The Treasure Keeper

would do very well for her wedding gown.

To Hayden. For the wedding gown she would wear for her wedding to Hayden.

Rhys was still directly ahead of her. 'Because, listen, I .'

She waited with her gaze on the hem of her dress, expecting any sort of new excuse or cajoling, prepared to ignore him all the way back to England if she must. But when she peeked up at him he seemed truly without words; he'd gone still, stock-still—she almost walked through him—and then moved swiftly to take her hand.

She yanked free, she couldn't help it. His slightest touch made her skin crawl with cold.

'The ring,' he said. 'Zee. The ring.'

She pursed her lips and arched a brow, once again moving out of the way as more people brushed past, her back against the glass front of a shop.

'Did you notice James's hand?'

She shook her head, puzzled.

'The ring on his hand,' the shadow persisted. 'The signet.'

Yes. Yes. Hayden was still wearing his gold tribal ring. He was! She'd seen it for days, and it'd never registered, because he'd always worn it, ever since she'd known him. Hayden had his ring. That meant—

'It was mine.' Rhys combed his fingers through his hair, sending smoke up in broken puffs. 'The one from the wallet. I'm sure it was. Who else's could it be?'

She shot a dubious glance at his hand, where the ghost ring still shone. He twisted it free of his finger and held it up between them, turning it back and forth in the clouding caramel light.

'But this isn't truth, is it? What you see before you is what I think I look like, what I want to look like. This is my favorite waistcoat, you know. These are my best boots. But I wasn't wearing them when I was killed. Taken. I recall that much. They're all still back in my quarters at Chasen, no doubt. I was, however, wearing this.'

The wind gave a sudden push; the first of the rain clouds began to release, miles away. Movement flickered at the corner of her eye; a shopkeeper inside the store at her back was lighting the sconces on the wall with a taper, throwing her long, curious looks as he moved from flame to flame.

Zoe found herself walking. There was an alley coming up, an alley of muggy foul smells and cats leaping down and away from their perch upon a broken stool smashed against a wall. Rhys went first, and the cats bolted out into the street on the other side. When she stopped by the stool he lifted his hand again, focused on the ring flat on his palm; it faded to nothing. Just like a wizard's trick. Gone.

She lifted her eyes to his.

'Who knows what the truth of me is now? I had hoped—' He drew a deep breath of air and let it hiss out between his teeth. 'I had hoped,' he finished, curt. 'All kinds of ridiculous hopes. That all this is a mistake, that I'm actually alive somewhere. Dreaming in my bed at home, and you're still back there too. That I might even be that wretched prisoner, tool of the sanf. But if I've been gone so long—if they destroyed my ring, kept it as a prize...'

For the first time ever, she reached for him in compassion, took his hand in hers despite the painful cold. He gave a taut smile, turned her gloved fingers over in his, and raised them to his lips. She felt his kiss, so brief and awful, even through the kid. The needles of ice gouging her bones.

'Do me a favor. Take the signet back to the shire. Give it to my brother. Let him know.' 'Know what?'

'That I died well, that I didn't suffer. I don't know. Lie to him. Pin him with those tremendous dark eyes and he'll puddle like snow in July. He's only a red-blooded dragon, after all. He'll believe whatever you say.'

'I will.'

'Thank you.' He seemed about to add something more, still holding her hand; she wanted to take it back and she didn't, but his gaze had gone fixed and distant, a flare of green against the blowing shadows.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw only the street, the shops, the rainstorm churning above rooftops.

He vanished, all of him, all at once. She was left with her arm lifted halfway to nothing, and the sensation of hoarfrost that had been creeping up to her shoulder.

The gray street had plunged to shadow just as Zoe's street had. A storm simmered here as well, but the raindrops were already falling, big fat plops of water spattering the walkways and buildings. People began to scatter, heels clicking, yanking coats over their heads, hats, newspapers, whatever they had. Rhys stood on his sidewalk and the rain fell straight through him, broke into beads through the soles of his feet. He didn't even feel it.

And yet this wasn't what had wrenched him back.

He turned a wide circle, searching. Perhaps he'd been mistaken. Perhaps he'd imagined it, that urgent pull that had got him here. That familiar, electric prickle along his senses that all his life had always meant only one thing. Yet nothing but the rain appeared any different: the damp buildings and the gabled roof and the shrub—hardly any leaves left—and the rat, all like before.

The rat, staring at him and then quickly to the right. The rat, running away with its tail a pink whip along the ground, into the house across the street.

Rhys looked to the right. And yes, goddamn it, there they were. James and the Zaharen boy, walking gradually toward him, cloaked, hooded, far slower and more deliberate than any of the Others dashing around them. James turned his head and murmured something; the other dragon nodded.

Rhys tried to go to them. He tried to at least get close enough to hear them speak, but he was stuck as he always was, unable to venture beyond his tiny realm. Yet it didn't matter: They were still coming to him. Right to him. James was tall and broad and the dragon-boy more slight, but there was no question that they both emanated identical crackling auras of watchful, sinuous menace.

They were hunting. Right here, on his street.

Rhys realized abruptly what it meant. He was in Paris, just as they were. He was in Paris, just like Zee! This was the same storm that brewed near her. The same time, the same place.

And they were hunting near him.

The hoods of their cloaks revealed only grim, pale jaws; their eyes were covered, their hands hidden. Raindrops shattered along their hoods and shoulders, slithered in rivulets to the sidewalk. He could practically mark their footsteps in the water, they moved so slowly.

Right as they reached him Rhys held up both hands, palms flat. They stopped. They stopped, just for an instant, both of them, and then as one continued through him. He broke apart, re-formed. They walked on down the sidewalk, but not before throwing quick, subtle looks at the building behind Rhys, the one with the gabled roof that he knew so well.

Rhys looked too. He saw a door, shuttered windows. He saw a pair of chimneys that let seep no smoke.

There were dots of recent solder around the lock of the door. He squinted at it through the downpour, trying to see better. Yes, the keyhole had been filled with lead. No sign or light or movement escaped the seams of the door; those were blocked too.

All ways to keep out smoke.

Great God. The sanf inimicus were here. He'd wager his fortune there was fresh solder sealing the windows as well. That the chimneys would be blocked.

James and the boy would have smelled the melted lead like an alarm; Rhys remembered it from life, acrid and then heady, metallic sludge with music that hardened into flat, strange notes.

He spun about in time to see them make an unhurried turn at the next corner. They were the last figures visible through the storm. After they were gone, Rhys stood alone. There weren't even any carriages going by.

And so he was the only one who heard the voices rise and cut short from the interior of the solder-sealed house. The only one who saw the door give a little shake, as if someone on the other side tested the lock.

He leaned a step toward the house. The music surrounding him reached a painful new pitch, hurting his ears, but to his very great astonishment, he managed it. Another step. Music rising. Another, like dragging his feet through quicksand. The weedy walkway to the front porch, up the steps to the bleak gray door. He stopped to rest a moment, his head spinning—was it too bloody much to ask for a little potency in death?—then pressed his palm