The Treasure Keeper

'Me. I don't want to go tonight.'

The rhythm of her breathing never changed. 'We could do this every night, I suppose,' she murmured. 'Laze here. Eat and sleep like a pair of satisfied house cats.'

'Make love,' he said, hopeful.

'Cats,' she said again, determined. 'And naught would change. Our world would slip by us. Our people would fight without us.'

He said nothing.

'But they would not win. They need us. We hold a key now. We know the sanf inimicus now, their weapons against us, a portion of their plans. We may be the ones who turn the tide. But to do that, we must leave this place.'

Rhys allowed his lashes to drift closed, his fingers exploring a rent in the sheets he'd made before, gradually widening the tear.

'You know I'm right,' Zoe said.

'Aye. But not tonight.'

She sucked in an impatient breath and his head rose sharply with it. He rolled over, snagged the sheets again, plucked free his claws, and rested on his elbow as he gazed down at her.

In her bare shift she was girlish and lovely, her skin fresh as cream, her lips dark rose. All that glinting silvery hair, surrounding her like winter wind spun to silk.

'Why do we even need to leave this room?' he asked.

'I told you—'

'No. You read minds, Zoe. You gather thoughts. You told me that. I've watched you growing these last days. I've watched your Gifts expand. Why do we need to go anywhere but here? Can't you find them from right here?'

She gazed at him, arrested. Opened her mouth, closed it. 'I don't know,' she said at last. 'It's only worked in close proximity before.'

'I wasn't close,' he pointed out. 'And you found me.'

He saw her comprehend it, saw it and felt it too, a sudden profound chill to the air, the unexpected awakening of her potential. She lay there as fetching as any maiden, and above and all around her he felt the soundless, bottomless depths of her power gather, invisible wings that brushed the air and stirred the molecules.

Her eyes went black. All black, pure liquid, just like that time at the dance hall. It was scary as hell and even more beautiful; he could not look away from her.

She didn't seem to notice. Those shining jet eyes seemed focused on a point beyond his comprehension. She was seeing things he could not, he realized. She was knowing things he did not know.

The velvet curtains rustled. The sheet across the broken mirror rippled and shimmied, trying to pull free. He felt the brush of those wings glance his face—

—malevolent dark, stinking water and dripping tunnels and—

Zoe blinked; her eyes went back to normal. She turned to him in the bed where he lay frozen, trying not to smell the decayed scent of earth and rot that had rushed over him with the touch of her Gift, no, not ever again .

'I know where they are now,' she said, her voice hushed and low and still luscious with power. 'You were right. It was easy. I know where to find the heart of the sanf.'

Chapter Twenty-Five

Kimber,

I'm alive. Hayden James was killed by the Others. All three emissaries are dead. Zoe Lane Langford is with me. I'll explain all when I get back. I hope.

—R.S.V.L.

Paris was one ravenous city built upon the back of another. Above the earth it bedazzled: marble facades, slate roofs, breathtaking palaces and cathedrals and ancient walled cemeteries brimming with statues and bodies. Hospitals and monasteries, faubourgs that housed the deprived and the prosperous and everyone in between. People flocked to its opulence, lamented the state of its water and its roads, were overwhelmed by the abundance of theatre and science and public restaurants. There seemed little to rival it in all the civilized world. And tourist or native-born, most people who traveled its streets gave no thought to that other place. That world that still existed, crouched and hunched, beneath them.

The other city had no official name. It was a running sore below the paving stones and filthy wide river, miles and miles of underground tunnels and rooms carved first by Roman hands, then Frankish, Carolingian, French: the bedrock chipped and sliced and hauled away to the surface to supply all those generations of buildings and bridges.

Les carrieres. The quarries.

They had been abandoned for centuries. Water pooled in milky puddles, made lakes and grottoes of entire portions of the hidden city. Where it didn't pool it merely leaked, or dribbled, seeping and plopping from above to below. Always seeking below.

Some of the tunnels had collapsed beneath the weight of the behemoth above them; great sections of Paris were progressively sinking, and all the timber joists to be found would not prevent it.

Most of the entrances to the quarries had been forgotten over time. There existed still a few more obvious apertures, usually by way of Gothic crypts, especially in Montparnasse, but by and large the populace of the upper city had overlooked its origins, and the warren of tunnels lay dead and dark.

But for those that formed the easternmost edge.

The passageways there spoked from a hub in eerie resemblance to the pattern of the streets above. The hub itself had once been a massive field of tightly grained limestone, but that was before Charlemagne. Its excavation had left a chamber the size of a granary and roughly the shape of a rectangle, with side tunnels leading away, both up and down, all across the city, toward walls of yet-untouched stone.

It was cold in the tunnels, but on this particular night it was colder above the ground. Fat gray clouds had enclosed the city, and the first snow of the season had started to fall.

The flakes drifted nearly directly through the twist of smoke that slithered above the sidewalks of la Vallee. They continued their path downward to catch along the shoulders and hair of the woman who walked just below the smoke. A servant out very late, or a tavern girl, with a woolen coat but no hat or muff, no hint of cosmetics or jewelry, not even a simple ribbon about her neck. She was scurrying along the lanes with her chin tucked to her chest, clearly in a hurry.

It was nearing midnight. The stalls of the poultry market she passed were empty. Feathers of all sizes and colors littered the ground, cupped the snow to create walkways of bumpy white. The flakes helped mute the stench as well; they muffled all the worst aspects of the city, hid the piles of garbage and stained roofs, dropped in quiet, drifting beauty along the wealthy and the poor in equal measure.

The woman slowed, then stopped. She hesitated, looking around her, then retraced her steps back to the poultry stalls, began to forge a new path through the virgin white.

The odd twist of smoke followed her, a smudge of gray above her head.

Zoe moved guardedly through the wooden stalls of the market, switching her gaze from the indigo cloak that writhed in its funnel ahead to the sticky mess at her feet, damp feathers clinging in lumps to her shoes and hem. She shook her skirts every few feet, glanced back behind her, and was pleased to see the snow falling quickly enough to muddle her tracks.

The cloak beckoned her forward. It had chosen a point upon the ground, the tapered end of it skipping and hopping, whipping back and forth in a random small circle without disturbing a single chicken feather.

She walked up to it, crouched, and touched a hand to the earth. The smoke that had been a twist rushed