The Treasure Keeper d-4

by Shana Abe

  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 drakon.

  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 bobbin work 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 drakon, 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 drakon that rose from a point east into the sky bright as a rainbow as the rain slapped down.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Suppose you were made a prisoner inside your own body. A mind without the ability to control physical limbs; a heart without the ability to beat. Suppose you were bound in painful cold iron— yes, painful, even for one of us—and your sole relief was the flight of your spirit, away, away from the miserable dark grave that actually encompassed you.

  Toward warmth, say. Toward other spirits like you, or the living light of the one you loved. Suppose people who knew how to do such a thing used their Voice to command that you remain frozen in your peculiar agony. That they used the chips and glistening dust of a magical diamond to ensure that you listened, that your body remained helpless, no matter how far your spirit roamed. And the closer your spirit returned to your actual, physical self—whatever remained of it—the thinner it became; the two separated measures of you cannot fluently share the same worldly space. Our natural state of being fights to reassert itself: Either you combine again with your body to dwell in the frosty isolation of your slow death, or you abandon it once more, you soar apart. Those are your only choices.

  You'd, be better off keeping away, wouldn't you?

  No matter how strong your Gifts, no matter how much you willed it, you would not escape the diamond dust and the iron, and the wicked, wicked song they sang. Such was the nature of the malevolence of Draumr.

  Draumr controls us. He who controls any fragment of Draumr controls us, in small ways or—with enough of the pieces—large.

  True, as a species we're varied in our strengths. For some drakon the shattered stone sings stronger and for others weaker; for many of us, even as shards, Draumr is unbearable to the touch. Others still may touch it without pain but fall yet under its spell.

  For all our variations, it remains the one horrific, common flaw we cannot avoid.

  That is... most of us. For every rule, there is an exception, you know.

  That's what Lord Rhys and Zoe Lane were about to discover, along with their illustrious companions.

  Chapter Nineteen

  He could not occupy Hayden's body this time. He tried. He could not occupy any of their bodies. They couldn't hear him, they didn't see him, and when he tried to push his way into them, it was like they were made of stone. He gained nothing. They didn't even slow. James and the boy had discovered a weakness to the house—Rhys hardly knew where, perhaps a chink in a pane of glass, a ball of tar melted loose from the roof, anything—and had Turned and rematerialized here, and they were slinking straight into a trap.

  He wasn't even sure how he himself had gotten in. He'd wanted it, wanted it urgently, and here he was.

  He tried speaking to them, he tried shouting. The two drakon only edged forward, because to them, he simply was not there.

  Rhys pounded the wall in front of them. He wanted to rip out the shabby wood, he wanted to rip down the ugly house, a prop, a set that looked and felt as false as cheap stage scenery at the Hay market. He was sick of being unseen, he was bloody sick of being a poor remnant of himself. The rage and resentment bubbled inside him like red-hot lava, and a child would have been of better use, an infant would have done a better job of warning them—there were sanf inimicus around the corner and a dim-blooded dragon somewhere below, and now, when he most needed words and touch he had neither, and his kinsmen were about to be slaughtered.

  He felt the lava beating in his head. He felt his vision waver; he did not want this, he'd never wanted this—let Hayden James live, let him live and go back to Zoe and keep her safe—

  James took another step. He was throwing a significant look to the boy—who grinned back at him with his lips peeled over his teeth—when the woman darted out, gave a single hard shake of her bowl: A cloud of rye-colored dust choked the little hall.

  They could not Turn. The powder shot through Rhys, sifted like silt through the air, and for a few precious seconds neither James nor Sandu could Turn; there was no way to see clear to anything but grit.

  One of the men stepped out in front of the woman, lifting his pistol. His finger squeezed the trigger. A white flash, a new instant dark.

  James grunted and slammed against the wall, and the boy behind him lunged forward.

  Rhys moved to catch Hayden James as he sank to the floor, but his shadow hands only slid through him.

  She shed her clothing as she ran. Hat, gloves, shoes. She darted past Others hunched under awnings, past snarling wet dogs. The colors in the sky drew her on and she'd never been so fleet in her life. A pair of fiddlers on a bridge hunkered together beneath their overlapping umbrellas; they played a duet of lively, quick-pattering notes, and
Zoe ripped at the bodice to her gown as she passed them, let the lavender merino go floating out behind her to land in the brown frothy rush of the Seine.

  The music ceased. Both men stood up and shouted after her: she didn't slow.

  The corset was easy. Chemise. The stockings—she did pause then, only long enough to yank them into tatters. If it hadn't been raining so hard she would have been truly invisible, but even she could see the water striking her legs and torso, separating around the shape of a sprinting woman.

  Sidewalks and streetlamps with yellow snakes' tongues of flame. Shops and beggars and shiny painted doors. The cloak and the colors of Hayden led her into a maze of twisting back lanes; across the peaked roofs she could see the cloak now taking the tapered shape of a whirlwind, violent, swirling stars; it curved and bent like a funnel cloud fixed to the roof of one particular house.

  Rhys was nowhere to be felt or seen.

  She reached the front door to the dilapidated place marked by her Gift, kicked at it—once, twice, three times, until it split enough that she could tear at it with her hands. Wood splintered and metal shrieked and Zoe slapped the water off her skin and crawled inside the hole she'd made, faced the darkness of the unknown ahead.

  He could not see. James and the Zaharen drakon were gone. Rhys was encased with utter night. He could not see, and he could not move; everything was bitter cold and ebony. One instant he'd been reaching for James, marking the blotch of blood left upon the wall behind him as James's body slid to the floor—and then the next, he was here. Stuck. Powerless.

  He had a sudden sharp memory of the dead sanf coachman leaning over him, the pale gray eyes, the sour smile, but when he tried to focus on it more clearly, it dissolved into dirt.

  He tried to breathe, but his lungs were crushed beneath a mountain of iron and ice. He tried to fling himself to Zoe and even that didn't work. He had descended into the earth. He was in the company of worms now.