Chapter 92 Are You His Prisoner?
The town was called Veyra.
It sat in a valley between two low hills, the kind of place that had existed long enough to stop trying to look like anything other than what it was. Old stone buildings with newer additions that didn't quite match. Narrow streets that had been laid before anyone was planning for vehicles. A market square with a fountain that still worked. Trees that had been growing in the same spots for a hundred years and had stopped apologising for the space they took up.
Grace stood on the main street and looked at it.
She was quiet for a long moment, turning slowly, taking in the buildings and the fountain and the way the morning light came down the street at an angle that made the stone look warm. She didn't say anything. Maddox stood behind her, leaning against a tree and watched her but also said nothing.
He had been watching her process things for two days. On the road, in the silences between the conversations they'd had and the ones they hadn't, he had watched her cycle through the information about Matteo and about her mother and about the woman she had called her grandmother for her entire life. She had not cried, or not in front of him. She had gone quiet.
And he had given her the space. It was the one thing he was certain he could do correctly.
Grace started walking.
She moved down the main street with her hands in her jacket pockets and her eyes going to everything, and Maddox followed a few steps behind. She looked at the shop fronts and the stone walls and the iron fittings on the older doors, at the window boxes with their late-season plants and the hand-painted signs above the smaller businesses. She stopped at the fountain in the square and looked at it for a moment and then at the buildings arranged around it.
She was looking for something she could feel but couldn't name, and Maddox understood that because Matteo had told him something of what this place had been to her mother, and he understood that Grace being here was the closest thing to proximity she was going to get for now.
He let her look.
After a while he became aware of the other thing, the thing that had been building since they'd come into the main street, he had been noting it quietly rather than bringing attention to it. The looks. A woman in the doorway of a bakery stopped watching her display and started watching them instead. Two men at a table outside the café across the square had gone still when Grace and Maddox came around the corner. A mother with two small children pulled the children slightly closer without looking directly at them.
He was being read. He had been read the moment he came within sight range of people who knew what to look for, and the reading had produced the particular response that wolves produced in communities that had reason to be cautious around them.
Veyra was a witch town.
Grace had not noticed yet. She was too absorbed in the town.
He would let her have a few more minutes.
She stopped outside a narrow building with a hand-lettered sign, read the sign, and moved on, and then she stopped again at the end of the square where the street continued and looked down it, and Maddox watched her take a breath that was deeper than the others.
"Grace," he said.
She turned.
"We should be asking questions," he said. "That's why we're here."
She looked around the square and nodded, and for the first time, she seemed to register the people looking at them, or rather looking at Maddox and then at her and then at Maddox again. She frowned.
A woman was standing near the fountain, older, with a basket over her arm, she looked like she had somewhere to be but had paused briefly to stare at them. Grace moved toward her before Maddox could assess whether this was a good idea.
"Excuse me," Grace said. "I'm looking for someone who might have lived here. Her name was Julia."
The woman looked at Grace, her eyes somewhat warm as she looked at her. Then her eyes moved to Maddox who stood behind her, and her expression became indifferent.
"I don't know that name," she said, and walked away with a pace that was several degrees faster than the one she'd arrived with.
Grace turned back to Maddox with a frown.
She tried again. An older man sitting outside the café who looked like he had been in this town long enough to know its entire history. When Grace said her mother's name he picked up his cup and looked at the table and said he didn't recall anyone by that name.
A woman in a shop doorway said she was new to the area.
A man walking past said he was in a hurry.
Grace came back to Maddox after the fourth deflection with her arms crossed and her jaw set.
"Why does everyone look like I just asked them something dangerous?" she said.
"Because you came in with a wolf," Maddox said.
"Then stop smelling like one," she said.
Maddox looked at her.
"I mean it. Can you do something about your looks or your scent? Wolves can control it, right? Tone it down or something."
"Sure," Maddox said, looking down at her. "Let me go take a bath and maybe soak in some perfume."
She glared at him. "It would genuinely help."
Another sarcastic tone, “Of course it would.”
She made a sound of frustration and turned back to the street. She was also noticing the other thing now, Maddox could tell, the thing beyond the general wariness around him. Julia's name was not being deflected the way you deflected an unfamiliar name. It was being avoided.
These people knew something and they were pretending not to, and Grace was picking it up.
"They seem to know who she is," Grace said, more to herself than to him. "They just won't say."
Maddox said nothing. He thought she was right.
The town had a specific relationship with the name. He had felt it in the quality of the deflections, the way people's eyes moved before they gave their answers. Something had happened here that had made Julia a topic that residents had collectively agreed not to revisit, and the agreement had been in place long enough that it came naturally now.
Grace kept walking.
She had gotten to a narrow side street off the main square when she slowed down and stopped.
Maddox came up beside her and looked at what she was looking at.
There was a shop at the end of the street, small-fronted, with the kind of window display that had been arranged by someone with a specific eye rather than a commercial instinct. Pieces arranged on dark cloth, varying in size and material, a mixture of things that were old enough to have history visible in them. The shop had no large sign, just a small plaque beside the door with the word ANTIQUES AND RELICS carved into it.
But what had stopped Grace was in the centre of the window display.
A necklace. A single piece, laid on dark velvet, a pendant on a fine chain. The pendant itself was a crescent shape in dark silver, set with a deep blue-green stone that caught the light in a way that made it look like there was movement inside it, and around the crescent, worked in the same dark silver, a series of marks that were not decorative. They were the kind of marks that existed on things that had been made to do something specific.
Grace was looking at it like it called to her, she could almost hear it breathe a sigh of relief at being found.
She couldn’t stop herself. She went inside.
The interior of the shop was cool and dim and smelled of aged wood and something faintly herbal that was not unpleasant. Things were arranged on shelves and in glass cases and on the surfaces of old furniture that seemed to be part of the display rather than just the container for it. The overall effect was a space that had been accumulating objects for a very long time and had made peace with the accumulation.
Grace went straight to the window display and looked at the necklace up close.
A man came through a door at the back of the shop. He was older, perhaps seventy, with the kind of face that age had organised rather than deteriorated, and the way he moved through the cluttered space suggested he knew every inch of it in the dark.
He looked at Grace and looked at what she was looking at.
"That piece," he said, coming to stand on the other side of the display, "has been here for over two decades."
Grace looked up.
"People ask about it," he said. "Occasionally they try to buy it. I don't sell it." He tilted his head slightly, looking at her. "It is not mine to sell."
"Whose is it?" Grace asked.
"I've been asking myself that question for twenty-three years," he said. He looked at the necklace thoughtfully. "Some things choose. The owner finds it, not the other way around. I keep it here because it has not yet found its person." He paused, still looking at the pendant. "But I’m beginning to think I was wrong about that."
Grace looked at the necklace and then back at him. He was looking at her with an expression that had shifted from the general attention of a shopkeeper to something more specific, more focused, the look of a man trying to place something he almost recognised.
"You remind me," he said slowly, "of someone I knew a long time ago."
Grace went still.
"There was a woman," he said, and his voice had changed quality, going somewhere slightly more private. "She used to come to this street. Years ago. She had your eyes. The same way of standing." He stopped and looked at her carefully. "The resemblance is quite striking."
Grace's mouth had opened slightly.
"I came here," she said. "I came here looking for my mother."
The shop was quiet.
The old man looked at her for a long moment. Something complex and careful moved through his expression. He had the look of a man who had been keeping something at a distance for a long time and was now being asked to bring it closer.
"What is your name?" he said.
"Grace," she said. "Grace Ainsley."
The shop door opened.
Maddox stepped in, ducking slightly under the low frame, and looked at Grace and then at the old man.
"We should keep moving," he said. "People outside are starting to—"
He stopped.
The old man had looked at him when he came in and now he was not looking at Grace anymore. He was looking at Maddox with a sharpened expression.
He raised one hand.
His lips moved.
Maddox blinked. He blinked again and his head turned slightly to the left, a movement with no apparent cause, and then he was still. His eyes were open but their focus was wrong, not directed at anything in the room. They had gone pale white!
Grace looked at him. "Maddox!”
Maddox didn't answer, he couldn’t answer.
The old man lowered his hand and looked at Grace with the full weight of his attention.
She immediately whirled on him, “What did you do to him!?”
He ignored her question. “Are you here by choice?" he said. His voice was very level and very direct. "That wolf behind you. Is he holding you captive? Are you safe?" He kept his eyes on her face. "Tell me honestly, little one. Should I kill him?"