The Dream Thief (4 page)

He stood there and felt, to his
distant surprise, none of the anger he had expected but instead a profound
sense of relief.

To manage it he took the cup from
her fingers and gave the chair a hard kick.

She came awake at once,
straightening, her hands fluttering across her skirts.

“Lady Amalia. I wish I could say
I was happy to see you, but I’ve already endured the pleasure of the Marquess
of Langford’s company thrice in the past two days. What the devil are you
about?”

“Father’s here?” she asked,
looking around them.

“Not at the present. No doubt it
won’t be long before he returns. I don’t believe he’s fully convinced I haven’t
hidden you away somewhere in the house. Imagine my joy,” he added silkily, “at
walking into my parlor tonight and discovering it to be true.”

“I’m sorry. I…” She trailed off,
shaking her head, then covered her eyes with one hand. “I haven’t been sleeping
well.”

“Perchance it has something to do
with the fact that you’ve been riding in a public coach for—let me see—almost a
fortnight, isn’t it? That’s about how long it takes to travel from Darkfrith to
my door by stage. Unless, I suppose,” he paused, “you flew here.”

He hadn’t meant it as a barb, but
she grimaced, just a little. Then her hand lowered; she gazed at him steadily.

“I
didn’t fly. You know I can’t. And that’s not why.” Zane didn’t like that look,
long-lashed, brown-eyed, direct. It reminded him too much of her mother. They
stared at each other in the growing silence. Amalia’s lips slowly compressed
into a thin, stubborn line.

With a sigh he gave it up,
lowering himself into the opposite chair. He glanced down at her cold chocolate
and then tried a taste, feeling his stomach rumble. Hell was going to cut loose
sooner or later, and he’d already missed supper.

The
drákon
did not take
kindly to losing one of their kind. He knew that too bloody well.

Lamplight glinted silver along
the scrolled edge of a tray beside him. Saints be praised, Joseph had left her
food. Scones, orange cake, a dish of honeyed nuts and dried fruits—he leaned
forward and helped himself to half an apricot and a sliver of cake.

“Bad dreams, snapdragon?”

“Yes.” It was a miserable
whisper.

“How unfortunate. I’m certain it
was worth fleeing your home without a word to anyone—without, I am equally
certain, permission from your almighty
drákon
council—to come here to
tell me.”

But she still didn’t avert her
gaze. She didn’t even seem abashed. All her initial, drowsy confusion appeared
completely vanished. She looked cool and composed and very much older than her
years, even in her wrinkled skirts. Whatever it was that had compelled her
halfway across the kingdom was well hidden behind that mask of mulish calm.

Very well. He knew how to wait.

Zane downed the apricot and
crumbled the cake into pieces, consuming each mouthful with purposeful leisure.
Joseph was thick-witted and slow and strictly as loyal as his next paycheck,
but the true reason Zane kept him in his home was this. Cake. Scones. Fresh
berry pies. He was the best hand at sugar pastries this side of the Channel,
and the starving child Zane had once been fully appreciated his skills. By the
force of his nature Zane remained a hammered blade; fat men never made good
thieves. He survived on bites and water and potfuls of bitter coffee. But he
was on his third slice before Amalia rose, taking back her cup from his hand.

She made a slow circle of the
room, not drinking. “This doesn’t seem much like the residence of a notorious
criminal.”

“No. That’s rather the point.”

“Is that why Mother gave it to
you?”

“Pardon me,” he retorted,
brushing the crumbs from his waistcoat, “she did not
give
it to me. I
purchased it from her, and at a damned premium price. It was all extremely
legitimate.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,
oh.
”

She set the chocolate on the
windowsill. She lifted a hand to the iron bolt holding the shutters closed.

“Do
not, if you please,” he said curtly, unmoving. “I’d prefer not to invite your
kith and kin inside at the moment.”

“It
isn’t sealed?”

“The molding around one of the
panes has come loose. I discovered that the hard way two days ago.”

Her fingers jerked back as if
burned. It was only one loosened pane, nothing very helpful to the ordinary men
and thugs who usually haunted him, a mere breath of space between the solder
and the glass. Yet it was all Christoff Langford had needed to breach all of
Zane’s careful defenses. Because Langford, of course, wasn’t a man at all. He
wasn’t even human.

And neither was his daughter.

“You love my family,” Amalia said
now, her back to him, rubbing her palm up and down her rumpled
blue-and-flowered skirts.

He did not reply.

“Some of them, anyway.” She
glanced at him from over her shoulder. “You do love some.”

“If you say so.”

“You know what we are,” she
persisted. “You’ve helped us, over the years. You’re…close to my parents.
You’ve aided the tribe.”

“That wasn’t for love, I assure
you.”

“What was it, then? Only money?”

“Money is a subject very dear to
my heart, child. Do not underestimate it.”

“And what of power?” she asked,
softer. “Is that dear to you as well?”

“Did you venture all this way for
an examination of my character, snapdragon?”

Lia turned and looked him fully
in the face. She didn’t like his pet name for her, and never had. It sounded
whimsical, childish, when everything inside her felt strong and cold.

But she knew what he thought of
her. She’d always known.

He was the only mortal tolerated
by the tribe. He was the only one suffered to keep their secrets. While she and
all her kind were kept trapped in the green heaven of Darkfrith, Zane was the
sole living creature allowed to come and go at will. Even her father, the
Alpha, tended to inform the council when he meant to travel.

It was their way. She knew it was
how they had survived all these centuries. The Others raised livestock, or
crops. The
drákon
raised silence, year after year after year.

Lia was the daughter of a lord.
She lived in a mansion of glimmer and light; she looked out her bedroom window
every day at open skies and wild, wooded hills and sometimes felt so suffocated
it was a wonder she didn’t open her mouth and start screaming and never stop.

The council gave lectures to the
children in the village:

Of all the world, we are the last
of our kind.

It
is our duty to remain safe.

It
is our duty to remain here.

We protect the earthbound: the
young, the women, the weak.

We are
drákon
. Duty to the tribe
above all.

Rhys and Audrey and Joan—even
Kimber, who at least got to leave to attend a proper school— moved through the
hours as if there could be nothing finer than what had been placed before them.
Their lives were planned out, their hopes and futures would be forever confined
by the boundaries of their land. They were born there, they would find mates
there, and they would die there. To them, the world beyond the mist and bracken
was of little consequence.

Lia understood why her mother had
run away, all those years ago. If she thought for an instant she could truly do
the same—

But she couldn’t. She wasn’t
Gifted like the rest of her family. She couldn’t Turn to smoke, much less to
dragon. She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t brave, she wasn’t any sort of
reflection of the magnificence of her kind. It had taken all her meager
resources just to get this far, and Lia knew her time here would be short.
They’d find her soon.

There were only two things about
her that set her apart from the rest of her tribe—two dark, disturbing things.
And one of them was seated before her in this chamber.

Zane had not stirred from his
chair. The lamps were bright and the shadows were harsh; he was sketched in
charcoal and light, studying her with a half-lidded gaze she recognized from
years of watching him pretend to relax at Chasen Manor, every line of his body
casually elegant, his coat unbuttoned to drape the cushions, his waistcoat a
satin gleam of pewter and taupe.

His eyes were paler than amber.
His hair was very long and thick, honeyed brown. He was poise and muscle and as
tall as her father; Joan and Audrey used to keep her awake at night for years
in the nursery, just giggling his name, until at last she was old enough to
realize why.

Because of this. Because of his
hands, so strong and tanned. His fingers, gently tapping the wooden arm of the
chair in an easy, steady percussion that belied the wolf-watchfulness of his
gaze. Because of his jaw, and his brows, and the handsome curve of his mouth.
Because when he stretched his legs and crossed his ankles and lifted his dark
lashes to fully see her once more, she was as pinned as a deer in a dragon’s
clear yellow sights.

The flames from the lamps smoked
oily black. Outside the shuttered window, the eastern song softly murmured.

She remembered the blind dream of
him. She remembered the stroke of his voice—

“Forgive me if I interrupt your
contemplation of my cravat,” he said now, in a very different tone. “No doubt
it’s adorned with all manner of fascinating stains, as I’ve been out the past
two days and nights straight, searching every inn and tavern and coach yard in
the city for one thoughtless, wayward miss. I find I’m a shade impatient with
all these heavy silences. Why, pray tell, have you landed in my parlor?”

Lia blinked. “You—you were
searching for me?”

“Your father seemed to require
it.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,
oh,
”
he repeated, this time clearly mocking.

She
took a breath. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to mention it to
anyone else?”

“No,”
he said bluntly.

“What
if it’s important?”

“In
that case, absolutely no. Look,” he said, leaning forward to prop his elbows on
his knees, “if it’s something so dire you can’t share it with your parents,
then I want nothing to do with it. I’m not courting that sort of trouble. Sorry,
my heart. That’s the way of things.”

And
tonight, my heart?

“Do you think,” she asked
carefully, “that it is possible to—to tell the future?”

His eyes narrowed. “What, like
tinkers and star-casters, that sort of thing?”

She shrugged. “Or like dreams.”

“Certainly.”

“You do?”

“Aye. In fact, I’ve a carnival
soothsayer on payroll who’ll read your runes and spin you as fine a future as
you could wish—especially if you’re so accommodating as to leave your reticule
unguarded.”

“I wasn’t jesting!”

“Neither was I. He’s bloody good
at what he does. Only been locked up twice. Much better average than most of my
blokes. But then,” he added mildly, “I suppose he’s able to see just when the
constables will be turning the corner.”

Lia crossed the rug to stand
before him. She felt calm, removed, after all the days of worry and heat and
dread, rocked to sleep and awake in that wretched excuse of a carriage, the
stench of people and old horsehair clogging up her nose. She felt a thread of
her dream-self, smooth and mysterious, flowing through her veins.

With Zane still seated, she
leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

When
she drew away again, his eyes had taken on a harder glow.

“Passable,” he said coolly. “Feel
free to try it again in about ten years. Until then, don’t waste my time.”

“Oh,
dear,” came a light, feminine voice. “Am I interrupting?”

“Not in the least.” Zane rose
from the chair; Lia was forced to step back. In the parlor doorway stood a
woman, hooded and cloaked, the slit in her mantle revealing skirts of dove silk
and a stomacher of white threadwork and moonstones.

With a
turn of her wrists, the woman pushed back her hood. Red hair, gray eyes; her
every movement carried the fresh scent of night.

Lia
felt a flush of exquisite shame begin to creep up her throat.

“Who is
this?” asked the woman, sounding amused.

“No one. Merely a little lost
lamb.”

“A lamb,” said the woman, still
smiling, entering the parlor. She touched a gloved finger to Lia’s chin,
lifting her face. “With those eyes? I think not. Rather more a windstorm
descending.”

Amalia pulled away. She glanced
up at Zane—wolf-eyed, stone-faced, despite his languid tone—then grabbed his
hand and held it hard.

“I want you to know,” she said
quietly, “that I will do anything to protect my family. Now, or in the future.
I’ll do anything at all. Remember that I warned you.”