What He Will Admit To

The drive back to Casa Vasco happens to me rather than by me. I am aware that I am in the passenger seat of a car I did not choose, that my own little hatchback is being followed somewhere behind us by Yves, who appeared out of the dark of the multi-storey the way the rest of them appear out of dark, and that the thing in the boot of the car behind, wrapped now in a wool blanket that smells of cedar and money, is not luggage. I am aware of all of it the way you are aware of a painting across a gallery, a flat fact at a distance, while my hands sit in my lap and shake in a small private way that has nothing to do with the rest of me.

Sabre drives like a man who learned on horses and never forgave the change. Both hands. Eyes ahead. He does not look at me, and I understand, dimly, that the not-looking is for my sake, that he is giving me the only privacy a man can give a woman whose throat still wears the cold print of another mouth, and I hate that I am grateful, I hate that I have catalogued the courtesy of it the way I catalogue everything, the restorer's reflex, reading the kindness for the older lie under it.

"You killed him," I say. It comes out of me without my deciding to let it.

"Yes."

"In a car park. In a town with a Greggs."

"It is not where I would have chosen, either." A muscle moves in his jaw. "I am sorry you saw it. I am not sorry I did it."

I laugh, and it is the wrong laugh, high and thin and not mine, and I put my shaking hand over my own mouth to stop it, and he does look at me then, one flick of those exhausted eyes, and whatever he sees makes him slow the car, gentle as he slowed himself in the library, the fast thing brought down to a careful speed because he knows what it does when he lets it.

"Breathe," he says. "You are not going to faint. You are going to want to, and you are not going to, because you are the kind of person who finishes the swab she started even when the house is burning. Breathe."

It is so exactly the thing I told myself in the multi-storey, the cotton swab against the house fire, that for one cold second I wonder if he was in my head, and that thought is the worst one yet, worse than the car park, worse than the cooling weight, and I press myself into the door and breathe and decide, with the last working corner of me, that I am owed some answers before I let myself come apart.

The library again. The fire, the two lamps, the bare stretch of wall where a mirror used to hang. He puts me in the deep chair nearest the heat and Yves brings me tea I do not ask for, strong and sweet enough to stand a spoon in, the universal nursing of the badly frightened, and the ordinariness of it, a cup and saucer in a house with a body in a blanket, is what finally steadies my hands. I wrap them around the heat. I look at the man who is not a man, standing where he always stands, and I ask the question I have been not-asking for nine days.

"What are you."

He does not pretend not to understand. He has stopped pretending, I think, somewhere between the pillar and here, and the stopping has cost him, you can see it, a varnish scraped off all at once leaves the colours under it raw and too bright and unprotected.

"Old," he says. "Older than this house. Older than the painting you are cleaning, though only by a little, which I find I want you to know, for reasons I do not yet wish to examine." He turns the bare wall over with his eyes. "We do not have a kind word for ourselves. The kind ones are all yours, your word, vampire, with its candles and its capes, a children's tale you tell to make the dark a costume instead of a fact. We call ourselves the Long Patrons. We outlive every owner of every beautiful thing, and so we have decided we are the only true keepers of it. It is a flattering name. We are very good at flattering names."

"You drink blood." My voice is admirably flat. I am proud of it. It is the last of the nothing-is-happening and I am spending it carefully, the way you spend the last of a colour you cannot get any more of.

"I taste it." A precise correction, made gently, the way I would correct an apprentice who called inpainting a repair. "Most living blood tastes of nothing, to a palate as old as mine. Watered student-grade, the thing in the car park called it, and he was right, he was a young vulgar thing but he was right. A mortal's blood is to me what tap water is to you, and I have gone whole decades without it because there was no reason to want what tastes of nothing." He looks at me then, full, and the desert moves across his face again, the man lifting his head to find the water on the horizon was not a lie. "And then you walked into my library."

I set the tea down before I drop it. "Don't."

"You asked me what I am. I am telling you. You are owed the telling, after a car park." But he stops, and gives me the distance, steps back into the dark by the shelves, governing. "You smell of every colour at once. You smell of the one thing every creature of my kind has lost and cannot name and would burn the world to taste again. I do not yet understand why. I have a guess, and the guess frightens me more than anything has frightened me in three hundred years, and I am not going to hand it to you tonight on top of everything else, because I am cruel, Lio, I have had a long time to practise cruelty, but I find I do not want to be cruel to you, which is itself the most alarming development of my entire long life."

There is a great deal in that I should seize on. The guess. The why. The thing they lost. But I am a restorer, and a restorer's whole art is noticing the place a hand has gone in to cover something, the too-confident smoothness, the lowered hand of the widow who was reaching, and I have spent nine days learning the surface of this man, and so what I notice is not what he says. It is the seam in it.

"You knew," I say slowly. "In the car park. You said you'd hoped for a few more years of peace. You said you'd nearly persuaded yourself to go under and not come up. That's not how a man talks about a stranger he's just met. You've been bracing for me. Not for a restorer. For me." I lean forward out of the warm chair, into the cold of him, because the grain under my own overpaint is up and certain and will not let me leave it alone. "You looked at that painting and said I used to think. You're looking at me right now the way you looked at her. So tell me the truth, the real one, the one under the flattering name. Who do you think I am?"

For a long moment the fire is the only thing in the room with anything to say.

And then Sabre Vasquez, who is older than the house and nearly older than the painting, who has had a thousand years to practise the smooth confident hand that lays one image kindly over another, does the thing I will spend a very long time learning to mistrust. He tells me a story. He tells it beautifully, in that low tired velvet, and I believe every word, because it is the first warm thing anyone has offered me in years that was not a correction, and because I do not yet know to watch for the lowered hand in it, the place the account has been smoothed.

"A thousand years ago," he says, "I was dying. A wound that would not close. And a woman who loved me went to a thing in the dark and traded her own soul to keep me in the world, and the thing cheated her, the way they always cheat, and what she bought me was not life. It was this." He opens his hands, the bare wall, the mirrorless house, the long cold of it. "She damned herself to save me, and she did it out of love, and she died of the doing, and I have spent ten centuries failing to deserve it." He looks at me, and his face is open, and grieving, and entirely, I will learn, only half-true. "Her name was Camila. And you have her hands, Lio. You have had them the whole time. I knew it the moment you reached for the panel."

The grain in me does not flinch at the name. That is the thing I will remember. It does not recoil, it does not protest, it does not say I have never heard of her. It does something far worse, far quieter, a thing that goes all the way down to the patch under everything I believe about my own forgettable safe-sister life.

It answers, the way it answered the doorway, the way it answered the lullaby.

It says: yes. And it says: he is leaving something out.

And before I can decide which of those two certainties is going to ruin me first, the great door of the library opens without a knock, and Yves stands in it grey and bloodless, and he says, in the voice of a man reporting that the house is already on fire, "Sabre. The young one in the car park. He was not freelancing." He looks at me, once, with something I have not seen on him before, which is fear, real fear, for me. "He sent word before you reached him. They know she exists. They are already coming."