Raking Light

Bea.

The name goes through the cold air and into me and out the other side, and for one whole second I do not move, because there is a part of me that has spent twenty-seven years hearing that voice come from the front of a room, the praised end, the lit end, and has built its whole understanding of the world around the fact that I am the one who answers it and not the one who is called for. To hear it call my name, from the dark, frightened, is so wrong that my body reads it the way it reads the low arch, as a thing that cannot be, and refuses it for a beat before it lets it through.

Then it lets it through, and I am out of the chair.

I do not remember standing. I have the cup in my hand and then I do not have the cup, I hear it go down somewhere on the hearthstone without breaking, and I am past Sabre before he has finished turning, past the place where Renata stood, into the corridor with its candle-shadows leaning, and I am at the great door and have my hand on the cold iron of it when his voice comes after me, not loud, never loud, but laid across the back of my neck like a hand.

"Lio. Wait."

"That's my sister." I do not turn around. The iron is so cold it feels wet. "That is my sister in your drive, in the dark, and a thing that wanted to drink me just told me she's a card someone played. So no. I will not wait. I have spent my whole life waiting in rooms while she got fetched, and I am not doing it now, not for you, not when she sounds like that."

A silence behind me, the particular silence of a man choosing which true thing to say.

"Then we go together," he says. "But you go behind me, and you do exactly what I tell you, because you do not yet know what else is out there, and I do." A pause, and then, lower, the velvet cracked clean through to whatever is under it, "Please."

It is the please that turns me. He has not said it before, not like that, not stripped. He is standing in the candlelight with his hands open at his sides, the way you hold your hands when you want a frightened animal to see you are not holding anything, and his amber eyes, the same amber as the thing I just sang half to pieces, are not cold at all. I had thought I knew the shapes his face could make. This is a new one. It is the face of a man who has just understood that the worst lever in the world has been left within reach of his enemies, and that the lever is a person, and that the person is mine.

"Behind you," I agree. "But the second she's hurt, I stop listening to you. Be clear about that."

"I have never been under any illusion otherwise," he says, and reaches past me, and opens his own door.

The night comes in. It smells of frost and gravel and the cooling engine of an expensive car, and under all of it, faint, the linseed-and-cold-stone scent the grain hangs on everything now, as if the whole world has started to smell of the studio. The cold is a real thing, a hand laid flat against my face, and I am grateful for it, the way I am grateful for a north-lit window, because it is honest, and I have had nine days of things that are not. The drive is a long pale ribbon under no moon. The car sits at the foot of it with one door open and its interior light burning, a little yellow box of ordinary in all that dark, and standing beside the open door, one hand on the roof of the car as though it is the only solid thing left in the world, is my sister.

Bea looks terrible. Bea, who has never in her life looked terrible, who is photogenic asleep, who used to be late to her own openings because she could not stop liking herself in the hall mirror. Her coat is buttoned wrong. Her feet are bare. There is a smear of something dark down one sleeve that I will not let myself name from here, and her face, when it turns up the drive and finds me in the lit doorway, does a thing I have never once seen it do, which is crumple with relief at the sight of me, as though I am the lit end of the room and she is the one who has been waiting to be fetched.

"Lio," she says again, and her voice breaks on it. "Lio, I don't, I don't know how I got here, I was in the kitchen and then a woman, there was a woman, she was so kind, she said you needed me and I got in the car and I, Lio, I can't remember the drive, I can't remember any of the drive."

I am moving toward her before Sabre's arm comes across the dark in front of me, not touching me, just there, a bar of cold I run up against and stop at.

"Wait," he breathes. "Look first."

"That's my sister."

"I know what she is to you." His head is up, his nostrils fractionally wide, reading the night the way I read a surface under raking light, looking for the retouch, the place the smooth story does not match the grain underneath. "I am asking you to let me look at her before you put your arms around her, because Renata did not drive a living woman fifty miles and leave her breathing in my drive out of kindness, and the thing I am afraid of is not that your sister is hurt." His voice drops to almost nothing. "It is that your sister is bait, and that the hook is still in the water."

The word bait does its work. I stand there with my whole body straining down the drive toward the one person who shares my mother's photographs and my father's silences, and I make myself do the thing I am best at and worst at, the thing my whole career is, which is to stop, and not trust the surface, and look for what has been painted over.

So I look.

And under the raking light of the burning car, with my eyes doing what they have always done, I see it. I do not want to see it. Bea is real, Bea is my sister, Bea is barefoot and terrified and that is genuinely her, but there is a wrongness on her the way there is a wrongness on the woman in the panel, a smoothed-over quality, a hand that has been moved. At the side of her throat, just under the jaw, where the buttoned-wrong collar has fallen away, there is a mark. Two small dark points, and around them, very faint, very fine, catching the yellow light, a whorl of something that is not a bruise, a fine cracking like the craquelure in old varnish, gold at its edges.

I have never seen it before in my life and I know exactly what it is. The grain knows. The grain goes very still and very cold and tells me, in the language I never learned, what my eyes are looking at. It is the thing I do for a living, run backward and made of flesh: a later hand has gone over my sister, smoothed her, deepened her, moved her hand to its side, and signed the alteration in a fine gold-edged crackle the way a forger signs the one corner he is proud of. Someone has restored Bea into a message. The two points are where the colour was taken; the whorl is the varnish laid over the taking.

Someone has marked my sister.

"Sabre," I say, and I do not recognise my own voice, it has gone flat, it has gone to the place past fear where the work happens. "Sabre, what is that on her neck."

He is already still in a way that frightens me more than any movement could. He is looking at the same thing I am looking at, fifty feet away in the dark, seeing it the way his kind see, and when he answers me his voice has lost the last of its velvet and is only old, very old, and tired in a way I have not heard from him even once.

"That is not a feeding," he says. "A feeding heals clean or it kills. That is a bond." A breath he does not need. "Someone has bonded your sister. The way I have not done to you. The way Renata accused me of being too much a coward to do." He turns his head and looks at me, and in his face is the thing he has been keeping off it for nine days, the want and the guilt and the dread all at once, no longer painted over. "It is a message, Lio. It is the cruelest message anyone of my kind could send. They have shown you exactly what can be done to the people you love, and they have done it to the one you were measured against your whole life, and they have left her breathing in my drive so that you will have to watch her carry it. And they have signed it." His jaw tightens. "I know that whorl. I know whose hand makes it."

Down the drive, Bea sways against the car, her hand sliding on the cold roof, and lifts her face to the candlelit doorway where her little sister stands frozen beside a monster, and says, in a small lost voice she has never had to use before, "Lio. I think there's something wrong with me. I think there's something really wrong with me, and I can hear someone singing, and it isn't you."