The White Wolf

Chapter 8

"Nobody touch him!"

Arthur came up the stairs last, and he came up slow, and he didn't look at Lucifer on the floor. He looked at me first. Then at the walls. Then at the fallen door.

"Get him a coat," he said. "Get him up. One of you on each arm. If he goes down, you go down with him."

The guards had their poles up. They were scared. They kept looking at Lucifer like he might grow teeth again.

"He's not gonna shift," Arthur said. "Look at him. He couldn't shift a chair right now."

Two guards grabbed Lucifer under the arms. He got his feet under him on the second try. There was blood running down the inside of his arm and dripping off his elbow onto the stone, and nobody was doing anything about it.

"Sir," one of them said. "Sir, the west wing—"

"I know about the west wing. Get him down the stairs. Put him in the blue room. Not his room. The blue room. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out, and if anybody so much as knocks on that door before I get there, I'll have their hands."

They carried him out.

Lucifer's head came around as they got to the stairwell.

He looked at me.

Not the way he'd looked at me in the hall. Not cold. Not bored. He looked at me like I was a fire in the middle of a road, and he was already in the car and couldn't stop.

Then they took him down and he was gone.

Arthur shut what was left of the door as best he could. It didn't close. He left it.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You're shaking like a leaf in a storm. Sit down before you fall down and I have two of you to deal with."

I sat on the bed. He pulled the chair over from the table and sat facing me, and he waited.

"What happened?" he said.

"You tell me. That's the second time one of you has asked me that tonight."

"Then let's do it the other way. I'll tell you what I know and you tell me where I'm wrong." He folded his hands. "The sun went down. The King's door in the west wing came open. Not broken — open. Which means he opened it, which means he was still him when he did it, which is the part I don't understand."

"The doors don't open?"

"The doors have eight locks and a bar the size of your leg. Somebody opens them from the inside or nobody opens them at all." He said it flat. "He knew. He knew it was coming and he let it out."

"Why would he do that?"

Arthur looked at me for a while.

"Because you didn't leave," he said.

I didn't have anything to say to that.

"Now," Arthur said. "The door to this room. Did you lock it?"

"No. I tried it and it was already locked. I thought you locked me in."

"Nobody locked you in." His voice didn't change but something behind his eyes did. "That door locks from the outside with a key. I've got the only key and it's been in my pocket since noon."

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

"So who locked my door?" I said.

"That's my question." He leaned forward. "Now tell me the rest."

I told him the rest.

I told him about the howl and the stairs and the door coming off the hinges. I told him about pressing myself against the window and saying I'm not running like an idiot. I told him about the thing pressing its head into my chest and going down on top of me. And then I stopped.

"Keep going," Arthur said.

"That's it. It fell asleep and then it was him."

"Your neck."

"What?"

"Your neck." He pointed. "Right there. What happened to it?"

I put my hand up. It was still warm. Not hot. Warm, like I'd been sitting in the sun.

"Nothing," I said.

"Ella."

"It got hot. That's all. It felt hot and then it stopped."

"How hot."

I looked at him. "Bright."

His face did something complicated. He sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling, and he was quiet for so long that I started to hear the wind outside the window.

"When you touched him," Arthur said. "The Beast. What did it do?"

"It whined."

"Whined."

"Like a dog. Like a dog that's been left outside."

Arthur got up.

He walked to the doorway and stood in it with his back to me, and I watched his shoulders go up and down once, slow.

Then he stepped out onto the landing and called down the stairwell.

"My King."

I heard a sound from below. Something weak and rough.

"She is the White Wolf," Arthur said. "She is the one."

Silence.

Long silence. Long enough that I got up off the bed and went to the doorway.

Down the stairwell, two floors down, they'd propped Lucifer against the wall while they got the blue room unlocked. He was sitting with his head back and his eyes half shut and the coat hanging off one shoulder.

He heard it. I saw him hear it.

His head came up and his eyes found me up the stairwell, and for one second he didn't look like a king or a monster or a man who'd just been dragged naked out of a tower.

He looked scared.

"No," he said.

Then they got the door open and took him inside.

Arthur turned around.

"What's a White Wolf?" I said.

"Go to bed."

"What's a White Wolf, Arthur?"

"I said go to bed."

"I don't even know your last name and you've got me locked in a tower in a castle I'm not supposed to be in and your boss turned into a—" I stopped. Took a breath. "Somebody in this building knows something and it's not me and I'm getting real tired of being the only one who doesn't."

Arthur looked at me for a long moment.

Then he walked back over and did something I didn't expect. He pulled the chair out from the table again and set it right in front of me, and he sat down, and he leaned in close.

"Sunday," he said. "There's a book in the library downstairs with a gray cover and no title on the spine. It's behind the atlas. Don't take it out of the room. Don't let anybody see you reading it."

"Why?"

"Because I've been waiting thirty years for somebody to walk into that pit and walk back out," Arthur said. "And now that it's happened, I'd like to be the one who decides what it means. Not the Council. Not the pack. Not the men in this valley who'll hear about tonight before breakfast."

He stood up.

"Lock the door after I leave. Don't open it for anybody. Not the maid. Not the guard. Not him."

"It doesn't lock from the inside."

"It does now."

He pulled a small brass key out of his vest and set it on the table.

Then he walked out.

I stood in the middle of the room and listened to him go down the stairs and I looked at that little key sitting there next to the bread.

I picked it up.

And I turned it over in my hand, and it was warm, and it was not warm from the room, because the room was cold.

It was warm from my fingers.

Everywhere I touched it, it got warmer.

Chapter 8 Ends