She wasn’t in Glenfrost anymore, and it took me a full day to understand that Damian already knew exactly where she was, because he was the one who’d put her there.
“You knew where she’s been this whole time,” I said, once he finally told me, something between betrayal and relief fighting for space in my chest.
“I arranged it the week after the alley,” he said. “A private facility three hours north. The kind that takes people who hurt themselves, people whose families have run out of ways to keep them safe. Someone I’ve done favours for over the years runs it, and owed me one large enough not to ask too many questions about the arrangement. She has her own room. Meals. A garden she’s allowed to sit in for two hours a day. She is not free to leave, and the staff have been told, gently, that she isn’t to be. But she is not suffering there, Sarah. I would not do that to her, whatever else I’ve done.”
“You locked her up.”
“I made certain she couldn’t reach Noah again,” he said, and there was no apology in it at all. “I would do it again tomorrow.”
We drove up on a grey Wednesday, three hours of motorway and one increasingly tense hour of silence once the city came into view, to a low brick building behind a gate that required Damian’s name and a code to open, set among gardens far too pleasant for what I’d been bracing myself to find.
She was in a sunroom at the back, in a soft chair by the window, and she looked, if anything, better than I remembered from either the gym or my nightmares since, calm in a way I hadn’t expected, her hair brushed, a book closed in her lap like she’d only just set it down.
“You brought her,” Camille said, and smiled, slow and delighted. “Look at you two. The happy family, come to visit the monster in her nice little cage. It even has a garden. Aren’t I lucky.”
“Who told you where we live,” I said, before either of them could turn it into something else. “I need to know. You knew the street. You knew the door.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” She examined her own nails, unhurried, savouring the wait she was making us sit through. “I could tell you it was easy. I could tell you I’ve had fifteen years of practice finding him wherever he tries to hide. Both would be true, and neither would be the interesting answer.”
“Camille.” Damian’s voice had an edge I hadn’t heard him use on her before, not even in the alley. “Answer her.”
“Or what. You’ll lock me somewhere nicer?” She laughed, and there was nothing broken in it now, nothing like the girl in the gym doorway. This was something colder, something that had had fifteen years to set. “I’ve missed you, you know. Even like this. Even after everything.”
“Who told you,” I said again. “Who gave you our address.”
Something flickered across her face, sly and pleased with itself, savouring the power of making us wait for it. “People who’ve been looking for him a great deal longer than I have. People who remember exactly what he is, and where he came from, and who made him.” She leaned forward in the chair, delighted, watching Damian’s face for the reaction she clearly already knew was coming. “People who still talk, in certain circles, about the boy who broke a witch’s heart. About Cybele’s own blood, and what it cost her to—”
The word broke apart in her mouth.
She coughed once, sharp and startled, one hand flying to her throat, and I watched her own eyes go wide with a confusion that had nothing performed in it at all, nothing left of the taunting a half-second before. Blood came up between her fingers, sudden and dark, far more of it than any human body should have lost that fast, and by the time Damian reached her she was already folding forward in the chair, the light gone out of her face as completely and instantly as a switch thrown somewhere far away.
We stood there afterward, the two of us, in a bright, ordinary sunroom that smelled like fresh linen and somebody’s lunch, looking down at a woman who had died mid-sentence the moment she got close enough to a name to say it out loud, in a building with a code on the gate that was supposed to keep everyone dangerous out.
“Cybele,” Damian said quietly, testing the word himself, like he half expected it to kill him too. Nothing happened. “She said Cybele’s own blood. She was about to tell us who made me, and something killed her before she could finish the sentence. In a building I chose because I thought it was safe.”
“Something’s listening,” I said, and felt the cold of that thought settle somewhere it wasn’t ever going to fully leave. “Something’s been listening this whole time, and it doesn’t want that name said out loud, and it just proved it can reach her anywhere you put her.”