Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(7)

“Do you really think I was the one who imprisoned you? I was not. Yes, I knew you were there, but I had no one I could trust to go to you . . . and I could not go myself. It was not until the arrival of Lady Grey I felt I had an ally who would be up to the task should you prove . . . reluctant.”

“You thought I’d gone completely mad.” She said nothing, but she looked away. Amelie looked away. He swallowed and stared hard at his clasped hands. “Perhaps you weren’t so wrong. I was . . . not myself.”

“I doubt that, since you are so much better already,” Amelie said. Her tone was warm, and very gentle. “Tomorrow we will leave this place behind. I have a castle far in the mountains where you can work in peace to recapture all that you have lost. I am in need of a fine alchemist, and there is none better in this world. We have much to do, you and I. Much to plan.”

There was a certain synchronicity to it, he found; he had been in Amelie’s company for many years, and when he left it, disaster always struck. She was, in some ways, his lucky star. Best to follow her now, he supposed. “All right,” he said. “I will go.”

“Then you’d best say farewell to Lady Grey and find yourself some rest,” she told him. “She will not come with us.”

“No? Why not?”

“Two queens cannot ever stay comfortably together. Lady Grey has her own path; we have ours. Say your good-byes. At nightfall, we depart.”

She dismissed him simply by picking up her book. He bowed—an unnecessary courtesy—and saw himself out of the room. It was only as he shut the doors that he saw her guards standing motionless in the darker corners of her apartments; she was never unwatched, never unprotected. He’d forgotten that.

Lady Grey was waiting for him, hands calmly folded in a maidenly sort of posture that did not match her mischievous smile. “Dinner,” she said. “Follow me to the larder.”

The larder was stocked with fresh-drawn blood; he did not ask where it came from, and she did not volunteer. She sipped her own cup as he emptied his, drinking until all the screaming hunger inside was fully drowned. “Do you ever imagine you can hear them?” he asked her, looking at the last red drops clinging to the metal goblet’s sides.

“You mean, hear their screams in the blood?” Lady Grey seemed calm enough, but she nodded. “I think I might, sometimes, when I drink it so warm. Odd, how I never hear it when they’re dying before me in real life. Only when I drink apart from the hunt. Is that normal, do you think?”

“Whatever is normal in this world, we have no part in it,” he said. “How long was I in the dark, my lady?”

“Ten months.”

“It seemed longer.”

“No doubt because it was so congenial.”

“You should have stayed for the formal procession of the rats. Very entertaining; there were court dances. Although perhaps I imagined it in one of my hallucinations. I did have several vivid ones.”

She reached across the table and wrapped her long, slender fingers around his hand. “You are safe now,” she told him. “And I will keep my eye on you, Lord Myrnin. The world cannot lose such a lovely head of hair.”

“I will try to keep my hair, and my head, intact for you.” She’d kept her hand on his, and he turned his fingers to lightly grip hers. “I am surprised to find that you accept Amelie’s orders.”

Lady Grey laughed. It was a peal of genuine amusement, too free for a well-bred young woman, but as she’d said, she’d buried that girl behind her. “Amelie asks favors of me. She doesn’t order me. I stay with you because I like you, Lord Myrnin. If you wish, I’ll stay with you today, as you rest. It might be a day of nightmares for you. I could comfort you.”

The thought made him dizzy, and he struggled to contain it, control it. His brain was chattering again, running too fast and in too many wild directions. Perhaps he’d overindulged in the blood. He felt hot with it. “I think,” he said finally, “that you are too kind, and I am too mad, for that to end well, my lady. As much as I . . . desire comfort, I am not ready for it. Let me learn myself again before I am asked to learn someone else.”

He expected her to be insulted; what woman would not have been, to have such a thing thrown in her face? But she only sat back, still holding his hand, and regarded him for a long moment before she said, “I think you are a very wise man, Myrnin of Conwy. I think one day we will find ourselves together again, and perhaps things will be different. But for now, you are right. You should be yourself, wholly, before you can begin to think beyond your skin again. I remember my first days of waking after death. I know how fragile and frightening it was, to be so strong and yet so weak.”

She understood. Truly understood. He felt a surge of affection for her, and tender connection, and raised her hand to his lips to kiss the soft skin of her knuckles. He said nothing else, and neither did she. Then he bowed, rose, and walked to his own chambers.

He bolted the door from within, and crawled still clothed between the soft linen sheets, drowning in feathers and fears, and slept as if the devil himself chased the world away.

As he rode away that night in Amelie’s train of followers, he looked back to see Lady Grey standing like a beacon on the roof of the stone keep. He raised a hand to her as the trees closed around their party.

He never saw her return the salute . . . but he felt it.