The Treasure Keeper

going to sleep.'

She realized she could hear her footsteps as she crossed the floor and modified her gait, so that by the time she reached the threshold to the antechamber beyond, she made no noise at all. It was only then that she turned, found the shadow standing with his hands at his sides in the middle of the chamber.

'I was lying before,' she said quietly. 'I did want the coachman dead. He betrayed Hayden, just for a handful of money. And in that instant, as soon I realized it, I wanted him dead.'

Then she left.

* * *

He was back at his bleak little road. He found himself too fatigued to stand and so sat upon the curb with a fist propped to his cheek, contemplating the deserted sidewalk, the drooping yellow shrub across the street from him. The pile of leaves beneath it.

The constant music that haunted him had shifted into a slower, drowsier tune. Rhys realized it was a lullaby, one his mother used to sing, especially when his younger sisters were fussing. He could almost hear her humming the notes, that soft dusky contralto that had soothed him to sleep so many nights as a child.

No. It's not real. Rue is not here. None of this is real.

It was nighttime in this place as well, with no moon to lighten the shadows. That might be a good sign. It could mean he was still in Paris, like Zoe. Or it could just mean that because her world was night, so was his.

He'd tried to stay with her, despite her insistence that he not. She had no authority over him, after all, and a great deal of reckless abandon when it came to her own safety. So he'd tried. But it seemed his efforts with the dying coachman had sapped more of his strength than he'd imagined. As soon as Zee had left the ballroom, he'd watched the walls and gilded doors fade into this gray place.

At least there were no Others about to ignore him. Even the rat was missing.

That coachman. His mortal body, his mortal pain. Leaping into him had been the strangest sensation, like drowning, an instant iron weight submerging every particle of his being, a sliding descent without end and oh—that agony. The knife wound. The slit lung. He'd felt that a thousand times over.

Poor bastard. It was a hell of a way to die. Rhys knew that now for certain.

But for all the pain, it had been worth it. He'd managed to lift the man's arm and even to throw the knife—it had been one of the hardest things he'd ever done, but he'd managed to throw. Now that he had time to mull it over, Rhys realized it was sheer blessed luck that it'd worked, any of it. Luck, and a desperation that had sent drakon strength through a human arm and granted drakon aim through fading vision.

As soon as it was done he'd found himself unable to attempt anything else; the iron weight sank him like a ship failing at sea. He'd crumpled as the man had crumpled, and perhaps the only thing that kept him bound to the body for the moments after that was the unexpected joy of seeing Zoe again with living eyes, flawed and human as they were.

Feeling her hands upon his chest.

From someplace to his left—west? north?—bells began to toll, shattering the night. He'd never noticed them before, cathedral bells by the sound of them, pure and piercing. Rhys counted the peals to three, which made sense . well, at least as much sense as anything else did.

Three in the morning: too late for honest folk to gad about, too early for the libertines to trickle back home. It was the perfect hour of the dead.

The black humor of it struck him, nearly made him laugh, but instead he lay on his back to stare up at the sky.

He drew a breath, closed his eyes, and summoned Zoe once more.

For an instant he was with her. She was in bed, in that great ugly bed in her chamber, curled on her side into a ball beneath her blankets. Her hair was a spill of pale shimmer over her pillow. She'd pulled the blankets up to her nose; her brow looked peaceful enough in her slumber. One hand poked out from the covers by her face. Rings of gold shone from every finger. A cabochon ruby gleamed like a ripe strawberry on her thumb.

He stood beside her. He turned a slow circle about the room, examining the walls, the windows, the curtains. The giant cracked mirror. The floating faces within it, gazing back at him.

They were masks atop vapor, every one of them the same, sallow and ghoulish with shadowed eyes and moving lips. He couldn't hear them; the lullaby was growing stronger and stronger and if they had speech that might have reached him, he could not hear them now. If one of them was Hayden James, Rhys could not tell.

One of the beings lifted an arm and pointed mutely at Zoe in the bed. He glanced back at her and had the dizzy confusion of seeing two images at once: one the Zoe he knew, with her ivory hair and brown crescent lashes and that single lax hand a glimmer against the sheets.

But the other was a dragon, the most delicate and exquisite dragon he'd ever seen, silver and gold and edged in pink, also sleeping peacefully beneath the covers.

A terrible weakness took his legs. He staggered and was back on the gray sidewalk of the gray street, flat against the ground. When he tried to stand he couldn't; the best he could do was crawl along to a smoother stretch of stone and collapse again, utterly spent.

His mother's voice sang the words to the lullaby, verses that seemed to sift down around him and settle like Stardust, straight from the heavens.

Sleep and dream, true heart, and cease to weep, Sleep and dream, true heart, all sweet relief...

Chapter Twelve

 For the first time in all her long and twisting flight to Paris, Zoe was uncertain of what to do next, or even where to go.

Hayden was actually dead. Her quest, her hope—all the meaning behind her risks, all the rewards worth the possible punishment awaiting her back in the shire—all to ash.

She didn't want to return to the Palais Royal to continue her hunt. She didn't want to stay in the cold, marbled mausoleum that was Tuileries. And she would never willingly visit a dance hall ever again.

Because the city now seemed a drab and dismal place, she wandered to the flower market banking the edge of the Seine. She found a seat on a bench between a stall of nodding tulips and one of orange blossoms on cut twigs and simply watched the passersby, shoppers and vendors, giggly girls in lace caps and crinoline picking out posies, sharp-eyed women with dirt on their aprons and wide-brimmed hats that flapped with the wind, the scent of soil and pollen and bulbs nearly overpowering the stink of sewage wafting from the river below.

Rhys had apparently taken her at her word last night and left her alone. She'd seen nothing of him so far today, not even a shimmer in window glass.

Fine. It was better this way. She wanted to mourn alone.

Between Zoe's fingers was the key she'd found in the wallet of the sanf. It seemed too small to be a house key. Too large to be the key to a diary, or even a jewelry box. When she rubbed it hard enough, the tarnish smudged her fingers, showing brass beneath.

There was a crude letter R scratched across the surface. She traced it with her nail, over and over, without even caring what it meant.

An elderly man eased down to the other end of the bench. He sat with his legs spread, holding a box of cut tulips and piles of small sackcloth bags, one atop another, his walking stick propped aslant against the arm of the bench. His skin was parchment pale and so thin she could see the fine spidering of veins across his cheeks, the thicker blue ropes along the backs of his hands.

He withdrew a handkerchief from his greatcoat and began to mop his face; beneath his bicorne and iron- gray toupee, he was sweating profusely. Someone called a question from behind another stall and the man flapped his handkerchief in response, not bothering to shout back.

Zoe returned to her contemplation of the key.

'A young lady so fetching should not be so sad.'

She lifted her head to view the man. He wasn't looking at her.