Time After Time (Cora's Bond) (8 page)

“Where’s Dorian?” I let myself ask—the only thing that I really cared about right then.

“He is awaiting you in the grand salon, madam.”

I looked up the single flight of stairs that led from the entrance to the salon, but I already knew that the angle of the steps would block the view. I thanked the butler as politely as I could, and, aware of the eyes of the servants upon me, I didn’t run up them as fast as I could, calling Dorian’s name like I wanted to. Instead, I steeled myself and walked with careful deliberation, and at the top, I froze.

There was Dorian, dressed in a tuxedo and sitting on one of the sofas with an unconscious grace I could never hope to match, looking as if nothing in the world was wrong.

I opened my mouth to scream at him, to run at him and hit him and cry until I was out of tears and tell him how much I loved him and hated him all at once.

But I couldn’t even move. I could hardly breathe. He stood, slowly, at my appearance—unusually, unnaturally slowly.

Finally, I managed to make my legs move, and I crossed to meet him. He was paler than I’d seen him since he’d first drunk my blood, and his face was hollow, his high cheekbones so sharp that I could cut my heart on them.

I reached out almost tentatively to touch his sleeve, and I felt a ridiculous, irrational surge of relief at the texture of the suit jacket under my fingers. Only then did I risk seizing his hand—for some reason, it did feel like a risk, like there was a chance that it wouldn’t be there. But it was, and at the touch of his naked skin, the touch that in the depths of the night I’d feared that I would never have again, the tension that was still coiled inside my belly unwound all at once, and I swayed under its force.

He was here. He was real. He was alive.

“Dorian.”
I breathed his name, and then I bit my lip as I blinked to clear my vision. “Oh, God, Dorian.”

He brushed my cheek with the backs of his fingers and before catching me around my waist, pulling me against his body as all the strength went out of mine. “My love, don’t cry. I’ll never leave you. Even if I have to storm the gates of hell itself, I’ll never leave you.”

I nodded, swallowing back my tears. All I knew was that I’d come close to losing him, but I still had no idea how or what had happened. I saw in his closed face his stark intention of keeping it from me, and deep inside the pit of my stomach, I despaired.

“Tonight is the vigil for Jean and Hattie,” he said. “Are you coming?”

“Vigil?” I echoed, not having any context for the word.

“The wake, it’s called more commonly now among humans, I believe,” he said, “though agnatic practice, like human practice, has changed over the years.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know if I could stand that just then, not when all my nerves felt so taut and raw. I still didn’t want Hattie to be dead, and even though it didn’t make any sense, the finality of a wake and funeral made her death more real, and in my jumbled state, I didn’t think I could bear it.

But Hattie wouldn’t have let her uncertainty stop her from doing anything she’d decided was important. And neither would I.

I straightened my shoulders and swallowed down all the confusion of the past few days, and I said, “Of course I’ll go. You just surprised me. I was thinking of everything being tomorrow.”

Dorian gave a slight, peculiarly stiff bow. “Of course. How remiss of me. I should have made a point to inform you ahead of time of the schedule of events.”

“What happened?” I asked then, unable to keep back the question any longer. “Since Wednesday. And last night,” I clarified, even though I was completely certain that he knew what I meant.

“So many things, Cora.” The darkness in his face wrung my heart.

“You have to tell me,” I insisted, even though I knew full well that he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to.

“I will,” he said. “It’s over, and I will. But not now. After the vigil.”

“Do you promise?” I insisted, not trusting him, not after what he’d put me through. Not after what he’d done to himself.

“I swear,” he said.

I still wasn’t satisfied. “You have to answer all of my questions now with real answers, not stuff you know I won’t understand.”

Looking tired, he agreed. “Real answers, Cora. Complete answers. Worth will help you dress. The car is already waiting.”

I nodded, and reluctantly, I stepped back and let him go. He watched me go up the stairs with a burning gaze that seemed to sear my soul.

***

A
Mercedes limousine that I hadn’t seen before whisked us to a high-rise apartment building in Arlington, and where it stopped under the overhang by the double brass doors. Dorian offered me his arm as I climbed from the car, and I took it automatically. We approached, and a white-gloved doorman bowed us into the foyer at Dorian’s murmur of, “Morel-Buchanan vigil.”

“Are you sure I look okay?” I asked, adjusting the small black hat that Jane Worth had pinned to my head.

“If you were of a different temperament, I’d say you were fishing for complements,” Dorian said as we crossed the gleaming lobby to the bank of elevators.

“That’s not what I meant. I meant, are you sure it’s the right thing to wear? To a funeral?” I wore a strappy black cocktail dress under my heavy coat and spike heels to match.

Dorian looked me up and down, and my skin prickled in the wake of his gaze. “No, but for a vigil it is.”

“I don’t like funerals.” My hand tightened over his arm as the elevator doors slid open. “Or vigils. Or wakes.”

“We’re only going to a few hours of this one, at the most. Less if you wish,” he said. We stepped inside the cabin, and he hit the button for the top floor.

“Right,” I said. “Hours.”

I dropped into silence as I realized how shallow and whiny I sounded. I didn’t mean to be either. What I really wanted was for Dorian to talk to me, to tell me what had happened to him that had caused me to spend the previous night doubled over the toilet—what had caused him to look so pale and drawn and move so slowly even now.

Instead, I was at the last place I wanted to be. It reminded me of my Gramma’s funeral, plus I missed Hattie too much to want to bid her farewell, which was a stupid thought because it was the exact opposite of what I should be feeling. And realizing that just made me angry at myself.

Then there were my fears about the other guests that I didn’t want to admit that I still harbored. The only social gatherings I’d been to since the nightmare of my Introduction had been small and carefully orchestrated by Dorian. And this was to be neither. Though it was an Adelphoi-only gathering, it would be open to all Adelphoi, and from my point of view, plenty of Dorian’s allies were almost as bad as his enemies.

The elevator stopped, but the doors didn’t open. Instead, there was a chiming sound from somewhere far away. I looked at Dorian.

“Is the elevator supposed to be doing that?”

As if in answer, the doors slid open all at once, revealing a living room with a sweeping view across the Potomac River.

I stepped inside reflexively as Dorian moved forward, into the party that was in full swing. The room was crowded with men in tuxedoes and women in black cocktail dresses. Servers bearing trays of canapés circulated among them while a bartender mixed cocktails at the near end of the room.

All the women wore some kind of sartorial nod toward a hat, veil, or both, and I supposed that I owed Jane an apology for doubting, however privately, the appropriateness of her selections. She’d probably rather commit hara-kiri than sent me to a public event in the wrong clothes.

“Penthouse suite,” Dorian explained. “Can’t just let anyone stroll in.”

“I suppose not,” I said, slightly stunned.

Incongruously, a small choir stood at the far end of the room, dressed in robes as if for church, and in front of the singers were two closed coffins, one a shiny piano black, the other white in a matching finish, attended by a priest and a pair of assistants. The clergymen were silent as the choir sang softly, hauntingly—no, not sang but rather intoned or chanted, the call and response of the lead singer not resembling that of a modern melody.

To make the entire event even more surreal, there were about a half dozen women in the crowd who were dressed in clothing unmistakably from another time, from hoopskirts to flapper dresses.

Two servants who looked vaguely familiar to me came up to take our coats. I surrendered mine and my small purse as well. I wasn’t going to try to juggle a drink, a plate, and my clutch all together.

Looking resplendent in his tuxedo despite his pallor, Dorian offered me his arm again. I took it, resting my fingertips along the fine fabric of his tuxedo jacket. I was all too aware that I was garnering more attention than a cognate on the end of her agnate’s arm ought to. But that was to be expected. I was the symbol of the research that Jean had been killed to obtain.

“There aren’t as many...interesting outfits here,” I said as softly as I could physically manage while still getting the words out. The agnates’ hearing was unnaturally sharp, and I didn’t want to offend anyone. “Is that because those people were all Kyrioi?”

Several heads turned sharply toward me at the mention of that name. Clearly, I hadn’t spoken softly enough.

“Shh,” Dorian said. “No, the ones who dress the strangest are usually fairly apolitical. Not exactly in step with current events, you see.”

“Oh,” I said, filing that away.

There were faces here that I recognized, nearly a dozen of them, cognates and agnates that Dorian had introduced to me on happier occasions. And there, near the buffet, standing next to Marie was—

“Paquita!” In my surprise, I said her name aloud.

“Yes, Raymond brought her back for the funeral after we understood the reason for Jean’s murder,” Dorian said.

I looked up at Dorian narrowly. His words were too bland, his face too impossibly still. I could feel the agitation underneath, a fierce kind of surge that I could almost taste, it was so strong. But I didn’t know what any of it meant.

So I made a mental note of my intention to ask later and simply said, “I’m glad she’s back. I hope she’ll be in my wedding now.”

Dorian said, “I don’t see why she wouldn’t be. They’re back in the country for the duration, as far as I know.”

“Can I go talk to them?” I didn’t think about the question before I said it, and it surprised me as the words reached my ears. I actually wanted to leave Dorian’s protection in a room full of vampires.

He looked down at me, and his brow creased for an instant before going still again. “You needn’t ask my permission.”

“I didn’t know if it might violate some kind of tradition or convention or something—if we needed to do something together first,” I said.

Dorian hesitated for a moment before seeming to make up his mind. “No. You may speak to them now.”

He escorted me across the room to where my friends were and lifted my hand from his arm, bowing over it before stepping away. “Ladies,” he said to all three of us.

But his eyes glittered only for me.

Marie and Paquita stood close together at one end of the buffet, and it was only when Dorian left that I registered the three shorter figures around them. Children, I realized with a small shock. Marie’s little girl was obvious, but I could only tell which boy was Hattie’s by the redness of his eyes and the way his gaze kept straying over to the caskets while the slightly younger girl held his hand and patted it reassuringly.

“I’m so glad you came, Cora,” Paquita said. “I knew you wouldn’t miss it. You might not have known Hattie as long as we have, but she always made an impression.”

“She did, didn’t she?” I said a little weakly, not sure what I should or shouldn’t be saying in front of the boy.

“Elise, Paul, Renato, allow me to introduce you to Miss Shaw,” Paquita said.

“Good to meet you,” I said to each of the solemn children. They each offered a hand in turn, smiling with preternatural poise over mine and murmuring echoes of my greeting. That settled, the little girl reached for Paul’s hand again.

“You are going to be Paul’s friend, aren’t you?” she asked. “That’s what Mama said this was for. Friends. Allies. And allies help one another when we need it, like Paul does.”

“I suppose we are,” I said carefully.

That seemed to satisfy her, because she looked away, back over to where the caskets sat with the priest now praying over them both.

“There are a lot of kids here,” I said, looking around the room and noting them for the first time. Not as many as there were agnates, of course, but there was one for most of the cognates in attendance.

Marie nodded, and Paquita said, “There are not very often funerals like this one for them to attend, no? This is something for them to remember. It’s important for them to understand that we really can die.”

I nodded, not quite following the logic but willing to go along.

“Why don’t the three of you go to the kitchen now?” Marie asked the children quietly. “I’m sure the cook can find you some treats.”

“I want to go to my room,” Paul said.

Marie bit her lip for a second before she nodded. “Of course you may. Just remember that all your toys and clothes and games are at my house now, yes?”

He nodded, looking solemn, and darted off.

She sighed. “Children are so peculiar in their grief. Some days, Paul cries at almost anything or bursts into a rage. Others, he seems like any normal, healthy boy, and others still, well, he doesn’t seem to feel anything at all.”

“I don’t think that’s peculiar,” I said, a trifle defensively. When my grandmother had died, I hadn’t felt all that different. “Anyway, I thought that Jean was in debt up to his neck. This place looks pretty palatial for that.”

Paquita laughed gaily. “Oh, Cora, you don’t truly believe he bought it, do you? They paid their enthralled staff out of Hattie’s salary from Gramercy labs—and for their groceries and her clothes, too. But as the condo, the furniture, the art, and Jean’s wardrobe, those he...asked for.”

“But they were Adelphoi,” I protested.

“They were,” she agreed. “That is why he took only what he
felt
he needed.” She put a delicate stress on the word. “And they treated their staff well.”