The Treasure Keeper

flat to the wood. He felt the resonance of its substance, not real wood but an echo of it, almost as stiff as life.

The voices inside had lowered to hushed babbles; he could make out no words over the song in his head. He thought he heard a woman, more than one man. He thought he smelled—heavens, he smelled—drenched wood and humans and the tin from the solder, something dry and spicy like herbs. And beneath all that ... the weak, dim perfume of drakon.

Rhys glanced around him, curled his fingers around the bronze-plated latch, and gave it a heave.

She was in the lace shop, desultorily surveying layers of fragile webbing, listening to the rain pattering the roof, sweeping strong, then faint, then strong again, soporific. A horde of people had ducked inside with the first pelting drops; the men clumped together at the windows, water from the hems of their coats dripping into puddles, staring out and speculating about the duration of the storm. The women had dispersed throughout the tall wooden racks of goods, doing precisely the same as Zoe. Fingering the delicate threads and knots of the reams, pretending they would make a purchase.

There were only a merchant and his young daughter to assist. A stout lady in a beaded aubergine hat had cornered them both, demanding to be shown a length of bobbin work from Portofino her cousins sister-in-law had described to her. The merchant kept lapsing into Portuguese; the woman spoke only emphatic French. He was having scarce luck convincing her she was in the wrong shop.

The daughter stood to one side with her head bowed, a silver chain around her neck the sole splendid gleam in the store.

Zoe'd not been out in rain since she'd left England. She'd not even attempted it, especially after what had happened at the coffee shop in Palais Royal. She stood as far back from the windows— the dripping men, the front door that opened and closed each time with a spray of wet wind—as she could. Like everything else right now, the lace shop was plunged into that caramel gloom. She had no umbrella or parasol. If she was quiet and still, she could likely linger in the rear of the shop for a good while, hopefully at least until the worst of it passed.

'Zoe.'

He appeared to her in the midst of a waterfall of long pale lace, a dozen dangling ribbons unspooled from a wire rod above them, draping down into his head and chest and shoulders.

She inhaled a swift breath with a hand pressed to her heart, but that was all. The shadow glanced about them quickly, then looked back to her.

'You need to return to the maison right now. Pack your things, and leave. I'll come to you when I can.'

Her lips formed, What?

'Just do it. Wait—don't even go back to the house. Go to—go to a hotel. Do you have the funds for that? Someplace common. An inn. Anywhere but where James and the boy know you've been, or imagine you might go.'

The door to the shop opened again; the ribbons of lace inside Rhys twirled languidly in the rush of new air.

'What's happened?' Zoe whispered. 'Did they find the sanf? Is Hayden in danger?'

'I'll tell you later. Honest to God, Zee, you've got to do as I say.'

'No, Rhys, you've got to tell me—'

He left. Just like before in the alley: an instant, complete vanishing. If she'd blinked, she'd have seen none of it.

Several of the patrons were glancing back at her, muttering to each other behind their hands. She realized she'd spoken her last sentence in her normal voice, straight to a line of crisp ironed ribbons, some of them still swaying an inch from her nose.

She did not wait to leave the shop. She closed her eyes and summoned the cloak with all the power her fear and anxiety lent her, and it came, indigo and deep and shimmering with the force of her will. She heard the voices from inside it. She felt the touch of countless hands, plucking, pulling, all along her body.

Find them. Hayden and Sandu.

Folds of heavy blue ballooned in waves across the shop. They devoured everything: the people and the ribbons and the woman in the hat, the rainfall and sodden scents and shying horses outside, everything physical, everything of carbon and mineral earth, smothered into silence.

From the infinity of blue before her came a pinprick of new light. It rotated in lazy, radiant spokes; it dazzled and expanded, blinding. Zoe lifted her arms to it, thinking, hurry! and the pinprick became a window, and the window became a door. Beyond the door was the light that was Hayden, the colors of his body flaring around him in orange and red and azure. They were the colors of his dragon self, but he and the prince were still in human form—naked, both of them naked—creeping along the hallway of an unlit corridor—two men and a woman in a mobcap with a palm over her mouth waiting around the bend in the corridor. The woman clutched a bowl of pale powdery something but the men were armed with guns. Rhys stood before the turn, frantically attempting to speak to the drakon, shoving uselessly at them both.

She did not bother to wonder why Hayden and the prince didn't sense the Others, or what Rhys was trying to do. She only ran from the lace shop, following the streaming arrow of the cloak, the bending, luminous colors of drakon that rose from a point east into the sky bright as a rainbow as the rain slapped down.

Chapter Eighteen

 Suppose you were made a prisoner inside your own body. A mind without the ability to control physical limbs; a heart without the ability to beat. Suppose you were bound in painful cold iron— yes, painful, even for one of us—and your sole relief was the flight of your spirit, away, away from the miserable dark grave that actually encompassed you.

Toward warmth, say. Toward other spirits like you, or the living light of the one you loved. Suppose people who knew how to do such a thing used their Voice to command that you remain frozen in your peculiar agony. That they used the chips and glistening dust of a magical diamond to ensure that you listened, that your body remained helpless, no matter how far your spirit roamed. And the closer your spirit returned to your actual, physical self—whatever remained of it—the thinner it became; the two separated measures of you cannot fluently share the same worldly space. Our natural state of being fights to reassert itself: Either you combine again with your body to dwell in the frosty isolation of your slow death, or you abandon it once more, you soar apart. Those are your only choices.

You'd, be better off keeping away, wouldn't you?

No matter how strong your Gifts, no matter how much you willed it, you would not escape the diamond dust and the iron, and the wicked, wicked song they sang. Such was the nature of the malevolence of Draumr.

Draumr controls us. He who controls any fragment of Draumr controls us, in small ways or—with enough of the pieces—large.

True, as a species we're varied in our strengths. For some drakon the shattered stone sings stronger and for others weaker; for many of us, even as shards, Draumr is unbearable to the touch. Others still may touch it without pain but fall yet under its spell.

For all our variations, it remains the one horrific, common flaw we cannot avoid.

That is... most of us. For every rule, there is an exception, you know.

That's what Lord Rhys and Zoe Lane were about to discover, along with their illustrious companions.

Chapter Nineteen

 He could not occupy Hayden's body this time. He tried. He could not occupy any of their bodies. They