The Treasure Keeper

couldn't hear him, they didn't see him, and when he tried to push his way into them, it was like they were made of stone. He gained nothing. They didn't even slow. James and the boy had discovered a weakness to the house— Rhys hardly knew where, perhaps a chink in a pane of glass, a ball of tar melted loose from the roof, anything— and had Turned and rematerialized here, and they were slinking straight into a trap.

He wasn't even sure how he himself had gotten in. He'd wanted it, wanted it urgently, and here he was.

He tried speaking to them, he tried shouting. The two drakon only edged forward, because to them, he simply was not there.

Rhys pounded the wall in front of them. He wanted to rip out the shabby wood, he wanted to rip down the ugly house, a prop, a set that looked and felt as false as cheap stage scenery at the Hay market. He was sick of being unseen, he was bloody sick of being a poor remnant of himself. The rage and resentment bubbled inside him like red-hot lava, and a child would have been of better use, an infant would have done a better job of warning them—there were sanf inimicus around the corner and a dim-blooded dragon somewhere below, and now, when he most needed words and touch he had neither, and his kinsmen were about to be slaughtered.

He felt the lava beating in his head. He felt his vision waver; he did not want this, he'd never wanted this— let Hayden James live, let him live and go back to Zoe and keep her safe—

James took another step. He was throwing a significant look to the boy—who grinned back at him with his lips peeled over his teeth—when the woman darted out, gave a single hard shake of her bowl: A cloud of rye- colored dust choked the little hall.

They could not Turn. The powder shot through Rhys, sifted like silt through the air, and for a few precious seconds neither James nor Sandu could Turn; there was no way to see clear to anything but grit.

One of the men stepped out in front of the woman, lifting his pistol. His finger squeezed the trigger. A white flash, a new instant dark.

James grunted and slammed against the wall, and the boy behind him lunged forward.

Rhys moved to catch Hayden James as he sank to the floor, but his shadow hands only slid through him.

She shed her clothing as she ran. Hat, gloves, shoes. She darted past Others hunched under awnings, past snarling wet dogs. The colors in the sky drew her on and she'd never been so fleet in her life. A pair of fiddlers on a bridge hunkered together beneath their overlapping umbrellas; they played a duet of lively, quick-pattering notes, and Zoe ripped at the bodice to her gown as she passed them, let the lavender merino go floating out behind her to land in the brown frothy rush of the Seine.

The music ceased. Both men stood up and shouted after her: she didn't slow.

The corset was easy. Chemise. The stockings—she did pause then, only long enough to yank them into tatters. If it hadn't been raining so hard she would have been truly invisible, but even she could see the water striking her legs and torso, separating around the shape of a sprinting woman.

Sidewalks and streetlamps with yellow snakes' tongues of flame. Shops and beggars and shiny painted doors. The cloak and the colors of Hayden led her into a maze of twisting back lanes; across the peaked roofs she could see the cloak now taking the tapered shape of a whirlwind, violent, swirling stars; it curved and bent like a funnel cloud fixed to the roof of one particular house.

Rhys was nowhere to be felt or seen.

She reached the front door to the dilapidated place marked by her Gift, kicked at it—once, twice, three times, until it split enough that she could tear at it with her hands. Wood splintered and metal shrieked and Zoe slapped the water off her skin and crawled inside the hole she'd made, faced the darkness of the unknown ahead.

He could not see. James and the Zaharen drakon were gone. Rhys was encased with utter night. He could not see, and he could not move; everything was bitter cold and ebony. One instant he'd been reaching for James, marking the blotch of blood left upon the wall behind him as James's body slid to the floor—and then the next, he was here. Stuck. Powerless.

He had a sudden sharp memory of the dead sanf coachman leaning over him, the pale gray eyes, the sour smile, but when he tried to focus on it more clearly, it dissolved into dirt.

He tried to breathe, but his lungs were crushed beneath a mountain of iron and ice. He tried to fling himself to Zoe and even that didn't work. He had descended into the earth. He was in the company of worms now.

Worms, and the music. That never stopped.

The air inside the house blurred thick and gritty; it smelled like a bakery. Like wheat, she realized, or rye. It clogged her nose and clung to her damp skin in particles, revealed her in a thin layer of dust: her stomach. Her breasts. Her arms and thighs. Zoe rubbed at it as she moved, breathing past her teeth, managing to roll most of it from her body into little balls that littered the floor at her feet.

The scent of dragon blood pulled her ahead. Thumps and shudders, one so strong the very walls trembled. She heard no voices, no shouts. There was a battle taking place but it was silent except for the creaking of the house. The floor bouncing with an impact that sent shivers through the soles of her feet. Pottery breaking.

And then, finally, a woman's scream, high, then low, then gone.

She ran on her toes. The place was small and miserable, more narrow than even the maison, and reeked of fear. She passed doors open to empty rooms, no life inside, not even spiders or mice; she ran all the way to the doorway framing the kitchen—pausing only long enough to note the blotch of dragon blood she'd scented before, swiped down a wall—and there before her was more flour drifting in the air, across pots and pans and kettles and the dead man upon the floor by the entrance, and another man with a pistol aimed at the lanky young prince of the Zaharen, who moved with a twisting, deceptive grace, dodging the aim of the gun through the dust.

A woman stooped over the man on the floor. She was clutching at his shoulders, her mouth still open and her eyes streaming cloudy pale tears, when Zoe walked in.

She stepped past the human woman and over the body of the sanf. She walked straight toward the one with the gun, lifting a hand before her—she could see it as if it were not her own, the floured contour of Zoe's invisible hand, the floured flutter of Zoe's invisible fingers to draw the attention of the Other. Hayden's ring of blue and gold, still lustrous enough to shine.

And it worked. The man's gaze flitted to her, and in that instant the prince had him, pushed him off his feet with a hard whap against the stone hearth. The gun flew from his grip and hit the floor. It discharged. Zoe couldn't help it: She cringed and shielded her eyes. When she could hear again, the woman was still screaming, and the man by the hearth was covered in a great splash of blood.

'Be quiet,' commanded Sandu in a velvet dark voice. 'Be still.' The woman cut short with a sobbing sort of hiccup, then a whimper. She collapsed over the man before her and buried her head in her arms.

'Where is Hayden?' Zoe asked above the ringing in her ears.

The prince had knelt, skimming his hands over the crimson-wet body of the sanf inimicus before him, and to his credit, he didn't waste time asking stupid questions about why or how Zoe could be there. He merely raised an arm and pointed toward the far corner of the kitchen, still searching the body.

Hayden leaned against the counter amid a great spill of flour and broken crockery, staring at her, coated with powder. His legs seemed to buckle, and he crumpled in a slow, queer way down to the floor, never taking his eyes from her face.

'No. Oh, no.'

She was there in time to prevent his head from striking the stone. She settled him against her lap, not even noticing the small, neat hole in his upper chest until the wet heat of his blood slipped along her folded legs. The bullet must have traveled all the way through him.

'You're alive,' she said. She willed herself seen. 'Hayden. You're alive.'

'Hullo.' His lashes drifted closed, then open again. He squinted at her, and the flour around his eyes caked into lines. 'Where are your clothes?'

'He needs to Turn,' said the Zaharen, who had crossed to them.

'Yes.' She touched a hand to his cheek. 'Turn to smoke. You'll be fine then. We can fix you back at the maison.'