CHAPTER FIVE

Smoke had a way of making everything feel farther away than it was, the corridor stretching longer in Elena's panicked half second of assessment than it had any right to, but her body moved before her mind finished cataloguing the danger, years of pack training taking over where thought left off.

"This way," she said, grabbing the sleeve of the nearest elder, an old vampire woman who looked more furious than afraid, and steering her toward the side door that led down to the riverbank instead of the smoke-choked main corridor. "The waystation only has the one chimney. That much smoke isn't an accident."

"I'm aware," the elder said, shaking off Elena's hand with more dignity than gratitude, but she moved in the direction Elena pointed anyway, which was the important part.

Behind her, Damon was doing the same for the rest of the Council, his voice carrying a calm authority through the chaos that made even panicked elders fall into line, and Elena found herself, in the middle of a burning building, absurdly grateful that whatever else he was, he was good in a crisis. They cleared the waystation in under two minutes, elders and attendants spilling out onto the riverbank in various states of soot-streaked composure, and it was only once the count came back whole, everyone accounted for, that Elena let herself actually look at the building they'd just escaped.

The fire hadn't spread far. That was the first wrong thing. A real accident, a kitchen fire or an overturned lantern, would have caught and climbed by now, the whole waystation lit up like a torch. Instead there was a single, contained blaze near the side entrance, already guttering under its own smoke, more designed to force a chaotic evacuation than to actually burn the building down.

"Someone wanted us out of that room," Elena said, half to herself, crouching near the treeline to examine the ground for tracks in the low light. "Not dead. Just out. And scared enough not to notice anything else happening around us while we ran."

Damon crouched beside her a moment later, close enough that she caught the low, cold scent of him under the smoke, something like winter air and old stone that she was, despite the circumstances, cataloguing with more attention than the situation strictly called for. "You think this was a distraction."

"I think a fire that convenient, set at the exact dinner where a werewolf and a vampire were finally having an actual conversation instead of a diplomatic performance, isn't a coincidence." She found what she was looking for: a single set of boot prints, pressed deep into the mud near the waystation's side wall, leading away into the trees, moving with the kind of controlled haste that spoke of training, not panic. "Someone was here. Watching, maybe. Long enough to know exactly when to light it."

Damon followed her gaze to the tracks, his jaw tightening in a way she was already starting to recognize as his version of controlled fury. "Wolf or vampire?"

"Can't tell from a boot print. Could be either. Could be human, for that matter, hired by either side, or a third party we haven't thought to suspect yet." Elena straightened, brushing mud from her knees, aware of the Council elders regrouping a short distance away, already murmuring among themselves in the particular way that meant blame was about to start getting assigned whether or not there was evidence to support it. "Somebody doesn't want this arrangement to work, Damon. Somebody wanted us running scared tonight instead of sitting across a table figuring out whether we could stand each other."

"Then they'll be disappointed," Damon said, and there was something steady underneath the words, an intention rather than a hope, that Elena found herself believing more readily than she expected to. "I'm not walking away from this because someone lit a fire to scare me off it."

"Neither am I." She met his eyes, and for the second time that night felt the strange, unwelcome recognition of finding something in him she hadn't been prepared to find: not the cold monster from her childhood stories, but someone as stubborn and as frightened of failing at this as she was. "But we should tell the Council. If someone's actively trying to sabotage the arrangement, that's bigger than one bad dinner."

"Agreed. Though I doubt it will improve Lord Aurelius's mood."

"Who?"

"My council's answer to your father, if your father had four centuries of patience and none of the warmth." Something dry entered Damon's voice, not quite humor, but close enough to it that Elena found herself, absurdly, smiling despite the smoke still stinging her eyes and the very real possibility that someone had just tried to burn down a bridge with her inside it. "He's already made his opinion of this arrangement clear. He won't be pleased to have evidence that someone agrees with him enough to commit arson over it."

"Great. So we've got at least one enemy on your side, one at large, and possibly someone in my own pack council who isn't thrilled either, given how loudly my father objected before he caved." Elena rubbed a hand over her face, smearing more soot than she removed. "This was supposed to be one dinner. I was going to eat soup and go home and complain to my sister about how awkward it was."

"I'm sorry to have disappointed the itinerary."

"You didn't. The arsonist did." She glanced sideways at him, and something in the exhausted, adrenaline-thin humor of the moment made the words come out more honestly than she'd planned. "For what it's worth, the soup was fine. The company was better than I expected."

Something shifted in Damon's expression at that, quick and unguarded, gone before he could fully suppress it, but not before Elena caught it: something that looked almost like hope, careful and rusty from disuse, the expression of a man who had spent twenty years being told he was either a traitor or a coward and had stopped expecting anyone to tell him otherwise.

"The company agrees," he said, quietly enough that it felt like it was meant only for her, not for the Council elders still murmuring a short distance away, not for whoever had lit that fire and vanished into the treeline, just for the two of them, standing on a riverbank in the smoke-thinned dark with a prophecy hanging over both their heads and, for the first time since the bridge, neither of them minding the weight of it quite so much.

The walk back to where their separate escorts waited was quiet, but it was a different quiet than the one they'd started the evening with: less a standoff, more a truce still finding its shape. At the fork where the paths split, hers toward the Voss pack lands, his toward Ashgrove Hall, Damon paused.

"Same time, next week?" he asked. "Assuming the Council doesn't cancel the whole arrangement out of an abundance of caution."

"They won't cancel it. If anything, tonight just proved the Oracle's warning has teeth. Somebody's scared enough of this working to try to burn it down before it gets the chance." Elena considered him for a moment, soot-streaked and steady in the moonlight, nothing at all like the cold-blooded story she'd grown up on. "Next week. And Damon?"

"Yes?"

"Bring your own guard next time. If someone's willing to set a fire to stop this, I'd rather not find out what they're willing to do for an encore."

"Worried about me, wolf?"

"Strategizing," Elena said, echoing, deliberately, the excuse she'd given her sister a week before, and watched a real smile finally break across his face, unguarded and surprised, the kind that made him look less like the last Ashgrove and more like simply a man, tired and stubborn and cautiously, carefully hopeful, standing on a riverbank at the edge of two territories that had spent a generation hating each other and might, if the two of them were very lucky and very careful, finally learn not to.

She turned toward home before either of them could examine that thought too closely, and did not look back, and told herself, the whole way home, that the warmth still lingering in her chest was nothing but adrenaline from the fire.

She was getting worse at lying to herself. She was starting not to mind.