Caught In The Vortex

They escaped the way thieves do, by walking slowly. Eleanor did not flee her own ball, she dismissed it. She kissed cheeks, accepted compliments on the orchestra, promised an old marquess that she would consider his nephew for some committee she had no intention of joining, and all the while her hand stayed locked in Grell's behind the screen of crimson silk, drawing her toward the long doors at the room's far end like a fish reeled in on a thread of pure intent.

"They will notice the hostess has gone," Grell whispered, delighted, not caring.

"They will notice the champagne has not," Eleanor murmured back. "That is what they came for. I am only the excuse."

The doors gave onto a gallery, and the gallery onto a stair, and the stair down into the gardens where the music thinned to a far-off shimmer behind glass. The night air took them whole. Out here the lilies that had performed so bravely all evening could finally be ordinary flowers, heavy-headed and sleeping, and the cold that Grell had carried as a weapon all night loosened from her shoulders until it was only the ordinary cool of an English April.

Eleanor stopped at the head of the south wall path and let go of Grell's hand only to turn and seize both of them, facing her, her composure breaking into something Grell had never once seen on her, not hunger, not cunning, but the giddy, undignified relief of a creature who had gambled everything on a single held breath and won.

"We did it," Eleanor said, and laughed, and the laugh was nothing like her drawing-room laugh. It cracked in the middle. "He stood in my house with his ink-men and his cross and his thirty years of grief, and he found nothing. Nothing. Do you understand what that costs me, to host forty rotten souls and taste not one of them? I am ravenous, darling. I am hollow as a bell. And I have never in six centuries felt so gloriously, stupidly alive."

"You let him watch," Grell said. "You could have ended it a dozen ways and you chose the only one that left him whole."

"I chose the one you would have chosen." Eleanor's thumbs moved over Grell's knuckles. "That is the dangerous part. I have begun to ask, before I act, what you would think of me after. I have not measured myself against another's opinion since before there were kings in this country."

They walked among the forty-year roses, which now arched black and thorned above the two of them like a roof. Eleanor pulled Grell beneath the deepest tangle of them, where no window could see, and there the last of her grand manner fell away entirely.

"Be cold for me again," she said.

"You're starving and you ask for frost?"

"I ask for you. The chill is you. I have spent a hundred years pretending to be warm so that warm things would come close enough to eat. You are the first cold thing I have ever wanted to pull nearer." She pressed her brow to Grell's, and Grell felt the demon's hunger humming just under the skin, that dark sweet pressure she had spent all night damming up. "Hold the line for me. Out here, where there's no one to fool. Let me feel something that isn't appetite."

So Grell did. She let the grave-cool rise off her, gentle now, not the killing draught she'd loosed in the ballroom but the deep still hush of a winter church, and Eleanor sighed into it like a woman lowering herself into a bath. The hunger in her settled. The trembling stopped. Under the roses the two unnatural things stood breathing each other's impossible air, predator and reaper, and for a long moment neither was anything but a woman holding another woman in the dark.

"I should report you," Grell said, against Eleanor's mouth. "I have known what you are for days. Every hour I don't file the page, William writes my name a little smaller in the great book."

"Then why haven't you?"

"Because the ledger says you take what isn't yours, and tonight I watched you give a grieving man his dignity back instead of his life." Grell drew off one glove with her teeth, theatrical even now, and laid her bare hand against Eleanor's cheek. "That is not in any column I'm trained to record. I have no box to tick for mercy from a monster. And I find I would rather be wrong in the ledger than right and alone."

Eleanor kissed her then. Slow, unhurried, a kiss with centuries of patience behind it and none of the performance she gave the world. The roses dripped dew. Far above, the ballroom blazed and laughed, oblivious, full of safe living people who would go home convinced of nothing. And here in the dark the two who could never be safe, who broke every law of their separate kinds simply by standing close, made a small country of themselves between the thorns.

"They will come for this," Eleanor murmured when they parted, her forehead still against Grell's. "Not Pell. Worse. There are things that smell a demon gone soft the way sharks smell a wound. And your order will not let a reaper go unrecorded forever."

"Let them come," Grell said, and meant it, and was surprised to find she meant it not for the thrill but for the woman in her arms. "I have spent my whole long life looking for something worth being thrown out of heaven and hell both. I think I've found her under a rosebush."