The Larder

Kiri lived in a stack of shipping containers somebody had welded into apartments and named Harbor View, though the only harbor you could see from it was a drainage canal and a billboard for a casino that had closed years ago.

Her bike was chained to the stair railing at the bottom.

Rain pooled in the seat. The chain was the expensive kind, the kind you buy when a bike is the only thing you own that earns money. I put my hand on the frame. I'd watched her climb back onto it six weeks after I'd straightened her spine, grinning like an idiot, while Sister Hale yelled at her from the clinic door to take it slow.

She had never taken anything slow in her life.

"Door camera's looping," Lancer said in my ear. "You've got four minutes of nobody before it notices."

"The lock?"

A click from the container door at the top of the stairs.

"What lock?"

Inside, the flat was one room and a curtain. It smelled of chain oil and instant noodles and the cheap lemon cleaner Kiri used on everything, including, once, a cut on her hand that I'd had to fix twice.

A bowl of noodles sat on the fold-down table, half eaten, gone cold and gray. Her jacket was on the hook. Her commlink charger was still plugged into the wall.

No commlink.

She hadn't packed to disappear. Whatever took her away from this room had interrupted her dinner, and she'd left expecting to come back.

I found the slip on the little cooler under the counter, pinned flat by a magnet shaped like a cartoon bike.

Printed code. A date. Black wax in the corner, pressed with a twist of briar.

I took the other slip out of my pocket, the one from Mags's toolbox, and held them side by side.

Same seal. Same printing.

I didn't need Lancer to tell me what that meant, though I wanted her to.

Two of my patients. Both carrying my magic. Both with receipts from the same people who bought blood.

One dead. One missing.

I don't believe in coincidences that line up that neatly. I believe in patterns I haven't understood yet. And a client who knew things about my patients that I'd never told him.

I folded both slips into my pocket and stood in the middle of Kiri's flat with the rain ticking against the steel roof.

Something settled at the edge of my awareness.

Raven.

Not a sound. Not a shape. Just the familiar weight of her attention, the way a cat lands on the end of the bed in the dark and you know it without opening your eyes.

She'd been gone since the shop. Since the overpass. Since a man in a good coat had stepped over Mags's sill.

Now he was somewhere else, and she was back.

I reached toward her, gently.

She stayed.

I didn't let myself finish the thought. Some thoughts, once you finish them, you have to act on.

"Lancer. I'm reading you two codes."

I read them off. Static ticked while she worked. I studied the bowl of noodles and tried not to think about Kiri leaving her dinner half finished.

"Okay," Lancer said. "Both codes go to the same buyer. Registered to a frozen-meat wholesaler that went bankrupt before I was born and somehow still pays its power bill."

"Address?"

"Hang on. There's something else." A pause. "Kiri's commlink pinged there once, two nights ago. Then nothing."

"Where?"

"Edge of the Barrens, by the old rail yards. Refrigerated meat-packing plant." A pause. "The street calls it the Larder."

"Cute."

"I thought so."

The sarcasm faded out of her voice.

"You want backup?"

"I want you to keep watching."

"And Vael?"

I looked at the bowl on the table. Kiri, who never took anything slow, had left her dinner half eaten and her bike chained outside. Maybe she'd gone to sell blood. Maybe she'd been offered enough money to make leaving the bike behind seem sensible.

Maybe somebody had known exactly what to offer.

"Still out," I said.

I turned off the light on my way out. I don't know why. She'd want it off when she came home.

* * *

The Larder squatted at the end of a dead rail spur, a long concrete box behind chain-link, with refrigeration units droning on its roof like something breathing through its teeth.

A sign over the loading bay still advertised a meat company nobody had bought from in thirty years. Somebody kept the power on. Somebody kept the cold running all night.

There was a line at the side door.

Two in the morning, in the rain, and there was a line.

I stopped across the yard and watched it for a while.

A dock hand with his hood up. A girl who couldn't have been more than sixteen, bouncing on her heels to stay warm. An old man leaning on a cane, patient as a church pew.

Nobody talked. Nobody looked at anybody else.

They looked like people waiting for a bus that only came to this stop.

"Lancer. You seeing this?"

"Seeing it. Hating it." A pause. "Valk, there's something in those walls. My signal's going soft just looking at the place."

"Keep watching as long as you can."

"That's the plan. If I lose you, assume they're—"

I stepped through a gap in the fence.

"—shielded. You're on your own, Va—"

Static.

Then nothing.

I stood in the rain with a dead line in my ear and thought about traps, and how they don't threaten you. I'd been told that only a few hours ago. I'd thought it was good advice at the time.

I got in line.

Nobody asked who I was.

The door opened every few minutes and let one more person into the warm.

When it was my turn, the warm turned out to be a long room under hard white light, lined with plastic chairs.

People sat in them with tubes running from their arms into collection bags set in low metal trays. A woman read a paper novel while she bled. A boy slept. The dock hand stared at the ceiling and moved his lips, counting something. Maybe the scrip. Maybe the drops.

At the far end, behind a steel counter, a man in a clean white coat paid them out. Scrip by the bag, counted onto the counter, the way Ezra had paid me.

Behind him, the coolers were stacked to the ceiling, each one sealed with black wax and a twist of briar.

I looked back at the people in the chairs.

Nobody was restrained. Nobody was screaming. They'd come here on their own, stood in the rain, and waited for someone to open the door.

That was somehow worse.

I'd been bottled before.

Not like this. Somebody had once taken the worst night of my life, packaged it, and sold it by the dose to people who wanted to feel what it was like to burn. I knew what it looked like when someone turned a person into stock.

It looked like this.

Clean. Polite. A queue.

The man at the counter looked up and saw me.

His eyes went to my face, then my hands, then the white of my skin under the light, and stayed there. Not the way people usually look at a drow, wary, deciding whether to cross the street. He looked at me the way a butcher looks at a cut he hasn't seen before.

He didn't say anything.

He picked up a pen and wrote something down.

I filed that, and it went into a file I didn't like.

Then Raven pulled.

Not hard. A tug at the edge of my attention, the way a hand finds your sleeve in a crowd.

Down the room. Past the counter. Toward a corridor with a plastic strip curtain hung across it, the kind they use in cold stores to keep the chill in.

Someone back there was close to the edge.

Raven knows the edge better than anyone. It's where she works.

I waited until the man in the white coat bent to count a new bag. Then I walked down the room like I belonged there, and stepped through the curtain into the cold.

The corridor smelled of frost and steel and something sweet underneath.

Doors on both sides, numbered.

Raven drew me past three of them and stopped me at the fourth.

Kiri lay on a steel table under a gray blanket.

Alive.

Barely.

Her skin had gone the color of old paper and her lips were blue at the edges. Two lines ran from the inside of her elbows into collection bags beneath the table. A small pump ticked beside them, drawing slowly, steadily.

Not fast. Not to empty her all at once. Just enough to keep taking, like a tap left running at a trickle so the well never went dry.

They weren't draining her. They were milking her.

Her eyes moved when I came in. It took her a while to find my face.

"Valk?" A thread of voice. "S'cold in here."

"I know."

I took her hand. It was ice.

"I'm here."

"Said my blood was special." Her mouth tried to smile and didn't make it. "Man at the counter. Said someone would pay triple. So I came back." Her eyes slid shut and opened again. "Then they didn't let me go."

Special. I didn't let myself ask what made it special.

I think part of me already knew.

I looked at the bags filling beneath the table, and at the other doors in the corridor.

Mags had sold her blood. Kiri had come here willingly, at least the first time. Whatever bargain she'd made had ended when somebody decided she was worth more lying on a table than riding through the streets.

Dex was dead. Mags was dead. And Kiri was being kept alive just well enough to bleed.

I didn't know whether the same people were responsible for all three.I hated that I had to wonder.

I reached for the lines.

"I'd leave those where they are," said a voice from the doorway.

He was leaning in the doorway like he'd been there a while.

Tall, lean, dark hair swept back, a suit that fit him perfectly and looked about a week old. Rings on three fingers. An easy smile, the kind salesmen practice in mirrors.

Ezra dressed like a portrait of old money.

This one dressed like money that wanted you to know exactly how new it was.

Two men stood behind him in the corridor. Big. Patient. Not moving yet.

He didn't breathe either.

I was getting good at noticing.

"Marek Thorne," he said, as if I'd asked. "And you're the one who set off my ward at Ferro's." He tipped his head toward the bags beneath Kiri's table. "I've been waiting all night to see who'd come looking. I'll be honest, I didn't expect a drow. I expected Vael's people. Or the cops, if Vael got careless."

Traps don't threaten you. Not until you step in them.

I'd stepped in this one with both feet.

"Let her go," I said.

"In a minute. I'd like to talk first."

He came into the room, unhurried, and stopped on the far side of the table, across Kiri from me. "You came for a courier. People don't come for couriers. That makes me curious."

He reached into his jacket.

The two men in the corridor shifted.

He took out a glass vial no longer than my finger, stoppered and sealed in black wax. Dark red inside, almost black under the hard light.

"Mags Ferro," he said. "The last of her."

He turned it slowly between two fingers, the way Ezra had turned the wax cap in Mags's shop. Like a man holding a glass of something old and expensive.

"It tastes alive," he said. "You wouldn't understand that. Your kind never does. Everything you drink is alive. But we drink cold things all night, every night, and then something like this comes along."

For one second the salesman went out of his face, and something hungrier and much older looked out instead.

"It's like being warm again. Do you know what that's worth to things like us?"

I didn't answer.

I let my sight slip sideways and looked at the vial. It was there. Faint and cool and patient, threaded all through the red. Not in bone this time. Not in a body. In a glass tube with a wax seal, waiting on a shelf to be sold.

My magic. My handwriting.

I'd never seen it outside someone I'd healed. I'd thought it stayed in the flesh I'd mended, woven into what I'd repaired.

But there it was, carried away in Mags's blood.

The floor didn't tilt this time. It went out from under me completely, and I stood on nothing and kept my face still, because he was watching.

I'd always thought of it as a gift.

What I mend stays mended. A promise I get to keep after I walk away.

And all that time, the people I'd knelt beside in gutters and alleys had been carrying something other people could take from them. Something they could bottle, price, and sell.

Dex. Mags. Kiri. The boy outside the arena. The old woman at the bus stop. The little girl in the alley.

How many more? I'd left something in all of them. I'd put it there. The list I'd never kept. Somebody else had found a way to make one, and now I knew what they were shopping for.

And under that, a smaller, colder thought I didn't want.

I fed tonight. It passes.

Ezra's hand had been warm. I'd never asked whose blood had done it.

I pushed that down. Not here. Not in front of this one.

But I'd been still too long. Marek's eyes had narrowed. He looked from the vial to my face and back again, slowly, like a man doing arithmetic.

"You know this blood," he said.

It wasn't a question.

"I knew her," I said. "She fixed my bike once."

"Mm."

He didn't believe me, and he didn't bother pretending he did.

He slipped the vial back into his jacket.

"You didn't blink when I said Thorne. Somebody's been telling you stories about my family. Vael, I'd guess."

He watched my face and smiled at whatever he found there.

"They tell everyone we're the traitors."

"Are you?"

He smiled, and this time it was almost real.

"We sold one old man to save a hundred of us. They've never forgiven us for surviving."

He said it lightly, like an old joke.

It wasn't one.

Whatever had happened, it had happened a long time ago, and it still had teeth.

"Somebody's killing people," I said. "Mags. A dockworker named Dex Morrow. Drained dry and left where they fell. Your buyers, your seal on the vials. Your family trades in blood. You do the math."

Marek laughed.

It was a good laugh, warm and surprised, and it made the room colder.

"Why would I drain a well?" He spread his hands, rings catching the light. "Look around you. I don't kill what I can sell. Dead donors don't come back next week. I'm a monster, drow. I'm not an idiot. I keep good books."

It made sense.

That was what I hated about it.

It made exactly as much sense as everything Ezra had said, and I'd been willing to believe Ezra. But Kiri was lying between us with her lips going blue, and this man had hung her up like a side of beef to tap a little at a time.

Whatever he wasn't, he was this. I didn't owe him the benefit of the doubt.

"I'm taking her," I said.

"She's paid for."

"Then I'll owe you."

Marek looked at me for a long moment. He looked at my face, and my hands, and the white of my skin, the same way the man at the counter had. Like a butcher looking at a cut he'd never seen before.

"You can't afford me," he said gently.

He nodded once, and the two men in the corridor came through the door.

The first one came around the table fast, reaching for me with both hands like I was something to be lifted off a shelf.

I don't like being handled.

I let the cold come up out of me, the way it does when I stop holding it back. Frost cracked across the steel floor under his boots, white and sudden. His feet went out from under him and his skull met the edge of the table on the way down with a sound I felt in my teeth. He didn't get up.

I didn't look to see if he was breathing.

The second one was smarter.

He didn't reach. He came in low and quiet, and I saw the knife a half second too late.

I got my hand up.

That was all I got.

The blade opened my left palm from the base of my thumb to the edge of my wrist. It didn't hurt. Not yet. Cuts like that never do, at first. There's just the cold of the steel, and then the warm, and then the blood, a lot of it, running down my fingers and pattering onto the frost.

Across the table, Marek went very still.

Not the stillness of a man watching a fight. The stillness of an animal that has just caught a scent on the wind. His nostrils flared. His eyes went to my hand, to the red drops on the white floor, and something moved behind them. The same look he'd had over the vial. Hungry, and wary, and doing arithmetic.

He didn't have it yet. But he was close.

The man with the knife came in again.

And then he wasn't there.

I didn't see Ezra come through the door. I don't think anyone could have.

One moment the enforcer was in front of me, knife up, and the next there was a charcoal coat between us and the enforcer was in the air, and then he was against the far wall, and then he was on the floor, folded in a way people aren't supposed to fold.

Ezra stood over him.

No wasted motion. No breath.

His face was perfectly calm, and that was the worst thing in the room.For one second I saw what he really was. Not a disappointing son in an old painting. Something that had been dead for a long time and had decided, a long time ago, that it would not stay down.

Raven went silent. Not quiet. Gone. The way a light goes out.

From the corridor came the sound of feet. Many feet, going away. Whoever else Marek had brought had decided this wasn't worth it.

Marek hadn't moved.

He looked at Ezra for a long moment. Then he looked at my hand, still bleeding onto the frost, and smiled, slow and pleasant.

"Careful, Vael," he said. "She bleeds."

He stepped back into the corridor and was gone. He didn't hurry. Men like him never do.

I turned on Ezra.

"How did you find me?"

It came out harder than I meant it to.

Or exactly as hard as I meant it to. I'd kept him out. I'd told Lancer to keep him out. I'd scrolled past his name in the rain and called someone else. Nobody knew where I was except Lancer.

"I was following Thorne's people," he said. "After the ward went off at the shop, I thought they might lead somewhere."

He looked at Kiri.

"They did."

It was reasonable. Of course it was. I turned it over and over and couldn't find the crack in it. That bothered me more than if I could.

Kiri made a small sound.

I went to her. I stopped the pump first, then freed the needles from her arms and pressed clean gauze against the punctures. Her pulse fluttered beneath my fingers, thin and quick and tired.

I put my good hand flat on her chest, over her heart.

It was beating like a moth against glass.

I reached for the light.

And stopped. My hand hovered over her. Every time I'd healed someone, I'd left a piece of myself behind. I'd been proud of that.

I'd been proud of knowing that what I'd fixed would stay fixed. Now I'd seen what men like Marek could do with it.

Kiri was already marked. Her spine carried my magic. They'd found her once, and if Marek was telling the truth about what her blood was worth, they had every reason to come looking again.

What would happen if I healed her now? Would it strengthen the mark? Make her blood worth more? Make it easier for someone to find her?

I didn't know.

And if I waited until I did, she'd die on a steel table in the cold, while I stood over her with my hands full of something that could have saved her.

I'm not here to save you.

I used to tell people that.

I used to mean it.

I let the light come.

Not much. Not all the way. Just enough to keep her tethered. Just enough to steady the moth in her chest and bring a little color back to the edges of her mouth.

The way I'd once knelt in an alley and kept a little girl from slipping away, and promised myself I'd done enough.

Kiri's breathing eased.

I didn't know what it had cost her.

Ezra watched the light leave my hands. He watched it the way some people listen to music.

Still. Rapt. Like it was something he'd heard described a hundred times and had never once been in the room for.

I didn't like that, but I didn't have time not to like it.

"We need to get her out," I said.

He picked Kiri up before I could ask.

He lifted her off the table the way you'd lift something you'd been told was precious, blanket and all, and carried her down the cold corridor and out through the front room. The plastic chairs were empty now. The man in the white coat was gone.

The bags still sat in their trays, half full, the tubing trailing across the floor.

The loading dock doors were open to the rain.

The moment I stepped through them, my ear filled with static, then a voice.

"—alk! Valk! Talk to me."

"I'm here."

"You've been dark for forty minutes."

Lancer breathed out, a long crackle of relief.

Then a pause, and I knew she was looking at the same thing I was: Ezra Vael, standing in the rain at the edge of the loading dock, holding Kiri in his arms. "Thought you said keep him out."

"I did."

Silence on the line.

Lancer is very good at silences.

"I'll call Hale," she said finally.

Sister Hale came in a battered white van with no markings and a dent in the side shaped like a bad decision.

She didn't ask questions. She never does.

She took one look at Kiri, one look at Ezra, and one look at my hand, and her mouth went thin.

She got Kiri onto a stretcher in the back, pulled a warming blanket over her, and started working before she'd even shut the doors.

I stood there while she secured an IV line and checked Kiri's pulse. I wanted to climb in beside her. I wanted to make sure she kept breathing.

Hale looked up at me.

"I've got her."

I believed her.

She shut the doors and drove off into the rain.

That left the two of us on the loading dock.

The rain had thinned to almost nothing. Over the rail yards, the sky had started to lose its black, going the dull gray of old pewter at the edges. It would be morning soon.

Not yet, but soon.

My hand was still bleeding.

Ezra took it. He didn't ask. He took my wrist in his gloved hand and turned my palm toward the light, and looked at the cut for a long moment. Then he took off his right glove with his teeth and drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket. White linen, a single V embroidered in the corner in gray thread.

He bound my hand with it. Carefully. Bare-handed. My blood was on his fingers. Red against the white of his skin.

I watched him look at it.

He didn't drink. His hands were perfectly steady, but nothing else about him was. There was a stillness on top of his stillness, the way there had been at the shop, like a man holding a door shut against a storm with nothing but his own weight.

He tied the knot and didn't let go.

He was close. Close enough that I should have felt his breath on my face, and didn't. Close enough that I could see the gray in his eyes, and something underneath it I didn't have a name for. I should have stepped back.

I'm good at stepping back. I didn't. Neither did he.

Then the first thin edge of light found the roof of the Larder.

He looked up at it. Something passed over his face, too quick to read. Then he let go of my hand, stepped back, and drew his glove on again, one finger at a time.

"Go home," he said quietly. "Lock your door. Don't heal anyone else."

I looked at him.

He'd watched me heal Kiri. He knew what my blood could mean to someone like Marek. And he'd known things about Mags that nobody had told him.

I wanted to ask how much he knew. I wanted to ask whose blood had warmed his hands the night before. I didn't ask either.

He turned to go. At the edge of the dock he stopped, half in shadow, and looked back at me.

"Be careful, Isilme."

Then he was gone, and the morning came up gray over the rail yards, and I stood there with his handkerchief on my hand and the cold coming back into my fingers.

He didn't seem to notice he'd said it.

I noticed. I had never told him my name.