Rhys did not wake up. He could not evade those tendrils even now, not enough. He still couldn't really move. He couldn't see, or Turn.
But he did manage a single, heaving breath. And it didn't taste like Soho, or London, or anything civilized. It tasted like cold, wormy dirt. It tasted like death.
His teeth were clenched. His jaw locked. His back and legs and entire body were a frozen spasm of rigid agony, and the symphony never ceased.
He tried to shut it out. He reached for the first clear image that flashed behind his lids—light; the bright and unforgiving face of—
'Zoe.'
She jolted awake in the night, instantly, awfully, her every sense flooded with dread, her skin slick with cold sweat. She did not gasp or twitch; she didn't breathe at all. She lay in the bed with her eyes wide open and knew that whoever had crept into the suite with her would see only a mattress and gems and strangely rumpled sheets.
The wash of her Gift hummed across her body, disguising her, an instinctive defense. The power of it chilled her blood even as the man's voice she'd heard echoed back into nothing, a memory. A bad dream.
But she lay there a very long time anyway, as motionless as she could be. She listened to the sounds of the city pushing over the treetops of the park, past her walls: dogs barking. Horses sighing, plodding hooves, iron- wheeled carts being pulled over cobblestones. Men and women laughing, even at this hour, and tavern music, and the very clouds above her dissolving, particle by particle, drop by drop, with the slow building heat of the coming morning. And no one spoke her name again.
She'd dreamt it. That was all.
God,what a fright. It hadn't felt at all like a dream; when she'd opened her eyes she would have sworn there was a man standing over her, shadowed and close. But there wasn't. There was no human smell anywhere nearby.
Slowly she sat up in the bed, rubbing her hands over her face, the rings on her fingers warm and rigid against her cheeks. With her head bowed she sucked in a lungful of air, released it, and watched as the locks of her hair became once again visible, phantom-pale strands shrouding her face and shoulders.
Without meaning to, she glanced at the mirror. It was exactly where she had left it, propped against the wall. The crack down the middle became a sharp silvery thunderbolt in the dark, frozen forever against the blue.
The ghosts shifted and sighed against it. They brightened and faded, and tried so hard to speak.
Zoe slipped from the bed. She padded to the glass, her feet chilled against the floor, and knelt before its wide, clear expanse, the bangles at her wrists chiming softly as she moved.
She touched it lightly. It was cold, very cold, beneath her fingertips.
'Hayden?'
No response. In the silence of the chamber, in this dark small hour, even the beings that haunted her on the other side seemed to have grown weak.
'Hayden, are you there? Was it you?'
Something did stir then. Something did change, a new shape forming against the endless blue. It looked like the outline of a man . perhaps a man, shaded and haloed with smoke . and then nothing: The smoke and man curled up and away.
She leaned forward, staring harder, but the light was too murky, and whatever she'd seen did not appear again.
Zoe leaned back on her heels, the anklets stretched tight against her skin, then gave it up and sank all the way to the floor.
She thought of her bed back in the cottage at home, the plush feather mattress. Of the nightingales that would rouse at dusk, serenading her as she'd sit and dream by the parlor window. The silver-faced clock gently ticking upon the mantel, a wedding gift to her great-grandparents. The Wedgwood creamware on the shelves in the kitchen, the handsome rosewood chairs and table, the silk azure curtains she'd help sew herself as a child.
The dense eastern woods. The soft summer nights.
She'd imagined a hundred different lives in that cottage. She'd imagined being married in the vine-covered gazebo in back, as Cerise had done, and cutting greens for her husband's meals from her garden. She'd imagined her own children growing up there, admiring the clock, pouring the cream, stroking the curtains as they gazed at the wild woods just beyond reach. Just as she had done.
Hayden or something else, the shade in the mirror did not reappear, no matter how firmly she pressed her fingers to the glass. So Zoe went back to bed.
Chapter Five
The most prized possession of Zoe Lane's youth had not been a doll, or a blanket, or a carved toy pony, all the things her sister and friends had cherished to the point of battered oblivion. Even as a girl, Zoe privately thought that dolls were a silly waste of time, and blankets were meant for babies. Toy ponies were fine enough, but since she'd likely never own a real one, idolizing a creature that would only bolt at the sight of her seemed, well, stupid.
No. While Cerise and all the other girls would gather and giggle over their pretend games, playing house- on-the-hill, picking boys for pretend husbands, Zoe was usually alone in her room or the lush cool forest, nestled in a bed of crushed buttercups or forget-me-nots. Studying the
Book.
Her Book.
She'd found it at Uncle Anton's house, dusty in his library, its spine an intriguing gleam of Gothic, silvery lettering. Young Zoe liked books and always had, their scent of ink and fine paper, the crack of their bindings, rough-edged pages. Words and words and words that sometimes made sense and sometimes did not, but that always seem to beckon to her with the answers to questions she'd never even thought to ask.
This particular book was thick and heavy and had very few words. It was mostly pictures. Engravings.
Of dragons.
They were extremely frightening. Certainly Uncle Anton would never have given it to her had he bothered to look through it;Mr.
By candlelight, by the dappled light of the woods, she'd examined the pictures and memorized their gruesome tales. None of the dragons looked like anyone she knew. There was no beauty to them, no lithe, ribbony elegance. They were fat-bellied and repugnant. They had fangs that dripped venom, and bulging snake eyes, and forked tongues. They terrorized villages and kidnapped virgins, and breathed fire across crops and frantic peasants waving pitchforks.
And none of them, not one, were heroes.
None of them had wives or little children waiting for them at home. None of them took tea with crumpets, or harvested wheat by the autumn moon, or played chess, or danced a jig. Zoe's own father had died a mere year after she was born, so she had no memories of his doing any of those things. But she knew how other drakon fathers behaved. As far as she could tell, there wasn't a stolen virgin anywhere to be found in Darkfrith.
Yet the dragons in the book were exactly how Mr. Merick's title depicted them: fiendish.
That was seven-year-old Zoe's first uncensored introduction to the human world, which was clearly a place filled with farmers bearing sharp tools who desired nothing more than to stab her straight through the heart.
For the first few weeks after discovering the Book she slept with a lamp burning all night by her bed, until Cerise had tattled and Mother made her stop.
Slowly, over time, she came to comprehend the nature of the stories, the mortal fear behind them. The
