Chapter 9 — First Encounter
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The road to Maren's house was long and the night was not kind to it.
The trees pressed in on either side. The kind of closeness that had nothing to do with the wind. Dorian rode without speed. The horse knew the way well enough and he let it find its own pace through the dark while he carried what he had brought with him from the palace and said nothing to the night about any of it.
The house appeared peaceful between one moment and the next, as though it had simply decided to be visible.
He dismounted.
The door opened before he reached it.
---
Maren stood in the frame with a candle in one hand and the particular expression he wore when he had been expecting someone and was not entirely pleased about being right.
"You look worse than the last time," he said.
"You say that every time."
"Because every time it is true." He stepped back from the door. "Come in."
---
The fire was low and the room was warm and Maren moved through it with the careful unhurried steps of a man who had made peace with his own slowness. The old Vampire. He poured something dark into two cups, almost black and set one before Dorian without explanation.
Dorian looked at it.
Drank.
It settled in his chest.
Maren lowered himself into his chair and held his own cup in both hands and looked at Dorian.
The fire shifted between them.
"Your brother was here," Maren said.
Dorian's hand stilled on his cup.
He did not ask when. Did not ask what was said. Just sat with it like most things that confirmed what he had already known.
His jaw moved once.
Then released.
Maren watched him do it and said nothing more about it.
---
"The human," Maren said, "Your wife."
"What of her."
"How does she fare."
Dorian looked at the fire. "She fares."
"That is not what I asked."
"She is in the palace. She is unharmed." A pause. "She is — adjusting."
"Adjusting." Maren turned the word slowly. "And you."
"I did not come here to speak of adjusting."
"No." Maren looked at him. "You came here because something is troubling you and you would rather ride a long journey in the dark than sit alone with it." He set his cup down. "So speak."
---
Dorian reached into his coat.
He set the letter on the table between them.
Maren looked at it without touching it. His eyes moved over the words, over what had made them, over the thing that was not ink but blood and his expression did not change but something in it settled deep.
"Where did you find this," he said.
"My study table." Dorian's eyes were on Maren's face. "Set there as though it belonged."
Maren was quiet for a moment. "And you believe someone placed it there with intent."
Dorian looked at him.
He did not answer.
He did not need to.
The look said everything "I know who and I cannot yet prove it and I came here because you are the one person who will not tell me I am wrong" all at once, without a word.
Maren held his gaze for a long moment.
Then he picked up his cup.
"Stay the night," he said. "The road is not the same after dark as it once was."
---
Dorian woke to grey light and the smell of old wood and something burning.
Maren was already in his chair.
"Come here," he said, without looking up.
---
He took Dorian's hands first.
Turned them over. Pressed his thumbs along the lines of the palms, across the knuckles, into the spaces between. His eyes moved over them with the focused quiet of a man who had done this many times and knew what he was looking for.
"Any pain."
"No."
"Here." He pressed the inside of the wrist.
"No."
He released them. Sat back. "Your fangs."
They came before the word had fully left his mouth, fast and clean. Maren studied them without expression. Then —
"Retract."
Gone.
Maren nodded once. Something moved in his eyes that was not quite what it appeared to be. "Your eyes."
Dorian looked at him.
The change moved through his eyes unhurried at first then all at once, the colour shifting into something that belonged to no ordinary hour of the day. Something deep. Something old. Something that had been in this bloodline longer.
Maren did not look away.
He studied what lived there, what rose when Dorian let the surface fall and his hands, resting on his knees, pressed down slightly.
"Enough," he said quietly.
Dorian blinked.
The room returned.
Maren was still for a moment.
Then —
"You are stronger than the last time you sat in that chair."
"You said that before."
"I say it again because it is more true now than it was then." He looked at him steadily. "Something is building in you, Dorian. Take care on the road."
---
He rode out as the morning settled into itself.
The fog was thinner than the night before — still present, still patient, but pulled back enough that the road was visible ahead of him in a long pale line through the trees.
The horse moved well.
For a time.
Then the cold came.
Not the cold of morning. It arrived between one breath and the next and the horse felt it before Dorian did, its pace breaking, its head coming up, that sound beginning low in its throat that was not any sound a horse ought to make.
Dorian's hand tightened on the reins.
He looked ahead.
The road was empty.
The trees stood as trees stand. The fog sat where fog sits. And yet the cold pressed in from every direction.
The horse would not go forward.
Dorian looked at the tree line.
At the spaces between the trunks where the dark gathered and did not move.
At the nothing that was not nothing.
He sat very still in the saddle.
And waited to see what came next.