Chapter 226 The Old Hag's History
POV: Violette | Outside St. Thomas site, then inside
I am forty-three years old and I have been forty-three years old for the past forty years, which is the specific arithmetic of a thrall bond that maintained its host past the point where the host would have aged naturally, the venom doing for my body what it did for everything it touched, which is preserve it against its own processes, keep it available, keep it functional, keep it in the state that was useful rather than allowing it to proceed to the state that was natural.
The bond has been broken for eighteen days and I am aging again. This is not a complaint, it is an observation, the specific daily observation of a body that is slowly remembering what bodies do when they are not being maintained by something external to themselves. There is grey in my hair that was not there a month ago, or was there and the venom was suppressing it, and there are lines at the corners of my eyes that are deepening at a rate I cannot quite predict, and the specific quality of the aging is not frightening to me, which surprises me, because I expected it to frighten me and it does not.
What I expected freedom to feel like was not what it feels like. I covered this territory in the days after the bond broke, the furniture-removed-from-the-room quality of it, the disorientation. What I did not cover, because I had not yet reached it, is what freedom feels like eleven days further in, which is more complicated and more interesting than I expected, which is that it feels like being required to be a person again after forty years of being a function.
I am standing across the street from the St. Thomas site at midnight and I am watching twenty-six people enter a building that I know the sublevel of because I know everything Mordaunt knows and Mordaunt funded this facility in the year before his disagreement with Fell and which means I know the sublevel layout, the access points, the specific architectural detail that the coalition's maps do not have because the sublevel was constructed after the last official record of the building's structure.
I was not invited to this rescue. Nobody invited me. I am here because I walked here after watching the Rookeries assemble and after watching the convoy leave and after standing in the street for twenty minutes asking myself what the last good decision I made before the venom took my capacity for decisions was and what the next one should be.
I walk while I think, and thinking while walking is something I have been relearning the way I have been relearning all the things the bond suppressed, which is that the thinking does not have a predetermined destination, it goes where it goes and arrives where it arrives, and where it arrives tonight is the St. Thomas site and the conclusion that I know something the twenty-six people inside do not know.
There is a secondary access to the sublevel through the building's old morgue section, which runs along the east wall of the basement and which connects to the sublevel through a maintenance passage that was sealed in 1987 with a door that uses a code Mordaunt's records contain because the Hermetic Order required access to the facility independent of the main entrance and Mordaunt provided it and documented it in the financial records the way he documented everything.
I know the code. Nobody else does.
I think about forty years while I stand across the street. I think about the beginning, which I have not thought about in a long time because the bond suppresses the part of the mind that processes the beginning, the part that would ask how did this happen, because asking how it happened leads to the answer and the answer leads to anger and anger in a thrall is not useful to the person the thrall serves.
I was twenty-three. I was a nurse, three years into the work, the specific quality of someone who has found a vocation and who is inhabiting it fully, the satisfaction of competence in a useful thing. A patient came in with injuries I should have asked more questions about and did not because I was young and the questions would have been awkward and he was calm and grateful and beautiful in the specific way that very old vampires are beautiful, which is the beauty of something that has been refined over centuries rather than something that was made and has not changed.
The first drink of his blood was not coerced. I have been honest about this in every version of the memory I have ever allowed myself to examine, which is not many, but in those few I have been accurate about the first drink being a choice I made with the information I had, which did not include the understanding of what the second drink would mean or the third.
By the third I was his and he knew it and he was already planning the introduction to Mordaunt, who collected thralls the way other people collect things they find useful and who found me specifically useful because nurses understand bodies and Mordaunt always required someone who understood bodies.
Forty years. Every degradation, every task, every morning waking up in a room that was comfortable and maintained and not mine, every year the person I was before the third drink becoming less accessible, further behind the thing the venom made of me.
I am watching Callum Brennan go into a building at midnight to get his daughter and I am thinking about what love looks like when it is the kind that moves through walls and into buildings at midnight and which does not stop because the person it is for is not yet born and which did not stop when the person it was for died on Parliament steps twelve hours ago, and I am thinking about the specific quality of that kind of love and how long it has been since I saw it and how long it has been since I understood what it looked like from the outside.
"That's what love looks like," I say, to the street, to the building, to the forty years. "I forgot."
I cross the street. I go to the east wall. I enter the morgue section through the access point that is in Mordaunt's records and which nobody else has, and I begin walking the maintenance passage toward the sublevel in the specific direction of one good decision made before the morning.