Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(112)

“Drink water anyway. I know what you’re like hung over.”

“Friends drink with you,” she said when the glass was half-done. “Good friends make you hydrate.” She set the empty glass on the end table.

“Why are you here, Cat?”

“Can I see the token she gave you?”

He produced it like a street conjurer summoning a coin. Up close it seemed clouded and deep. Strange shapes shifted within. Her head swam as she watched them. She passed the stone back. “What does it do?”

“It’s their blood,” he said. “Their family. Two thousand years and more of not-quite-life, feeding off the great monsters of the deep. Two thousand years of recruiting sucker refugees kicked out of their homes by torchbearing lifers, two millennia of converts and dark miracles. All that power, all that hunger in a single package.”

“It’s a drug.”

“It’s a religion. It’s more than a religion.”

“You take it, and they own you. Like the dreamdust.”

“They don’t own me,” he said. “When I take this, I can use their power. All the family’s hunger is mine, as I need it. And when I’m done, when the power recedes, the dregs of my soul drain out into the ocean with theirs. I’ll have to go there to fill myself. And what I get back won’t be me. It’ll be one drop of my blood to a million of theirs. I’ll be a faint flavor. Most of what’s left will be them.”

“You’ll die.”

“You need help, and so does Seril, and so do Abelard and Tara. I’ve lived a long time already.” He sat on a chair before his writing desk. “You’re going to tell me to let it go.”

“No.”

“What, then?”

This was the part she’d had to get drunk for, and she wasn’t drunk anymore. But then, if being sober made some things hard to say, maybe the things said were better for it. “You’re not doing this because of some half-assed sense of civic duty to a place you don’t live. You like Tara, and Abelard, and the others, but you’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it for me. Because Seril helped me get unf*cked in the head, and you’re afraid if she goes, I’ll slide back to the way I was before.”

“And this is the part where you curse me out for presuming to live your life for you, where you say you can handle yourself—”

“Listen to me.”

He stopped.

“We keep second-guessing each other. I don’t think we’ve been on the right foot two days running since this thing started.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t broken my neck that one time.”

“Shut up,” she said softly. “Please.”

Water slapped the ship’s side. A dockside drunk sang a warbling Talbeg song.

“Tomorrow I’ll do something dumb for my goddess, and I might die. Tomorrow you’ll do something just as dumb for me, and you might die. Tonight we deserve each other’s honesty. This isn’t my habit talking. I want to be with you now. Do you want to be with me?”

He said the word she was afraid to hear.

He could move faster than the human eye could follow. Now, though, he moved slow as a statue would be if it decided to walk. He joined her on the couch. His fingers were cool against her cheek, and she let out a breath as they traced the line of her jaw to her neck, and the line of her neck to her shirt.

She ripped his getting it off him, and tangled his pants in his boots; they had to stop and tug, laughing, together. The couch velvet was hot and soft against her skin, and he poised above her, one hand firm against her side. “Oh,” he said, and cursed, rolled off the bed and returned a second later with a sheet. “Sorry. In case.”

“It’s fine,” she said, and stood naked in the cabin; he was, too. Moonlight lit old scars on his skin and hers, but for now the scars were not the point.

They reclined again. She held him like a vise, and then, and then—

Mechanically, it wasn’t altogether different from her other trysts. There were mouths and two tense bodies. He was strong, and so was she, which he knew when they were dressed but it took him a few minutes to understand it was still true when they were naked. She wouldn’t break. Neither would he. There were teeth, too, and there was some blood, which the sheet caught, and there was sweat and meat and bones and spit and slickness.

There were no strange-godded cities beneath the waves; there were no necromancers lurking in the shadows. There were no contracts, no gargoyles, no moon, no water, no Justice.

Just us, she thought, and laughed.

It was enough.

Well. Once wasn’t. So after a rest they tried again.





57

“I hate dungeons,” Tara said when they reached the third lightning-lit gallery. Far above, leathery wings fluttered, too large and loud to belong to normal bats. A grim red glow lit their path, and as they walked Tara tried not to think about the writhing shapes in the shadowed halls to her left and right, or the stone’s tremor underfoot like the quivering of a wounded animal’s skin.

“It is a neat effect,” Shale said.

“Neat is how a room looks when it’s clean. This place could crush us.” Crystal veins grew thicker on these walls, and their light left her shadowless and red. She switched off her hand torch. The tunnel narrowed; walls warmed her fingertips. She did not touch the crystal. “You know why we use anesthetic in surgery?”