Not Home

Chapter 5

"Bring her" turned out to mean a hand on my elbow and no explanation.

The guards walked me out through the gate at the end of the pit, and the crowd noise followed us the whole way — that chant, witch, witch, witch, except it was thinning out now, breaking up, because people were scared of what they'd just seen and scared people get loud and then they get quiet and then they go home and tell their kids to lock the doors.

We went down a corridor. Then another. Then a door with a bar on it, and I thought, this is it, they're putting me in a cell, and then the door opened onto the loading bay and I saw a black car.

Not the broker's car. A different one. Longer. The windows were so dark I couldn't see in.

"Get in," the guard said.

"Where's my bag?"

"Your bag's gone."

"It had my mom's—" I stopped. The ring was on my finger. I checked. Still there. "Fine. Where am I going?"

"Get in the car."

"Nobody's answering a single question tonight, huh?"

The guard looked at me. He was maybe thirty, tired, and he had a scratch across his knuckle that was fresh.

"You want my advice?" he said. "Get in the car and don't talk to anybody until Arthur tells you what's what. And don't cry in front of them. They'll think you're doing it for show."

I got in the car.

Arthur was already in the back seat. I hadn't seen him get in. He was just there, sitting with his hands folded, like he'd been waiting ten minutes.

The car pulled out.

"Am I going home?" I asked again.

"No."

"Okay."

He turned his head. Just a little. "That's it? Okay?"

"I asked already. You didn't answer." I shrugged. "I'm not gonna ask twice."

Something moved across his face — not quite a smile, but close. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

"Twenty-two." He looked out the window. "You're the first one in eight years who didn't beg me."

"Beg you for what?"

"For a different car. For a phone call. For your father." He said your father like it was a dirty word. "They always beg."

"Begging's not really my thing anymore."

"No," he said. "I noticed."

The car took the north road out of town. I know because I used to walk that road to school and there was a fence with a dent in it where a truck had hit it when I was nine. I watched the dent go by.

The trees got thicker. The houses stopped. Somewhere around the twenty-minute mark we passed a sign that had been painted over, and I could just barely read the old letters under the paint.

BLACKWOOD.

"Wait," I said. "That's the pack line."

"It is."

"We're crossing into the Blackwood Pack?"

"Yes."

"Nobody crosses into Blackwood." My voice went up. I couldn't help it. "Nobody. That's not — that's the whole point of the Culling, it's so they don't come here, they keep him there—"

"You know the history."

"I know enough."

"Then you know it's not a cage," Arthur said. "It's a wall. And you're going to live behind it now."

I sat back against the seat.

The road kept going. The trees got taller and older, and the air changed, and I don't know how to explain the air thing to someone who's never felt it. It got heavier. Like walking into a house where somebody's sick.

Then the trees stopped, and the car came up over a ridge, and the whole valley opened up.

The castle was down there in the dark.

I'd seen pictures. Everybody's seen pictures, the same four photos passed around for a hundred years — the black towers, the frozen fountain, the gate with the wolves carved into it. The pictures were bad. They didn't show how big it was. They didn't show how the windows all looked black except the ones that didn't, and I couldn't tell which ones those were.

"Your family's had Silver Creek for six generations," Arthur said. "You know what this family's had for six?"

"What?"

"Everyone else's."

The car went down the hill.

The gate was already open. That felt wrong. Gates that big don't stay open. They stay shut and there's a man on them and he asks your business.

We went through and it was just open.

The courtyard was stone. Big enough to park a hundred cars. There were three.

A man came out of the east door before the car even stopped, walking quick, holding a lantern. He looked at the car, then at Arthur through the glass, and then his eyes came to me and he stopped walking.

Just for a second.

Then he started again, quicker.

"Sir," he said, when Arthur got out. "Sir, there's people already calling. The hall—"

"I know what happened at the hall. I was there."

"The Council's going to want—"

"Tomorrow." Arthur held up one hand. "Tomorrow, at ten. Tell them ten and tell them if anybody shows up at this door before then I'll have them answering to the King himself."

The man's eyes came back to me. He was scared. He was doing a good job of covering it, but he was scared.

"She's in the east tower," Arthur said. "The room at the top. Not the second one, the top one. Put water in there, put food, put something warm. Don't put a guard on her door."

"Sir—"

"Don't put a guard on her door. That's an order."

They walked me across the courtyard. My heels had given up somewhere around the pit and I was walking on the sides of my feet, and the stones were cold, and my shirt still had coffee all down the front of it. I could feel it dried stiff against my skin.

The east tower had a spiral stair. It went up forever. By the top I was out of breath and too tired to be embarrassed about it.

The room had a bed with four posts. A fireplace. A window the size of a door. A table with bread on it, and cheese, and a glass of wine I wasn't touching.

Arthur stood in the doorway and didn't come in.

"Sleep," he said. "Nobody's going to hurt you tonight."

"Who's going to hurt me tomorrow?"

He didn't answer that. He just looked at me for a long moment, and then he said something strange.

"Your neck," he said. "Does it ever bother you?"

"My neck?"

"Itch. Burn. Feel warm, out of nowhere."

I put my hand up. It felt like a neck.

"No," I said. "Should it?"

"Good night," Arthur said, and pulled the door shut.

I stood there and listened to him go down the stairs.

Then I sat on the edge of that enormous bed and looked at the bread and didn't eat it. I was hungry. I just couldn't.

I got up and went to the window.

You could see the whole valley from up there. The road I'd come in on. The trees. The wall at the ridge line, and the little lights along the top of it where they had men posted.

And past all that, down in the dark, on the other side of a courtyard, there was a wing of the castle with no lights in any of its windows.

Not one.

There were six windows on that side and every one of them was black, and I stood there with my hands on the cold stone sill and I watched them, and I don't know why I didn't look away.

Then one of them moved.

Not a light coming on. Nothing bright. Just a shape, passing behind the glass, once.

I couldn't see what it was. It was too dark and too far and it was gone before I could get my eyes to focus on it.

But my neck got warm.

Just for a second. Right where Arthur had asked about.

Then it stopped.

Chapter 5 Ends