31
VAPOR AND SMOKE
KINGFISHER
THE FOX SMELLED like wild winter and frost-bitten mornings. I held him tightly under one arm, humming a lullaby that my mother had sung to me as an infant
quietly under my breath.
Not to the fox.
I wasn’t humming to the fox.
That would have been weird.
I just liked the song, and I had a feeling he did, too. There was nothing wrong with that.
Ana drowan, doyath drowan, teyra drowan cal su marn. Massurith, massurith, kalminan tu dan shay . . .
One fish, two fish, three fish in the tub. Around they go, around they go, swimming off to sea . . .
Onyx didn’t so much as wriggle as I transported him through the palace. He didn’t growl at the high bloods we passed. He didn’t study the cold, unwelcoming surroundings he found himself in. He fixed his eyes on me, nose twitching, and he listened to me sing.
My magic was useless here—a source of unending frustration. I should have been able to ward Saeris’s chambers against unwelcome visitors, but even that was beyond me here. Tal had been the one to take care of that task. He’d made sure I would have access to her rooms whenever I wanted, but the knowledge
that it was his magic that provided an extra layer of security to her rooms and not mine chafed horribly as I made my way through the double doors to her bedroom.
The fox sat patiently in my arms as I carried him over to her bed.
Hris drowan mayth tair, hris drowan brin gilterrith, ayen hris drowan farh miniethh loss . . .
The first fish drowned, the second fish froze, and the third fish swallowed them all . . .
I ended the song with a flourish, setting the fox down onto the bed. He blinked up at me, eyes glassy and black as jet, not really sure what to make of my performance, it seemed.
“I’m sorry, little one. Now that I think about it, that isn’t a very happy song, is it? Do you like fish? I bet you do, huh?”
The fox blinked.
“I bet you’d like some now, huh? Some tasty trout?”
His ears pricked up. I would have sworn to all the gods that he was smiling hopefully.
“Okay, okay. Let me see.” My illusions were real as long as they were observed. A bath could be real. Clothes. But not food. It just didn’t work like that. I had to pull that kind of magic from somewhere else, and that took concentration. I reached . . . reached . . . and grunted with the effort as I reached into my small magic, into a different place entirely, and I drew a silver bowl containing half a smoked piece of trout. Right about now, a barmaid at the Shag’s Nest in Western Dow was wondering where in all five hells the order of smoked trout she’d just been carrying had disappeared to. It was no matter, though. I’d make sure to go there and pay them for the meal soon enough.
I set the little bowl down and then watched with straight-faced satisfaction as the fox hopped down from Saeris’s bed and promptly scarfed the lot. The fish was gone in moments.
“All right, little one. I have to go now. Don’t be causing any trouble while you wait for your mistress, okay?”
Onyx looked up at me, pink tongue licking his lips as he savored the taste of
the meal I’d stolen for him.
“Go on. Go take a nap or something.”
The fox yawned and then turned and darted under Saeris’s bed.
I was at the door, hand on the knob, when I heard his soft whine. “What is it, hm?” Glancing back over my shoulder, I watched as the little white fox popped his head out from under the bed and then came trotting over to me with purpose. When he reached me, he ducked his head, and something small
and brown hit the rug.
It was a pine cone.
One of the smallest—and most perfectly formed—I had ever seen.
Onyx nudged it with his nose, huffing, then looked up at me expectantly.
I stared down at the fox and the pine cone, hand still on the doorknob, not sure what to do. “Is that . . . for me?”
Onyx nudged the little spiked pine cone, butting it with his nose again, until it rolled and hit the toe of my boot. It was for me.
A gift.
I bent and collected it, tucking the memento into the inside pocket of my leathers. Before I turned and left, I scratched the little fox between his black- tipped ears, trying and failing to pretend that I was unmoved by the gesture.
“Thank you, little one.”
The library was deserted.
Lamps dotted the length of the clerk’s table, their pale green glow forming small pools of light. Books were gathered in five neat stacks, ten tomes high each, at the far end of the table. The place was as silent as the grave.
As I crossed the entryway of the library, headed for the steps that led up to the stacks, a small black cat made of shadow appeared out of my shadow, taking me by surprise. Plenty of shadows had come from me before—that went
without saying. But they’d done so at my behest, and none of them had ever solidified into something living afterward. The cat dug its claws into the rug as it stretched, peering up at me with bloodred eyes.
“Where did you come from?” I asked it.
The shadow cat sniffed my leg curiously, tiny nostrils flaring.
“What can you smell?” I asked. “A fox? I don’t know if the two of you would get along.” As if it knew what I was saying, the shadow cat butted its head against my shins and began purring loud enough to wake the dead.
I stooped down to pet it, and the damned thing darted away, making for the stairs. On the bottom step, it paused, glancing over its shoulder as if to say, Well, then. Are you coming?
Saeris’s scent hung in the air, faint but detectable, as I crossed the library and headed up the stairs. I lost her as I entered the stacks, following the feline, who trotted on ahead, occasionally looking back to make sure I was still there. I had always made it a rule to follow a cat. Particularly a black cat. This one was the darkest shade of midnight there was—an absence of light I knew all too well. My senses were on high alert as we wound through the high stacks, left, then right, then straight ahead for two rows. Magic hung thick in the air here, as the rows grew closer together and the light grew dim, veiling the titles of the hundreds of books that we passed.
The cat’s feet barely seemed to touch the ground as it padded softly ahead. It rubbed its side against the corner of a shelf as it waited for me to catch up, its long, dexterous tail swaying side to side like a blade of tall grass on a breeze.
Once I was close enough for its liking, it took a left, disappearing into a walkway (or more of a tunnel, perhaps), constructed entirely from dusty old books.
Golden light flickered at the end of the tunnel.
When I exited the tunnel, I found myself in a high-ceilinged section of the library that felt very different from the rest of it. A table. A chair. In the far corner: a bed, half-concealed behind a maroon velvet curtain edged with a golden tassel fringe. The walls were made of the stacks themselves, which had
been arranged to form a sort of internal sanctuary, separate from everything else.
The rug underfoot was threadbare at the entrance to the snug. Threadbare also along the section before the large hearth on the far wall, in which a fire crackled merrily in the grate; the bald spots in there indicated many hours during which someone had paced, lost in their thoughts.
In the center of the cloistered space was a large table, on top of which sat a contraption made of cogs and long, spindled arms with shining brass balls attached at their ends. The arms were still, but over time, they would move. It was an orrery. A beautiful one, too. Once, there had been one in my father’s study. As a Faeling, I’d been fascinated by the complex workings of it. My parents had sat at the device, studying it at length. They’d shown me the planets as they were represented by the globes of inlaid silver and copper—how they danced around one another, all spinning around the much larger golden sun at its center.
This orrery was very different from the one in my father’s study. The alignment and the number of the planets were different. It was beautiful to be sure.
If there were time, I would have stayed and appreciated the craftsmanship of the device a little longer—orreries were notoriously difficult to make—but I had come in search of its owner, and I had a feeling I would find him among the real stars.
A rolling ladder had been bolted to the wall to the right. Twenty feet up, a small window stood open, the heavy curtain that was partially drawn across it billowing on a cold breeze. The cat sat at the bottom of the ladder and looked up at the open window, its meaning clear: Your friend is waiting for you up
there.
So be it.
At the foot of the ladder, the cat meowed, blinking slowly at me. It did a turn, the way cats do when they’re about to lie down and nap, but when this
one stretched its front paws out, it became a thing of ink and darkness again and disappeared into the long shadow I cast across the moth-eaten rug.
“All right, then,” I muttered to myself.
I felt no different. Aside from having just seen it happen with my own two eyes, I had no evidence that the cat had just merged with me somehow. I shrugged and climbed the ladder. The window was three feet tall and only two feet wide. I had to fold myself considerably and angle my shoulders to slide through and out onto the narrow walkway beyond. A low parapet ran around the domed roof, providing minimal protection from the three-hundred-foot drop that fell away on the other side of it.
Above, the stars rioted, blistering and brilliant.
I had walked halfway around the dome before I came across the recessed flat section of roof where a male sat at a small, weather-beaten desk, perched high above the world, scrawling away in a book with a feather quill. Though he didn’t look at me, he knew that I had come: the brief pause . . . and then resumption of his scribbling confirmed it.
Once, Foley had been a lord’s son. His father, Warrick Briarstone, had been advisor to King Rurik. Their family line had been second only to the Daianthuses in power and pride. If the true king had not been slain by Belikon, Foley would have eventually risen in rank to become the second most powerful male in all Yvelia. It was the duty of a king’s advisor to act in his stead in emergencies, and as such, a lot of responsibility was placed on his shoulders.
Foley had been born to be respected and to work diligently in service of his realm, and instead he had learned how to fight and had joined the Lupo Proelia.
And now he hid here in his tower on top of the world, among an ocean of books, a shunned vampire who was too afraid to look up and face an old friend.
The scratching of his quill stopped at last. He set it down. “I see Guru hitched a ride with you,” he said quietly. “He does that sometimes.”
When I looked down, I found that the cat was already there, looking back up at me. Whole. Alive. Purring.
“He likes to chase the birds. They used to roost here at night, a long . . . time ago.” He seemed to get lost along the way as he spoke, as if he were, in truth, too weary to complete the thought out loud and had to force himself to finish it.
“Foley.” I said his name, and the male flinched at the sound of it. “Foley, look at me.”
He stared down at his book, frozen solid.
“All right. Fine.” There was no second chair on the roof, only the one Foley currently sat in, but there was a wooden crate full of odds and ends that he’d obviously used to carry items up here in. I upended the crate, dumping the leather tubes, ink bottles, and other bits and pieces onto the roof, flipped the crate upside down, and sat down across from him.
Where was I supposed to start? Foley and I had never laughed together all that much. He’d always been far more serious than the others. More serious than Renfis, even. But there had been an easy camaraderie between this male and me. An understanding, it could be said, of a life that should have been, now lost. We had both been subject to Belikon’s ire—heirs to a future that he had gone to great pains to destroy—and had suffered his close attention until it had become too much to bear. We’d become brothers out of necessity, more than anything. Inseparable. But so much time had passed. Lifetimes during which we’d both endured the kind of misery that would have ended most other males.
I didn’t know where to begin, but the last thing I would do was rush him. I sat silently, leaning down to pet the cat when he approached and started begging for affection. Guru was an appropriate name for him; he seemed wise.
The wind teased at our hair and plucked at our shirts. It scattered Guru’s solid edges, smudging him as if he were a charcoal drawing being swept from a page.
Foley looked up from his book, glancing off to the right, at the rise of the tower’s domed slate roof. He covered his mouth with his hand. “You don’t need to do this,” he said, his fingers muffling his words.
I smiled slowly, sadly, arching a brow at him. “And when have you ever known me to do something I don’t want to do?”
He huffed, as if acknowledging the truth in that, but didn’t say anything else.
I let the silence sit a moment longer, then I said, “You have a fire burning down there. Real flames, not evenlight.”
He nodded. “I like the warmth of it,” he said. “It . . . reminds me.”
Of what it was like to live. The words went unsaid, but I gathered his meaning perfectly well. “I noticed the titles on some of those books down there, too. You made your home in the philosophy and morality section?” I allowed myself a small smile.
Foley did the same, but his smile was tight around his eyes. “Hm,” he said.
“The creatures here have very little interest in either. Seemed like the safest place for me.” He laughed bitterly, finally turning his gaze to me. “You look the same,” he said. “Tal used to tell me what you were going through. I . . .” Both of his eyebrows rose. “I thought you’d never be free of it. I wanted to help. I . . .”
Slowly, I shook my head. “It’s gone. Done. Passed. I’m okay.”
“Are you just saying that to make me feel better?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I mean it.” And I did. My dreams were often nightmares, but they were nothing I couldn’t handle. Carefully, I said, She has a tendency to make things feel better.” I laughed, a little chagrined by the admission. “Even when they’re not.”
Foley’s chair creaked as he sat back in it. His eyes narrowed at me, and for the first time, I saw that he didn’t look the same anymore. Not quite. His pupils were vertical now, rather than round. There was a flighty, hunted shadow behind his eyes that made my chest hurt.
His hair was cut short.
It should have been longer.
“She?” he said. “The female? Saeris?”
I chuckled at his apparent surprise. “That’s the one.”
He seemed to struggle for his next words. “It’s real, then? The God Bindings? All of it?”
I pursed my lips, taking a beat to stare down at the table. “God, I hope so. If
it isn’t, then I’ve officially lost my mind. It feels more real than anything else I’ve ever experienced. She’s . . .” Gods. How in all five hells did you describe Saeris Fane?
“Remarkable,” Foley said. The way he said it didn’t sound wholly like it was meant to be a compliment. The word was at least half of a condemnation.
Again, I laughed. “She’s changed everything,” I admitted.
“And the fact that she’s half vampire? That she’s the ruler of this place?”
“Means nothing,” I said. “She isn’t a half of anything. She’s all Saeris. I love her.”
My old friend watched me, his quick eyes scouring my face. After a long moment, he said, “Okay,” as if that settled the matter and it would never be spoken of again. “What else?” he said.
“You’re coming back to Cahlish,” I told him.
Foley shook his head. “I’m not. I’m staying here.”
“Foley, you don’t belong here. You’re—”
“I’m not going anywhere. I can’t leave Ammontraíeth—”
“Your place is with us. Your friends. We miss you. You need you. We—”
“GODSDAMNIT, FISHER! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT IT’S LIKE!” He smashed his fist onto the table. His feather quill jumped and rolled onto the roof with a clatter. “There are people I love out there in the world.
You. Lorreth. Vash. Mayen. I would sell my soul to keep all of you safe, but the demon crouching on my shoulder’s already fucking taken it. I have no soul left.
The hunger eats me, Fisher.” Tears welled in his eyes, ruby red and confronting —a truth that could not be denied. He spoke it out loud, though, so there could be no misunderstanding. “I am a vampire. I feed on the blood of the living.” He bared his teeth, showing them to me. Gold, engraved, and vicious. “They ripped my canines out when I wouldn’t kneel and shoved these in my mouth so I couldn’t feed. But I still drink, Fisher. Ask me how.”
“It doesn’t matter.
“From rats. Birds. Anything I can hunt, catch, and kill. Because it’s a part of
me now. The hunting. The killing. I pull them apart and I drain them dry, and then I do it again, and again, and again—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
A trail of blood streaked down his cheek. “There is no dignity left in this body, Fisher. I’m not your brother anymore. I am something so low and reviled that I cannot even settle on a name for myself. Monster. Devil. Murderer. None comes close enough to explain the evil that crawls in my veins. I—”
“You are my brother. And it doesn’t matter.”
Foley drew in a shaking breath. “I cannot leave this place,” he whispered.
“When was the last time you took a life?”
He closed his eyes. “I . . .”
“When was the last time you attacked a member of the Fae and drank them dry?”
He shook his head, swallowing. “Not since . . . Ajun.”
“You haven’t fed on Fae blood since Ajun?” I wanted to bury my face in my hands and scream. “Whe—” I stopped. Sighed heavily. “When was the last time you were around a living, breathing member of the Fae?”
“Your mate . . .” he said, trailing off.
“Did you think about eating her?”
“No, I . . . I was more focused on killing her, I’m afraid.”
“But you saw Lorreth, too, didn’t you? Did you try to kill him?”
A deep crease formed between Foley’s brows, as if he hadn’t even considered this. “No, I . . . didn’t. I remember thinking his scent was enticing, but . . . I didn’t think about feeding from him.”
“And before then, when was the last time? When were you around someone and the hunger felt too strong to control?”
He thought long and hard. “Seven hundred years ago.”
“And did you eat that person?”
“No.”
“Gods alive, Foley. You’re so fucking . . . urgh!” Frustration transformed my
words into a snarl. Quickly, before he could stop me, I sank my teeth into my wrist and made a small incision. He was up and out of his seat and clinging to the parapet rail before the first drop of my blood hit the table.
“Mercy! Gods!” he panted. “What are you doing?” His eyes were full of fear.
“You aren’t new to this life anymore, Foley.” I didn’t get up. Between us, Guru sat quite comfortably, batting the feather quill that had fallen to the roof with his paw. Tap. Tap, tap. He jumped up and came running when he noticed the bead of blood that had dropped to the ground at my feet. Yowling, he looked up at me, as if asking for my permission; of course the strange little thing drank blood. “Go ahead, little prince,” I told him.
Foley’s tormented eyes nearly rolled back into his head as the cat began to lap.
“Seven hundred years ago, you were young. The thirst still had hold of you.
You didn’t know how to control it. I hate to break it to you, but there are members of the Fae down there, in the town. I can scent them from here, which means you certainly can. You haven’t torn down there and laid waste to any of them, have you?”
“No,” he said breathlessly. “I haven’t.”
“There you are, then.”
He seemed to shatter out of nowhere, his fear getting the better of him.
More tears fell, staining his pale skin with tributaries of blood. “How am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to trust myself?”
“You’ll know that when you can walk across this roof and come sit back at this table with me.”
He eyed my blood, pooling on the table in front of me. I had created only a small wound, nothing that would pose me any real problems. The bleeding was already slowing. Soon it would stop altogether.
“I can’t, Fisher! I—”
“Don’t look at it. Here. Look at this.” I reached into my pocket and took out the small wooden box I had been carrying.
Foley’s attention bounced from my blood to the box, my blood, the box, my blood . . . It settled on the box. “What is it?”
“It’s a box.”
“I can see that,” he shot back. “But . . . what’s inside it?”
I tapped the box’s lid. “A real demon,” I told him.
Foley spun around, facing out into the night. He interlaced his fingers behind his head, hissing in Old Fae. “Otariallan dyer mé.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not kidding. Believe me, I wish I was, but I’m not.”
Slowly, Foley turned to look at the box over his shoulder. “Which one?” he
asked.
“Joshin.”
“Which one is that? I can’t remember.”
“The scorpion demon,” I said dryly. “King of the Dark Dream.”
“Gods and sinners have mercy.” Foley lowered his arms, turning, his golden teeth glinting in the muted light. “And what are you doing, carrying it around in
a box?”
“I made a deal with it.”
“You did what?”
“I didn’t have a choice. It stung me. Carrion, too. We needed its venom.”
“Who’s Carrion?”
I almost laughed. In another life, gods almighty, they would have relied upon each other, those two males. Ruefully, I admitted, “He’s a friend. You’ll meet him soon enough, I’m sure.”
Foley chewed the inside of his cheek, processing that. His eyes darted to the small puddle of cooling blood on the table but quickly flitted away again. “All right. So . . . what kind of deal?”
I recounted it for him, word for word. “One secret and its venom in exchange for our lives. But I had to agree to release it once we were okay. I swore that I wouldn’t place it into a demon trap.”
“Fuck. So it’s in there, then? All of it?”
“What’s left of it.”
“And you’re okay now? Why haven’t you released it?”
Ahh, the beauty of the fine print. Even in a rush and dancing on death’s doorstep, there was always a way to swing a bargain in your favor if you paid close attention to the details. “Because I didn’t say when I’d release it,” I explained. “Nor did I say where. And the box isn’t a demon trap. It’s just a box.” I tapped my finger against the lid again, and the furious scorpion inside threw itself at the walls of its new prison. “Don’t worry, Joshin. I’ll uphold my end of the bargain soon enough. I’m a male of my word, after all.” The box rattled again. Slowly, Foley crept toward the table to get a better look.
“Why have you brought it here?” he asked.
“Because I won’t risk leaving it at Cahlish. I just can’t. And I can’t keep carrying it around with me. I can hear it whispering all the time, and well, it doesn’t exactly have anything nice to say to me.” I gave him a lopsided smile.
“Are you still a member of the Lupo Proelia, Foley? In there?” I pointed at his chest.
The vampire looked down at his solar plexus, his right hand closing around the hilt of a sword that he hadn’t been able to hold for nearly a thousand years.
His eyes shone bright when he looked back up at me. “Yes. Sometimes. When I dare to dream of a reality in which I still might be good.”
“Dreams are just vapor and smoke,” I said. “They mean nothing unless you’re willing to live them. You are good. You are my brother. You are a wolf.
Nothing will ever change that.” I slid the box toward him across the table, holding my breath. Would he do it? Would he sit?
Gingerly, Foley took the chair he had kicked away when he’d leaped up and placed it back at the table. He moved painfully slowly as he sat down, but still he sat. A long moment passed, in which he looked at the glossy, near-black pool of blood on the surface of the table and shivered. Eventually, he reached out a shaking hand and picked up the small wooden box. “I’ll keep it here for you for now. I’ll watch over it until you ask for it back. But in the meantime . . . tell me
about the demon’s secret.”