluctant to crawl back inside that human casing, to be contained, and gods, did it feel good, so good, stretched out there, unfurled beneath the blankets, beneath his friend, his someday-lover—
The change made her stir, and exhausted eyes met his, wide and full of terror.
And in a blink, he was human again, panicked and awake.
Her fingers dug deep into his skin, her breathing fast, the taste of fear and sweat lacing the air as her heart thrummed, dadum-dadum-dadum-dadum-dadum, and she’d pushed herself half to sitting, swallowing hard, looking around the room.
“Elsie,” he hardly dared to whisper, “please—”
At his voice, her head snapped back to his, a look of recognition dawning across her face, and already, her eyelids were heavy. “Just…a nightmare,” she murmured, letting herself drift back onto the pillow, rolling onto her side.
A nightmare.
That’s what he was to her.
And she deserved so much more than a nightmare. It didn’t take keen investigative skills to see that she had more than enough of those, already.
Human. For her, a human.
The next morning brought her no recollection of her waking dream.
She remembered now, though.
Fletcher let the silence of the deadened house wash across him.
Now, she remembered.
ELSIE
“People believe that freedom tastes like morality, justice, goodness.
It does not.”
~Mariann Bell
There was an unnatural stillness to the night.
Like even the wind didn’t dare to breathe.
Run, it would’ve whispered.
Run.
The locket was warm against her fingers as she worried it, a reflexive tic to pull her through the minutes of solitude.
Was it really yours.
No.
Probably wasn’t.
And still, she’d memorized the filigree heart, curling in the soft metal. The smooth joints of the hinges, hiccupped with hairline fractures, the sweet dig beneath her fingernail as she clasped it open, the ridges of the empty frame curled atop the diamond-patterned texture.
“You know, I quite thought I saw someone lingering beyond the window.”
He was meandering down the carriage-house path, hands stuffed with casual nonchalance in his trouser pockets, like he greeted all trespassers with such friendly warmth.
“Did you know her.” Elsie’s voice was hoarse, cracking in the cold.
No pretenses.
No games.
His smile faltered, an expression of gravitas washing the light from his eyes. “This is not a conversation for garden walk-ways, Ms. Mirabeau,” he said quietly, gesturing to the carriage house. “Please. After you.”
Perched on the edge of a puckered leather chair, pulled before the great carved desk, Elsie’s knee was bouncing with quiet apprehension.
“There’s no need to fret,” Clark muttered, glancing up from the drawer he was thumbing through.
She swallowed, saying nothing.
An idea, in the back of her mind, simmering, and in a moment of heartache, she’d succumbed to her own burning curiosity. Alone, watching Fletcher walk away
, and she was tired of not having the answers to her own life.
You should’ve found Sam.
Sam, who’d have had the good sense to talk her out of storming to the manor on the hill, into the den of the monster on some half-cocked plot to demand answers.
Clark gave a soft chuckle, like he’d heard the thought. Pulling out a thick portfolio, deep butcher’s brown and bound in twine, he tossed it onto the desk, falling gracefully into the accompanying armchair. “You know, it isn’t all true, what he says about me.”
“What?”
“Sam,” he carried on with an exasperated sigh, a smile still playing at the corners of his mouth. “He’s a sweet boy, but prone to hyperbole. I am not the big bad wolf he would have you believe.”
You are you are you are
“I’m not here to talk about Sam.”
“Oh, you are, love. You most certainly are.” And with a single finger, he pushed the folder across the desk.
The twine was shedding beneath her fingers, freshly wound, and she let it fall in hopeless curls on the soft carpet as she glanced inside.
No no no no no no
“Go on, love. Take a look.”
Her hands were shaking as she pulled the stack from the envelope, because she knew the hand that’d penned those twirling words, knew it, loved it—
“A bright young girl,” she murmured under her breath, eyes flying across the page, “she is taken with her books and the idea that there is simply more…what the hell—”
Her. This was a—a documenting of her life, laid out in Sam’s own hand.
She adores her brother—
A moment-by-moment account of her loves and hopes and heartbreaks, recorded meticulously by the man who was supposed to be her friend.
…a most vivacious response for a fourteen-year-old, though doubtlessly appreciated…
She flipped through the pages, watching the years of cataloging fly by.
Years.
He’d been doing this for years.
—utterly unrepentant, roguish, even, and her remarks are beginning to fall, as she neglects her schoolwork in favor of P.W.—
Elsie’s eyes snapped across the desk. “Bullshit. He wouldn’t—”
Wetting his fingertip, Clark slid a single sheet of parchment off the desk. “She is mistrustful, to the highest degree,” he read, “and though I am reluctant to betray such trust, I find it the necessary evil, when given…the choice.” Clark tossed the paper aside, letting it flutter down between them. “He would. And more than that, love, he did.”
“I don’t understand—”
“I knew your mother.” His eyes were polished coal, hands folded neatly before him on the desk. “She was a shrewd woman. Powerful. Great, even, and that…that is a word I do not offer lightly. You can be, too. But you are soft. You’ve known my son for how long? And not once did you question why the charge of the Commissioner—the heir to the district, heir to the Guild, even—would befriend a poor little farm girl. You never stopped to wonder, and now, in your hands, you hold the answer to a question you were too naive to even ask.”
She was on her feet, tears stinging in her eyes, piercing, biting, gnawing—
“No.” A resounding clap of thunder through the quiet carriage house echoed no, no, no with phantom whispers against the polished wood, and they were lying, lying little echoes—
“Yes,” he said in a low voice, rising. “He may like you, he may care for you, he may even love you. And yet, he still betrayed you, Elizabeth. You cannot fill your mother’s shoes, believing that he was anything other than a means to an end for someone else. And you’re lucky, this time. Lucky that someone was me. Lucky that I had your best interests at heart. Because next time, it will be someone else. Someone who would rather see you dead than reaching for her torch.”
She blinked back the hot tears, eyes darting about the carriage house.
Sam.
Her Sam.
The one who’d paid her way out of the debtor’s cells, who’d shelled out the gold to pay off the mercenaries, the one who’d helped feed her, clothe her, who’d loved her—supposedly—and for what.
So that he could chronical her life for the Commissioner.
“I understand this is a great deal to take in,” he went on softly. “And I do not relish shattering what little comfort this life has offered you. But they have hunted her, Elsie. They hunted her, and they found her, and they killed her, and they will do the same to you, too, if they’re given the chance. You have a good heart, love. It truly is gold. And they will use it against you.”
Her eyes flicked back to his.
He was not wrong.
This, she felt. Deep in her bones.
Deep in the scars she’d spent too long chasing.
She’d been foolish, having any faith in Sam. Having faith in any of them, really. Because what had they brought, but disappointment and pain.
They’d used her.
Fletcher, to play out his fantasy of humanity.
Sam, to slip Clark information.
“Fine,” she found herself saying, palms pressing into her damp cheeks, willing the tears away. “What if you’re right. What if all this is true, and…what is it that I stand to gain? Trusting you?”
A wicked grin spread across his face, eyes sparking to life. “A city, my dear, the likes of which you’ve yet begun to imagine.”
SAM
“Morality is an ocean current, and even the best sailors lose their way. And when you’re finally shipwrecked, out of options—you don’t care about the current. Survival, that’s all that matters.”
~Mariann Bell
It was necessary.
That was what he told himself, turning over the cream envelope.
Cherried wax had been spilled across the pointed flap, a generically calligraphed S.A. coming into relief when he pulled the seal away. They will hunt her, he’d been told. I do not know when and I do not know how, but eventually, they will come for her.
And when they do, they will kill her.
But who.
Who wanted Elsie dead.
Fletcher’s not even supposed to be here, she’d shrugged, Elsie’s own confession as she’d sat curled beneath the blanket on Sam’s sofa.
No.
No, he damn well wasn’t.
Eyes damp, Sam sniffed, slumping back into the cafe chair, tossing the envelope atop the polished tabletop.
Fletcher was nice enough. The boy unquestionably had a good head on his shoulders. He was thoughtful. Quiet. Kind, too, far beyond what Percy had been.
And he wasn’t worth her life.
But it was Fletcher.
Fletcher.
Elsie was precocious and witty, and Teddy was sweet-hearted and gentle, and he loved them both, and it had been utterly wonderful, having someone else join their little ensemble, someone who could tell the difference between the a Fieldlande ‘82, with the oaky aftertaste and rousing tannins, and Winter Reach ‘84, with the fruity lightness one would expect of such a mellow red. Someone who appreciated a proper table setting, who noticed when the napkins were folded fancy for special occasions, who took each meal as a vivid exploration of palate instead of merely the sustaining of body.
A friend.
The word hit him hard.
Elsie, he’d always thought of more as a sister than anything else. A spunky, wild little sister. And Teddy…well, fiancé had been a word he’d been hoping to use for a while, now.
But Fletcher was a friend. A good friend.
He was everything to Elsie, that much was plain.
And she was everything to him.
Clark’s words echoed loudly in Sam’s memory.
They will kill her.
They will hunt her, they will find her, and they will kill her.
Unless you bring this to me, she will die.
Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow.
But she will die, Sam. That, I promise.
And who better to hunt a b
ack-water bastard than a warrior singing her praises from every proverbial roof-top.
Eyes tearing up, he blew out a breath, fingers drumming against the table. The thought made him feel sick. Tendrils of cold, oily shame were curling in his gut at the unspoken accusation.
That Fletcher—his friend, Fletcher, Elsie’s lover, Fletcher—would use her, toy with her feelings, draw her out…and for what?
No.
No, he’d been here for nigh on six months. If he was going to make a move, he’d have done it already. And he certainly wouldn’t have shown his hand. Anyone could see the wary distance in Elsie’s eyes. It was the same look one might find in a cornered cat—dangerous. Like she could bolt, at any moment, if he gave her cause. Fletcher ate with them, talked with them, laughed with them, wrapped his arm around Elsie as she nestled into his shoulder on the sofa, and if he’d been hoping to make a strike in Elsie’s direction, he’d certainly had his window.
“Mr. Alderton?” A child’s voice drew him from his melancholia with a start.
Chim was lingering by the table, staring at him, unblinking, head cocked to the side. “Mr. Alderton, is something wrong?”
“I, uh…” He straightened up, swallowing. And paused.
She’d already boosted herself up onto the chair across from him, had, in fact, already gestured the waiter over, and was, as she waited, turning over the teacup before her, pouring all the contents of the creamer therein. “Is it the dockman from the store this morning?”
“What dockma—oh, no,” he muttered, watching her heap spoonful after spoonful of sugar into her filled-to-the-brim cup of heavy cream. “No…no, it wasn’t that. I received some rather disappointing news today, that’s all.”
She rested the spoon with dainty elegance against her saucer, and with her pinky out, lifted up the cup, taking a delicate sip of her sugared cream. “Well, buck up, buttercup,” she nodded, smacking her lips.
“Buck up, buttercup,” he echoed. His eyes flicked to hers. “My mom used to say that.”
“Mine, too,” she said softly. “It never really worked.”
“No. But it was nice hearing it, all the same.”
Death and the Merchant (River's End Book 1) Page 10