Still Alive

Chapter 9

The key was gone from the table.

I knew before my eyes were even all the way open. I'd left it right there next to the bread, and it wasn't there, and the door was shut and the lock was turned.

I sat up and looked around the room like an idiot. Under the bed. On the windowsill. On the floor.

Nothing.

The door opened.

I jumped so hard I knocked the water glass over.

The maid from yesterday came in with a tray in one hand and a folded dress in the other. She set the tray down and put the dress over the chair and didn't look at me once.

"Where's my key?" I said.

"Not mine to keep, ma'am."

"Somebody came in here while I was asleep."

"Mm." She straightened the tray. There was bread on it, and jam, and a boiled egg, and the smell of it made my stomach turn over. "He wants you in the small study at nine. Not the west hall. The small study. Down the east stair, through the green door, and don't go past it or you'll end up in the cellars."

"Who wants me?"

She finally looked at me. She was maybe fifty and she had the face of a woman who'd seen a lot of girls come and go through a lot of doors.

"You know who wants you," she said. "Eat something. He doesn't like it when people look half-dead."

"I am half-dead. Somebody locked me in a room with a monster last night."

"No," she said. "Somebody locked you in a room with the King. The monster's a different thing and it doesn't use doors."

She walked out. The tray stayed.

I ate the bread because my hands were shaking and I needed them to stop.

Then I put on the dress — dark blue this time, plain, sleeves that fit — and went down the east stair.

The green door was where she said. I went through it and there was a study with a fire and a desk and a window, and Lucifer was standing at the window with his back to me.

He was in a suit. Charcoal. Pressed. Not a wrinkle anywhere. His hair was combed back and his hands were in his pockets and he looked like a man in a magazine ad for watches.

I don't know what I'd expected. Bandages, maybe. A guy in a robe, shaking. Something that looked like what I'd seen on that floor last night.

"You're still alive," he said.

"Disappointing, right?"

He turned around.

His face was gray. It was the only thing that gave him away. That, and the way he held the edge of the windowsill behind his back, like he needed it.

"Arthur's told you something," he said.

"Arthur told me I'm a White Wolf. Whatever that is."

"He shouldn't have."

"I don't think he told me much of anything, honestly."

"He told you White Wolf," Lucifer said. "That's more than most people hear in a lifetime."

"Then tell me the rest of it."

"No."

He said it the way you'd close a gate.

I stood there in the middle of his study with my hands at my sides and I felt it happen. Last night I'd been scared of him. Really scared. The kind where your body does things before you decide them.

This was different. This was the angry kind of scared. The kind where you want to break something.

"Somebody locked my door last night," I said.

"I know."

"You know?"

"Arthur told me." He moved away from the window. He didn't walk straight. He walked like a man who'd been thrown off a horse. "He also told me he's had the only key to that door for six months and nobody else in this castle knows how to cut one."

"So somebody who works here cut a key and locked me in a tower room with you."

"With me." He said it flat. "Not with the Beast. Those are two different problems and I'd appreciate it if you'd keep them apart."

"They were the same problem last night."

"That's exactly what I don't want you saying."

"Then tell me something." It came out loud. Louder than I meant. "Tell me something real. You want me to get in a car and go home and lie to my whole pack, and you've got a castle full of people who know what I am and won't say it, and you won't tell me anything, and now someone's cutting keys—"

"It wasn't a servant," he said.

I stopped.

"What?"

"The key. It wasn't a servant." He rubbed his jaw. "Servants in this castle don't have access to the forge. Somebody who knows how much a key weighs and how thick the brass has to be made that copy."

"That's not a servant. That's—"

"That's a member of the household. Or the guard. Or the Council." He looked at me. "Or somebody with money and time who wants to see what you do at night."

"That's a real comforting list."

"It's not meant to comfort you."

I sat down. I didn't ask. I just sat down in the chair in front of his desk because my legs were doing the thing again.

"What do you want?" I said.

He watched me. Gray eyes, no gold in them at all.

"I want you to leave," he said.

"Then let me leave. The car was supposed to come at six. I looked. It didn't come."

He didn't answer.

"Did you cancel it?"

He was quiet for long enough that I could hear the fire crackle.

"Lucifer."

"Don't call me that."

"That's your name."

"Everyone in this valley calls me the King. Or they call me something else and don't say it to my face." He walked around the desk and sat down, slowly, like his ribs hurt. "Lucifer is a name my mother used."

"Where's your mother?"

"Dead."

"Okay," I said. "Then what do I call you?"

He looked up. Surprised, again. That kept happening and I was starting to like it.

"My King," he said. "Or nothing at all. I'm not your friend."

"Fine. Then King." I put both hands on the armrests. "Let me leave. Or don't. But do something. Because I sat up in a tower all night waiting for something to come through that door again and I'd rather be dead in a pit in Silver Creek than waiting in a room for it to happen."

Something moved behind his eyes.

"I can't let you go," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know what you are."

"I don't know what I am either! That's the whole—"

"You glowed," he said.

I stopped.

"You glowed," he said again, quieter. "Arthur told me. White light. Out of your neck. You put your hand on the Beast and it went down like a shot."

"I don't know how I did that."

"No. But I know what it means when something that big goes down without a fight." He held up his hand. The one with the four red scratches from yesterday.

They were gone.

Not scabbed. Not healing. Gone. Smooth skin, all the way across the back of his hand, like they'd never been there.

I looked from his hand to his face.

"Those don't heal," I said. "Scratches from the Beast don't heal. Those stay for months. I've seen—" I stopped myself. "I've heard."

"I know," he said.

We looked at each other.

He put his hand down flat on the desk and left it there.

"Somebody in this castle locked your door," he said. "Somebody in this castle wants me to look at you and see the Beast. I don't know who. I don't know why. So for now you stay upstairs and you eat what I put in front of you and you go nowhere without Arthur or me knowing where you are."

"So I'm a prisoner."

"You're a guest," he said. "And it's a castle with a very tall wall and a lot of things in the dark that would like to be let in. Believe me when I tell you you're safer in the tower than on that road at night."

"Why?"

He stood up.

"I think we're done."

"Answer me. Why do you care if I'm safe on that road?"

He came around the desk. He walked toward the door, and I thought that was the end of it, and then he stopped right next to my chair.

For a second he didn't say anything.

"I don't," he said.

Then he walked out of the study and left me sitting there.

I stayed in that chair for a long time. The fire burned down. The room got cold.

Then I got up and walked over to his desk, and I looked at the little brass key sitting in the ashtray where he'd dropped it, and I picked it up.

There was a bright new scratch on the end of it. Fresh. The kind you get when you cut a copy and get sloppy.

Chapter 9 Ends